The Body as Battleground in Accounts of  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 201 ‘‘He’s Making Me Feel Things in My Body That I Don’t Feel’’: The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction Patricia Felisa Barbeito

In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, a forget what had happened to them, the Hills New Hampshire couple under heavy pressure for were allowed out of the UFO and watched it their interracial marriage, decided to visit Mon- depart. treal, , for a short holiday. On their return, Published in 1966 as Interrupted Journey, the they found themselves suffering from unexplained Hill narrative is one of the earliest published ac- physical pain, , and nightmares. They were counts of alien abduction and a blueprint for the particularly disturbed because they could not ac- veritable avalanche of narratives that has been count for two hours of their return drive, so they published since. Indeed, the outpouring of books consulted a psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon. After and articles about alien abduction and UFO undergoing repeated sessions of with sightings reached a peak during the 1990s, when Simon, they recalled a truly incredible experience: they seemed to literally saturate the literary mar- they claimed that while driving south on US ketplace. They ranged from highbrow (Time, Highway 3 through the White Mountains of New Yorker) and scholarly works (historian New Hampshire, just south of Indian Point, they David M. Jacobs’s Secret Life: Firsthand Docu- were taken from their car by a group of small, mented Accounts of UFO Abductions [1992] and gray, large-eyed aliens, led into an UFO, and Harvard professor John E. Mack’s Abduction: subjected to a series of physical examinations Human Encounters with Aliens [1994]) to tabloid and medical procedures, including the taking of shockers. Almost daily radio and television pro- skin, nail, and hair samples. The aliens gave Betty grams, as well as made-for-television movies and what they called a pregnancy test by inserting a Hollywood blockbusters—for example, Inde- long needle into her abdomen, and they took pendence Day (1996), the seventh highest gross- a sperm sample from Barney by attaching a cir- ing film of all time (Handy 65)—also identified cular device to his groin. The Hills also reported the alien and the UFO as particularly popular and that the aliens, who communicated telepathi- profitable sites in contemporary culture. cally with them, seemed fascinated by the differ- Even more striking than the ubiquity of the ences between the couple, especially by Barney’s alien image during this period, however, was dark skin. After being told by the aliens to the uniformity of the experiences recounted in

Patricia Felisa Barbeito is an associate professor of American ethnic literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently working on a book that examines the role of diverse forms of captivity narrative—from Indian captivity narratives to contemporary prison narratives and accounts of alien abduction—in the shaping of concepts of race in the . 202 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 accounts of alien abduction. As in the Hills’ case, choanalytic formulation of trauma as a pathology most abductees recalled traumatic alien investiga- whose main symptoms are a disruption in one’s tions of their bodies—and in particular, their sense of time and an inability to create a coherent body’s reproductive processes, from the taking of narrative of the traumatic event. These discussions sperm samples, to the harvesting of eggs, and allow us to examine how the investigation of the even, at times, embryos—all conducted, ostensi- body conducted by the aliens serves only to un- bly, for the purposes of advancing what the aliens derscore a realization of the fictional and incom- consistently present as an intergalactic interbreed- plete nature of conventional narratives of identity, ing program. In fact, these narratives are abso- time, and history. lutely seething with about the body, The second section focuses on the way that reproduction, and even more specifically, misce- the aliens’ technological disruption of the natural genation. Moreover, the central role of the body female body becomes the prevalent way of signa- in these accounts is also evident in the heated de- ling the traumatic disruption of hegemonic nar- bates about their reality status, which often hinge ratives of identity and history. Not only does the on the availability (or lack thereof) of physical aliens’ interference with the natural reproductive evidence, and more generally, draw on the truth- process destroy biologically grounded notions of value of the abductee’s sensory and emotional ex- identity, but in so doing, it also complicates the perience. role of the maternal body as symbol of the nat- What, then, is the significance of this literal uralness of the origin and identity of the nation. outpouring, at the end of the twentieth century, of By drawing on seminal essays in film theory, this narratives detailing the traumas of procreation section analyzes the way that the repeated refer- and miscegenation? And why does this anxiety ences to film and the cinematic experience in these manifest itself in such a literally outlandish—yet accounts emblematize the alienating effects of at the same time strangely familiar—form, one the alien. that had, by the end of the 1990s, achieved the The third and final section analyzes how the status of a highly stylized and predicable genre? aliens’ destabilization of the body as a source of This article analyzes the significance of the over- meaning is linked to the way that these narratives whelming anxieties about the body as a source of problematize the politics of the telling and dis- meaning, identity, and truth evidenced in accounts semination of stories. The authority of the body of alien abduction by first considering the way as a source of meaning relies on the idea that the these accounts, for all their outlandishness, are body produces an unmediated, personal, and su- actually shaped by extremely potent and enduring premely authentic ‘‘experience.’’ These narratives, conventions regulating the conceptualization and however, consistently undercut the notion of ex- articulation of racial difference in the United perience as something self-evident, natural, and States. The article is then divided into three sub- authoritative. The body and its experience are sequent sections that, through a dialogue with consistently depicted as products of the power these historical conventions, investigate the ways dynamics pertaining to specific contexts. This in which contemporary accounts of alien abduc- article is based on readings of alien abduction tion dwell on an anxiety that results from the accounts collected in two of the most compre- revelation that the body is unable to ground hensive collections of the 1990s: Jacobs’s Secret meaning and identity. Life and Mack’s Abduction. These texts are also The first section examines how the physical important for my purposes because in using the and emotional traumas experienced by abductees credentials of academia and an academic method are directly linked to a destruction of a coherent to legitimize a much-ridiculed phenomenon, both notion of time that leads, in turn, to a destruction Jacobs and Mack directly engage with issues of a clear conception of identity. This section of reality, legitimacy, and identity as centered on draws on contemporary discussions of the psy- the body. The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 203

A Story of Origins: of the new nation by figuratively imposing the The Indian Captivity Narrative boundaries between races, cultures, and territo- ries: white vs. Indian, civilized vs. savage, com- munity vs. wilderness. Indian captivity narratives, During the 1990s, the image of a long-limbed, then, are dramas of national survival that are es- gray-skinned alien with huge, slanted black eyes, tablished through the successful triumph over the a tiny nose, and a thin line of a mouth in a large, various threats (including, most obviously, sexual triangular head had become as ubiquitous an im- contamination) posed to a white woman’s body, age of the Other as had been that of the savage, and they describe a dynamic of national identifi- tomahawk-wielding Indian all the way up to the cation through the writing, and an empathetic mid-twentieth century. Both, after all, are power- reading, of her narrative. ful images in American popular culture that em- Typically, Indian captivity narratives articulat- phasize the conceptual ‘‘otherworldliness’’ of the ed, in a particularly graphic and popularized form, Other in remarkably similar ways.1 These rather evolving conceptions of race and national identity general similarities, however, are powered by a during periods of transition in American history. much deeper and more meaningful history of ar- For example, during the nineteenth century, the ticulating racial difference in the United States: rapid US expansion to the south and the west, the use of a captivity/abduction scenario institu- powered by the ideology of manifest destiny, was tionalized by the Indian captivity narrative. enabled in part by the way these narratives had Accounts of alien abduction are clearly relat- already reinforced the idea that the American ed—formally, thematically, conceptually—to this continent was destined to be conquered by the equally popular and more enduring ancestor, the United States. They did so by depicting Native Indian captivity narrative: the stories of white Americans as a population doomed by savagery women (primarily) who had been captured by and irrationality, and the white captive as right- Native Americans, typically written on the cap- eous and always ultimately triumphant.4 It is tive’s return home. Literally thousands of Indian therefore not surprising that accounts of alien ab- captivity narratives were published between the duction, once defined as contemporary science mid-seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries, fiction inflections of the captivity narrative, take and they were among America’s first best-sellers center stage in American popular culture at the and one of the country’s first indigenous genres. end of the twentieth century—a period charac- As much recent scholarship has pointed out, the terized by anxieties about the impact of global- genre played a central role in the articulation of an ization, the rapidly changing face (and race) of the evolving national identity.2 The narratives allowed ‘‘typical’’ American, and the transition into a new the white community reading about the captive’s millennium. But while accounts of alien abduc- travails and eventual return or escape from cap- tion present us with stark racial, spatial, and cul- tivity to imagine its own struggles with, and