What Can She Know, Where Can She Go? Extraterritoriality and the Symbolic Universe in the Alien Series

Abstract

In this article I focus on the trajectory a female character undergoes from her status as constitutive outsider to a being that matters. I analyze the films of the Alien series, and suggest the features that confirm the woman's state as the outsider in the symbolic universe of the father, if taken within a new normative injunction, can in Judith Butler's sense, become the features that matter. The work of Slavoj Zizek is pertinent to the central theme of the article, although I ultimately side with Butler, who, with the help of Derrida's concepts, elaborates the possibility of breaking out of embedded categories and labeling practices. The way to insert the marginal or the excluded into the realm of the universal requires that the excluded be theorized as a signifier. In terms of the Alien films, the features such as ‘alien’, ‘monster’, or ‘synthetic humanoid’, matter precisely because they mark a deviance and a difference from ‘woman’ as a universal category. New universes can come into being to the extent that alternative signifiers are able to compete with the paternal signifier. The possibility I put forward is the universe governed by the Law‐of‐the‐Alien. This law engages our capacity to envision a different kind of male as well as female existence, and it is an occasion for alternative subjectivities to come into being.