The ‘Alien’ Franchise: Gender, Sex and Motherhood

TW: Mentions sexual assault

When you think of iconic science fiction horror franchises, it is likely you will think of ‘Alien.’ Birthing in 1979 under the watchful eye of Ridley Scott, the franchise itself is still going strong today, as evidenced by the recently released ‘Alien: Romulus.’ After rewatching them all each film has a certain set of tick box features. A fearsome adult Alien, spawned by someone’s early encounter with a facehugger, a tomboyish female lead with a similarly tomboyish name, a mass of side characters needed to be killed off horribly, usually featuring your token ethnic minorities and probably an alien human hybrid for extra squirm factor and to hammer home to the audience that the Aliens are not as far away as we think. Considering the amount of content that stemmed from the original, it is not surprising that certain set pieces and plot points get repeated. Some of these repetitious plot points however work to elevate and reinforce the thematic stamps of the franchise: gender, sex and motherhood.

What is interesting is that the environment of the first film especially is not typically feminine or masculine. Originally, all characters were written without an established gender, which in hindsight should be obvious by their names. Ripley, Parker, Lambert and Kane do not align themselves with a specific gender, thus the franchise occupies an androgynous space. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley herself aligns with androgyny, as she possesses both feminine and masculine traits.

Some characters lean more into the masculine or the feminine though, such as Lambert. Lambert can be likened to the damsel in distress, as she prefers to be protected by masculine presenting characters, such as Parker. It is the presence of the Alien that disrupts all notions of gender within the film. The Alien’s existence obliterates all human life present, and with it, all human conceptions of gender. The Alien does so through its deployment of sexual violence. It is the Alien’s phallic imagery that disrupts this androgynous landscape through forced, penetrative action which can be likened to male sexual violence.

The elongated, phallic shape of the Xenomorph and its multiple variants is reminiscent of various reproductive systems at different stages. For me, the facehugger is the most unsettling Alien within the franchise, and this is in part because of its reproductive cycle. The spindly fingers and whipping tale of the facehugger are quite obviously phallic, and its reproductive cycle of forced penetration against the will of the host is reminiscent of a violent sexual assault. With deeper thinking though, perhaps the facehugger is more androgyne than it’s male-coded appearance suggests. The area at which the tub extends is reminiscent of female genitalia, so perhaps the Alien is androgyne as some of its human counterparts. But then, am I taking this too far?

It’s one thing to say that something long represents a phallus, but making the link to female genitalia feels more specific than just a generic, long shape. Can I compare an alien to human genitalia, and the human concept of gender? Does any of that make sense? Let’s just agree it’s all pretty gross.

The result of this assault is the iconic chestburster, as immortalised in the original film. The birth of this Alien also displays the same violence in being born as in being conceived. While the facehugger forced itself onto a human host, when gestated, the Alien forces itself out. The facehugger is the active agent in this scenario, and the human is the passive actor. This power imbalance comments on the lack of consent in this scenario and reinforces the rape allusion.

As established previously, the presence of the Alien destroys human concepts of gender. We infer that this is the case, because the Alien enacts violence on everybody equally. The male-coded Alien does not discriminate.

The Alien’s nature, and that of Ripley’s also links to the theme of motherhood. Throughout the first film several characters, most notably Kane, are forced to give birth. This disrupts the idea of gender norms, especially when dealing with male characters such as Kane, as the act of giving birth is female-coded. This already inverts the romanticised idea of having a child, something that typically is supposed to be born of love, something that brings joy. The Alien’s reproductive system provides no such thing. As the theme of motherhood is built upon and strengthened throughout 1986’s ‘Aliens,’ what we get at the end of Cameron’s sequel is the ultimate face-off between the two superior mothers. The Xenomorph Queen and Ripley herself. Let us talk about the Xenomorph Queen first.

The Xenomorph Queen’s physical form can be likened to that of the previously established Xenomorph, although she is more ornate. The Queen has the same phallic head and tail, but is coded as feminine, and named Queen, because of her capacity to give birth. What is interesting, is that she requires no male to fertilise any eggs, she births them herself. She reinforces human ideas of gender norms, she is female as she gives birth, but also carries that bit of androgyny that Ripley does, linking them together. The Queen’s very presence cements the inference that the Xenomorph in the previous film is male, as it could not produce eggs independently.

