Miss Cylon: Empire and Adoption in Battlestar Galactica

Picture this: a white man, presumably American, in military uniform, presumably a soldier, is stranded behind enemy lines. He is aided by an Asian woman whose job, unbeknownst to him, is to seduce him and make him fall in love with her. Once they have consummated their affair, however, it is the Asian woman who falls in love with the white soldier and betrays her own people. Like Miss Saigon and Madame Butterfly before her, the Asian woman discovers that she is pregnant; she will do anything to protect her child. Wait, there's more. This old orientalist tale is given a new treatment. The white man is a lieutenant from the planet Caprica. And the Asian woman is not human; her spine glows bright red when she has sex. She is a cyborg, an exact replica of the same model that was a friend, crush, and fellow officer of the male soldier before her kind, the Cylons, attempted to destroy all of humanity. Not so familiar? This is one of the many storylines in the breakout television hit Battlestar Galactica (produced by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick), a storyline of importance as a colonialist reiteration within the contemporary moment. The Battlestar Galactica series (BSG) has become the highest-rated program ever to air on the Sci Fi Channel, with more than 2.8 million viewers during its first season (Drumming). Not just popular with audiences, the show drew comments from sources as diverse as Stephen King and indie director Kevin Smith, and official accolades from the American Film Institute and TIME Magazine's James Poniewozik, who named BSG TIME's best television show of 2005. Critics and fans agree that Battlestar's hard-hitting socio political issues (war, torture, refugees, suicide bombing, reproductive rights, religion and the state, etc.), space-battle action sequences, and PG-13 dalliances add up to a winning combination. A sudden, unexpected attack on humanity holds a particular resonance for a post-9/11 American viewing audience. Rolling Stone writer Gavin Edwards calls the show "TV's most vivid depiction of the post-9/11 world and what happens to a society at war." A growing body of academic scholarship has also materialized, most notably the recent anthology Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall). While this is an undeniably important collection, it lacks an analysis of the character Sharon (aka "Boomer") as an Asian American figure. The essay by Robert W. Moore on Sharon does not examine issues of race, while the piece by Christopher Deis that formulates Cylons as racial others does not include Boomer. I reflect on BSG's popularity generally and the character of Boomer specifically, putting Asian American studies and science fiction discourses into conversation. I look most closely at the first two seasons of BSG, when Sharon and Boomer are interchangeable names for the Cylon Number Eight. I ask how the globalized, or post-Fordist, moment is reflected and addressed in the logics of BSG and how the character Boomer, read as an Asian American female, employs old tropes in new ways. (1) As science fiction texts shift from modern to postmodern, from utopian to dystopian, and from liberal to neoliberal, how are the constructions of "Asian" and "female" altered and reified? How are previous imperialist narratives of romancing the Asian female subject reconfigured in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's formulation of an emergent Empire, global and de-territorialized? The character of Boomer redeploys the Madame Butterfly/Miss Saigon narrative that renders visible the colonialist connection between the Vietnam War and the War on Terror. As a new articulation of the racialized and colonized female subject, Boomer shifts the figure of the cyborg from a white signifier of the other to an Asian American representation of the other. Specifically, Boomer occupies both the metaphoric and literal positions of miscegenation, most notably in the simultaneous embodiment of adoptee and birth mother. …