Opengender

Monstrous feminism and the avenging Amazon

On the whole, feminists and lesbians tend to treat the figure of the Amazon as a positive trope for lesbianism and/or feminism. On the one hand, she has the 'masculine' characteristics of strength, physicality and activity and, on the other, she is female-oriented. Her combination of male and female characteristics apparently undermines the exclusivity of gender categories. Her 'chastity' combined with her 'phallic' physicality has obvious lesbian implications. She is perceived by many lesbians and feminists as both 'positive' and 'subversive'.

Representations of the Amazon or female warrior in patriarchal culture, however, may acknowledge a perceived 'threat' of female aggression and seek to neutralise it. Narratives of female militancy tend to enjoy a resurgence in Western patriarchal cultures precisely at historical moments in which there has been an exceptional opening out of gender categories under pressure of social change and political contestation. As patriarchy struggles to restructure, the Amazon classically signifies male anxiety about gender disorder and efforts at containment of that anxiety. From classical times in the West, the warrior-maid has been constituted as sexual spectacle for the male onlooker, and her 'chastity' represented as passive sexuality — as loyalty to heterosexual values. Alternatively, and sometimes as 'alter-ego' of the 'good' Amazon, often in the same text, the sexualised Amazon, who subjects men to feminine rule, is pathologised, ridiculed, and violently destroyed.

Representation of the masculinised female body in contemporary horror/sci-fi seems to be the site of lesbian subcultural identification; as much as the occupation of the phallic subject position of protagonist by a female-sexed body. This is partly because it recalls the homosexualised representation of the male body as object of desire in the same genre (gladiatorial 'beefcake'). It is also because such gender-confused representation fits easily into the current preoccupations of 'queer' politics. A further element of appeal is that lesbians have always been particularly concerned with the practical expression of an autonomous lesbian/female agency, and, historically, cross-dressing has been a means of achieving either a practical autonomy not available to women or of expressing and signifying a forbidden, active sexuality. The masculinised bodies of the female warrior-protagonist reproduce the desired effects of cross-dressing for lesbians (in a more socially acceptable form which can also appeal to heterosexual feminists). Lesbians may also make the connection to the historically documented incidences of lesbians 'passing' as male soldiers.

Contemporary representations of militant women do not necessarily denote a positive male response to feminism, nor an increasing respect for women's demands for autonomy. They are more likely to represent an effort at amelioration of male anxieties and a struggle to redefine the challenged boundaries of gender categories in order to prevent their collapse. But this does not mean that their pleasures are necessarily 'bad' for lesbians, or feminists. Read through a lesbian subcultural context (this does not refer to the 'biographical' status of the lesbian reader, but the context in which she finds herself) the film-text may become instrumental in the continuous project of 'securing [oppositional] sexual political [...] identifications'. Such a reading would not have universal validity but is 'particular to the needs of a specific readership'. [Bristow, 1990]

I am paraphrasing conceptualisations of reading strategies for 'gay' texts — that is texts 'authored' by gay people in which the subcultural context is seen as enabling gay writing and informing gay reading. However, for many lesbians and gays, popular culture is a major site of such specific reading and 'securing of identifications'. It seems important, therefore, to bring a similar kind of analysis to popular texts which have acquired lesbian subcultural importance. I want to explore why/how many lesbians find pleasure in certain mainstream films which, at best, deny or suppress lesbian identifications and, at worst, demonise and condemn lesbianism.

The Independent Woman Goes To Hollywood

The question of female independence became a predominant theme of popular US cinema by the end of the 1970s. Besides a number of films concerning 'female buddies' and the single-working-woman towards the end of the 1970s, the female protagonist began to appear in the traditionally male genre of the thriller. The most self-consciously pro-feminist of these pit the heroine against a corporate conspiracy involving the misuse of technology. Alien has been described as a 'sci-fi-thriller', and these thrillers have technology as a major theme. Such films as Coma (1978), China Syndrome (1979), Alien (1979) and Silkwood (1983), express the dystopian vision of technology typical of the 1970s — fed by revelations of the full horrors of the nuclear age, combined with cold-war paranoia, and anxiety about the increasing 'corporatisation' of American life. Feminist militancy is represented relatively positively in these films, as justifiable concern.

For the male spectator, however, the alienation of 'the woman' in patriarchal culture becomes a metaphor for the alienation of male individuals in the modern world signified by the thriller protagonist's conventional mystification and lack of control over the events which drive the narrative. In other words, the feminist protagonist here signifies the feelings of loss of control of the part of the male spectator — his 'feminisation' by the evil corporation. The physical vulnerability of the female protagonist's body intensifies the suspenseful pleasure of the thriller.

By the mid-1980s, the female protagonist-heroine was becoming more incorporated as explicitly sexual spectacle in the fantasy-comic tradition, in films such as Night of the Comet (1984), Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984), Supergirl (1984), Red Sonja (1985) and Aliens (1986). Whilst these heroines are clearly offered as 'positive images', they are basically 'exploitation flicks' aimed at bringing female audiences into an area of the market traditionally restricted to young male audiences. By the end of the 1980s, the independent 'single-working-woman' was being sexually pathologised in such films as Black Widow (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), Fatal Beauty (1987).

Feminism, Militancy, Motherhood, and Monstrosity in Science Fiction

The science-fiction films which I will be looking at bring an Amazon into conflict with a monstrous 'mother' (animal or mineral) protecting a 'genus'. The Amazon is a 'good' mother. Her body has been increasingly masculined and laden with military hardware, but the heroine is militant on behalf of her offspring. Feminist psychoanalytic readings of 'monstrous motherhood' in horror/ science fiction, whether they include extra-textual reference or not, attribute such apparitions to rehearsing of 'the primal scene', or to anxiety about 'abjection', and/or the 'archaic mother'. These anxieties are read as male, and the subversive potential of horror is interpreted in terms of its power to unsettle the normalising construct of gender. Williams [1984] and Creed [1990] both conclude, by different routes, that there is a subversive representation of a potent, non-phallic sexuality in the monstrous-female. Clover's [1992] analysis, which works to undermine the inevitability of the male's controlling phallic gaze in horror, focusses on male identification with 'the final girl'. The heterosexual exclusion of same-sex eroticism remains substantially unchallenged.

Images of non-biological generation in science fiction are products of its most central preoccupation: the perpetual renegotiation of what it means to be 'human'. Psychologically intense images of monstrous motherhood, parthogenesis and artificial birth are related to fears of disturbance in the 'natural' order — and the very demarcation of nature and culture — produced not only by alarmingly rapid social and technological change, but also by the postmodern problematisation of the category 'man'. Included in the many political challenges to this category are feminism and homosexuality.

The question of the lawfulness of the 'natural' reproductive order is dealt with through the theme of monstrous birth. This theme is often worked out through representation of the feared collapse of the boundaries of the biological and the technological (as in Frankenstein) thus vitiating not only gender categories, but the essence of 'the human'. The ostensible role of women in such narratives is, 'naturally', that of the biological, and technology is coded male. Technology is generally considered a male bastion, and to be represented as emphatically phallic tool of human progress. This is often the case, particularly in 1940s and some 1960s science fiction. However, technology is by no means necessarily coded masculine. Not only is science fiction perhaps the only genre which has fairly consistently represented women as a-sexual in the roles of technicians and scientists, but it has equally consistently concerned itself with 'man that is born of woman'.

In the early decades of the 20th century, there were a number of films made about illicit, technological 'birth', or transformation, by mad scientist unleashing evil on the world: Frankenstein (1910, 1931), Homunculus (1915), Alraune (1918, remade 1928), A Blind Bargain (1922), Metropolis (1925). Films dealing directly with this theme thin out in the 1940s and 50s but recur with a vengeance in the 1970s in films such as Embryo (1976), Demon Seed (1977) . In 1980s dystopias, androids or artificial intelligences run amok — too numerous to mention — in films such as Blade Runner (1982). The products of such tampering with or imitation of 'the female' are, if not actually female, 'other', and coded female.

