Alien Feminisms and Cinema’s Posthuman Women

Dijana Jelača Alien Feminisms and Cinema’s Posthuman Women T for posthuman paradigms of inquiry is a matter of some urgency. As a shift toward undoing anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, posthumanism is a site of both opportunity and struggle—for feminism and beyond. Posthumanism’s appeal lies in the proliferation of possibilities for theorizing the contingencies of life (broadly defined) in a way that collapses firm disciplinary boundaries. “Far from being the nth variation in a sequence of prefixes that may appear both endless and somehow arbitrary,” writes Rosi Braidotti, “the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet” (2013, 1–2). Addressing this qualitative shift some two decades ago, Paula Rabinowitz posed a set of probing questions about the posthuman condition that, in many ways, we still struggle to answer: “Do posthuman bodies have histories, genders, or sexualities?” (1995, 97), “Can the posthuman speak?” (97), “Is there a posthuman woman?” (98). If the answers are yes, the crucial question becomes what new epistemologies arise in their wake? Rather than reiterate the notion that the posthuman figure is something entirely new and endemic to contemporary circuits of nature/culture/technology, Rabinowitz concludes that “posthuman bodies have been around a long time” (99). At the same time, the definition of what constitutes a posthuman body is a continually shapeshifting discourse, much like that of the body itself. In positioning the posthuman as a site of subjectivity outside the anthropocentric frameworks that cater to the firm split between nature and (techno) culture, we sometimes inadvertently assume that traditional humanoid traits (of subjectivity, empathy, and human bodily form) are inadequate within the posthuman paradigm, incompatible with its interest in what is beyond such humanist frames of recognition. And while the notion of subjectivity is not altogether dispensed with, it is considered to be an ontological void rather than a marker of certainty—a machine with many gears, perpetually in the process of becoming, composed of ever-shifting contingencies rather than an a priori given. In the posthuman condition, subjectivity continues to be a site of contestation. Pointing out its simultaneous centrality and dislocation, Braidotti argues that “we need to devise new social, ethical and discursive schemes of subject formation to match the profound transformations we are heorizing feminist epistemologies [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2018, vol. 43, no. 2] © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2018/4302-0006$10.00 380 y Jelača undergoing” (2013, 12). This essay is an attempt to devise one such discursive scheme, as a way to theorize new feminist epistemologies along the lines of alien posthumanism. To put it succinctly, posthumanism emerges in the wake of what is perceived as humanism’s failed promises. Failure therefore becomes a generative force for new constellations of knowledge. Humanism is “a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress” (Braidotti 2013, 13). Moreover, it is a doctrine that has time and again favored Western/ European whiteness as the normative subject position. Feminism, too, has often been problematically rooted in these fraught principles that limit the scope of who gets to count as human and as a woman. The urgent question, then, is how to move beyond these founding humanist paradigms in envisioning alternative posthuman or alien feminist futures. To that end, thirdworld, intersectional, postcolonial, decolonizing eco- and cyborg feminisms have all leveled pointed critiques of the traditional humanist forms of feminism and have charted new courses for feminist politics on a transnational scale. These frameworks are not necessarily posthuman—instead, some of them seek to reconfigure humanism in order to incorporate bodies and subjectivities that have traditionally, and systematically, been denied legitimacy within the humanist paradigm. I see these proliferating feminisms not as mutually exclusive but as overlapping and mutually informative along the human–posthuman scale. But often, even within the critiques of humanism, the notion of the subject (of feminism and beyond) remains rooted in traditional understandings of fixed or naturalized identity formations. Here I want to explore the possibility of charting alien feminisms that respond to the new and emerging forms of subjectivity across the nature– (techno)culture continuum without inadvertently upholding the centrality of humanist anthropocentrism. My use of the term “alien” does not simply entail an entity that is “out of this world,” or extraterrestrial, but rather an entity that is simultaneously familiar and strange, humanoid and posthuman, while not adhering to preconceived notions about subjectivity, gender, and identity that have historically come to stifle feminist political projects. Alien—broadly construed as both of and not of this world and a liminal figure who is elusive and concrete at the same time—resides at and haunts the human-posthuman spectrum, refusing to conform to a strict binary between the two. As screen culture continues to be an important, if fragmented, mirror of society, in this essay I explore two recent iterations of a cinematic alien who is decidedly female in an everrecalibrating mix of organic and inorganic parts (a shape-shifting cyborg, as it were). I do so in order to probe the question of what is alien about being S I G N S Winter 2018 y 381 female and what is female about being an alien in the context of contemporary Western screen culture and its reflection (and constitution) of ourselves. In these screen iterations alien subjectivity appears along the nature– (techno)culture continuum in a way that does not place the two in a binary opposition or within linear temporality but rather reaffirms nature and (techno)culture as mutually intertwined systems to such an extent that we cannot determine with certainty where one ends and the other begins. Braidotti finds that “discourses and representations of the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our globalized, technologically mediated societies” (2013, 2). In cinema, nonhuman, inhuman, and posthuman figures have been fixtures since the medium’s early days, whether in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or in the teratological imagination of the early cinema of attractions. In recent years, the cinematic screen continues to reflect contemporary anxieties about gender, nature, and technology—for instance, in Ellen Ripley’s trajectory from human to posthuman in the Alien franchise, in the figure of the Borg Queen in the Star Trek series, or in films as varied as Blade Runner, Wall-E, and Mad Max: Fury Road. However, the inevitable ebbs and flows in the screen reflections of the posthuman suggest that each new iteration exhibits the particular epistemological struggles about the limits of humanness prevalent during its time of emergence. With that in mind, I scrutinize two recent cinematic iterations of the feminine alien posthuman in order to examine what insights about feminism, sexual difference, and gendered subjectivity they entail in the context of our millennial, screensaturated technoscapes of contemporary existence. Cinema is a tableau onto which we (still) project our fantasies and anxieties, but it is also an organic extension of our technologically