Cirrus@Austlit

'Science fiction is often concerned with reproduction, which is typically figured as an incursion of the alien upon the human – exemplified by the horrific inseminations and chest-cracking faux-births in that classic of science-fiction cinema, Alien (1979). Mothers and motherhood are common themes in these films, as we see in the second instalment of the Alien franchise, in which the androgynous hero Ripley faces off against a grisly, extra-terrestrial, egg-laying mother. The feminist Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), has described such films as a figurative expression of an underlying misogyny that casts the reproductive female as “monstrous”, requiring violent repression.' (Introduction)