Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  However, in order to carry out such a policy, or to police it, one must be able to identify “the enemy.” Women, except for the occasional passing butch, were relatively easily identified. But how does one recognize a “homosexual”? The problem of how to identify the alien in our midst, the queer who could pass, remained fraught both for governmental institutions and for “ordinary” people. Lee Edelman, in his study of the discursive contradictions underwriting the conceptualization of sexuality in this time period, points to the ways in which, on the one hand, queerness was envisioned as always already written on the body, while, at the same time, queers were feared in part because of their ability to “pass” (“Tearooms and Sympathy” 151-156).

  Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find a proliferation of stories and films fixated on the danger of the alien who is able to assume human guise and travel unseen amongst us, wreaking havoc on the nation and destroying the family. Among films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is probably the best known, although the film version of Campbell’s story, The Thing (1951), certainly merits an honorable mention. Just as Frankenstein’s tale of the monster created from within can be read in a multitude of ways that focus on the revelation of different kinds of monstrous births—in at least one of which it can be read as an originary story about the parent’s, especially the father’s, fear of producing a queer child (queer as different serving always synecdochically to bring into view queer as sexually different)—so “Who Goes There?” serves as a near perfect example of the way in which the story of the alien who passes as human derives from the precise confluence of anxieties that serve to claim, at the same time, that homosexuality is always written on the body and that it is always able to pass.

  In “Who Goes There?” the alien—and a very nasty alien it is, too, with an immutable drive to conquest that may be part guilty imperialist conscience and part fear of the Other—has been frozen into the ice of Antarctica for twenty thousand years. A team of researchers finds the alien ship, retrieves the solitary frozen specimen, and sets out to thaw and study the apparent corpse. That the alien is not innocently dead is presaged by the dreams of various members of the all-male team; even frozen, it appears to be able to exert some sort of telepathic and perhaps suggestive pressure on the human mind, luring men into unconsciously betraying both themselves and their species.

  The revived alien takes over the bodies of other species, merging with them and consuming their physical being, so that each in turn becomes the Other. The alien imitation of the “normal” man is so perfect, however, that it remains undetectable by all the tests that the men are initially able to devise. They know that some of them have become monsters, but they do not know which. The threat is internalized, as all of these apparently human males are involved, one way or another, in a race to discover a test that will reveal (that is, make visible) the monstrosity lurking in the guise of human before the alien is able to muster enough strength to escape Antarctica and conquer the remainder of the planet. The tone throughout the story is minatory, every scene replete with the unseen but omnipresent threat: “An air of crushing menace entered into every man’s body, sharply they looked at each other. More keenly than ever before—is that man next to me an inhuman monster?” (118).

  The conversion from human to alien is figured in bodily terms that are reminiscent of the sexual act. The men, caught in the monster’s gaze, are passive victims of its alien seductions—Connant, for example, stares into the living red eyes of what is supposed to be a corpse but it seems to him “of no more importance than the labored, slow motion of the tentacular things that sprouted from the base of the scrawny, slowly pulsing neck” (95); he puts up no resistance, psychological or physical, to his absorption by the alien. The actual moment of alien takeover is never shown to us, taking place discreetly “off camera”; yet it is figured in terms of both consumption and consummation: the alien inserts a part of its substance into the men, taking them over complelely. Contacts with identifiable versions of the alien are depicted in terms of violence of very specific types: the men burn it with a fiery probe, they fall upon it and virtually tear it to pieces which they then cauterize, and they attack Blair—the first convert and last survivor—with yet another equivalent of the red-hot poker:15

  The huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white, three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly . . . crawled and howled. (123)

  The alien seduces men into submission to its will and then uses their appropriated bodies as the means by which to assimilate the remaining men. The men, some of whom are already aliens in disguise, argue about its imitative abilities, concluding that a perfect imitation “would take a superhuman skill” (102):

  “It would do no good,” said Dr. Cooper, softly as though thinking out loud, “to merely look like something it was trying to imitate; it would have to understand its feelings, its reactions. It is unhuman; it has powers of imitation beyond any conception of man . . . no [human] actor could imitate so perfectly as to deceive men who had been living with the imitated one in the complete lack of privacy of an antarctic camp.” (102)

  The fear of the perfect imitation, undetectable even within an environment as intimate as the camp, resonates with the fear that the gay male can imitate “real” men so perfectly as to pass undetected in the most masculine of environments. The imitation should be detectable—written on the body of the gay man pretending to be straight—yet he remains undetectable within the military, the government, and—most frightening of all—the family.16

  The alien is also unable to reproduce and is portrayed as having, by necessity, to recruit its forces by converting the normal in literally physical ways—consumption and appropriation—into the monstrous. In addition, what gives the monstrous alien away in the end is its selfishness, the one thing that distinguishes it from the valorous altruism of real humans. McReady explains that every part of the alien is a whole—even its blood once it’s split off—with the result that, being too selfish to sacrifice itself for the good of the species, the new part will strive to preserve itself: “the blood will live—and try to crawl away from a hot needle.”17 There is a resonance here with the populist conception of the gay man as selfish, a conception which may have arisen, in part, because he’s seen as refusing to share his genes and perform his male role in perpetuating the species, but which may also be partially a bowdlerization of Freud’s theories of the role of narcissism in the psychosocial construction of the male homosexual.

