"I Ask the Xenomorph Queen: Do I Want My Womb?" by Nino McQuown
“In transitioning a colony through a republic into
a representative democracy with imperial might,
the emergent United States grew a womb.”
- Joy James, The Womb of
Western Thought“Is this mother going to try for us all?”
-Dutton, Alien 3
____
I ask the Xenomorph Queen if I want my womb. It’s 1986, we’re in Aliens, the second film in the Alien quadrilogy, which lasted from 1979 to 1997. We’re in her hive, in the basement of a thermonuclear reactor on a distant future world. It’s going to blow soon, and before that happens, Sigourney Weaver, as the butch feminist icon Lieutenant Ripley, is going to charge down here and rip her nest apart. But she doesn’t know that yet. All she knows is it’s warm here, there’s food, and there’s hosts for her babies.
She’s not sure what a womb is. What she has is something different: a modified ovipositor, a doozy. It’s fifty feet at least. It’s made of transparent mucilaginous membrane. It’s pumping out leathery eggs. Every one of them’s a threat to humanity. She is on top again, just doing her job as both a mother and as a symbol for the threat of Black women's reproductive power to white Reagan America. She doesn’t know that either. She is the queen of a hive of Xenomorphs, the most that have ever existed in one place and time for millenia. She has successfully transitioned most of the colonists’ bodies on planet LV-246 into womb-cocoons, so she expects to keep expanding, although it is a lot of work. Her reproductive labor keeps her anchored to this place, that’s the only hard part.
She looks me over. I seem as if I could have babies and still defend myself effectively. Through her steely, dripping teeth, she snarls Why not? If I keep my womb, I say to her, then some of the members of my species will insist that I’m a woman. They will claim that because I was born with a womb, what I am cannot exist. Near me, one of her thousands of eggs opens and the thing inside it stirs. Sex is a social construct. Bodies are multifarious. There is a universe of ways to become. There are so many ways to make kin, she hisses, and then her baby covers my face.
One thing I like about the Aliens series is the fact of its many, many, pregnant men. Commander Kane, for example, the first to die in the original Alien back in 1979. In one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, Kane gives violent birth to a homicidal maggot after having been attacked by an alien egg. In this first movie, the crew of the Nostromo doesn’t know what’s happening to them. They’ve been awakened from hypersleep because their shipwide computerized monitoring system, called “Mother,” has sent them to investigate a distress call on an uninhabited planet in deep space. Unbeknownst to the crew, they are being used as bait by their employer, a shadowy mega-corporation called “The Company,” which wants the Xenomorph Alien for its weapons division and is perfectly happy to force the unsuspecting astronauts aboard the Nostromo to gestate the specimens for them. The birth of the Alien first erases Kane’s identity, obliterating his face, and then it kills him: the baby Alien bursts through his chest cavity in a shower of blood and viscera that apparently shook up the film’s crew for days. The scene is a parody of male birth as death. Kane is on his back, huffing and moaning on a table while his loved ones hold his hands, and hold him down, and cannot believe what they are witnessing emerge into the world. When Alien first hit screens, the scene’s power was such that viewers vomited in the aisles and dared one another to see the movie without getting sick. Film critic David Thompson, who saw Alien in theaters, reflects that it was Kane’s pregnancy—and the threat it seemed to represent to his own male body—that produced such discomfort, far more than the violence on screen: “For I think very few people then foresaw that the monster was going to demand birth from Kane’s body. …We had not really understood the title, Alien, until this scene, and the absolute parasitic subduing of one organism by another. … [T]he body seemed more secure then.”
Wombs: they make a body insecure. It’s summer of 2022 when I first feel this for myself. In the US, the federal right to an abortion has been struck down in Dobbs v. Jackson and the internet is alive and crawling with commentary. At first, my rage feels vicarious. I’m a transmasculine person living a life of relative physical safety, and I don’t think much about my womb except as a purveyor of blood and bad feelings each month. To be honest, I sometimes forget that it can do anything else. But then a hot take making the rounds on social media brings the problem home to me. The hot take goes, for example, like this: “abortion is not just a ‘woman’s issue’, because cis-women are not the only ones who are able to get pregnant. A reminder that trans/non-binary/gnc people of childbearing capacity exist and this affects us too.” The post is by and for trans people, and it’s intended to make me, a trans person, feel included. It does. But with repetition, “trans men have wombs too” starts to feel like a threat. Not only the threat of pregnancy and forced birth all people with wombs face under restricted abortion, but the threat my own womb makes to my identity. Because its existence seems to deeply upset other abortion advocates on the internet. Faced with my womb, even some self-styled feminists lose their cool: “Anyone who will need female-centered services is part of our activism,” replies a frustrated user named @dammitpatriarchy, “no matter how you ID.” She’s the friendliest in the thread, but her phrasing still feels demonstrative: to need an abortion, she implies, would be to need “female-centered services,” or, as another commentator with a rainbow flag in his bio put it, “so still women then, thanks for clearing that up.”
