Normative body identity in Science Fiction

This paper is concerned with representations of non-human, yet humanoid bodies embodied as female in contemporary Science Fiction (SF). The analysis is grounded in specific, textual representations of humanoid characters found in the contemporary TV-series ¿Battlestar Galactica (BG) ¿. This paper analyses in what way representations of humanoid bodies portrayed in BG are subject to identity categorisations based on corporeal features. The analysis shows how body identity is inextricably linked to socio-symbolic identity categories, this understood as structural patterns of norms, values and standardisations related to specific bodies. This paper is primarily concerned with the interrelations between discourses of body, gender and sexuality projected onto the non-human. Analysing representations of bodies in SF texts is an analytical tool in order to understand how such representations are constructions of textual bodies, existing as contemporary metaphors, abstractions or symbols of the socio-symbolic body. In this paper, I continue to analyse how identity politics of the ¿normal¿ body becomes threatened by an abnormal body; the humanoid. Positioned as enemy, as Other, the non-human body reveal how the normative categories of body identity work through the materiality of the body. The humanoids represented in BG look identical and behave similarly to human beings, and my analysis looks at the way in which this distorts the normative dynamics of body identity. Drawing on feminist theories of how identity categories are written on the body (Butler, 1999, Schildrick 2002, Grosz 1994), I argue that the gendering of the humanoids as female results in a representation of double Otherness in these characters.