tural differences—human and alien, earth and eventual triumph over, the racial Others that outer space, technology and nature—that are threatened it. The captive white woman thus reminiscent of the Indian captivity narrative, they functioned in these accounts as an embodiment of do so only to turn our to the way that the community itself; her literal and figurative the captive’s body completely fails to impose return to the ‘‘home’’ and the maintenance of her boundaries between them. In fact, in stark con- physical and spiritual ‘‘purity’’ were crucial to the trast to the Indian captivity narrative, accounts of community’s sense of continuity and identity. alien abduction dwell almost exclusively on the White women were typically taken captive along alien violation and colonization of the captive’s the frontier, wherever there were incursions by body and, as a result, point to the ways that the whites into Indian territory.3 These narratives, body betrays hegemonic narratives of national therefore, literally marked the expanding borders identity based on racial purity and the recasting of 204 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 history as destiny. The alien abduction narrative al,’’ and ‘‘clean’’ room that resembles a ‘‘hospital refers, almost nostalgically, to the well-worn cap- operating room’’ (Jacobs 88). Once there, they tivity dynamic and its evocation of a world gov- undergo a thorough, ‘‘efficient’’ physical exam erned by clear distinctions and national certainties that consists almost entirely of probing. This ex- in order to signal a crisis in the way the body cerpt from a description of the tests dedicated to functions to articulate and anchor identity at the the feet and legs is typical: end of the twentieth century. The aliens carefully observe and touch the soles of the abductee’s feet. Sometimes they take a sharp instrument and scrape it down Trauma and Narratives of her soles . . . They quickly touch her ankles Self and Nation and twist her foot from side to side. They push and press against her calf muscles. Sometimes they squeeze hard and painfully between the bone and calf muscle. They look As is evident in the Hill narrative, accounts of closely at her knee and bend her leg a few alien abduction center the traumatic disruptions times as if they are observing the action of they describe on the body. In fact, all of the anx- the . (Jacobs 91) ieties that the Hills experience—nightmares, miss- ing time, and, importantly, the pressures of being Clearly, the aliens approach the human body with an interracial couple in the 1960s—either stem a systematizing, scientific mission: to render it from or are collapsed into the aliens’ violating legible. As one of Jacobs’s subjects recounts, it investigation of their bodies. Trauma, as many was like ‘‘they were operating a typewriter on his scholars of Freud’s seminal formulation have body’’ (91). pointed out, is a pathology that stems from an But rather than yield any certainties about the event that cannot be fully grasped or understood body, all of this plumbing of its inner intimacies at the moment and place of its occurrence, and only reveals an illegibility that, in typical trau- therefore continues to haunt the person. Trauma matic fashion, appears as a disruption of linear is thus characterized by a latency, a type of gap, time and the organized conception of space. In that separates the time and place of the traumatic fact, the confused and extremely problematic sta- occurrence from its eventual and repeated expe- tus of time and space in these accounts signals the rience. The gap both structures the experience of traumatic realization of the body’s inability to ar- trauma and constitutes its most salient symptom. ticulate identity. After all, the awareness of having As a condition that allows for the perception of an experienced ‘‘missing time’’ episodes is the most event only belatedly, trauma is characterized by common indication that an abduction has taken its own problematic reality or referential status; place, and strange disruptions of time are endemic the ‘‘violence of a collision,’’ the traumatic event, to the experience itself. Time and space appear as is discernible most clearly in ‘‘the impact of its malleable, multidimensional, and incomprehensi- very incomprehensibility’’ (Caruth, Unclaimed ble in human paradigms, and are directly related Experience 6). In other words, trauma is a pa- to the body’s lack of stability as a source of iden- thology that does violence to one’s sense of self tity. As Mack reports, ‘‘Catherine . . . spoke of a and meaning by destroying what one perceives as ‘place’ she remembered between times of embod- the coherence of time, place, and the body. iment on Earth. In that ‘place’ bodies were not After even a cursory reading of accounts of solid, appearing only in a kind of energy outline. alien abduction, it is evident that the body is both ‘This was from a long, long, long, long, time ago,’ the focus of a radical investigation and, paradox- she explained . . . ‘This place is in a totally differ- ically, a type of theater of . Abductees ent universe. It’s not in our Earth space/time report being taken to a ‘‘serviceable,’’ ‘‘function- dimension’’’ (402–03). The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 205