In a deleted scene in ‘Aliens,’ we learn that whilst in cryo sleep, Ripley’s daughter died. This leaves the daughter void wide open for the entrance of Newt. It is through Newt that Ripley cultivates her motherly instinct, even following it against Hicks’ advice. Ripley’s strong belief that Newt is still alive highlights the strong connection she has with, what is framed as, her adoptive daughter. It is this connection that eventually spurs her to confront and defeat the Queen, in a sequence that is the closest thing we are going to get to a sci-fi catfight… albeit with more acidic bite. Ripley’s iconic cry of ‘get away from her you bitch!’ prefaces the iconic showdown.

A note on this lexis. While later heroines Rain and Daniels refer to their respective Aliens as ‘motherf*****,’ Ripley’s use of ‘bitch’ not only notes the Queens animalistic tendencies, quite literally calling her a female dog, but also notes her gender as female by referencing her ability to breed. Much like Ripley herself. The line also speaks to a mothers’ willingness to do anything for her child. The Xenomorph Queen is also prepared to do anything for her children, but the difference is that hers are dead, at Ripley’s hand. She is prepared to do anything to avenge her children. Ripley’s relationship with the theme of motherhood only complicates in later ‘Alien’ films as does her relationship with the Aliens themselves.

In ‘Alien III,’ spawned in 1992, it is established that Newt is dead, leaving Ripley devoid of a surrogate daughter. At the films climax, Ripley discovers that while sleeping, she was attacked by a facehugger and that a Xenomorph Queen embryo is growing inside her. This places Ripley in a unique position. In Newt’s place is the Xenomorph embryo, making Ripley the mother to the organism that has previously terrorised her. Her strong maternal instinct, as developed in ‘Aliens’ directly conflicts with the Alien growing inside her. This is an organism that she does not want to be mother to – but is. This can be likened to Kane’s forced motherhood in the first film. The only choice she has is to end her life and that of the embryos’. However, in the following 1997 film, ‘Alien: Resurrection,’ Ripley is cloned, the embryo is extracted, and the cycle of chaos and acid blood continues.

Ripley is aggressively confronted with the fact that she now has Alien blood running through her veins. She is integrated with the Alien race in a more intense way than being attacked by a facehugger. It is not a physical attachment that she can remove, their DNA is intermingled. It is almost more intimate than an encounter with a facehugger. Due to this, Ripley now possesses some of the Alien’s characteristics, notably having a more feral nature and a level of acidity to her blood. She is beginning to embody the very creature she fought against, again, without choice, the being that threatened, and by extension took away, her second chance at being a mother.

What is birthed at the end of ‘Resurrection’ is an Alien, human hybrid. The hybrid, being Alien and human, is the physical embodiment of the conflict occurring within Ripley’s body. The conflict between her human half and her Alien half. The hybrid would have also challenged the human concept of gender in a more explicit, physical sense. Originally the hybrid was shot with male and female genitalia, which were edited out in post production. What is interesting about this note is that Ripley is female, why would the hybrid have human female and male genitalia? Perhaps this is something to do with the female-male appearing facehugger.

The presence of the hybrid directly challenges Ripley’s maternal instinct. Knowing that she cannot let this hybrid continue to exist, she ejects it from the airlock. This is not the first child Ripley has lost, she lost her daughter and then Newt. Ripley is visibly distressed and guilt-ridden when ejecting the hybrid but understands its importance for the greater good, as although the hybrid had some human, it still contained some of the deadly Alien. The complexity of this conflict deepens Ripley’s relationship with the Alien species, as she, although temporarily, became part of their evolution. The force that Ripley fought so hard to destroy has now become amalgamated with her, and she cannot be separated from it. Both her and the Alien survive.

The Alien franchise seems to love a human Alien hybrid, and in ‘Prometheus’ Dr Elizabeth Shaw births a Trilobite by caesarean, which is key to the eventual birth of the Xenomorph. In the most recent entry, ‘Alien: Romulus,’ Kay births a hybrid, known as the Offspring. Humanity appears to have had multiple hands in what will eventually become the Xenomorph, by birthing some sort of anti-christ. This very birth subverts the idea of mother and child, as both Shaw and Kay are visibly horrified by what has been gestating inside them. They both are also attacked by their offspring. The Aliens encountered throughout the franchise are antithetical to humanity, and despite that dash of humanity gained from their mothers, they are still animalistic, bloodthirsty predators. They are pretty ‘un-human.’ Due to this, these women, despite being biological mothers, do not display that instinct in an emotional sense, as what they have birthed is horrifying to them.

Thanks for reading!