ABSTRACT
There is a scene in Aliens in which a female paratrooper is doing press-ups on a bar. Her hair is short, her body muscular, lithe, powerful, her skin black. This image of female muscularity threatens boundaries of race, gender, colour. By way of offering an insult, a white male paratrooper (not nearly as virile) says: ‘Hey, Vasquez! You ever been mistaken for a man?’ She eyes him calmly and replies – with just the right hint of menace – ‘No! Have you?’ The phrase ‘sexual subject’, with its emphasis on ‘subject’ rather than the already determined categories of ‘female’ and ‘male’ invites us – like Vasquez – to adopt a flexible response to the question of sexual subjectivity. Is she a man? Is he a woman? A not-woman? Or a he-woman? An object? A subject? Bisexual? Homosexual? Asexual? Nothing?
