In Jeffrey Brown’s, Gender and the action heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return, I think that the idea that heroines are ‘really only ‘boys’ in ‘girls’ clothing’, and a ‘male impersonator’ (Brown 1996, p.53) pretty ridiculous. It suggests that women can’t be anything but a secondary character and a damsel in distress. This notion depicts ‘men as active [while] women are passive’ (Brown 1996, p.53) and I definitely disagree. Just because a female character is strong and isn’t afraid of the ‘monster’ doesn’t mean that she is pretending to be a man.

I really enjoyed the debate in the workshop this week. I was on the team arguing that Aliens is only science fiction and nothing more. I was hoping to be on the other side of the argument but I actually managed to convince myself that it is only sci-fi. We looked at a text that argued that sci-fi draws from a lot of different genres but that doesn’t mean it is more than a sci-fi. This draws back to the week one reading from Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)  about referencing genres. We live in a time where referencing different genres is big and directors are becoming like remixers. As Kazuo Ishiguro said, ‘we have to distinguish between something that’s part of the essence of the genre and things that are merely characteristic of it’ (2015).

Just because there is a battle in the movie doesn’t mean it’s in the war genre as well. One of the tropes of a sci-fi film is that there is a battle when humans protect humanity, this simply satisfies the genre of sci-fi films. And there is action in the film but that simply propels the film forward, it doesn’t imply that it is an action movie.

References:

Neil Gaiman & Kazuo Ishiguro (2015, June 4), Let’s talk about genre, New Statesman.

Brown, Jeffrey A. (1996). Gender and the action heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return. Cinema Journal, 35(3), pp. 52-71.