Lucy Peng

CWR1A

Professor Mary Grover

December 12, 2019

Aliens: When an Action Heroine Becomes a Cyborg

Leading the marine soldiers to fight against the parasitic aliens, assembling

Flamethrower and Pulse Rifle to incinerate the alien eggs, driving a power-loader to fight with an

Alien mother, Ellen Ripley, the female protagonist in James Cameron's movie, Aliens (1986),

embodies a “transgressive character of action heroine” in action genre films (Hills 38) who

shows strong ability to utilize technology. Ripley is a former crew member on a spaceship re-

cruited by Weyland-Yutani Corporation and has been sleeping in stasis for 57 years after escap-

ing from the aliens on planet LV-426, now a site for a human colony. When the company loses

contact with the colony, they decide to send a representative of the company along with a troop

of Colonial Marines, and Ellen Ripley as the advisor for the investigation. After the investigative

team enter the colony, they are slaughtered by the aliens. Humans are vulnerable under the attack

from the lethal aliens. Ripley, however, utilizes technology, such as Flamethrower, Pulse Rifle,

and power-loader, to fight against the aliens, successfully surviving and rescuing a little girl, the

only survivor of the human colonists. Ripley’s efficacy of manipulating technology, on one hand,

shows her mastery of skills and abilities that have been traditionally defined as masculine, and

therefore transgress conventional gender norms. On the other hand, Ripley drives the power-

loader as an extension of her body, creating a hybrid and genderless body of human and machine
(similar to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg”) and challenging the concept of gender essentialism. In

short, Ripley transgresses the binary gender system through debunking gender norms and biolog-

ical essentialism by her efficient use of technologies.

In the movie Alien, Ripley’s proficiency in using equipments confounds typical gen-

der norms, because technologies such as Flamethrower, Pulse Rifle, and power-loader are tradi-

tionally associated with masculine characteristics. Under binary gender norms, jobs that are

technical, physically-demanding or complex have been seen as men’s proficiency and jobs that

are domestic and less physical as more suitable for women. However, Ripley as a women, deal

with mechanical tasks very well. When she drives the power-loader for the first time, she

amazes other male soldiers who considers her as a useless "Princess." In a scene where the ma-

rine soldiers are busy in loading and stripping weapons, the camera focuses on a man who con-

trols the loader to lift a massive bomb onto the spaceship. And then Ripley walks to a comman-

der, saying, "I feel like kind of a fifth wheel around here. Is there anything I can do?" The com-

mander expresses indifference on his face, replying to her: "I don't know. Is there anything you

can do?" Ripley pauses for a while, speechlessly, and then goes: "Well, I can drive that loader. I

have a class-2 rating." Hearing Ripley's words, the commander and a male soldier look at each

other skeptically, and then the commander says to Ripley "be my guest." The movie uses a mon-

tage to show Ripley's a series of flowing movements: tying the safety belt, fitting her feet into

foot pedals, adjusting various components, pressing control buttons, stretching the iron arms,

which is actually a lifting fork, and finally lifting a giant iron box. The men who thinks there is

nothing she can help with are shocked by her dexterity. Ripley smiles at them, asking, "where

you want it?" The commander remains silent and staring at her for a while and then starts to
laugh, saying, "Z 12, please.” Ripley, as a woman, takes over a supposed masculine job and even

more efficiently conducts it than a man does, suggesting the norms that limited women to certain

types of jobs to be false. Therefore, Ripley's ability to use technology undermines the division

between male and female roles and the associated definition of masculinity and femininity.

Ripley's character in the movie not only undercuts the gender norms but also chal-

lenges the dichotomous thinkings of human versus machine and women versus men and there-

fore questions the biological essentialist thinking which lies as the essence of gender binary. Rip-

ley’s efficacy of driving the power-loader makes it as a powerful extension of her body, hence

creates a fusion of Ripley's body and the machine. This fusion resonates with Donna Haraway’s

definition of a cyborg: "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of

social reality as well as a creature of fiction. (Haraway viii)” The cyborg breaks the boundary

between human body and machine, so is the boundary between men and women because a cy-

borg’s body can have no genitals and organs. Therefore, Ripley, fusing with the power-loader and

becoming a cyborg, can live as a powerful and genderless creature. When she is being hunted by

the alien mother, who is giant, grotesque, and lethal, her physical body is too weak to protect

herself. As the alien mother almost catches her, she scrambles to drive the power-loader to fight

back. The alien waves her huge and intimidating tentacles and legs around, trying to kill Ripley,

and Ripley lifts her giant "machine claws" to clench the alien. At that moment, she transforms

into a unity with the technology, becoming more powerful not only than men but also a lethal

alien. Ripley’s existence as a cyborg in metaphorical way shows a possibility that in the future,

humanity can overcome the physical limitations, and even to eliminate the genital differences as

the essentialist differentiation of one gender from the other. Without biological essentialism as
justification, the gender binary system lost its theoretical foundation and thus will be easily de-

composed through reforms of social values.

Ripley’s cybernetic body not only provides us a utopian subject to imagine a gender-

less body, but also to construct a transgressive way of understanding the reality in a postgender

world that overthrow gender binary. Just like Haraway suggests, to create a cyborg body is to

create "a creature in postgender world. (Haraway 8)" In our society, our way of reading the reali-

ty are influence by the internalized gender binary paradigm. However, in the postgender cyber-

netic world, Ripley can fully express her subjectivity beyond the limitation of gendered expres-

sion. In the genderless utopia, if Ripley is powerful, that is not because he is more masculine, but

only because she has leadership and the ability to use technology; And she will not be considered

as a phallic woman but as a complex individual; If Ripley takes care for Newt, the little girl she

rescued, her connection to Newt will be no longer merely seen as her maternal sentiment but in-

stead pure love and sympathy of humanity. Just as Hills suggests, in the first movie of the Alien

series, Ripley’s skills of using weapons and machines make the differences between Ripley and a

man now becomes pure differences between two genderless human beings without any hierar-

chical characteristics (Hills 46). The cyborg version of Ripley even move further to picture a bio-

logical genderless body for such non hierarchical differences to thrive. It does not mean that un-

der the cyborg assumption everyone will be androgynous, but underlines that individuals can

choose to identify themselves freely.

Ripley in the film Aliens indeed is a pioneer image of action heroine back in 1980s

and even today, providing us an inspiring perspective to undermine gender binary system. Fur-

ther, she encourages audience to move forward to picture a “utopian dream of the hope for a
monstrous world without gender (Haraway 67), ” and to imagine a postgenderist reality though

the lens of Technoscience. For many young girls who watch movie and drama, what they often

see are the representations of women as tender, passive, vulnerable, and subordinated. Especially

in action movie, traditionally men have been the leaders and saviors, whereas women are foils

for men, and usually the one waiting to be saved. These roles reproduce and consolidate the ex-

isting problematic gender system because they tell the young girl that what are their supposed

roles, limiting them to imagine infinite possibility of life choices. Ripley, as an action heroine

icon, shows the little girls that in the future, they can also drive spaceship, lead a group of

marines, save others’s life; And most importantly, Ripley shows them that as a woman, they

should not be disqualified from striving for their goals due to their gender.
Works Cited

Hills, Elizabeth. "From 'figurative males' to action heroines: Further thoughts on active women

in the cinema." Screen 40.1 (1999): 38-50.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Manifestly Haraway. [Electronic Resource]. Univ Of Minnesota Press,

2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx

direct=true&db=cat04202a&AN=ucb.b23273654&site=eds-live.