Page 47 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Gender and Sexuality 31

Bundy, who killed numerous young women all of whom resembled a girl-
friend who rejected him. Because he was illegitimate, his mother pretended
to be his sister as he grew up, so he had no one to care for him and to
nurture a healthy gendered self in which affect could be monitored inter-
nally. Instead, it repeatedly erupted in rage and violence.
Movies monsters are often expressions of similar emotions. They tear
people apart after all, just like serial killers. The monster in Alien poses an
interesting problem of gender identity because it is both masculine and
feminine, and its confusion is an index of the instability of gender identity

that motivates the film ’ s fantasy story. The monster embodies a boy ’ s fear
of female sexuality as something so powerful that it makes it impossible
for him to achieve certification as a heterosexual male. If women are pow-

erful and active, it means men are passive and weak. The monster also
embodies a boy ’ s fears regarding the violent power of his sexual drives.
The coldhearted “ Mother ” is at the root of the problem both in the story

of the film and in “ real life. ” And the solution – in the film and perhaps

in real life world of male heterosexual fantasy – is for a woman to quell
the monstrous violence of sexuality by adopting a feminine posture
appropriate to the heterosexual norm the film ’ s narrative ultimately seeks

to re - establish. Ripley, the female lead, becomes a caring mother who
looks after her cat, and she strips almost naked in a display of sexual
attractiveness that repositions women as sexual certifiers of normative

male heterosexual identity. They cease to resemble a cold, uncaring
Mother and become visual emblems of realized male desire for attentive
care and sexual pleasure.
These cultural images should be seen as expressions of the chemistry of
life, as further iterations of what really goes on in human psychological
development and in human interaction. If monster movies seem irrational,
it is because elements of our lives together, when not conducted with care,
can become highly irrational.
Culture also consists of stories about our lives, and all of us live our life
stories as gendered creatures. The stories or narratives that tell our lives are
often themselves gendered, from the “ hard - boiled ” detective genre of the
1930s on in America, which was a heavily masculine literary form in which
men learned to be strong to survive in a tough world, to the “ chick lit ” of
the 1990s, which depicted female experience and was more concerned with
struggles against personal failure and with striving for success in relating
to others effectively. Such cultural stories change with time. The masculine
stories were written at a time when men were the designated breadwinners