"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?"

“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” asks Private Hudson in the film Aliens.

“No, Have you?” replies Private Vasquez.

Her retort seems like it would fit perfectly well into some sort of discussion disassembling gender definitions. Instead, the line is merely used to highlight Vasquez’s endangered femininity so that she becomes a scapegoat to liberate Ripley of homophobic scrutiny and to assure the film viewer -- with the additional narrative threads of romance between Hicks and Ripley, and Ripley’s motherly protection over Newt -- that the action heroine subscribes to heteronormativity.

In his essay “Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return,” Jeffrey A. Brown makes the limitations of Sigourney Weaver’s action hero very clear when it comes to crossing the divide of conventional gender roles.  He says that “the development of the hardbody… heroine … indicates a growing acceptance of nontraditional roles for women and an awareness of the arbitrariness of gender traits” but that it does not go far enough to create a “legitimate role for women” because an action heroine like Ripley does not remove women from the “strict binary code” in which women can only be evaluated by the degree of their masculine traits. Brown continues to imply that roles like Ripley are not liberating as they are considered more like a “gender transvestite,” “cinematic cross-dressing,” and that “the action heroine is just a sheep in wolf’s clothing”; especially when compared to roles like Maggie in Point of No Return, which presents a true parody of conventional gender standards. As a biological woman, Maggie illustrates the plasticity of gender definitions through her exploitation of gender stereotypes depending on which suits her objective -- her stereotypical femininity with a mini-skirt appearance and her diminutive demeanor place an enemy off guard so that when she switches to stereotypically masculine aggression and gunplay, she decimates her enemy. I very much agree with Brown that the role of Maggie takes greater strides to expose the artificiality of gender definitions than action heroines like Ripley and Sarah Connor (of Terminator 2), who merely demonstrate that gender boundaries can be crossed. However, I do think that Aliens (and the franchise in general) has a few other objectives in mind when it seeks to "harden" the body of a woman because it is determined to show the capability, and often unstoppability, of maternal instinct.

Before I consider the material of maternal instinct, I want to point out the film’s treatment of women in general. While not as encompassing as Brown would have it, I do find Aliens to be more empowering for women than not. Vasquez may be a scapegoat, but she is also more than just a narrative tool, she is a positive representation of the “butch” or the “ballsy” military woman. The movie isn’t looking to demean her traits -- frankly, she is one of the more heroic characters. In fact, James Cameron is very much looking to emancipate women regardless of those who may think that his intentions don’t extend far beyond the surface level. He takes the damsel of The Terminator and makes her the stoic soldier in the sequel. He takes the “final girl” of Alien, and makes her the dominant matriarch in Aliens who can handle any matter of hardware. Hell, he’s got two women in the marines of Aliens and they’re treated with nonchalance given that the film was released in 1986. I know that women have been allowed volunteer opportunities within the military since the 70s, but it wasn’t until five years after the film, 1991, that 41,000 women were deployed in combat zones of the Persian Gulf war. The movie is well aware of changing times and it is impractical not to acknowledge the fact that, even though the action heroine does not shake gender definitions to their core, she has placated a very sexist industry that is usually only concerned with the objective use of women.

Of course, it is difficult to disband the heteronormativity of the film. The time of its production was rife with homophobia, and contrary to any of the creator’s intentions, there were and will continue to be box office numbers to meet. Let’s, for a moment, consider that the film is wary of a heteronormative agenda because it is preoccupied with its display of motherhood; that display is grounded through a heterosexual female because, while a contemporary argument might assert that caretakers can be of any sex or gender, the general 1987 audience is more familiar with the heteronormative choice. As an aside, and adopting the particular contemporary argument that I just mentioned, I tend to disagree with Brown’s assertion that T2 adheres to the same limitations as Aliens when it comes to removing gender boundaries. This opinion is definitely based on a postmodern perspective, but I think that since Arnold Schwarzenegger is such a cultural icon for stereotypical masculinity, the very notion of him playing the stereotypical feminine caretaker is evidence enough that gender definitions are illusory and made arbitrarily -- whereas Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton didn’t have the benefit of a famous background to dismantle gender boundaries and so they were compared by default to the discourse of previous action heroes.

