Alien is filled with sexual imagery, highlighting the divide between male and female. The flamethrowers the men use to battle the alien intruder are symbolically phallic, as is the rolled-up newspaper Ash uses to try and choke Ripley into submission in one of the film’s most horrific and psycho-sexual moments. When Ash, an android, is bludgeoned to death, his body sprays out a viscous white liquid, reminiscent of semen. To take the sexual symbolism even further, Alien illustrates what happens when a man is the victim of a non-consensual sex act (the face-hugger) and later endures a violent birth (the infamous chest-bursting sequence) — two acts of violence in which the victims are traditionally identified as women. These men are forcibly penetrated and made to sacrifice their bodies in ways they’ve never had to imagine, much less fear.

“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.