Full Description
Gender and Parenting in the Worlds of Alien and Blade Runner is a comparative, gendered analysis study of Ridley Scott's contributions to the genre of science fiction and horror cinema. Observing that while Ridley Scott's science fiction classics Blade Runner and Alien each feature future worlds in which space travel and off-earth colonies are commonplace, the author showcases how patriarchal and gendered expectations regarding women, usually associated with the past, still run rampant. Amanda DiGioia argues in this book that Scott has shifted from focusing on the future, and what humanity may be able to obtain from it, to a focus on facing mortality: what occurs after death and the futility of human existence. The opening chapter provides the necessary theoretical framework and background for the rest of the book, defining the Blade Runner films as science fiction works with elements of horror, from the corporeal to the existential, and the Alien universe as a collection of horror texts. The following chapters go on to discuss the idea of gender, across the works, ruminating on how humanity is in some instances nothing but a social construct that reinforces patriarchal myths about gender and power.
Contents
Chapter 1. Gender, Childbirth, and Parenting in Science Fiction Films and Gender in Horror Films
Chapter 2. More Human Than Human: Blade Runner 2049
Chapter 3. "We were so wrong": the perversion of male creation. Motherhood, fatherhood and birth in recent incarnations of the Alien series
Chapter 4. "You've never seen a miracle": Birth and Parenthood in Blade Runner 2049
Chapter 5. "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies"
Chapter 6. Conclusion