Jardine [1985] and Creed [1990] argue that anxiety around the instability of the post-modern subject is displaced onto 'the feminine' as the uncanny through a process dubbed 'gynesis'. It is also at the level of the uncanny that 'the feminine' is interpreted as subversive. Representations of the imagined social role of women (the realistic) in a future world usually refer more or less directly to contemporaneous discourses on 'the woman question'. It is at this level of representation that pro-feminism is likely to be manifest. If these films manifest superficial pro-feminist content, how then do we interpret the covert presence of the — duly demonised — 'female-subversive'?

It is argued that 'the uncanny' is of itself coded female. However, fears of diminishing 'difference' in a corporate society may also be displaced and expressed in Anglo-American culture as a 'lack' of phallic individualism. The technological may then be coded 'female' via a slippage between a concept of the 'logic' of 'natural selection'; the 'rational' principles of social utilitarianism (and 'contract' theory generally); and the figure of the mother as terrifyingly ruthless in ensuring the survival of her offspring. One of the clearest examples of this kind of coding is Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, in which the 'feminine' ant colony is deployed as metaphor for a fictional feminine society as a ruthless survival machine.

This kind of imagery segued into a paranoid apprehension of 'scientific' (Stalinist) communism in US 1950s science fiction. The 'bodysnatching' sub-genre exemplifies this form of paranoia. It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958) (whose 'alien' characteristics are humorously terrestrial to feminist spectators!), Invaders from Mars (1953); in Village of the Damned (1960). It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is generally credited as the original of the Alien plot in which bodysnatching becomes literally 'monstrous birth'.

The metaphor can also be traced in analogies between feminism and 'Stalinism' (or even 'Fascism') in anti-feminist re-presentations of feminist discourses, particularly during the 'pornography wars' of the 1980s. In the 1980s and '90s, anxiety about the dis-appearing human (white, Western, male) individual (whether into corporatism, an uncertain world-order, the collapse of metaphysics, feminism, or the 'computer-virtual') appears as science fictional obsession with Artificial Intelligence, Androids, cybernetics, corporatism, the Single-Working-Woman-in-space, reproductive technology, and 'monstrous-motherhood'. The invading or technological 'alien' always manifests the mother-as-survival-machine qualities of collectivity and ruthless, unemotional logic without the 'human' (male) characteristics of individualism and creative inspiration.

In the 'post-feminist' decades, individualistic (phallic) characteristics may be personified by a female protagonist; and the de-humanising corporation by mother-as-survival-machine. However, the latter no longer signifies the paranoia of MacCarthyism but the ethos of the multi-national corporation, all-too-clearly out of 'democratic' control, and intent on subordinating the (male) individual to its corporate (female) ends. The popular male conception of feminism in the 1980s is also that of anti-individualism, and the subordination of men to its 'corporate' interest — in short, an imagined monstrous regiment of 'the female'. Thus, such purportedly 'progressive' film narratives may simultaneously validate the tokenistic incorporation of women to the ranks of a phallic-individualist 'pro-feminism', whilst demonising 'the feminine' (feminism) as ruthless corporatism — and demonising (actually male) corporatism as 'alien-feminine'. Confused? You will be!

Where does the lesbian subject find herself (as she clearly does) in these narratives? Are these texts 'positive' and 'progressive' in feminist terms. If not, how are lesbian spectators 'reading against the grain' in order to experience a pleasurable/ subversive identification and/or desire? Are lesbian spectators identifying with the androgynous 'final girl', or with the subversive erotic potential of the 'monstrous feminine'? Or is lesbian subjectivity disseminated through narrative positions in quite a different way?