“Justice for Harry Kim!”

Abstract

Although Star Trek: Voyager ’s Ensign Harry Kim, portrayed by Taiwanese American actor Garrett Wang, remains the character of East Asian descent with the most on-screen time in the Star Trek franchise, the Kim character remains under-examined by scholars, often reduced to his widely lamented exclusions from professional advancement and durable heterosexual romance. By assembling a trans-media archive including Wang’s previous work in Asian American theater and the Kim character’s queer Asian American reception, this paper instead reads Kim and Wang for their experiments in alternative forms of ethical response to vexed dynamics attending Asian American masculinity, extending dialogues between feminist and queer currents in sf and Asian American studies.