Goddess Cults in Techno-Worlds: Tank Girl and the Borg Queen

In this essay, I examine elements of the Goddess ethos in science fiction through comparing the eponymous character of the comic book series Tank Girl, a punk Goddess, with the Borg Queen character of the film Star Trek: First Contact, a cyborg Goddess. I argue that Tank Girl offers opportunities for integrating a Goddess ethos with a vision of a heteroglossic cyborg-like body politic. Through this integration, Tank Girl offers alternative visions of social organization to those promoted in narratives like those that form the Star Trek corpus, which legitimate a vision of body politic that, derived from Enlightenment idealisms, is based on relationships of government and subjection. I argue that the graphic texts of the Tank Girl corpus produce an antisocial myth that engenders heteroglossic subjectivity, allowing a Goddess ethos to emerge at the expense of not only myths of male heroes and gods but also male-generated Goddess myths.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.28.1.5

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