Men’s wombs: always clearing things up. As a Western cultural fantasy, masculine birth is about security and control. Think Chronos keeping his children in his stomach to ensure his own absolute power, Zeus siring Athena from inside his own head or gestating his son Bacchus within the skin of his thigh to safeguard his offspring from a jealous wife. The fantasy of male pregnancy is a fantasy of control, but the reality of male pregnancy is that to be seen as pregnant is to be seen as property, regardless of gender. During his first pregnancy, for example, the author Krys Malcolm Belc describes the way that strangers suddenly felt emboldened to touch him. Transmasculine pregnant people describe strangers telling them what to buy in the grocery store, what to eat and drink, how to move. Of course it’s not just transmasculine people that this happens to: pregnant people in this culture usually discover that every man, woman, and child on the street feels entitled to speak for the voiceless creature forming inside them, and through it, to tell them what to do. That these are common occurrences for all kinds of pregnant people only underscores the fact that gender has nothing to do with it. Kane, sweating and moaning on the white table in Alien, turns from Commanding Officer into breeding stock when the commodified Alien fetus bursts, as planned, through the womb of his chest.
This is also obvious: a womb makes a body insecure because the ownership of reproductive bodies is the original business model of American Capitalism. Talk about the parasitic subduing of one organism by another. Thomas Jefferson had many wombs at his disposal, and so did all his friends. Their white wives produced babies deemed ordinary and human, the Black women they raped produced slaves. Once Black women’s wombs were no longer productive of fungible commodities, the state tried to recall them. Fannie Lou Hamer was just a bit older than me when her womb was removed without her consent during surgery in accordance with a eugenicist policy meant to reduce the number of poor Black people in the South. It was a procedure so common, people called it the “Mississippi appendectomy.” In her essay, The Womb of Western Thought: Trauma, Time-Theft, and the Captive Maternal, Joy James writes about these examples. They display how the United States has appropriated its global productive prowess from the bodies of Black and indigenous maternal beings: “For centuries, patriarchal, enslaving Womb Theory normalized—as natural, universal, and befitting the diminished capacities of the captive—trauma and theft of labor and time….Citizen and ruler benefit from reproductive labor to accrue leisure and space for theory, war, and power.”
White womb-having people are part of the citizen and ruler class that benefits directly from this theft, and so am I. This is the basis of the insecurity of having a womb; Jefferson’s wife could have become Jefferson’s chattel if someone else didn’t take the labor off her hands. All wombs under white supremacist capitalism are in danger of being impregnated, removed nonconsensually, or poisoned at any time, but we agree, as a society, that only some wombs will be treated in this way. See, for example, the development of birth control, which freed millions of white women to enter the professions, but only after it had been tested thoroughly on the wombs of poor Latine-indiginous people in Puerto Rico. Like the land and wealth white womb-having people can now inherit, like the indigenous bones and art and seeds in our museums, white wombs have been handed down to us as heirlooms: meaningful, beautiful, stable, symbolic, secure.
My womb “clears up” the question of my gender for commentators on Twitter because it has to. As another commentator in the same thread put it, “And that's why the far right have traction on this because now they can say the abortion issue is not a women's reproductive rights issue anymore b'cause ‘men get pregnant too!’” They are afraid that if they fight with us, if the call for bodily autonomy moves beyond the rights of a protected class of women to access the same rights as a protected class of men, and into a fight to create a system in which every body is secure, they won’t be able to bargain. As Sara Ahmed has written, fear of losing their power makes “gender-critical” feminists conservative. They are afraid that the world they would be saving is not their world. And to be fair to them, this is certainly true. To fight for real bodily autonomy would mean fighting for abortion and the right to our own labor and time. It would mean fighting for trans bodies and their right to self-determination, for men’s bodies, and their right to softness and leisure, for Black bodies and their right to freedom and repair and compensation, for Indigenous bodies and their right to steward their homelands. Clearly, a womb makes a woman because if a womb doesn’t make a woman, then we are talking about a whole different kind of fight. The lines of benefit, of who gets what, become blurry. The clarifying fact of my womb must be defended because it is the same kind of fact as white womanhood in general. The neoclassical frontage and extensive, pleasant grounds of Monticello are the same kind of fact as my womb.