Returning from my tangent, Aliens is continuing the franchise’s main theme, the examination of motherhood. An argument could almost be made that there are elements of the film’s universe that seek to dismantle gender definitions, particularly the main novelty of the film: facehuggers impregnating humans without any discrimination towards their sex; but because these hosts, usually on the screen as male, give birth by way of their violent death the potential for blurring the role of gender is discredited -- the only motherly role that comes out unscathed is the biologically female Ripley. So again, we have to pursue the role of motherhood in Aliens under the assumption that it is only for heterosexual females.

I’m not going to go into great detail on the exhibition of motherhood in this movie as the symbolism is quite overt (the many affectionate gestures from Ripley to Newt, the battle between Newt-protecting Ripley and the egg-laying xenomorph Queen). If you’re looking for even more evidence, just look at what the theatrical version cut out:

0:08:29: Ripley is sitting on a bench and looking at a clearing. The camera slowly makes a curve and we see that it is only a projection on a video wall. Ripley powers it off with a remote control. Then Dr. Burke enters the room and the following dialogue takes place:

Burke: "Hi, sorry I'm late. I've been running behind all morning."

Ripley: "Is there any word about my daughter?"

Burke: "I do think we should worry about the hearing now, cos we don't have a lot of time now, okay? I read your deposition, and it's great. If you just stick to that, I think we'll be fine. A thing to remember is there are gonna be a lot of heavyweights in there. You got feds, Interstellar Commerce Commission, Colonial Administration, insurance company guys -"

Ripley: "Do you have any news about my daughter?"

Burke: "Well, we did come up with some information. Why don't we sit down? I was hoping to wait until after the inquest. Amanda Ripley-McClaren – married name, I guess – aged 66. And that was at the time of her death. Which was two years ago. I'm real sorry."

Burke gives her the picture of her daughter, an old woman can be seen. Ripley touches the photo.

Ripley: "Amy..."

Burke: "Um... she was cremated and interred at Westlake Repository, Little Chute, Wisconsin. No children. I checked."

Ripley: "I promised her... that I'd be home for her birthday. Her 11th birthday."

Ripley's voice gets weak and she starts crying pressing the picture of her dead daughter against her face.

Or:

1:28:54: Newt and Ripley talk a little longer.

Newt: "Did one of those things grow inside her?"

Ripley: "I don't know, Newt. That's the truth."

Newt: "Isn't that how babies come? I mean, people babies? They grow inside you."

Ripley: "No, that's very different."

Newt: "Did you ever have a baby?"

Ripley: "Yes, I did. I had a little girl."

Newt: "Where is she?"

Ripley: "She's gone."

Newt: "You mean dead."

The film goes to great lengths to describe Ripley’s need for the maternal role and her efficiency once she has obtained it -- the maternal instinct: the take-no-prisoners, leave-no-quarter resolve that Ripley dares the Queen not to cross, and makes good on her threat when she is defied. That is what I am more interested in. The nature of the display of maternal protection in the film and its overall importance. Its nature is akin to the berserker status that we discussed with Rambo. She has entered a state of “nothing left to lose” where her only concern is the well-being of Newt, whom she figuratively adopts as her own child.

Another scene from the Director’s Cut might be relevant:

1:31:24: The DC contains a dialogue extension about the alien-queen. While Hudson and Vasquez are talking in the DC the Theatrical version only shows them looking in silence.

Hudson: "Hey, maybe it's like an ant hive."

Vasquez: "Bees, man. Bees have hives."

Hudson: "You know what I mean. There's, like, one female that runs the whole show."

Bishop: "Yes, the queen."

Hudson: "Yes, the mama. She's badass, man. I mean, big."

Vasquez: "These things ain't ants, estúpido."

Hudson: "I know that."

Is the berserker status needed to illustrate that a mother has respectable opinions that demand attention, or that a matriarchal authority is just as effective as patriarchal leadership? I’d like to think that Ripley’s authority, and the efficiency of that control, is adequately explicit by the time she goes berserk; and that the berserk is merely the final declarative touch cementing the film’s expression of female equality, a touch that is considerate of its predominantly young, male demographic in that it uses the action-hero berserk as a signifier of the hero’s cause being one of nobility. This is an oversimplified and reductive view in which I’d welcome more thorough opinions, but maybe Aliens only does play the role of the intermediary. It is an early, though long past due, wake-up call for the audience to the existence of gender definitions so that subsequent movies like Point of No Return might eventually break those definitions. I’d say the film is still monumental to even the furthest causes of gender theorists who seek to elucidate people of gender’s imaginary substance. It may not have reached the finish line, but it provided something radical in a solidly patriarchal, eighties, American society.