infused realities that frequently blurs fact and fiction. “It is at the site of the collapse between reality and fiction, referent and image,” notes Kim Toffoletti, “that I locate the posthuman as a figuration that reformulates identity as a process of transformation” (2007, 17). Toffoletti goes on to argue that such reformulations are a particularly fruitful ground for feminism, since “the ambiguity arising from technologies that collapse the distinctions between nature and artifice, mind and body, organism and machine, offers the potential for new forms of subjectivity beyond oppositional frameworks” (20). The posthuman body, as a site where oppositional frameworks collapse, is located at the intersections of “postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences” (Halberstam and Livingston 1995, 3). Two recent films about alien/cyborg posthuman female entities explore the posthuman female body as a site of ontological and epistemological 382 y Jelača struggle around feminism, femininity, bodily sovereignty, and subjectivity: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). Both works envision posthuman female entities unnervingly dislocated from traditional humanist frameworks, which is perhaps why each has alternatively been lauded as feminist and criticized as antifeminist in almost equal measure. This spectatorial uncertainty is due in large part to the films’ refusal to anchor our viewing experience in recognizable discourses that we can attach back to humanist ethics. In that sense, their stance is decidedly alien, as I illustrate in greater detail below. Each film illuminates important assemblages of female posthuman subjectivity. Moreover, each explores the sites of circular convergence—rather than fissures—between the human and the posthuman. In their placing of an alien/cyborg figure at the center of spectatorial identification (and empathy), both films break down the boundary between the human and the posthuman in a way that blurs the lines that define traditional notions of humanity and of human(e) ways of being in the world. In both films, the protagonists are nonhuman women—or illegitimate children of humanity—of varying origin stories (or lack thereof ). These contemporary cinematic alien/cyborg women extend the tenets of cyborg feminism and its transformative potential, memorably postulated by Donna Haraway (1991). As such, they chart a territory that extends the late twentiethcentury cyborg feminism into the twenty-first-century posthuman, or as I call them, “alien feminisms” (which can only appear in plural form). “While the cyborg operates as a figure through which women may better understand the self in the context of changing technologies,” Toffoletti writes, it is important to “mobilise the posthuman as a figure that disavows identity” (21). Disavowing identity is easier said than done, particularly when posthuman disavowal results in appearances that reflect traditional feminine forms, as in Under the Skin and Ex Machina. Yet, more than a “mere” reiteration of traditional gender, such disavowal becomes a circuit that illuminates limitations rather than manifests as a network of myriad possibilities. Where appearances, or surface structures of traditional gender norms, become part of an alien disavowal of identity, gender reemerges as one of the (still) central foci of the posthuman contestations over identity. But here, gender is in circular interplay with the (technologically driven) processes of its own undoing, as well as of perpetual becoming. Alien feminisms do not ask who the subjects of feminism are but how they perpetually become inside the circuits in which “woman” is recognized as a posthuman entity to begin with. In discussing posthuman alien women in recent cinema, and speculating about what they may entail about the posthuman epistemologies of alien feminisms, I heed Braidotti’s suggestion S I G N S Winter 2018 y 383 that “one needs to turn to ‘minor,’ not to say marginal and hybrid genres, such as science fiction, science fiction horror and cyber punk, to find fitting cultural illustrations of the changes and transformations that are taking place in the forms of relations available in our posthuman present” (2006, 203). Under the Skin and Ex Machina are hybrids in which sci-fi, horror, and psychological/revenge thriller meet and shape alien film forms, offering frameworks that help to situate hybrid genre extensions of gender as a posthuman shape of surface appearances. Both films are fairly unclassifiable within traditional genre frameworks, as if to mirror something about the alien posthuman entities depicted within their frames. In both, femininity is initially positioned as inorganic, alien, and threatening rather than domesticated or familiar, only for the story to become more complicated later. Reflecting contemporary anxieties about gender within the nature– (techno)culture continuum, they examine what is inhuman about femininity, exploring its inorganic elements while simultaneously revealing affective investments that challenge an all-too-easy dichotomy between humanness and posthumanness. Dehumanizing cine-feminist inquiry: Or, film feminisms beyond humanism In feminist studies of cinematic posthuman forms, significant focus has been placed on representations of the maternal, or deviations thereof. Barbara Creed (1993) analyzes the monstrous feminine forms of archaic mothers and monstrous wombs in sci-fi films, while Mary Ann Doane examines motherhood, or more generally reproduction, “as that which is, at least initially, unthinkable in the face of the woman-machine” (2004, 183). Motherhood, Doane asserts, “acts as a limit to the conceptualization of femininity as a scientific construction of mechanical and electrical parts” (183). Jackie Stacey (2003) further explores the projections of the monstrous in JeanPierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection along the lines of deviant reproduction and “excessive sameness” (252). Stacey observes that “fantasies of reproductive technology . . . have pervaded popular culture in the form of a technological fetishism, involving a disavowal of the mother’s role” (259). And while such focus on reproduction and the monstrous feminine undoubtedly deserves attention and reflects patriarchy’s anxieties about inorganic, nondomesticized femininity and reproduction made possible through technology, one can note a shift in the more recent cinematic renderings of posthuman women, which repositions them away from maternal/monstrous frameworks of deviant constitution that seek to reestablish organic normalcy and toward the feminine as inorganic, alien, and nonmaternal to begin 384 y Jelača with. It is an important shift to acknowledge, since it has the potential to render gender and sexual difference alien in ways that incorporate technology as a central, borderline-natural vector of their constitution. In a relatively short period of time, Under the Skin and Ex Machina have garnered a significant amount of scholarly interest. Both contain a seeming paradox: while their protagonists are nonhuman, they are also indisputably feminine in traditionally humanoid ways. This double occupancy entails that we not be too quick to assume that the posthuman and the feminine are mutually exclusive. In Under the Skin, the central protagonist is an extraterrestrial who takes on a female form, while in Ex Machina, the protagonist is a manmade, artificially intelligent (AI) cyborg. The differences between the