Sci-fi and feminism

The post-human predicament impolices a blurring of gender boundaries. I think this does not always work to the advantage of women, though. Many feminists have turned to both writing and reading science fiction in order to try and assess the impact of the enw technological world upon the representation of sexual difference. All fans know that science fiction has to do with fantasies about the body, espicially the repreductive body. Science fiction represents alternative systems of procreation and birth, ranging from the rather child-like image of babies born out of cauliflowers, to monstrous births through unmentionable orifices. This gives rise to what Barbara Creed defines as the syndrome of the monstrous feminme. Thus it is no coincidence that in Alien, a classic of this genre, the master computer that contorls the spaceship is called 'Mother' and she carries the characteristics of being vicious, especially to the heroine (Sigourney Weaver). The maternal function in this film is displaced: she reproduces a monstrous insect by laying eggs inside people's stomachs, through an act of phallic penetration through the mounth. THese are also many scenes in the films of ejection of smaller vessels or aircrafts from the mother-dominated, monstrous and hostile spaceshift. Mother is an all-powerfl generative force, pre-phallic and malignant: she is a non-representable abyss from which all life and death come.

Following feminist critics of science fiction, I want to argue that science fiction horror films play with fundamental male anxieties and displace it by inventing alternative view of reproduction, thereby manipulating the figure of the female body. Julia Kristeva has argued that the 'horror' part of these films is due to the play with a displaced and fantasized 'maternal' function, as holding simultaneously the key to the origins of life and to death. Just like the Medusa's head, the horrific female can be conquered by being turned into an emblem that is to say becoming fetishized.

Modleski has pointed out that in contemporary culture, mena re definitely flirting with the idea of having babies for themselves. Some of this is relatively naice, and it takes the form of experimenting with new and definitely helpful social forms of new fatherhood. In postmodern times, however, this male anxiety about the missing father must be read alongside the new repreductive technologies. They replace the woman with the technological device- the machine- in a contemporary version of the Pygmalion myth a sory of high tech 'My fair Lady.'