“Faced with the Alien, we are all feminized,” write Ximena Gallardo and C. Jason Smith about the Alien franchise. The way that Gallardo and Smith are using the word feminized, it just means to be made into a womb. In context it also means to be dominated beyond any hope of agency. To be penetrated by the piston-like inner jaw of the movie’s eyeless Alien monster, to be dragged off and wound up in its viscous cocoon, fed to its ripened, vaginal eggs and turned into a gestation chamber for its maggots until they’re ready to tear their way out of your flesh. To be made, quite literally, into the Alien’s bitch, its breeding animal. Feminized is a brutal word. What is most radical about the Alien series is that it isn’t the Alien itself that is feminizing the human crew of the Nostromo. It is the Company that sent them there, specifically so that this would happen to them. The Alien is not so much a monster as a weapon, an instrument that the Company is using to further exploit its workers’ bodies for its profit. That Lieutenant Ripley struggles to contain this fact in the face of her own dependence on the Company is what makes them realist films.
Ripley, the hero of the Alien series, is a woman I can relate to, and am, indeed, related to, both in the interdimensional lineage of the ‘90s Butch and in the legacy of white people who want to save the world. For four entire films she races through the oozing corridors of spaceships, terraforming stations, and offworld jails, resisting penetration in a unisex flight suit and a pair of chucks. The way that Sigourney Weaver plays her, she is always a woman of divided loyalties because she is a woman in danger. She knows that the Company is always willing to cash in on the productive potential of her body, but the threat to “humanity” or “the earth” represented by the Xenomorphs makes her ally herself repeatedly with the Company anyway. As the scholar Judith Newton put it in 1980, Ripley is “a Company man.” Like a trans-exclusive feminist who thinks that kicking trans people out of feminism is the only way to achieve a coalition of women strong enough to vote their way into power, Ripley repeatedly makes the mistake of thinking the Company is the lesser of two evils.
In a way it’s understandable. The Company is all she has. At the end of the first movie, for example, after directly contravening a Company order by killing the Alien and refusing to die, Ripley dutifully records her log for them before going back into cryosleep. There’s no triumph in her voice, and there’s no dissonance—even though her survival is, from their point of view, just profit lost, she is asking them to save her, to pick her up when she reaches “the frontier” like a dutiful father, because there is no one else to call. She begins the 1986 sequel Aliens in an identical conundrum. Once again, the Company has sent a group of people to breed profit for them by gestating weapons and wants Ripley to retrieve these specimens. Once again they lie to her and tell her she’s on a mission to eradicate the Alien threat. She has no reason to believe them except that she thinks she needs their power to save the world. That’s the conservative part of the Alien series—that the only way for Ripley to survive is at the expense of the Xenomorph, even though they are just two different kinds of Company breeding stock, and therefore natural allies. It’s also, in its way, the perfect metaphor for trans-exclusive white feminists. Like Thomas Jefferson’s daughters burning the papers in which he describes his rapes of Sally Hemmings, like TERFs refusing the evidence that denying gender-affirming care immiserates trans children and trans adults, Ripley attempts to resolve the threat that the Company poses to human survival by destroying the evidence of its violence. If her own body is in danger through the willingness of the Company to force us all to use our bodies for its profit, she will erase all the bodies on which that violence is practiced as if erasing them will keep the world safe.
I ask the Xenomorph Queen if I want my womb. It’s Alien: Resurrection in 1997 and she’s lying on her back. Pretty soon, Ripley-8, eighth clone of Ripley, is going to come down here, and, to make a long story short, crash this spaceship into the surface of Earth like a meteor, causing untold human and environmental devastation but probably killing the (already injured) Queen. She doesn’t know that yet. What she knows is that it’s taken hundreds of years and they’d thought they had finally got her breeding for them, making babies in little chambers for them to torture and extract. But as Ripley-8 predicted, she bred, they died. Her little trans-species babies are everywhere (flaunting their lifestyles on TikTok, seducing your daughters and sons). Her babies have chewed up the government, put their teeth through the generals’ brains. Do I want my womb? Now that she’s a hybrid of human and Xenomorph DNA she is uniquely positioned to answer. Like me, she has a womb, but is not a woman. She still has her ovipositor, and she has her single organ full of one maturing fetus. She made the baby herself—there are no fathers here. Do I want my womb? All around us, sadistic scientists, cops, and bureaucrats are trussed up for eating. She has killed off the misogynist pirate captain, she has killed the colonists. We are going back to Earth now, to change it. Keep it or don’t, she says to me, we are already free.
Nino McQuown is a poet, essayist, and performer. They live in Baltimore, MD, where they host the podcast Queers at the End of the World (queerworlds.com), make puppet shows, and write. These days, they’re at work on a nonfiction manuscript. Their writing, comics, and audio on dirt, death, food, top surgery, apocalypse, and chickens has been published in Electric Lit, Catapult, Edge Effects, Barrelhouse, Hotel Amerika, the podcast Radical Nourishment and elsewhere.