  Not only is there an extremely dark homoerotic tone underwriting both the construction of and the threat against this closed all-male society (traditionally the one environment in which homosexual activity is most likely to take place among men who do not define themselves as gay), but the threat is also conceived in terms that replicate the particular rhetoric with which the heteronormative forces of the political and religious right have chosen to characterize the threat of the (male) homosexual: he is endlessly but inexplicably seductive; he cannot reproduce and so must convert in order to continue his species; he is the monster who comes from within, since he is, by necessity, produced by apparently normal heterosexuals; and he is able to vanish and to remain nearly undetectable, free to work his wiles against all of those institutions Americans hold most dear.18

  There are powerful resonances between the historical understanding of dissident sexuality, particularly homosexuality, from the turn of the century through to the beginning of the gay liberation movement and the construction of the alien in this story. Nevertheless, I do not mean to suggest that this reading of the story is necessarily more authoritative than or precludes other potential readings. It does serve, I think, as a useful example of how that peculiar, imprecise thing we have come to call “queer theory” can illuminate the connections between, on the one hand, a particular perspective on our sexual ontology and its ori
gins and, on the other, a science-fiction story about the dangers of aliens who can pass invisibly in the midst of “normal” people. Not surprisingly, it is Blair, the first alien convert, who argues for a viewpoint not based on an attempt to naturalize a normative ideological formation, when he tells the other men that they “are displaying that childish human weakness of hating the different” (94). Given the events of the story, “hating the different” would appear to be just what the doctor ordered.

  3 Alien nation: Visualizing the (in)visible

  . . . it is a central purpose of art, in conjunction with criticism, to expand the realm of conscious choice and enlarge the domain of the ego. It does this by making manifest what was latent, a process that can be resisted, but not easily reversed. And so even those who dislike what I have had to say may yet find it useful as a warning of how things appear to other eyes . . . . Thomas M. Disch, “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction” (155)

  Cultural constructions of visibility operate like magic: they make certain things disappear, or appear only in very particular contexts. Let me tell you a story. Once, about a decade ago, on a long and boring car ride with a young woman I scarcely knew, I found myself running out of topics of conversation. It was all too obvious that everything that interested me bored her. Her descriptions of her fiancé, on the other hand, bored me, but might, I thought, at least give us some commonality on an aesthetic level. So, as we waited at a stop light, I pointed out a particularly lovely young man. She perked up, gazed in the direction of my pointing finger, and finally said, with much puzzlement, “Where?”

  “Right there,” I said, “at the bus stop.”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Sure you do—that good-looking black guy. . . .” And at that moment I looked at her blonde hair and contemplated the story of her Norwegian husband-to-be and finally figured it out.

  You see, now I’ve told you a story. It’s one that functions—as sf itself often does—on the level of analogy. On an academic and intellectual level, we are generally conscious—I hope—of race and racial issues. It’s no longer completely improbable to us that a young white woman, someone who probably would describe herself as not at all racist, would be unable to see a young black man in this context.19 We understand this story. It is less clear to me that we—that is, all of us—understand the other story, the one by which queer people in plain sight escape the heterosexual or, perhaps more precisely, the heteronormative gaze. This is the other half of the story: while “Who Goes There?” replicates the concern with the gay man (or lesbian) who “passes” invisibly within the larger society, other queer people, their history and their cultural production, remain invisible and unrecognized, even when that invisibility comes at the cost of a willful act of blindness.

  Now I can theorize this peculiarity of the heteronormative gaze in reference to feminist theorizing of the gaze20 itself or—in a useful analogy to heteronormativity—to work by people like Richard Dyer on the visual and cultural meanings of whiteness, or to the larger discursive strategies of post-colonial theory. Furthermore, I can also explain the invisibility of queerness within the text, specifically, by reference to the work of critics and theorists such as Alan Sinfield, who have labored to make visible the invisible and to demonstrate the usefulness and importance of reading from a subcultural position, whether it be queer or racial, ethnic or gendered, a matter of class or location. Such theoretical constructions are useful, perhaps essential, to what I’m calling queer theory, since they help to explain the seemingly quixotic inability of heteronormative institutions (which largely includes academia itself and also, I’m sorry to say, often includes sf, both readers and critics) to see anything queer in a text, an image, or the world itself.

