Page 46 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

30 Gender and Sexuality

highly sexual, gendered imagery. One did not have to be a trained scholar
of culture to notice that the fi lm Alien (1979) dealt with male anxieties
about female sexuality. Trapped in a space ship run by “ Mother, ” a danger-
ous and coldhearted computer, the space workers are killed one by one by
a vicious creature whose head resembles an erect penis and which turns
men into women by birthing itself out of their bodies. Danger fi rst appears
in an egg hatchery and is linked to female reproduction when the alien
seed, having been planted in one of the men through the mouth, erupts
from his stomach in an image resembling birth. The man is turned into a
woman, a recurring image in cultural stories about male sexual fears. Fear
of not being masculine, of not attaining a sexual identity that matches male
heterosexual norms, often takes the imagistic form of either masculine
women or feminine men. Women who are masculine provoke fear in men
because they do not match the heterosexual norm for women. If men are
supposed to be active and dominant in that cultural paradigm, women are
supposed to be passive and subordinate. Images of powerful women in

horror films therefore often imply male anxieties regarding masculinity

failure. At the time the film was made, in the 1970s, the feminist movement
was transforming traditional heterosexual gender norms and relations.
Women were becoming more assertive personally and publicly, abandon-
ing roles that had been taken to be natural. In that climate, it would be
understandable that men might begin to feel that their own identities had
become less fi xed, stable, or natural seeming.
But there is also a deeper psychological dimension to male fear. A cold
and insufficiently caring mother might provoke in a boy a sense of disloca-

tion regarding his gender identity and his sexuality. Without some sense
of confirming affection, he might take the world to be a threatening place.

Without an internal monitor for his emotions that is derived from early
experiences of care by others, he might not be able to control his feelings
in regard to sexuality especially, an area that demands that one relate to
others in a particular way. His gender identity might not develop toward
the heterosexual norm he sees endorsed all around him in his culture.
Women might come to appear “ monstrous, ” and his sexual drives, because
they are not encouraged, become instead repressed. Repression tends to

force material that might flow freely into a compressed form that can
increase its force. Sexuality as a result can become violent, and that violence
can be directed against women who, as emblems of the cold mother, are
perceived to be the source of one ’ s sexual blockage and gender fear. In “ real
life ” this failure of care and self - development can lead to someone like Ted