non-, in-, and posthuman figures should not be too easily collapsed onto one another, as the prefixes “non” and “in” imply entities whose origin can be entirely separable from human trajectories of emergence, while “post” may imply a closer relationship to the human—that of a temporal kind, where the posthuman subjectivity comes after the human and its emergence is closely tied to the fact that it is preceded, and to some extent still infused, by a human existence. Yet intricate parallels between the figures of the non-, in-, and posthuman remain, particularly where their role as morality tales of what became of humanity in a nonanthropocentric, posthumanist framework is concerned. While the extraterrestrial origin of the nameless nonhuman who takes the form of a sexualized young woman (Scarlett Johansson) in Under the Skin appears entirely independent of her subsequent encounter with humans, the posthuman female android in Ex Machina (Alicia Vikander) is created by an eccentric male scientist and is framed as both a product and captive of his heteronormative desire. And while the alien figure in Under the Skin initially shows little interest in becoming human—or in upholding the humanist values of individualism, liberty, or the right to live—outside of merely appearing in feminine human form in order to fulfill her destructive mission, Ava in Ex Machina is driven by a powerful motivation to become more human than her sadistic human creator. Ava’s struggle to become (more) human is largely framed through the humanist tropes of individualism, independence, and freedom from captivity. Humanism here looms large as a channel of spectatorial empathy, even when it is positioned as ultimately utopian and inadequate. Moreover, in both films, these larger themes are rendered in terms of gender inequality and the struggle of (white) posthuman female subjectivity over male dominance, giving each film strong feminist overtones of an alien kind that complicate our traditional understandings of feminism and its objects. And since alien feminisms constitute themselves within a circuit comprising the human-posthuman spectrum, rather than emerging in a linear framework of progression, they reference traditional humanist S I G N S Winter 2018 y 385 feminism only to challenge its key premise—the stability of womanhood as an organic, embodied identity. The nonhuman in Under the Skin and the posthuman in Ex Machina point to the inextricable connectedness of organic and inorganic pieces through alien, cyborg technology (evoking Haraway’s cyborgs but flirting with the figure of a humanoid goddess as well), and to the simultaneous positioning of technology as man-made but also alien, strange, and uncanny. Both figures embody decidedly human and nonhuman traits in ways that make it difficult to extricate the two or determine where one set ends and the other begins. In fact, standard scientific indications of humanness that traditionally determine the separation between the human and the nonhuman (such as the Turing test) are here rendered inadequate, perhaps because such a separation is, the films suggest, fraught to begin with.1 The alien in Under the Skin is a female vigilante who goes on a ruthless murderous mission against men (and therefore functions as a projection of patriarchy’s worst nightmares about feminism) and who ultimately falls victim to male violence. Ava in Ex Machina is a captive of her male creator until she ultimately frees herself from imprisonment; her quest to set herself free has lethal consequences for the men who are given the authority to decide her fate. And through her planning and execution of the escape, Ava ultimately passes the Turing test she had been subjected to, although, ironically, there is no human left to certify the results. New gender realities are reflected and constituted in the wake of these screen interventions, where the technoscapes of posthuman subjectivity generate shifting understandings of gender and of sexual difference. If both gender and sex are unnatural, or alien, how is their inorganic occurrence rendered additionally strange in the image of an impeccable posthuman femininity? This is where the unfinished business of feminism steps in, since the posthuman frameworks of both films are positioned as feminist interventions that recall humanist understandings of female agency faced with the threat of patriarchal violence, while simultaneously making such understandings inorganic and alien to themselves. The archetype serves to invite familiar feminist overtones, but the films simultaneously refuse to rest on said familiarity, opting to explore what is strange in the familiar forms of feminism and what is familiar in the strange forms of feminism. Out of this, alien feminisms arise, multiple and proliferating, hybrids of old and new epistemologies at the same time. 1 The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing, was designed to test whether human evaluators can tell if they are communicating with a machine. If the evaluators cannot tell whether their interlocutor is a human or a machine, the machine is said to pass the test. 386 y Jelača Encounter, empathy, and the posthuman femme fatale in Under the Skin As a parable for the posthuman condition, Under the Skin functions as minor cinema: a visual study of the process of becoming-woman, where womanhood is not a given, natural category but rather a skin-deep assumption of identity that conceals an alien mass underneath. A nameless, mysterious alien arrives on Earth and takes the shape of a young, attractive woman. The opening sequence firmly places us within the film’s alien form—always somewhat outside of the grasp of our full understanding. As atonal music plays in fast-paced, dramatic rhythm, we see a series of puzzling images—a mysterious circle suddenly becomes a pulsating human eye—and hear the sound of a woman’s voice uttering sounds. The film’s opening depicts the process of becoming-posthuman, the synergy of human and otherworldly matter, as well as entrance into language as a signifier of traditional forms of subjectivity. In a brightly lit space, the alien takes the clothing and appearance of a woman found dead by the side of the road (it is unclear how she died). After the alien emphasizes her feminine traits with makeup and revealing clothes, and without any exposition that would give us a clue as to her motivation (indeed, the film’s alien form actively resists exposition and familiarity), she spends her days and nights driving around Glasgow in a white van, seducing unsuspecting men and then luring them, enthralled and oblivious to the danger, into a black pool of nothingness into which they eventually dissolve. It should be noted that the film is loosely based on Michel Faber’s novel of the same title, though the two differ in significant ways, too numerous to be accounted for in the short space of this essay. Significant here is the question of motivation: while in the novel the alien lures her victims so that they can be turned into meat and consumed by her species, the film leaves any such backstory out, opting for unnerving uncertainty instead. The film frequently features phantom ride sequences in which the camera embodies the alien’s point of view as she cruises the streets in search of unsuspecting male victims. She is a vigilante loner on a mission; her motivation is both otherworldly and at the same time an embodiment of a radical feminist threat. She is a threatening phantasm of a