This problematic status of space, time, and the earth because of human greed, aggression, and body is directly related to the more general overconsumption; they are shown images of the breakdown of narratives of personal history. As earth devastated by the explosion of atom bombs is evident in the recent heated debates emanating or the effects of environmental pollution. from Harvard psychologist ’s study The abduction experience changes the contem- about repressed and alien abduction, ac- porary captive; the revelation of her body’s vul- counts of alien abduction are steeped in the con- nerability is tied to the eventual affirmation of a troversy that surrounds recovered or repressed philosophy that positions itself in opposition to memory syndrome. In this syndrome, memory some of the more stereotypical tenets of modern figuratively hijacks the person’s sense of self by US culture. This philosophical positioning in- radically disrupting—and, in some cases, com- volves a rather complex hesitation and dialogue pletely undoing—any coherent, ‘‘normal,’’ or pre- among different versions of American history. On existing narrative of self.5 After starting to the one hand, accounts of alien abduction clearly his repeated abductions, Paul, one of Mack’s adopt the futuristic, progress-oriented, and tech- patients, comes to a realization that is typical of nology-obsessed language of science fiction that is many captives: typical of a certain vision of the United States as a I am a cross between—this is hard to un- country of ‘‘state-of-the art’’ technologies and derstand for me—between what I’ve known cutting-edge innovation. On the other hand, these as me and the brothers who were with me accounts are equally obsessed with a comforting [during his abduction], what the human be- and by now outdated vision of the United States ings would call an alien . . . I’m in between. as a natural paradise, a virgin territory where the I’m more than a TA person [his term for the enterprising traveler can start a new life unen- aliens]. I’m more than a human being . . . cumbered by the baggage of older civilizations. It This is hard! More people are finding out is highly suggestive, after all, that many of these just how in between they are themselves. alien abductions take place in spaces that index (221) the notion of a pristine and untouched wilderness: The investigation of the body is directly linked to woods, countryside, or the aptly named ‘‘White the realization of a hybridity that literally renders Mountains’’ in the Hills’ case.6 These diametri- the body foreign and inarticulable. cally opposed but equally idealized versions of the Relatedly, many captives also declare them- United States are complicated in these accounts selves possessors of extraordinary information and by being directly implicated in a history of rapa- knowledge that cannot be adequately translated cious conquest and unbridled racism, a history into human paradigms and terminology. Ed, a that is beautifully embedded in the very location ‘‘mild-mannered technician’’ who described him- of the Hill abduction; it takes place not only in self as ‘‘Joe average,’’ found himself grappling with the White Mountains, but close to Indian Point. his new identity: ‘‘It’s like trying to be Superman As the abductee is transported from the wildness and Clark Kent. You can’t go walking around in of the natural American landscape to the tech- your cape and tights all the time. You have to be a nology of the spaceship, he or she is exposed to kind of Clark Kent’’ (Mack 51). Similarly, Scott, an the destructive and alienating effects of progress actor and filmmaker who works as a mechanic, and the invariably violating effects of contact be- speaking in his alien voice, wrote in a letter to tween different ‘‘races.’’ The traumatic alien ex- Mack, ‘‘I do not feel it is safe for me to come out periments, after all, are motivated by the aliens’ yet . . . I feel there is much I wish to convey, and I desire to study and understand the human ‘‘race’’ feel at a time very soon there should be a meeting and institute an interbreeding program. It is of the high powers of your world with us’’ (95). therefore only appropriate that the narrative that Many captives also report that they are warned by inaugurates the genre of alien abduction is one the aliens of horrible disasters that will befall the that recounts the sexually humiliating experiences 206 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 of an interracial couple in the late fifties and early the US population, and changing social and work- sixties. While Indian captivity narratives were de- related roles in a globalized world, and is part and ployed to figuratively tame the wilderness—thus parcel of what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘‘eth- making it ‘‘white’’—and guard against the very nocidal violence [that] evidently mobilizes some racial mixing represented by the Hills, accounts of sort of ambient rage about the body as a theatre of alien abduction uncannily repeat this language of deception, of betrayal, and of false solidarity’’ natural origins, triumph, and progress, only to be (236). Symptomatic of the ‘‘intolerable anxiety’’ consistently haunted and violated by its implica- about the relationship of individuals to state-pro- tions. If, as Cathy Caruth argues, trauma, ‘‘is not vided goods in a globalized world ruled by trans- so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a national corporations, this violence is ‘‘a macabre symptom of history. The traumatized . . . carry an form of certainty’’ in a world of ‘‘social