Son of a Bitch
"Feminism, Humanism, and Science in "Alien
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4300358 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James H Kavanaugh (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Pages | 90 |
| Publication date | 1980-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | October (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2870 • E-ISSN: 1536-013X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3397704 |
| OpenAlex | W2316483249 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
An aesthetically effective mass-cultural production, A lien cleverly fuses a number of disparate cultural semes into a cinematic narrative that has considerable visual and emotional impact. At the same time, it cannot entirely conceal its own internally overdetermined and contradictory construction, which allows criticism to expose its attempt to resurrect a specific ideological figure. For the death of the alien, as Alien has it, is the triumphant rebirth of humanism, disguised as a powerful, progressive, and justifying feminism.' The concept of humanism which functions as a crucial ideological trope in Alien is similar to that suggested by the Althusserian reflection above. Within a rigorous Marxist theory of history, society, and culture, it is a theoretical error to found a transformative program for social liberation on the pseudo-concept man-an ideological notion that conceals differences, contradictions, and struggles in the real under the sign of a generalized, shared essence. For Marxism, there is no such thing as man; there are specific men and women, distributed as differentially functioning agents into specific classes, with class standing as the significant category of an effective theory of social transformation. Whatever their good intentions, humanist theories are, in this Althusserian construction, inevitably ineffective and self-defeating grounds for transformative social practice. Even Stalinism is understood, in part, as an effect of irruptions of pre-Marxist humanist
Aesthetics · Alien · Art · Feminism · Humanism · Sociology · Theology · Demography · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism
| Citations per year | 0.1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1987 - 2004 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |