Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements and Thanks
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Introduction: The Formation of the Genre
- 2 Science Fiction Films in the 1950s
- 3 Spaced Out: Between the ‘Golden Years’
- 4 The Masculine Subject of Science Fiction in the 1980s Blockbuster Era
- 5 Gender Blending and the Feminine Subject in Science Fiction Film
- 6 Alien Others: Race and the Science Fiction Film
- 7 Generic Performance and Science Fiction Cinema
- 8 Conclusion: The Technology of Science Fiction Cinema
- Bibliography
- Film Cited
- Index
6 - Alien Others: Race and the Science Fiction Film
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements and Thanks
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Introduction: The Formation of the Genre
- 2 Science Fiction Films in the 1950s
- 3 Spaced Out: Between the ‘Golden Years’
- 4 The Masculine Subject of Science Fiction in the 1980s Blockbuster Era
- 5 Gender Blending and the Feminine Subject in Science Fiction Film
- 6 Alien Others: Race and the Science Fiction Film
- 7 Generic Performance and Science Fiction Cinema
- 8 Conclusion: The Technology of Science Fiction Cinema
- Bibliography
- Film Cited
- Index
Summary
In science fiction ideas about human subjectivity and identity have traditionally been established in a comparison between self (human) and Other (non-human) characters. So, the alien, monster or robot of science fiction may provide an example of Otherness, against which a representation of ‘proper’ human subjectivity is established, interrogated and, on occasion, problematised. Images of Otherness in science fiction can be understood as a metaphor for forms of Otherness within society or between societies and in this way the genre can engage with the fears and anxiety surrounding a given society's Others. Preceding chapters have concentrated on the representation of gender and sexuality, but received notions of human subjectivity and identity are also bound up with issues surrounding race and ethnicity. Based upon classificatory models largely constructed in the nineteenth century, qualities and traits have often been assigned to particular races with the assumption that the race in question is homogenous and that individuals belonging to various racial groupings are the vessels of essential racial characteristics. So racial markers, as with the markers of sexuality, are frequently referred to as ‘evidence’ of an essentialised being that is separate and divided from other modes of being. However, divisions between self/Other have not always been based upon models of a clear cut opposition. For instance, as Robert J. C. Young points out:
Racial difference in the nineteenth century was constructed not only according to a fundamental binary division between black and white but also through evolutionary social anthropology's historicised version of the Chain of Being. Thus racialism operated both according to the same-Other model and through the ‘computation of normalities’ and ‘degrees of deviance’ from the white norm.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science Fiction CinemaBetween Fantasy and Reality, pp. 175 - 214Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007