![]() I think this directly speaks to the lack of control women have over their own bodies. I've never come up with anything coherent out of all this, but there's certainly plenty of fodder there for those who want to try. There's Dead Ringers (with Jeremy Irons playing identical twin gynecologists, one of whom, IIRC, specializes in treating women with deformed wombs), but there's also The Fly (in which Geena Davis' character dreams she gives birth to a giant maggot) and eXistenz (in which Jennifer Jason Leigh carries around a virtual reality pod that attaches to her with an "umbycord" - do a Google image search on the film, and you'll see what I mean). ![]() The suction scene, in particular, always struck me as a metaphor for abortion, though I haven't seen much written about it as that.Ĭronenberg is perhaps a category of his own - he seems to be weirdly fascinated with reproduction, gynecology, etc. In the Alien film, Ripley is never actually pregnant - it's the Alien queen who gives birth to a human-alien hybrid "baby." But at the end of the film the hybrid indicates that is sees Ripley as "mama," and Ripley in turn seems to acknowledge it as "child" (she strokes it and speaks softly to it) - but then she uses her own acidic blood to make a small hole in the spacecraft, through which the hybrid is slowly sucked out. She omits two interesting examples that immediately leap to my mind: 1) Alien Resurrection and 2) almost anything by David Cronenberg. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture a textbook about gender and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. Following Laura Shapiro, she calls out writers and directors for using pregnancy as a form of “torture porn” and using women’s biological capacity as a plot device, meanwhile ignoring the real, non-fiction threats to women’s reproductive rights. In this episode she reveals the Mystical Pregnancy trope, common in science fiction, in which women are involuntarily impregnated by aliens and monsters for nefarious and frightening purposes. Instead, she draws our attention to insidious and ubiquitous tropes that many of us have, nonetheless, never quite noticed before, exactly because they’ve simply become the water we swim in (e.g., the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl). ![]() Women, is that she doesn’t go for the obvious. One thing I like about Anita Sarkeesian’s series, Tropes vs.
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