Arrival of the Fittest

Main Article Content

Tess Williams

Abstract

Prometheus, the fifth film of the Alien franchise, maintains narrative connections to the original four films but the inclusion of new aliens—the Engineers—radically shifts the feminist politic of the series. There is a move away from centralising the monster and the repressed feminine, through images of horror and bodily abjection, toward a politic of carnival, seen in representations of multiple grotesque bodies and subversion of the affect of primal scenes. Carnival is a space where the authority and stability of current social powers and orders are challenged and subverted. This article contends that in Prometheus such a process occurs in the deliberate mixing of scientific knowledge and religious cosmologies, the ambivalent relationship of horror and SF genres to science and scientific knowledge, the gendered complexities of the specific bodies of astronauts and of scientists, and disruptions of the notion of gaze and viewer positioning in the opening scenes.

Article Details

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Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Tess Williams, The University of Western Australia

Tess Williams is the published author of two SF novels, Map of Power (1996) and Sea as Mirror (2000), numerous short stories, and co-edited an awarded international collection of feminist science fiction writings, Women of Other Worlds (1999). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the School of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.