‘Unpredictable Aliens’ in Aliens and Others by Jenny Wolmark . essay . N7
04.04.2013
Really good essay (N7), used a lot of the ideas for my dissertation and I still want to read the rest of the book.
[Quotes]
Bibliographical information: Wolmark, Jenny, 1994a. ‘Unpredictable Aliens’ in Aliens and Others: Science fiction, feminism and postmodernism (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf)
Quotes from Chapter 2: Unpredictable Aliens
Those who are different are objectified and are denied the capacity to be active agents in the creation of their own subjectivity; in taking on a sense of their own otherness, they are disempowered. PP. 27
…As Ursula Le Guin has pointed out:
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it wholly different from yourself - as mean have done to women, as class has done to class, as nation has done to nation, you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship.
The limits of social and cultural identity are tested when those who are different are depicted as active subjects who resist both the hierarchical relation between centre and margins and unitary definitions of difference. PP 28
Her fiction (Octavia Butler’s) is centrally concerned with the exploration of transitional states in which the boundaries between self and other become fluid, and in which the search for homogeneity is resisted. (Check out Xenogenesis trilogy)
What the Xenogenesis trilogy clearly indicates is that the process of demolishing existing boundaries in order to begin any kind of reconstructing is accompanied by equal measures of pleasure and pain.
This shift enables Butler to explore the possibilities of those partial and fluid cyborg identities and subject positions proposed by Donna Haraway, in which the ‘permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ of the cyborg have the potential to enable one to ‘see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.
P35
Mutation allows for the development of a new kind of selfhood in which difference is not seen to diminish but to fulfil. It implies connection rather than severance by suggesting that sameness and difference are integral parts of a whole rather than binary opposites.
‘I probably loved him in self-defense. Hating him was too dangerous (34)
The science fiction convention of the alien attempts to present otherness in unitary terms, so that ‘humanity’ is uncomplicatedly opposed to the ‘alien’: both Jones and Butler focus on the way in which that opposition seeks to suppress the others of both gender and race by subsuming them within a common-sense notion of what it is to be human. 46
The narrative does not suggest that the other is unknowable but it does indicate that assumptions or impositions of sameness represent refusals to recognise difference, and that within such refusals lies the terror of the other.
…because she fears that the presence of aliens would mean the inevitable end of ‘Everything we ever did, everything we ever made: dead or worse than dead, meaningless’ (287, from ‘White Queen’) 50-51