5 ways Sci-fi can reproduce heterosexist, ageist, ableist, racist, neo-liberal white supremacist patriarchy
Don’t you just love Sci-fi? I do — superhero movies, dystopian futurist scenarios, space-alien-war type films, you name it — I’m going to see it. But sometimes it feels like for every bell hooks, Laura Mulvey or Stuart Hall text I read (the list continues, but let’s save it for another blogpost) — my filmic experience is morphed, as if I’ve put on a permanent lens — a lens that makes it impossible to unsee all of the challenging representational issues this genre carries with it.
One might think that Sci-fi has the best chances of reimagining and redesigning the normative structures that shape our society, yet somehow that doesn’t really seem to be the case. Here are 5 examples of Sci-fi doing its best to reproduce norm:
1. Alien races as symbols. Think of all of the times different alien races have differed, only ever so slightly, from humans — and what those differences might symbolize. Is it possible that the alien-species function as symbols of racial differences? Is it possible that alien race differences are stand-ins for presumed human racial differences?
Take for instance the Galactic Senate scenes in Star Wars: even though there are all kinds of aliens in the room, they all represent different planets and live in segregated communities. Their species-differences are specifically linked to personality-traits and behaviors, much like pre-DNA race-research suggested human races to be.
This use of alien races as symbols of nationalities and races in the world is mirrored in a bunch of sci-fi alien-films — think of guardians of the galaxy and the empathetic passive quietness of the Mantis-character — something that was critiqued heavily for its sexism and racism. Was it a coincidence that a character played by an Asian woman was designed to be passive and submissive? Read more about that here.
But returning to Star Wars for a minute — just think briefly about what indicates a stupid or lowly race (perhaps there is a reason Jar Jar Binks has a special vernacular or accent?) and consider why, in a completely hypothetical fantasy-fictional alternate universe, white people should still be in charge? (A question which makes it even more laughable and appalling that audiences would oppose the recently more diverse casts of newer Star Wars franchise films.)
2. Future-scenarios that (try to) tackle race. Many sci-fi films with futurist aspects are noteworthy in their lack of (or erasure of) racial issues, to a point where it seems almost like futurist sci-fi sometimes wishes to erase racism, erase race (sometimes by erasing racialized minorities) or at minimum create fantasy-futures based on color-blindness. Think of sci-fi films with Will Smith in a leading role (like Hancock, Suicide Squad, Men in Black, I am Legend, After Earth), for instance. Race is neatly erased and becomes a non-issue in the future-scenarios, where he is the hero of the day. The problem of these erasures of racial discrimination, then, arises when these films are celebrated as positive developments for diverse representation. What happens, when racially diverse films play out in scenarios where racism is extinct? Does diverse representation rely on erasure of the realities of racialized discrimination? To put it more sharply: do we only want to see people of color, black people and indigenous peoples in contexts where racial difference is erased and racism is a thing of the past?
But perhaps especially problematic, are the sci-fi scenarios that do tackle race — often through twists or reversals of racial roles (race-bending or black- and yellowfacing). Think, for instance, of ‘Cloud Atlas’; the film seems to assume that race-bending is apolitical as long as multiple variously racialized people reverse multiple racialized roles. As such almost all actors, regardless of their racial experience in ‘real life’ get to perform as alternately racialized characters. However, this choice to assume that race-bending is apolitical underscores how sci-fi can be used as a veil to perform color-blind or post-race fantasies, which further erase racism (both in past, present and future worlds, real and fictional alike).
Particularly troubling in Cloud Atlas, then, was the use of cannibalism. One might wonder how a presumably color-blind (or post-race) film ended up (re)producing non-white cannibalistic characters, and (re)imagining slavery and indentured servitude that (once again) positions women of color as victims.
Cloud atlas was widely critiqued, but the problem of racebending is challenging, even for Sci-fi that doesn’t use black- or yellow-facing. Think, for instance, of Sense8. In spite of the celebrated series taking a well-researched and productive stab at representation and actually platforming diverse actors, the premise of the series (that we might feel and experience through different bodies and quite literally sense what it’s like ‘being’ another race, gender etc.) brings with it some serious challenges to privilege and experiences of subjugation.
For the majoritized, powered person positioned most frequently as the oppressor (what bell hooks might call the people who benefit from white supremacist heterosexist patriarchy) — sensing and experiencing life in an oppressed or subjugated body might at first seem like a welcome lesson — but let us not forget that this exercise is not only fictional, it is semi-permanent. As such it becomes a racial holiday of (or visit to) subjugation — race-tourism. Not unlike when white people venture into imagining that the poor treatment they might have experienced on a vacation is ‘reverse racism’. For this majority-person, tourism into the experience of the oppressed is not unlike the satisfactory impermanence of ‘eating the other’ — a sentiment hooks describes in the famous essay of the same name.
On the other hand, allowing for the subjugated and oppressed to venture into the life of, say, a white cis-male body, seems nothing short of mockery.
In Sense8, the traversing of gender- and race-lines (and other differences) becomes a window into varying forms of oppression. However, in order to mark these differences, the series relies on reproducing them. Think of the final episode of season 2, where a heterosexually married Indian mans mind is expanded through a sexual experience involving a white man. This scene drives home the homonationalistic undertones of the series. Homoeroticism is framed as something that is white and Western; for the Indian man in question it is a mind-blowing change to his normative and naive masculinity — and to the gay Mexico city actor in the series, the Mexican homophobia becomes detrimental to his career — a career that can only be ‘saved’ by Hollywood opening up its arms and receiving him. As such, these characters are framed as queer-intersectional celebrations of difference, but only through relying on the reproduction of their ‘backwards’ backgrounds as something they must distance themselves from.