uncer- impossible history within them, or they become tainty’’ (228). It is a means of graphically and themselves the symptom of a history that they nostalgically reinscribing on the body of the Oth- cannot entirely possess,’’ accounts of alien abduc- er its disappearing and fictional Otherness. As in tion collapse the traumatic realization of the the Indian captivity narrative, the woman’s body body’s lack of reference into a traumatic disrup- functions as a type of stage for the playing out of tion of narratives of personal and national history these Self/Other distinctions, but unlike the In- (Trauma 5). dian captivity narrative, accounts of alien abduc- tion merely point to the way that the woman’s body itself is always already nothing but a fiction. The ways in which the machine disrupts the The Body in the Age of natural workings of the body are most clearly Mechanical Reproduction encapsulated in the actual description of the aliens themselves. There are always two different types of aliens in these accounts: the ubiquitous ‘‘small In accounts of alien abduction, the traumatic grays,’’ typically described as ‘‘drones’’ (Mack 45, effects of the aliens’ exploration of the body are 290, 345, 363, 378), and the more powerful and most evident in the repeated scenes of technolog- scientifically minded ‘‘tall beings.’’ This separation ical interference of the natural body and process- of the physical and the intellectual is reflected in es. In fact, the portrayal of the body in these the overdetermined physical and emotional cold- accounts is reminiscent of the ‘‘deadly decon- ness of the aliens; it is inscribed in the description struction of the body’’ by technology described of their living quarters, the metallic, sterile, in- by Baudrillard: ‘‘a body . . . entirely dominated by strument-filled ships, and attire, usually described gash marks, excisions, and technical scars—all as gray, ‘‘close-fitting bodysuits with hoods that under the gleaming sign of a sexuality that is seem to be made of something like Lycra or latex’’ without referentiality and without limits’’ (‘‘Bal- (Mack 290). As Bridget Brown notes, ‘‘The Grays lard’’ 313). While earlier captivity narratives dwell are, above all, an army of uniformity, devoid of on the threat of interracial rape and miscegena- compassion, emotion, individuality, and color . . . tion, alien abduction accounts reconfigure this and wearing the second skin of a ‘gray-tan body quintessential expression of sexuality as power suit’’’ (5).7 The uniformity of the lycra-clad into a violating meeting of flesh and metal, human drones explicitly identifies them as symbols of and machine. the effects of mass reproduction. This focus on the role of technology as a means In keeping with the explicitly mechanized of investigating and proprietarily mapping the ‘‘deadness’’ that characterizes the aliens, abduct- body directly links anxieties about identity and ees, throughout these accounts, emphasize that reproduction to late twentieth-century concerns once in their presence, they lose all control over about immigration, the changing racial makeup of and feeling in their bodies. They become either The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 207 numb or completely paralyzed, a dehumanized from the ‘‘uterus lining,’’ is followed by the in- condition that is typically likened to that of an sertion of an implant into Catherine’s brain: ‘‘It automaton, animal, or doll: ‘‘I’m starting to feel was this long, flexible thing, and he kind of leaned numbness in my face now. My arms are starting to over my right shoulder . . . He was looking at my feel really heavy. Numbness is moving down my nostril, and he put it in as far as he could . . . and hands . . . like Novocain numbness’’ (Mack 140); then he hit something in the back and he just kind ‘‘it’s like we look like a couple of rag dolls, it’s like of pushed it, and he pushed it through whatever it we’re . . . shot with a tranquilizer dart, like a cou- was . . . I could feel something breaking in my ple of grizzlies or something’’ (Jacobs 56). This head’’ (Mack 144). perception of self as a type of automaton leads In these accounts, the episode that most clearly directly to the abductee’s subjection to sexual ex- reveals the way technology violates the natural periments, procedures that invade the body and body is the central scene detailing the climactic use a variety of instruments to forcefully usurp viewing of hybrid offspring. After the insertion of the reproductive process. the brain implant, Catherine is led into a room Accounts of alien abduction are replete with lined with ‘‘‘cases’ stacked in rows reaching from images of women, and to a lesser extent, men, the floor to the ceiling’’ that contain ‘‘creatures . . . lying naked, penetrated by a variety of metallic kind of deformed looking . . . like baby versions of objects and attached to machines. Luise White them.’’ Significantly, she likens these creatures to describes this alien interest in human reproduc- dolls: ‘‘when you go buy a doll and it’s in a plastic tion as ‘‘pretty much what nineteenth-century case . . . that’s how it is . . . like a window display ideas about race wanted to find out—what was in a toy store. They cover the entire thing with the physiological extent of biological and cultural Barbie dolls and you can see through the plastic differences . . . could races interbreed and if they things and they’re all standing there’’ (Mack 146). did, what would the offspring look like, and Another abductee describes a similar experience: where could they live?’’ (28). Rather than merely ‘‘there’s like the machine, and [test-tubes] are all reiterate a nineteenth-century fascination with sitting up on the machine, going straight up. And race, however, accounts of alien abduction re- they line the wall. It’s like a big fish tank or frame this fascination with biological repro- something, each one of them’s a little fish tank. It’s duction into a fascination with mechanical like blue liquid.’’ Each of these test-tubes contains reproduction. The egg harvesting, impregnation a small being that looks like a ‘‘bald hamster, just procedures, and fetus removal performed by the kind of lying there with wires and stuff attached aliens are all conducted with the aid of instru- to it’’ (Jacobs 154). These scenes of interaction ments that not only penetrate the body but also between the hybrid babies—part human, part an- colonize it. Jerry, for example, describes how the imal, part doll—and the abductee are truly un- aliens press something that ‘‘looks like a tube’’ canny in the layering of emotions and dynamics through the wall of her abdomen. They then in- of identification they describe. As the most suc- sert ‘‘a shiny, horseshoe-shaped object with a cinct expression of the alien/human interaction, handle on it . . . beyond the vagina, perhaps the hybrid babies are at once an expression of the through the cervix.’’ Mack notes that ‘‘it felt to only viable form of life in a world mediated by Jerry as if something had been placed deep within technology, and a graphic representation of abort- her body’’ (114). Catherine describes how the al- ed life. Abductees are both horrified by and iens insert a conelike object into her uterus in drawn to these babies; they reject them, yet can- similar terms: ‘‘He puts it in. It feels cold. It’s even not help but claim them, and in this moment of colder than his hand. I can feel something going identification, they are confronted by the realiza- up inside me farther and farther. It feels like tion of their own technical reproducibility in bulk something’s going up in the intestines, up so far.’’ and mediation by the machine. This haunting re- This procedure, which collected ‘‘tissue samples’’ alization is illustrated by the uncanny appearance 208 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 of the Barbie doll, an image that reflects on con- needs to be nurtured.’ It’s very important, and temporary debates about the disappearance of the they can’t do it. It needs it from me . . . It’s sort of ‘‘real’’ female body from film and television a -specific need’’ ( Jacobs 171). screens and pages of fashion magazines. Inviola- In addition to this explicit anxiety about wom- ble, mass-produced, and encased in plastic, Barbie en’s roles, however, the focus on the technological is a perfected and virtual embodiment of the fe- rearticulation of the female body reveals the way male body that is the antithesis of the maternal.8 that these accounts completely destroy the role of Primarily, then, these accounts articulate deep- the mother as national symbol. While genres like ly rooted fears and anxieties about what White the Indian captivity narrative firmly established describes as ‘‘reproductive rights, childbirth, and the pure, white, maternal woman’s body as a na- child custody in distinctly modernist terms’’ (30). tional symbol in the United States, accounts of In a world where increasingly more sophisticated alien abduction unmask the comforting vision of reproductive technologies not only underscore union presented by this image as illusory and the constructedness of concepts such as race but haunted by a repressed history of miscegenation also of reproduction itself, these narratives seem and violence. In fact, the aliens’ destruction of the to voice women’s conflicted feelings about how role of the body as bearer of meaning is most these advances impact and alter their identities. clearly emblematized in their repeated association The repeated scenes of egg harvesting, termina- with the medium that, for Walter Benjamin, best tion of pregnancy, sexual violation, and the view- exemplifies the shift into the era of mechanical ing of hybrid offspring are by far the most reproduction: film.9 Indeed, the cinematic expe- distressing for the abductees. Some report a cer- rience is alluded to repeatedly in these accounts, tain feeling of liberation, a feeling that, in the end, from the visual testing experiments conducted by it has all been in the service of a greater good. Lee, aliens in which abductees are forced to look at for example, describes her experiences not only as screens only to be confronted by the manipul- that of an ‘‘intergalactic rape victim,’’ but also as ability of their sight, to the searing ‘‘bluish-silver’’ ‘‘an experience of something which has nearly light that heralds an impending abduction and blown my head off with expansion of conscious- evokes the powerful stream of light that emanates ness. I am strangely grateful’’ (Mack 80). But most from a projection room (Mack 45). From its in- dwell on the horror they feel for a body that has ception to the abductee’s return, the abduction been revealed as unfamiliar and under the control experience is clearly embedded in a cinematic ex- and surveillance of a cold, mechanized alien will. perience that is linked to the alien’s violation of Indicatively, abductees