UC Merced

In this dissertation, Asexual Androids: Manifestations of White Supremacy in Science Fiction, I examine the intersections of whiteness, asexuality, and (dis)ability on the android body in varying texts: HBO’s Westworld (2016-2022), Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), and Bethesda’s Fallout 4 (2015). Using Richard Dyer’s White: Essays on Race and Culture as a departure point, I focus on the white-bodied android figure as it appears within the last ten years. This dissertation argues that the android figure is largely undertheorized and that it is a figure upon which the violence of whiteness and white supremacy can be erased through the concept of childhood innocence. Science fiction is a genre wherein we explore the future and the potential of technology as seen in the likes of Star Trek and its many films and television series over the decades. In these explorations of the future we contend with the anxieties of the present. As such, the androids in this dissertation speak to a felt present anxiety that has been around since Star Trek: The Next Generation’s android character, Lt. Commander Data, first debuted on television. The android figures here thus speak to a felt anxiety that permeates the landscape of American politics and issues that ultimately pivot around what counts as a healthy, sexually reproductive citizen in twentieth and twenty-first century American society. The figure serves a prop for the superior human, coded implicitly as white supremacy through the colorblind medium of science fiction.