Gender Roomours II

21     A more gentle version of male reproductive powers can be found in Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco science-fiction movie Silent Running. Here, a male botanist named Freeman is left all alone on a space-station orbiting Saturn where he takes care of the last remnants of vegetation of a nuclear-devastated earth. When Freeman gets the advice to destroy the plants, he decides to ignore the order and bring his spaceship on a course away from earth. Together with his drones, three little robots, he tends his garden, speaking of himself as "mother." When all fails he sends the garden into deep space to facilitate a possible second chance for mankind. Freeman is in more than one sense a free spirit in space. Not only does his name, Freeman, signify a liberation from restrictions and constraints. He is the only character left on a spaceship after abandoning both his former co-workers and his civilization as a whole. He becomes a silent martyr with only two children to survive: the garden and one of the robots.

The Longing for a Third Sex

22     Other science fiction movies make use of sexually ambiguous characters to negotiate the in-between-ness of space. In the Star Wars quintology we meet the comical figure Jar Jar Binks, a huge, clumsy, yet good-natured Gungan, who is marked as a composite figure not only through his appearance (he wears a skirt and has a wiggly-kind-of walk), but also through his speech. Jar Jar does not speak the high dialect of his community, but a Gungan/Basic pidgin. In addition he has a high, soothing voice that leaves it unclear if the character is a male or a female. An outcast of his native clan, Jar Jar has to survive in the swampland of Naboo and live on raw shellfish before he is rescued by the official fleet of the Galactic Republic. All these signifiers establish him (or her?) as a highly ambiguous creature. Jar Jar Binks is not the only ambiguous character in the Star Wars quintology. Episode II: Attack of the Clones features a warrior woman who fiercely attacks the beautiful senator Amidala. This amazon figure, it turns out, is a so-called "changeling," that is, in the terminology suggested by the makers of Star Wars, a creature that can alter its biological sex as well as its general appearance. "The 'he' is a she," one of the Jedi knights remarks and adds, "she's a changeling." Unlike the Jar Jar Binks figure, the changeling is a dubious and potentially threatening character. The act of changing is associated here with deceit and hidden danger, since the changeling is never what he or she seems to be.

23     Steven Spielberg's movie E. T. from 1982 offers a less threatening version of alien boundary crossing. As Vivian Sobchack has convincingly shown in her essay "Child/Alien," the friendly creature E.T. stands for an androgynous, innocent life form (20). Yet, E.T.'s environment obviously has some problems with this gender ambiguity. The very first question that little Gertie asks when she sees E.T. is, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Although E.T. is repeatedly associated with symbols of masculinity in the course of the movie, these attributes are quickly neutralized through a movement of infantilization. The glowing phallic finger, for example, does not represent a threat but offers a healing effect, standing for affection and warmth. E.T.'s voice is rather dark and coarse, yet also childlike and affectionate, suggesting both vulnerability and tenderness. These images can be seen as indicators for a tendency in Western culture that has been described as a hidden "longing for a third sex" (Uecker 124-135).

24     In the postmodern age - and here I return to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a malleable identity -, such desires have taken on the form of a play with the possibilities of self-fashioning. This playful challenging of given boundaries encourages us to deconstruct the mechanical patterns of gender hierarchy. In the disorderly room of experimentation, new and potentially inexhaustible forms of identity constitution can be developed, tested and, if necessary, discarded. The "other" here no longer appears as an enemy, but as an integral element of one's own identity. Notably, the technical term E.T. stands for both "extraterrestrial" and "embryo transfer." Analogously, postmodern subjectivity is not only flexible and volatile, but also transferable. E.T.'s alternative gender identity, we may conclude, will be transferred to the children who save him from the pursuers. Identity is no longer seen as something essential but more and more as a performative feature. It becomes, to rephrase Joan Riviere's famous concept from the 1920s, a masquerade. In a carnivalesque manner, postmodern discourse entices us into experimenting with preliminary identities, trying them out and eventually discarding them as if they were clothes in a supermarket.

The Astronautic Subject as Cultural Figuration

25     In her book Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti describes those women as nomads whose subjectivity is constituted on a temporary basis and whose thinking and actions resist established power structures. I want to take Braidotti's concept one step further and suggest the notion of "astronautic subjects" as an appropriate figuration for postmodern subjectivity. Following Braidotti, I use the term figuration[5]In social science, the term <em>figuration</em> is usually deployed to denote a social network of mutually dependent individuals. As Norbert Elias explains in his introduction to sociology, a figuration is marked by a nexus of power structures. In Braidotti's adaptation of the term, the imaginative function of a <em>figuration</em> becomes much stronger. Whereas Elias concentrates on the element of power maintenance in social <em>figurations</em>, Braidotti underlines the utopian quality of the term, signaling a path for a development of new power structures. I want to express my gratitude to Renate Kroll for pointing out to me the relevance of Elias's text. to point to a "politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity" (1). In her phrase, the concept refers to "a style of thought that evokes or expresses ways out of the phallocentric vision of the subject" (ibid). By using the figuration of the "astronautic subject," I delineate a form of unattached and independent identity constitution symptomatic of the individualizing tendencies in postmodernity. This highly expressive mode of self-constitution does make use of existing codes of behavior; yet, it distorts and disseminates the signs attached to such strategies beyond recognition. Astronautic identity is nomadic in the sense that it avoids a recognizable affiliation with cultural norms and standards. However, in contrast to nomadic identity, it lacks an awareness of the full possibilities and the exact outcome of the exploration. The astronautic subject embarks on a voyage in which the geographic range and the dimensions of this transformative process are not predictable. Components of "astronautic identity" can be found, for example, in the actual lives of cosmopolitans and transsexuals. German filmmaker Monika Treut has made use of the motif of the astronaut in her film Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities (1999), which deals with transsexuals living in the San Francisco Bay Area. On the official website for the movie, we are informed that this is "a film about cyborgs, people who alter their bodies and minds with new technologies and chemistry."[6]See http://www.hyenafilms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=35 &lang=english