man-destroying feminist embodied in an irresistible femininity. Such figures are certainly not unfamiliar to cinema and popular culture more broadly, either as human femme fatales or as their posthuman, sci-fi counterparts. Whether human or posthuman, the femme fatale is the embodiment of a dialectic—she is simultaneously a symptom of masculinist paranoia about the perceived threat of female sexual power and an agent in her own right, a figure driven by a desire for power, which she attains by symbolically castrating the male protagonist. The frame- S I G N S Winter 2018 y 387 work of alien feminisms allows us to explore the constitution of the posthuman femme fatale outside humanism’s oedipal structures for understanding sexual difference, unconscious drives, and a subject’s motivation (and, by extension, rationality). In writing about sci-fi films, Vivian Sobchack observes that “to make us believe in the possibility, if not probability, of the alien things we see, the visual surfaces of the films are inextricably linked to and dependent upon the familiar” (2001, 88). Indeed, Alicia Byrnes (2015) finds that “Under the Skin is successful in its depiction of an alien perspective because of the interplay between this point of view and its human façade.” Yet this hybrid positionality makes the alien a liminal figure who can be fully empathized with only when she is rendered in the traditional framework of a female victim toward the end of the film. In the film’s early stages, the posthuman femme fatale does not harbor any anthropocentric motivational drives. With the film’s determination to deny the viewer any gratifying exposition, the alien’s quest is rendered outside the dominant frameworks of understanding, particularly those that extend to oedipal interpretations of her castrating symbolism. Rather than castrating men—symbolically or literally—the alien seeks to dissolve their bodies without apparent gratification in that act. “How strange to experience the female gaze saturated with desire but unencumbered by care,” Ara Osterweil (2014, 47) notes pointedly. Skilled in flirtation, the alien is initially unmoved and unfeeling. This is emphasized when she appears unfazed by a screaming baby on the beach, whose parents the alien had calmly witnessed drowning. She is not simply nonmaternal or antimaternal—rather, she is outside such frameworks altogether. She appears driven by a singular goal of luring lonely men (she only chooses those who appear to not have family or friends, presumably so as to leave as little trace as possible) into the nothingness of the black pool. This absence of motivation further places the female alien firmly outside of the humanist frameworks of understanding female agency, power, domination, and control. Moreover, it pushes the alien deep into posthuman territory where either/or binaries are dispensed with. “If the human is dead, the alien, the other, goes with it. Or does it?” ask Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (1995, 13). Osterweil observes that in the film, “everything of this world is rendered alien” (2014, 44). The alien film form echoes this perspective—as the familiar is frequently made unfamiliar and strange through her point of view and through the framing that emphasizes the strange aspects of everyday occurrences. As the alien moves through space and observes the mundane, the spectator is aligned with her perspective and is compelled to perform a phenomenological shift in perception, not taking for granted the familiarity of 388 y Jelača the ordinary. The alien’s affectively detached posthumanness persists largely uninterrupted in a nonanthropocentric ethical vacuum—apart from occasional but telling fissures, such as seeing her own blood or suddenly facing physical vulnerability upon tripping and falling down—until she encounters a man who is socially ostracized and effectively rendered inhuman because of his severe facial disfiguration. The man is shy and inexperienced with women and is shocked that this attractive stranger has shown so much interest in him. In her encounter with disability, the alien discovers that the definition of “humanness,” and masculinity in particular, is fraught with ableism. Her usual questions—“Do you have any friends?” and “What about a girlfriend?”—suddenly take on an entirely different meaning, emphasizing the man’s alienation from humanity, akin to her own. After leading the man into the black pool, she stops by a mirror and examines her own reflection—a posthuman mirror stage. Then she lets the man go (he is later recaptured by the alien’s mysterious male helper anyway). Something in their encounter affectively moves the feminine posthuman and compels her to arrive at empathy in being faced with the structures of humanist ableism. As Osterweil notes, “finally encountering someone whose skin is as alien to him as she experiences her own to be, she is moved to empathy” (49). The encounter with the disabled man becomes an encounter with her own alterity, an arrival at posthuman subjectivity and the emergence of posthuman ethics. She appears to realize that not all of her victims are the same. The teratological embodiment of disfigurement and the alien embodiment of posthuman femininity relate to one another in a way that results in an affective reaction of empathy. The two figures forge an unspoken bond born out of their shared alien displacement: one a disfigured male human, the other a feminine alien. When she spares the disabled man’s life, the feminine posthuman effectively abandons her destructive mission and flees for the highlands, while her male accomplice follows in pursuit. Suddenly, the sinister alien femme fatale is transformed into a figure of feminine vulnerability, an object of more traditional spectatorial empathy, as a fugitive who relies on the kindness of strangers to get by—specifically, a man on the bus who appears worried about her. He takes her in, and something akin to traditional human courtship ensues, whereby the alien tries out a mundane human life (food, television, music, hiking, sex). The alien gradually experiences the human encounter between bodies and beings through skin. She examines her naked body in the mirror, fascinated by her feminine traits. Libidinal investment begins to emerge. When they attempt to have sex, she abruptly ends it when the man attempts to penetrate her. Examining her vagina under lamplight, she appears shocked. The shock is ambiguous: while it may be read as the moment she encounters sexual difference and enters the oedipal framework of hu- S I G N S Winter 2018 y 389 manist subjectivity, it is also possible to see it as a moment when she encounters the alien frameworks of becoming-woman. Byrnes (2015) notes that in this scene, “the heroine’s realization of her alienness has interesting implications for Under the Skin’s feminist allegory. Her discovery concretizes her function as purely aesthetic; she is built to signify sex, but is denied its pleasure.” Rather than placing the encounter with the feminine “lack” within the anthropocentric framework of sexual difference, libido, and oedipal castration anxiety, the film’s alien feminism frames it as a questioning of whether womanhood as subjectivity extends beyond the skin to begin with. In fact, in a reversal of the oedipal frame, the alien’s “lack” (both figurative and in/organic) does not predispose but rather interrupts the possibility of a (hetero)sexual encounter. Within the circuitry of alien feminisms that