3. When disability is a super-power: Studies of mediated and cinematic representations of disability, debility and ability have identified a series of tropes and stereotypes that are continuously repeated and reproduced. There are enough for full books and dissertations (for instance my friend Sarah wrote one on Danish film, which inspired part of this post — read her blog here), so I will not venture to feature them all, but will center on two that are specifically relevant to the Sci-Fi genre: Super-crips and Cyborgs.
Super-crips and cyborgs are tropes that reproduce disability as something that can either supernaturally or technologically be enhanced or turned into a strength/superpower*. The premise for this enhancement or unexpected inherent power, of course, is that bodies and minds that are seen as deviating from the norm are otherwise inferior. In other words; by celebrating super-powerful and superior (dis)ability, these filmic representations are implying that compensation, enhancement and reversal is needed in order to succeed. This effect is accelerated by the other frequent ableist tropes and stereotypes: if most of the representation of disability rests on victimization, then a problem arises when the occasional alternative representation requires you to have superpowers or be a cyborg in order to be worthy of presence and celebration. Think of the Oracle in Matrix, Professor X in X-men or perhaps Iron-man.
It might initially be counterintuitive that well-intended and ‘positive’ representations of disability can still be violent and oppressive. Many viewers often assume that representations that ‘celebrate’ or ‘highlight’ minorities are automatically flawless and can’t contribute to marginalization. But if we look closer at the nuances of these tropes, we might find that even ‘celebratory’ representation can be violent. I wrote about that in a recent blog-post about inspiration-porn, rolemodels and Crazy Rich Asians.
4. When universe-flips or dimension-flips still reproduce norms: Some Sci-fi entirely flips and reverses reality. Think of Inception, Avatar or Rick and Morty. But even in these fictional worlds where everything can be flipped, switched and reversed, it is surprising to find that gender roles often can’t and don’t.
In Avatar even though everything is different on Pandora, the planet still relies on a binary gender-system and heterosexual pairings. In Inception people can run on ceilings and flip gravity, but Ellen Paiges character Ariadne remains a naive and confused female character full of questions and doubt, meanwhile being mansplained to and rescued throughout.
In Rick and Morty’s early seasons, our two main characters Rick and his grandson Morty literally traverse the universe and alternate dimensions across space and time. Nonetheless, in almost all of these alternate spaces, their gendered family-structure continues to be a stable premise for the show. Morty’s father is still fraught with fragile masculinity, his mother is a domineering mean girl, and his sister is a sterotypical superficial, dumb and teenage-annoying peripheral character. Rick and Morty take centre stage — once again making white men the key characters.
5. when gender-non-conformity or queer sexuality is exploited to signify something violently different, progressive or dangerous and “new”. In the Sci-fi film SPLICE a gene-manipulated human experiment turns into a shapeshifting monstrous animal. In its initial form, the animal takes a stereotypically female human shape, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, gets raped by it’s (human) male creator. Later in the film, the human-animal hybrid shapeshifts and takes on a human-like stereotypically male form, complete with carrying out a rape of its human female creator.
This gender-shifting character mirrors figures like the mutant-chameleon Mystique in X-men, and reproduces a hypersexual and evil monstertrope that gets linked to gender-non-conforming or gender-shifting. Similarly the use of queer/bisexual and hypersexual/violently sexual behavior in robot and AI film-characters creates strange artificial links between futurism, fiction and queer sexuality.
The implied “newness” or modernity of fluid gender or queer sexuality as norm being used to signal futurity in some sci-fi is really quite norm-conforming as it serves to re-perpetuate ideas that heteronormativity is the now and queerness is the future. Begging the question: If queer is the future, then what of all of the queers in the past and the now? Does a queer utopian future rely on queer erasure in the present and past?
Films like SPLICE also perpetuate the dangers that are discursively framed in fear-mongering politics about erasures of difference and queers taking over (it makes us believe that the future is dangerously queer).
On the other hand we find films that frame queer futures as safe and likely make us believe the future is beautifully queer — but does the insinuation that we are on a path to a safe and beautiful queer future work to frame the present as progressive and moving in the ‘right’ direction?
Moreover, the positives/ successes of trans- and queer materialities in the future are almost always framed within a white society that often claims to be first to this ‘modernity’. This sentiment erases POC queerness and non-western gender-nonconforming/ queer pasts.
Notes:
*This is a really reductive and overly simplified definition. For more thorough and precise definitions please refer to the texts by Kama and Olsen in the below Bibliography.
Literature:
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Racism without racists: Color-blind racism & racial inequality in contemporary American.” Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield (2010).
Haraway, Donna. “Simians, cyborgs, and women.” (1991).
hooks, bell. Black looks: Race and representation. South East Press, 1992.
Kama, A. (2005). Supercrips versus the pitiful handicapped: Reception of disabling images by disabled audience members. Communications, 29(4), pp. 447–466. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2018, from doi:10.1515/comm.2004.29.4.447
May, Vivian M., and Beth A. Ferri. “Fixated on ability: Questioning ableist metaphors in feminist theories of resistance.” Prose Studies 27.1–2 (2005): 120–140.
Olsen, Deric. “Neither Villain nor Super-crip: Cyborg Representation in Film and the Augmentation of the Invalid Other.” International Journal of the Humanities 9.12 (2011).
