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Association: Name: American Studies Association URL: http://www.theasa.net
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114108_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Bastiaans, Aisha. "“Replicating Racial and Gender Difference: Blackness as Subtext in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner”" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114108_index.html>

Bastiaans, A. D. "“Replicating Racial and Gender Difference: Blackness as Subtext in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner”" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114108_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: My panel presentation considers the science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), and its “replicant” figure, to explore how blackness, even in the absence of actual black bodies, undergirds the film’s explorations of humanity, difference, and freedom. A genetically engineered being designed for slavery in “off-world” colonies and virtually indistinguishable from humans, the replicant not only expresses ambivalence toward technological progress in the tradition of urban dystopic science fiction, but subtly articulates concerns about race. With its post-apocalyptic vision of an America degraded by multiracial freaks and dominated by multinational corporations, and its ambivalent longing for colonial slavery, Blade Runner captures cultural anxieties in the early 1980s about the changing racial composition of the post-industrial United States. Whereas scholars discussing race in Blade Runner have focused on its Orientalism, in this paper I identify the ways in which blackness is simultaneously assumed and produced in the treatment of the replicant. How does Blade Runner engage the viewer in the attempt to solve the problem of the replicant’s liminality? In which instances does film, as a medium which relies on visual and discursive shorthand, depend upon the viewer’s desire for, and adeptness in, perceiving racial and gender difference? Might blackness function as the very mete and measure of difference- even in its absence? An interdisciplinary inquiry into the ideological work performed by the replicant, this paper offers a close reading of Blade Runner and considers its critical reception through analyses of reviews and fan websites. Race and blackness, I suggest, can remain subtexts only through the film’s engagement with the viewer. The film responds to the provocative uncertainty between appearance and reality posed by the replicant by soliciting the viewer’s recognition of codes of racial difference. Presuming the viewer’s recognition of coded references to blackness, the film reifies these very taxonomies of difference. If this dynamic exchange between film and viewer obliquely articulates cultural concerns about race, then gender is a decidedly more apparent ideology of difference constituting hierarchies of human value. Blade Runner’s replicants present a literal example of gender programming and thereby reveal how integral gender is to the construction of blackness, and vice versa. By way of conclusion, this presentation asks if- despite the film’s deployment of the replicant figure to reify ideologies of race and gender and make blackness a fundamental referent for difference, and indeed inferiority,- the replicant figure can be taken up critically to expose the shifting and contingent terms of racial and gender difference. Might we discuss the film and its critical reception without making recourse to binaries of blackness and whiteness, fear and fascination, self and Other, but rather utilize the replicant as a window into the ways that race operates on a spectrum of sameness and difference in which the terms of difference are contingent? “Replicating Racial and Gender Difference” thus gestures towards framing blackness as a category of difference that effectively obscures its circular logic and the fluidity of its classifications, within an over-determined condition of constraint.

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