yearn for a more natural, the natural body. less technologically mediated world. The aliens’ Indeed, film, as a medium characterized by the possession of technological expertise that surpass- elision of the very object it represents, seems to be es human knowledge—and also, relatedly, dis- in a unique position to speak to the consequences rupts natural law—is directly linked to their of the machinization of the body that takes place fundamental inability to nurture their young; ab- in these accounts. Theorists Laura Mulvey and ductees describe the hybrid babies as unhealthy, Christian Metz have famously argued this case. ‘‘scrawny,’’ ‘‘dopey,’’ and ‘‘passive’’ ( Jacobs 166, Metz has written that the power of film resides in 169). In the face of this perceived alien lack, ab- an unaccustomed perceptual wealth (as opposed ductees assert the desire to nurture and provide, to music or writing, for example) that is coupled and in so doing, turn to the very language of es- with an unusual degree of unreality from the very sentialized and natural identities destroyed by the outset; not only is what unfolds—the film narra- vision of the babies themselves: ‘‘I feel as if it’s tive—more or less fictional, but ‘‘the unfolding very important to the baby that it has this contact, itself is fictive’’; film is, after all, a recorded me- and I’m very happy to do it for it . . . it’s like it’s dium (783). Therefore, for Metz, film is charac- soaking up the experience of being held . . . ‘Baby terized not by the imaginary that it ‘‘may happen The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 209 to represent, but the imaginary that it is from the unexpressive and completely blank, like a type of start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signi- empty screen. Paradoxically, it is precisely this fier’’ (784). And it is film’s imaginary signifier that blankness, the opaque blackness that meets their allows the spectator to identify with the camera gaze, that the abductees find ‘‘spellbinding, rivet- and thus with ‘‘himself as pure act of percep- ing,’’ and, ultimately, ‘‘overwhelming’’ ( Jacobs tion’’—and, consequently, as ‘‘transcendental sub- 98). Simultaneously resisting and meeting the ject’’ (788). spectator’s gaze, the alien eye implicates the spec- Moreover, the dynamics of signification de- tator in its own lack: scribed by film once again identify the female I’m looking into those eyes. I can’t believe body as central to the production and reproduc- that I’m looking into eyes that big . . . Once tion of identity. Mulvey defines the female body you look into those eyes, you’re gone . . . as crucial to the workings of film as spectacle. I can’t think of anything but those eyes. It’s According to her, film uses the female body as a like the eyes overwhelm me. How do they passive icon—what she calls her ‘‘to-be-looked- do that? It goes inside you, their eyes go at-ness’’—and the object of scopophilic pleasure; inside you. You just are held. You can’t stop the female body ‘‘holds the look, plays to and looking. If you wanted to, you couldn’t look signifies male desire’’ (809). In so doing, she al- away. You are drawn into them, and they sort of come into you . . . My eyes are open, lows for the development of a narcissistic sco- but my mind is sort of gone. I have no will. pophilia that depends on the active/passive I have no will. I am absorbed and I’m not heterosexual division of labor; the spectator’s fighting it. ( Jacobs 98–99) sense of omnipotence derives from the percep- tion that he is what she is not. Implicit within this The scenes of fascination with the alien eye hierarchized and gendered model of a pleasurably teeter between repulsion and attraction. The alien hegemonic gaze that resonates with psychoana- eye seems to present the human viewer with the lytic formulations of castration, however, is the apocalyptic vision of a self lost in the literally danger of an uncanny reversal: what happens alienating grasp of technology. As such, the eye when the spectator identifies with the emptiness becomes the clearest emblem for the way that of the image of the female body? Mulvey writes, these accounts make it impossible for the abduct- ee to comfortably return to a world governed by Desire, born with language, allows the pos- the certainties authorized by nature: race, sex, re- sibility of transcending the instinctual and production, nation. At the same time, however, it the imaginary, but its point of reference con- also marks the impossibility of actually envision- tinually returns to the traumatic moment of ing a self without these certainties. Anxiety about its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening what it means to ‘‘mother’’ in these accounts is in content, and it is woman as representa- thus but the most obvious manifestation of an tion/image that crystallizes this paradox. anxiety about origins, identity, and the production (808) of meaning in a world mediated by machine tech- nologies. The portrayal of the maternal body al- The abductees’ fascination with the aliens’ ludes to its hegemonic use as essential and natural large black eyes is the most interesting symbol origin—as an essentialized image for the direct- for this breakdown in a cinematic model of iden- ness of reference—but serves only to place this tification that emblematizes the paradoxical role dynamic under a radical questioning by squarely of the woman’s body as anchor of identity. More