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Battlestar Galactica: Rape Portrayals
I have recently become obsessed with Battlestar Galactica and have watched everything through Season 3 on DVD (I am impatiently awaiting the release of Season 4.0). The show brings up so many issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics.
One episode that I found especially intriguing was "The Farm" in Season 2. Lt. Kara Thrace "Starbuck" is held hostage in a medical facility where her cylon-docotr, suggests that being pregnant would be a better use for her than continuing as a fighter pilot. She is repeatedly drugged and it is implied that the doctor may have harvested her eggs or removed one of here ovaries. Starbuck being the strong woman that she is murders her doctor. In her escape, she finds many women hooked up to machines to impregnate them. She destroys the machines stopping their rape
At this point, I want to celebrate, jump up and down, hoot and holler. But Starbuck’s doctor, the head honcho in this "hospital," is a black man. Here BSG is holding hands with the likes of Birth of a Nation and lynch mobs. BSG is taking part in the American stock story that black men rape white women. This relationship has been used to justify not only casrtration of black men, but also the paternalistic "caring" for white women. Black women are all but erased.
Now this is not the only portrayal of rape on the show. Two cylon detainnees, Gina Six and Athena, were both vitims of ...