oscillate between human and posthuman and blur their boundaries, the presence of an anthropocentric oedipal script is acknowledged but denied dominance. Here femininity and sexual difference are skin deep, yet being temporarily encapsulated in that skin ultimately determines the alien’s fate. If skin both “protects us from others and exposes us to them” (Cataldi 1993, 145), the alien’s skin initially conceals her alienness as a protective veneer but finally reveals her otherworldliness. When she flees into the forest, she runs into a ranger who asks if she is there on her own, in an eerie echo of the questions she posed to her victims. Indeed, he later attacks her, and the threat of sexual violence becomes real. In the ensuing physical struggle, her skin starts to peel off, exposing the alien who resides under the layer of skin. The skin functions as a temporary humanoid container of an alien form, but what is under it? Something shapeshifting and material, yet elusive, made out of inorganic matter but nevertheless shaped in female form: the feminine alien posthuman. The alien is not able to escape the fate of a brutalized woman, even when her humanoid female identity is revealed to be only skin deep. The more humanoid she becomes (marked by the emergence of empathy and libidinal desire), the more susceptible to the threat of masculinist violence she appears to be. As her skin starts to peel off, the alien examines her human face—another posthuman mirror stage, where one encounters the self as the ultimate other. Rather than being an entrance into identity, the mirror stage becomes an encounter with the impossible experience of one’s posthuman death. As the alien, shed of human skin, is set on fire by the attacker, she crawls outside of the forest and dies, surrounded by the tranquility of an indifferent landscape. The film’s final shot has the camera facing upward into the sky, from which snow is slowly falling. Organic and inorganic forms are fused in a cinematic juxtaposition that serves as a study of the vicissitudes of the feminine as alien posthuman experience. 390 y Jelača The alien’s merging with nature (through visual dissolves and her moment of death) calls into question the standard assumption that there is an inherent unnaturalness to alien forms. In the film’s alien feminism, nature and alienness become a hybrid circuit: alien is natural, and nature is alien. If the skin is typically understood as the surface limit of our human bodies and, by extension, beings, the alien’s humanoid skin initially conceals, and then ultimately reveals, a literal body without organs, to utilize Deleuzian vocabulary. At the same time, in the sequences that depict men who descend into her pool of black mass, their bodies dissolve from the inside, until only skin without matter is left. In their Thinking through the Skin, Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey warn that “it is the fetishising of the skin as boundaryobject that allows the contours of the body to appear as a given” (2001, 3). By refusing to take skin as the boundary that upholds bodily sovereignty, we can rethink “the relationship between depth and surface, between inside and outside and between self and other” (4). Perhaps we can do so as a way to acknowledge our own alienness and its implications for posthuman feminist epistemologies. The skin in Under the Skin exists as another double occupancy: both a site of and a barrier to an encounter with another and a surface landscape that gives temporary humanoid form to an alien body without organs in the process of becoming-woman. Skin is not just gendered; it is the only landscape of gender. Becoming-woman is a process imbued with giving humanoid shape to, and thereby effectively concealing, alien forms that reside under the permeable boundary of skin. Moreover, for the alien’s male victims, death renders skin the only organ that remains tangible—albeit in inhuman shape—in its aftermath. We could stipulate that experiencing one’s own sense of self through skin and through touching puts us in contact with our inhumanity. Karen Barad has asked, “what if it is only in the encounter with the inhuman— the liminality of no/thingness—in all its aliveness/liveliness, its conditions of im/possibility, that we can truly confront our inhumanity, that is, our actions lacking compassion?” (2012, 216). Barad concludes that encountering our own inhumanness is an ethical stance toward the alterity of another, a stance that puts us “more intimately in touch with this infinite alterity that lives in, around, and through us, by waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we are” and, moreover, “to a recognition that it may well be the inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depths of what responsibility entails” (218). While Barad’s conclusion is a hopeful one, Under the Skin provides a more pessimistic encounter with the inhuman alterity experienced through the permeable boundaries of skin. The implications for a feminist politics here circle us back to the precarious vulnerability still tied to alterity, where a posthuman entity S I G N S Winter 2018 y 391 succumbs to masculinist violence through a convergence of related factors: she is both a woman and an alien, an impossible bind. As “one of the most important feminist interventions in recent cinematic history” (Osterweil 2014, 45), Under the Skin is a critique of the ongoing masculinist threat of violence toward a woman, even when her womanhood is inorganic and contained only in the permeable surface boundary of her skin. The film’s parabolic framework therefore embodies one possible form of posthuman, alien feminisms, acknowledging the ongoing reality of masculinist violence without upholding the organic naturalness of womanhood as humanist subjectivity in the process. Objects in the mirror are stranger than they appear: The posthuman woman’s return of the gaze in Ex Machina Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, a hybrid mix of sci-fi and psychological thriller/ horror, opens with a short, wordless sequence that situates its story in a futuristic but simultaneously familiar technology-infused milieu. Caleb, a young computer programmer and employee of Blue Book, “the world’s most popular internet search engine” (named after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notes), receives the news that he has been selected to work on a confidential project with the company’s founder, a reclusive genius, Nathan. As in Under the Skin, the nature in Ex Machina is filmed as an alien, otherworldly entity: the mad scientist’s compound is located in the middle of a vast territory of seemingly untouched nature. But nature is integral to the process of creating artificial intelligence rather than juxtaposed against it. Nathan’s largely subterranean compound is almost indiscernible from the trees that surround it, and it appears to be fused with nature rather than built on top of it. The interior of the modernist building emphasizes the ingrown aspects of its existence, with elements of nature—such as a rock—forming some of the walls of the place. Elsewhere, walls are composed of transparent glass, making the compound’s separation from its natural surroundings appear seamless. The continuity of the posthuman, rather than its break from the human, is overtly acknowledged by Nathan when Caleb asks him why he created Ava: “I don’t see Ava as decision, just an evolution.” The posthuman AI, to her male creator, is an evolutionary inevitability, blurring the line between organic and technological extensions of life. “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods,” says Caleb. Indeed, the film’s title reflects the godly overtones in its reference to deus ex machina—God from the machine. Yet God is replaced by the centrality of the human-technology interaction, resulting in an incomplete phrase that can be loosely translated as “from the machine.” 