Sidelining Women in Contemporary Science-Fiction Film

Abstract

The present article examines the role and space given to women in contemporary science fiction films since the 1980s. While the character of Ripley in the Alien franchise has been widely quoted and analyzed, I wish to argue that Ripley is an exception obscuring the general sidelining of women in a genre concerned first and foremost with masculine concerns. The emergence of women as active sidekicks in the 1980s (in RoboCop or Universal Soldier) led to the fleeting rise of action heroines in the 1990s (e.g. Terminator 2 and Ghosts of Mars), but the turn to postfeminism has contributed to the marginalization of women’s issues and roles in the films of the last decades. So why include women at all? This paper contends that the female characters literally play a supporting role vis-à-vis the male hero, defining and confirming the acceptable bounds of masculinity.