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
5 - Gender Blending and the Feminine Subject in 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
As the previous chapter indicates, the 1980s science fiction blockbuster exhibited an overwhelming concern with masculine identity and subjectivity. Both the ‘family films’ and the ‘cyborg films’ I have discussed seemed, in one way or another, to question, reinvent and/or preserve outmoded forms of masculine subjectivity in a world that was fast moving toward cybernetic connectivity and globalisation. At its most basic, the Freudian model of gender acquisition was based upon the bourgeois family and required the presence of both the father and mother in order for the boy-child to successfully complete his passage into manhood and take up his role within a wider, patriarchal society. As previously explored, notions of ‘proper’ family arrangements, and the demarcated roles that the father and mother traditionally played within this scenario, had been challenged by feminism and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, in the late 1970s a ‘politics of return’ emerged with the rising power exhibited by the New Right movement. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner describe the New Right as:
The combined call to return to pre-New Deal, pre-social welfare economics (with its faith in the free market), to the traditional, male-supremacist family (in which children were disciplined and women subservient to men), to fundamentalist religious values (especially as allied with the ‘right to life’ movement and with an eschatology that equated the Second Coming with the destruction of the Soviet antichrist).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science Fiction CinemaBetween Fantasy and Reality, pp. 145 - 174Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007