392 y Jelača Caleb is brought to the remote compound to be the human component of the Turing test that will determine whether Ava can pass as human. The Turing test is contaminated from the start because Caleb already knows that he is talking to a machine. What he is measuring, then, is the level of the AI’s human consciousness, premised on his own subjective assessment. “The real test,” Nathan informs him, “is to show you that she is a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.” Caleb’s feelings become a litmus test of another entity’s humanness. In assessing the level of Ava’s awareness of her own mind as separate from Caleb’s, the test is searching for proof of Ava’s theory of mind—an ability to distinguish someone else’s thoughts, desires, and intents as different from one’s own. Theory of mind has been used to differentiate humans from animals and to assess supposedly humanoid abilities in other species. Here, however, theory of mind is deployed to assess the ability of a machine not only to act like a human but in effect to be human. At first, Ava visually appears as a cyborg—with little to no skin covering her body, except for the face, and with transparent parts revealing the manmade technology that constitutes her organism. Eventually, she puts on a more human, feminine appearance: a dress and a pixie-cut wig. “This is what I’d wear on our date,” she says to Caleb. Ava discerns that Caleb is attracted to her. When she says, “sometimes at night, I wonder if you are watching me on the cameras, and I hope you are,” she overtly plays into the desiring male gaze in order to gain Caleb’s solidarity. Later, she is seen undressing— uncovering her cyborg body in the process—while Caleb watches on the screen. The replication of the male gaze nods to the history of its controlling apparatus in classical cinema, but it also indicates how the conditions have changed: the object to-be-looked-at is now an inorganic machine-woman who is manipulating the male gaze in order to find her way out of confinement. The true test that Ava is subjected to is finally revealed to be Nathan’s attempt to see whether she would use everything she can—namely, Caleb— to escape. (“There is nothing more human than a will to survive,” says the film’s official log line.) Nathan, in declaring that Ava has passed that test after she convinced Caleb to help her escape, notes: “Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did. Now, if that isn’t true AI, what the fuck is?” The film’s philosophical overtones convey its meta-awareness of the ethical implications of posthuman extensions of ourselves in technology. After Ava flirts with Caleb, he asks Nathan: “Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a gray box.” Nathan dis- S I G N S Winter 2018 y 393 agrees: “Can you give an example of consciousness on any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?” When Caleb responds that sexuality “is an evolutionary reproductive need,” Nathan asserts that there is no imperative for interaction (or consciousness, which is produced through interaction) without the desire and pleasure that sexuality brings. He goes on to confirm that Ava is capable of having sex and, moreover, of enjoying it because “in between her legs, there is an opening with a concentration of sensors. You engage them in the right way, it creates a pleasure response.” Caleb suspects that Ava was programmed to flirt with him: Caleb: Did you give her sexuality as a diversion tactic? . . . Like a stage magician with a hot assistant. Nathan: I programmed her to be heterosexual, just like you were programmed to be heterosexual. Caleb: No one programmed me to be straight. Nathan: You decided to be straight? Please, of course you were programmed, by nature or nurture, or both. While the two men conflate and collapse the vicissitudes of gender, sexual difference, and sexuality, the film’s overarching suggestion of their technological manipulability is an important epistemological shift to note. Unnoticed by both men during this exchange, Kyoko—Nathan’s “hot assistant” who, he asserts, does not speak English—is listening intently. As Kyoko later reveals to Caleb, she, too, is an AI that Nathan created. Kyoko and Ava eventually turn against Nathan, echoing the cinematic trope of the femme fatale who leads to the male protagonist’s downfall. In the framework of the film’s alien feminism, they are illegitimate posthuman daughters who kill their father. When Kyoko stabs Nathan in the back, she performs a crucial role in the events that lead to Ava setting herself free— more so than Caleb, who is unconscious during most of the final turn of events. Moreover, while revealing her cyborg nature to Caleb, Kyoko peels off layers of skin and eventually breaks the fourth wall by looking straight at the camera with her half-human, half-cyborg face. She returns the cinematic gaze to embody a silent, defiant, hybrid entity, an alien posthuman woman who enacts revenge on a sadistic male creator. In an alien feminist turn, Ava and Kyoko turn against the male-dominated world that frames them in the image of a sexually alluring real-doll. (Ava’s face, Caleb learns, was programmed based on his porn preferences, and Kyoko fulfills Nathan’s sexual needs.) To defy such a world takes circular 394 y Jelača tactics that may play into the traditional stereotype of what makes a desirable woman. Ava quite consciously manipulates that stereotype, alternating between a seductress and a little girl lost, in need of rescue. The damsel in distress sets herself free, but she also denies us a comforting ending along the humanist lines of empathy, because she calmly, and without hesitation, leaves Caleb—the man who sought to help set her free—locked in the compound, presumably to die. Ex Machina’s treatment of gender garnered some controversy upon release. While the director has described Ava as “genderless” and suggested that Nathan’s creation of cyborgs who resemble real-dolls is supposed to be seen as “creepy,” or, as the film’s commentary on the “constructs we’ve made around girls in their early 20s and the way we condition them culturally” (in Watercutter 2015), Angela Watercutter finds that “in the pursuit of that commentary, the movie ends up reenacting those same patterns.” Watercutter goes on to note that “Sentient male androids want to conquer or explore or seek intellectual enlightenment; female droids may have the same goals, but they always do it with a little bit of sex appeal, or at least in a sexy package.”2 What to make of such instances where the technological construction of posthuman gender aligns with traditional humanist traits, particularly for man-made posthuman women? Are they inevitably reactionary? Perhaps a cyborg can be a goddess too. Ava becomes increasingly feminine in traditional terms as the story unfolds, and that transition becomes a plot device in and of itself but in a decidedly posthuman way that renders her gender a process of deliberate, calculated becoming. The posthuman femininity here opens up a space