  Thus, on the one hand, a queer reading can be a reading against the grain, where one looks at a text from what is clearly a subcultural position: often that involves reading the text through the cultural and historical milieu in which it is written; that milieu is not, however, understood in hegemonic terms, but rather through the historical and sociocultural perspectives afforded by the reader’s subculture. On the other hand, a queer reading may set out either to reveal or to recuperate what is already in some sense a queer text, usually a product of a history in which writing as a gay man or as a lesbian was impossible or dangerous. Such queer readings also provide alternative understandings of texts that cannot be labelled gay or lesbian, since those subject positions were not available to their creators. Thus, for example, we queer certain, indeed many, Renaissance texts. This does not, however, imply that their authors are “queer” or gay/lesbian or even homosexual, since those categories are all modern; it does imply, though, that we can recognize within the texts the traces of an alternative or dissident sexual subjectivity that may be revealed through close and careful reading within both a historical context and a theoretical framework. Such a reading is delineated, for example, by Earl Jackson when he attempts to map the strategies by which deviant subjectivities can be represented within the text. Jackson notes the necessity for a decoding practice, a cryptography of the text, which is historically contingent:

  Like the Renaissance sodomite, the nineteenth-century “Uranian” relied on phallocentric mythographs of masculine self-overestimation to disguise his fantasies—he sought a visibility through which he could remain unseen. This defense allowed the writers or artists to elude surveillance while conveying their hidden meanings to those whose desires enabled them to read the codes. (51)

  While it is possible to argue both that such subterfuge was historically necessary—and may still be necessary for those desiring to have their work commercially published, at least in some fields—and that it was a self-defeating strategy in terms of a nascent homosexual identity politics, such encrypting of meaning should not be understood as necessarily subversive. Both Sinfield and Jackson note the containment by hegemonic forces of coded texts: one can be a little subversive so long as one remains below the synaptic threshold at which the dominant regime is forced to take notice. Furthermore, as Jackson notes, “Although the perverse resignification of dominant masculine iconography provided a cryptography for an ‘outlaw’ community, its mimesis of patriarchal autoaffection was too well executed to disturb the dominant meanings of those expressions” (51).

  The mimetic reproduction of a hegemonic vision of the world is itself a historically contingent process, in the sense that codes that are indecipherable to one decade or age or to one set of people may become obvious to another. Thus, for example, we have masculinist readings of the stories of James Tiptree. Jr—Alice Sheldon’s male pseudonym and alter ego—that are wholly lacking in irony. Tiptree was praised for “his” understanding of the male psyche, and texts that, to us, are not only obviously but almost paradigmatically feminist were understood totally within the domain of a reading practice that rendered women invisible. Tiptree’s works were not only not read as feminist but were defined—and not only by Robert Silverberg, although he seems to have been the only person unfortunate enough to put what appear to have been widely held opinions in print—as arising from a clearly masculine understanding of the world. Not only does Silverberg refer to Tiptree’s prose (having, ironically, just cited “The Women Men Don’t See”) as “lean, muscular, supple,” he adds that

  there is, too, that prevailing masculinity about both [Hemingway and Tiptree]—that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss. (xv)

  Men, it seems, did not see any of the women in “The Women Men Don’t See.”

  In a not dissimilar way, purely feminist readings of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” may not account for, or have any interest in, either the necessary lesbianism of these future women or the construction of the Andys as transgendered. Andy is variously described, mostly by Bud, the sexually aggressive male (of the three, one of the others is figured as a patriarc
h—literally, the name of the father—and the other, the narrator, is likely homosexual), as “a boy,” as having “no balls at all,” as “a dyke,” and as a woman with excess androgen (thus the name). Yet a reading that foregrounds only the gender relations within the story is one that, in a sense, makes men central once again. The story is then read as a sad parable of the impossibility of heterosexual women and men being able to create a viable world together, since Tiptree, it seems, has already damned the men as innately violent, domineering, patriarchal, and sexually aggressive (although none of those constructions explain the narrator). The positive, loving, and intimate relationships between the women, the fact that they have survived and prospered, that they have, in fact, become “humanity,” are seen as less important, in such a reading, than the failure to repatriate heterosexuality. Yet demonstrating the viability of a successful, happy, and entirely non-heteronormative world seems quite queer to me. Surely the story’s assertion that heteronormative relationships are irredeemable argues not so much for a feminist uprising in which all men will be slaughtered as for a rethinking of the ideological and sociocultural presuppositions that make it impossible to imagine relationships across the sexes outside the limited regime of what one might call the “heterosexual imaginary”?21 Is it then possible to consider “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” as a queer text, as well as a feminist one? Can it be both? I raise these questions not to answer them, but to suggest to the reader some of the potential ways by which one might perform a queer reading of this text.