When I returned to Star Trek research I sought out Blair’s work, and was excited to find Meaning in Star Trek. Studying and analyzing Star Trek had me considering an academic career, and to hold in my hands this woman’s book analyzing The Original Series was hugely inspiring. I found myself asking: Who is Karin Blair?A quick Google search of Karin Blair doesn’t bring up much but her academic work and a small page on the wiki Memory Alpha. The information I found was essentially a summation of Meaning’s preface and author bio: she’s an academic who worked and lived in Geneva. But where was Blair now? Was she alive, maybe enjoying retirement somewhere? Could I contact her and express how much her work inspired me? I didn’t he time to dig deep enough to find her while juggling classes, but Karin Blair continued to haunt me, and the bibliographies of Star Trek scholarship.I inevitably returned to my search for Karin Blair, and though it took a variety of search terms, I slowly compiled a better picture. Testing any terms to try and find something, I tried “Karin Blair forum,” aiming further back in online Trekkie history.
I didn’t find the forums I expected, but I found a lead — an article in the academic publication, Forum: A Journal for the Teacher of English Outside the United States. There was nothing Star Trek related about analyzing the nuances of English past, present, and future tense, but there was an author bio. Some information was familiar, and I found names of her alma maters, teaching positions, and publications, including Meaning In Star Trek and a journal: ANIMA. My next lead. This bio also featured the only photo of Dr. Karin Blair I’ve found: the black and white headshot on Meaning’s dust jacket.
A year before the Forum article, Blair published “Sex and Star Trek.” In barely six pages, it distills two primary interests from Meaning, the portrayal of women in Star Trek and Mr. Spock’s appeal, and reevaluates them for The Motion Picture. She breaks down the presentation of women in The Original Series like this: every woman that appears is either dead or gone at the end of the episode, beholden to a male character (love interest, husband, brother, father), or objectified, serving more as a (sexy) narrative prop than a character with agency. Most women are all these things, including Ilia in The Motion Picture. From here Blair asks: if women in Star Trek are objects, what can women connect with in the show and in their fanfiction?
To answer, she analyzes Mr. Spock’s appeal. She stipulates that Spock features heily in women’s fanfiction because he is a unique, appealing love interest as well as an inherent feature in Trekkie power fantasies. To put oneself in the place of Kirk includes hing the invaluable first officer. This look at the space women carved into the fandom is inventive, and these ideas are often cited in similar works, from Harvey Greenberg’s “In Search of Spock” (1984) to Patricia Vettel-Becker’s “Space and the Single Girl” (2014).
As I continued my research, I found some pages of ANIMA: The Journal of Human Experience (1974-1973). The only direct references to Karin Blair that I found were in the list of editors, and I found her husband’s name: John. The grainy, photocopied nature of the work I found brought back the question: was she even alive? The morbid work of searching obituaries turned up two Karin Blairs, but they had only names and dates, nothing verifiable.
The most recent article I found by Blair was “Star Trek Old and New: From the Alien Embodied to the Alien Imagined” in 1997. It builds on her analysis of Spock as a bridge between the familiar and the other to discuss how The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager he handled the other and traditional binaries. Dr. Blair examines how Star Trek continues to negotiate these ideas, just as Spock did, citing episodes and characters that engage with binaries like human/alien, male/female, good/bad, young/old, and, centrally, us/them. It’s a fitting expansion of her Star Trek work, encouraging serious analysis of the franchise’s most inspiring ideas.
I kept digging, searching for more of Blair’s work and finding mostly citations. Then I uncovered “Karin Blair's Comparative Civilizations Project In 1998: Theatrical Traditions Along The Silk Route,” buried in a journal on the sociology of leisure. The author was Dr. John G. Blair, her husband.
As he contextualized the research, I found out more about Blair’s life. After their time in Europe, the Blairs taught in Beijing in the late 1980s. Karin Blair also treled in India, and her experience of diverse cultures inspired her, again, to analyze questions about the familiar and the foreign. She was comparing theatre in India, China, and The West: their similarities and differences, and how the parallel study of all three can oid binary conclusions.