for reconstituting traditional gender traits and their firm attachments to the nature/culture binary. What if we consider gender, as I think Ex Machina does, as neither organic nor nurtured but as posthuman altogether? Considered outside the limiting binaries of nature/ technology and agency/victimhood, femininity is here inorganic, simultaneously human and posthuman; it presents vital tactics for a subject’s survival. And while Ava’s survival is framed around the completion of her human/gender makeover—she covers her cyborg body with skin grafts from other AI prototypes that came before her and puts on long wavy hair, a lace dress, and stilettos—her survival is also premised on dispassionately 2 Another critical piece, by Ariane Lange (2015), argues “Ex Machina—more than being a horror film about the scary possibilities of artificial intelligence—is a flawed story about men losing control of women and the bankruptcy of gender roles. Basically, Ex Machina is the Gone Girl of 2015.” S I G N S Winter 2018 y 395 disposing of the male figures. In fact, Ava’s becoming feminine is coupled with the demise of men rather than with a reiteration of their dominance. Ava quite literally assembles herself into an organic-appearing figure of femininity, where gender is constructed in an artificial and self-controlled manner, as a mode of posthuman survival. Her assemblage of gendered subjectivity (re)turns to traditional feminine gender traits methodically and in calculated ways that do not merely reinstate femininity as natural or inevitable. Rather, femininity here is a circuit deployed toward ensuring posthuman female continuity and articulating alien feminisms, utilized to ensure the AI’s seamless entrance into the world. Masculinity is not entirely free from the circuitry of the nature-(techno) culture continuum either. After Caleb gets access to surveillance videos and discovers Nathan assembling (and torturing) previous versions of female AIs, and after Kyoko reveals that she, too, is an AI, Caleb starts suspecting his own humanness and inspects his bodily surface in search for proof. As in Under the Skin, skin appears as a suspicious and unreliable boundary that conceals posthuman existence even to itself. Caleb tests his humanness by cutting into his skin and inspecting what is underneath. In a moment of paranoia, he suspects that everyone is inhuman, where “I think, therefore I am” does not serve as an adequate test of humanness. Here, to think is to doubt one’s humanness of being. After letting his blood slowly drip, Caleb looks at his reflection in the mirror, smears it with blood, and then breaks the mirror in a gesture that acknowledges the uncertainty of what the “I” reflected in that mirror is in a posthuman world. Indeed, mirrors and visual reflections are important for bringing out existential overtones of the overarching questions: Who is the posthuman “I”? What is a body? Mirrors recur in pivotal moments, such as the final one, in which Ava looks at her reflection at a busy cosmopolitan intersection. Visually, she blends in, and that seamlessness guarantees her survival: the feminine figure looks at her reflection in the mirror in a view of posthuman life where the continuum of nature and culture, or nature and technology, is so omnipresent that it becomes unnoticeable. In an earlier scene, when Kyoko reveals her cyborg identity, multiplying mirrors signal Caleb’s realization that things are not as they seem. The shot of multiplying posthuman female figures is a visual reference to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All about Eve. Here, Ex Machina overtly calls attention to its form, and to the known feminist tropes of film history, which it summons and reconfigures within the framework of the posthuman condition. Similarly, as Ava is assembling her femininity, multiplying mirror reflections convey a dispersal of posthuman subject formations. With this, the Lacanian mirror stage of entering subjectivity is again referenced, but it is not entirely 396 y Jelača adequate as a method of discerning humanity—instead, mirrors are multiplied, shattered, and reflect posthuman entities in becoming. While most of the film is framed as a game of cat and mouse between the two men—Nathan and Caleb—it is the cyborg women’s unspoken solidarity outside of the male circuit of power/knowledge that propels the film to its outcome and triggers Ava’s emergence into the world. Reflecting and constituting alien feminisms, both posthuman women subvert the traditional framework of the controlling male gaze—Kyoko, by silently and threateningly facing the camera as a posthuman figure and by stabbing her creator in the back, and Ava, by playing to and manipulating the surveillance cameras and the male gaze behind them. Even Ava’s final transition to feminine form is conducted under the watchful gaze of Caleb. Yet instead of being an objectifying device, that structure of looking reveals Ava’s control and poise, and Caleb’s powerlessness. After mesmerizing Caleb with her transition, she leaves him locked up without so much as looking back or expressing any of the emotion she had strategically displayed toward him. For significant stretches of time—including the prolonged final sequence— the film is wordless, and although at other times it is verbose and philosophical, the silences convey its underlying anxiety at the multiplying circuits between the human and posthuman. Anxiety is left to linger with the spectator at the end, with Ava’s poised emergence at a busy intersection signaling an evolutionary step that is both inevitable and unnerving. The film’s alien feminism resides in its refusal to humanize its posthuman woman, whose surface appearance conceals the depths of technological circuitry comprising a human body that is only a mirage. White skin and the tactical circuitry of alien feminisms The posthuman does not merely emerge after the human. Rather, it is a circuit that both contains and perpetually indicates the inadequacy of the human to account for the proliferating extensions of technology in organic matter and of alien forms in the ever-more hybrid clusters of posthuman identity formations. Braidotti’s question, “how does the posthuman engender its own forms of inhumanity?” (2013, 3), should be further extended to include inquiry into how the posthuman engenders its own forms of humanity, thereby exposing the circuits that mark the ongoing links between human and posthuman conditions in nonlinear ways. Or, to return to a question I posed earlier, if gender and sex are rendered alien, how is their inorganic occurrence made additionally strange in the image of an impeccable posthuman womanhood? I have inspected how some answers are manifested under the cloak of gendered anxieties, female agency, and posthuman fem- S I G N S Winter 2018 y 397 inist epistemologies. While the feminine posthuman does not seek out affective relations to humans in Under the Skin, and while they represent instances of interruption that cause the alien’s final downfall, in Ex Machina Ava actively seeks such encounters, not as an unequivocal confirmation of her humanness but to tactically ensure her posthuman survival. In these two prominent screen reflections (and circular constitutions) of posthuman womanhood, masculinist violence is still a threat; it remains a key point of reference on the continuum between the human and the posthuman woman and between human and alien feminisms. Both films carry overt feminist implications of an alien kind that nevertheless nod to traditional humanist feminist discourses without unquestioningly upholding their premise. The films’ foregrounding of the masculinist threat strategically returns us to the fold of the humanist cinematic gaze posited as a controlling device (and a long-contested object of feminist film inquiry) and builds posthuman feminist epistemologies from there. In Under the Skin, the alien posthuman woman initially returns the gaze by being the one who is in control and whose gaze could spell a death sentence to any man she encounters. Yet, as she becomes more humanoid, she falls victim to a misogynist violation that reminds one that even the most threatening posthuman feminine figure is not immune to masculinist violence, rape, and murder. This moralistic/ humanist return to earthly realities is rendered in quietly tragic overtones that merge alienness and nature and place them along an oscillating continuum rather than as separate entities. It suggests that even posthuman alien forms can fall prey to patriarchy’s violent hold. In Ex Machina, Ava is brought to life through the symbiosis between patriarchy and technology: created by one man and then subjected to a test of her humanness by another. But she overturns the dominant order and shatters the circuit that sees technology as inescapably bound to patriarchy. She partially embodies the information-age paranoia about AIs and the end of male-centric humanity. She was built when Nathan mined information by hacking into global cell phone data: data mining here becomes a way to transfer humanity into the posthuman condition. Nathan compares the existence of such data to the initial discovery of oil: “too much raw material, nobody knew what to do with it.” This data, he says, is a map not of what people are thinking but of how people are thinking. And just like this observation about data, we may stipulate that the two films collect raw material about posthuman ways of rethinking subjectivity and give it shape through an alien feminist lens. That lens continuously oscillates between humanist and posthumanist modes of recognition, as the posthuman framework cannot be rendered fully meaningful without reference to humanist epistemologies. Proliferating alien feminisms arise out of humanist incommensurability, charting 398 y Jelača new epistemologies on the tectonic ground of the posthuman condition. As such, they are bound to be in perpetual discovery, rendered alien even to themselves. In the two films, the posthuman condition is not (yet) a postgender condition in a way that it arguably might be in their important cinematic predecessor, Alien Resurrection. Rather, it is a becoming-gendered condition, where traditional features of gender and sexual difference stubbornly persist but as contingent processes of perpetual assemblage and undoing, rather than of continued stability and fixity. Posthumanness is strategically concealed by the surface layer of skin, which peels off and can be put back on as an unstable barrier between the human and the posthuman, self and other, surface and depth (or the illusion thereof ). The difference in outcomes lies in the films’ differing approaches to human-posthuman encounters. In Under the Skin, the emergence of empathy leads to the alien’s demise at the hands of masculinist violence. In Ex Machina, Ava feigns empathy and displays a complete lack of it at the end. It is the dismissal of an empathic encounter within humanist frameworks (which sustain traditional patriarchal power structures) that becomes a source of posthuman survival. Only by entirely forgoing empathy toward—or indebtedness to—the patriarchal structures of subjectivity’s emergence can the posthuman woman survive. This is an important insight of alien feminisms, where emerging forms of posthuman solidarity circumvent the centrality of humanist frameworks of subjectivity and the hierarchies of power/knowledge. In diverging yet overlapping ways, Under the Skin and Ex Machina chart these trajectories of alien feminisms and their threat to humanist, male-centric forms of being in the world. The parable-like structure of both films—which transplants the ongoing anxieties about gender, feminism, and subjectivity onto the futuristic hybrid forms of aliens, cyborgs, and artificial or otherworldly intelligence—might obfuscate the fact that, even in their symbolic domain, the films position white femininity and white skin as a transuniversal posthuman form. This point is further emphasized by Scarlett Johansson’s more recent posthuman role in Ghost in the Shell, where she plays a cyborg-enhanced woman who was Japanese in the original manga source. And white femininity would indeed remain the norm for these posthuman alien women were it not for figures like Kyoko, whose actions effectively set Ex Machina’s key events in motion. Yet she remains completely silent throughout, an enigmatic alien—a nonwhite posthuman woman who cannot, or perhaps refuses to, speak within the humanoid frameworks of expression through language. Alien feminisms need to continue charting new paths of and for the posthuman women like Kyoko. The contemporary cinematic posthuman women indicate that the project of feminist inquiry is still urgent, still threatening, and moreover, pivotal for S I G N S Winter 2018 y 399 our understanding of ethics, optics, and subjectivity in the posthuman paradigm and in the uncertain charting of our own alien futures. Yet, alien feminisms need to resist (re)inserting white femininity as the normative framework of their ethics and optics alike. Just as it is still gendered, the posthuman figure is raced through the privileging of whiteness too. As I have suggested, posthumanism cannot entirely avoid engaging humanist frameworks because they are too deeply embedded in the existing structures of meaning and formations of power/knowledge against which we build new forms of knowledge. Rather than rejecting them altogether, posthumanist epistemologies need to reengage notions such as “empowerment,” “community building,” and “bonding” (Braidotti 2013, 54) and the notions of self and other, in ways that displace implicit Eurocentrism, ableism, whiteness, and anthropocentrism rather than reiterate their epistemological hold. In the spectatorial invocation of posthuman empathy with the alien female subjectivity, we can evoke Barad’s assertion: “How truly sublime the notion that it is the inhuman . . . that may be the very condition of possibility of feeling the suffering of the other” (2012, 219). The object of alien feminisms is inextricably tied to the corporeal dimensions of existence, or to ongoing raced and classed bodily implications, even when the bodies in question are all surface, skin, and no organs, and when the lines separating the sovereign boundaries of self and other blur. Because of this, alien feminisms have the potential to chart the constellations of race as technology in revealing and transformative ways—a project that is in urgent need of attention. Feminisms haunt anew the posthuman cultural circuits in ways that indicate that their material impact and political urgency are ever shifting—but far from over. In fact, feminisms’ most important contribution might still be on the alien horizons of our posthuman future— shape shifting, elusive, and alien to traditional humanist forms of knowledge but nevertheless referential to them in a perpetual ontological loop. 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