implicating the maternal body in the very ma- than their strange skin or misshapen form, the chine technologies that usurp its naturalness. The alien eye is what most profoundly figures the al- accounts dwell on maternal bodies that are inter- iens’ Otherness. Devoid of pupils and irises and rupted in the process of procreation: eggs are sto- taking up a large portion of the face, alien eyes are len, fetuses torn out, and scenes of mother and 210 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 child reunion are shattered by disgust and mis- for both the ‘‘truth’’ of the narrative and its ability recognition. These narratives do not allow for the to elicit the empathetic identification of the read- comforting notion of maternal plenitude, nor do ing audience. These narratives are replete with they allow for the sustaining myth of the ‘‘natu- clearly rendered sights that serve as evidence for ral’’ reproduction of the body politic. In alien ab- the deep and unbridgeable differences between ductions, the maternal body thus illustrates what Englishness and ‘‘savagery.’’ The ‘‘English fields’’ Baudrillard has called the ‘‘vanishing point of that Mary Rowlandson, the author of the first meaning’’ in a world characterized by the uncan- Indian captivity narrative, catches sight of and is ny power of technology to mediate our experi- comforted by on her forced journey into a ‘‘howl- ences—a concept he defines through a discussion ing wilderness,’’ is one such example. The Indian of the ‘‘stereophonic’’ perfectibility of music: captivity narrative, then, is grounded in the au- thority of the observer and eventual narrator’s I still remember a control room in a record- ing studio where the music, diffused on four perception to take in what is out there and turn it tracks, came at once in four dimensions, and into the story that is national history. of a sudden seemed viscerally secreted in the In stark contrast, accounts of alien abduction interior, with a surreal relief . . . It was no completely shatter the authority of the body as a longer music. Where is the degree of tech- reliable source of narrative and history, and in so nological sophistication, where the threshold doing, radically complicate the notion of an un- of ‘‘high fidelity’’ beyond which music as it adulterated and originary perception that acts as were disappears? For the problem of the the source of narrative. The most obvious way disappearance of music is the same as that of they do this is by repeatedly signaling a problem history: it will not disappear for want of music, it will disappear in the perfection of with sight and dramatizing the production of a its materiality, in its very own special effect. narrative, which, as a consequence, seems to have (‘‘Year 2000’’ 39) its own power of generation and dissemination. As in this typical exchange between Mack and one Abduction accounts articulate this disappearance of his patients, sight is alluded to only to be un- of the body within its own special effect that dermined and implicated in other, equally unre- leaves a haunting absence figuratively located at liable models of perception: the heart of the mother. [Ed] spoke of ‘‘seeing how the laws of the universe are made’’ and ‘‘something about the point where the universe comes into See, Listen,Tell: The Body as birth.’’ Again [the alien] warned him about Source of Knowledge misusing his understanding. ‘‘‘You see the ambush of the planet now,’ she said.’’ At this moment in the session Ed felt ‘‘blocked from seeing’’ further. I asked him what he saw of One of the principal ways in which these ac- the universe being born. counts illustrate the body’s paradoxical relation to Ed: An incredibly blinding, searing white the making of meaning is by interrogating the light. way the body functions as a source of narrative. JM: She showed you that? In fact, these accounts allude to a model of sig- Ed: Yes. nification characteristic of the Indian captivity JM: What was that like for you? Ed: Almost too much. But it was like, holy narrative and based on a transparent and seamless shit. There’s a particular chord or passage in interaction between outside and inside, subject Mahler’s tenth symphony. Goes like, it just and object, and history and the natural world, opens up and there it is. It’s like a galaxy only to turn it on its head. In the Indian captivity being born. It really is, really is, really is this. tradition, the role of sight is privileged as the basis ‘‘But [she says] I don’t want you to see too The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 211

much of it. You have to know. You must be and emotions’’ that abductees exhibit as they re- wise in how you talk about this.’’ (49) live their experiences (3). Jacobs writes,

Whether or not their experiences were real, Typical of most abductees, who seem to ‘‘see’’ al- they were all people who had experienced most nothing during their abduction experiences great pain . . . As I listened to them, I found except for what is placed on screens or telepath- myself sharing in their emotionally wrench- ically communicated to them by aliens, most of ing experiences. I heard people sob with fear what Ed ‘‘sees’’ in this instance is all within his and anguish and seethe with hatred of their head, placed there by an alien in what Ed calls a tormentors. They had endured enormous ‘‘flash’’ (48). And even this strangely internalized psychological (and sometimes physical) pain and explicitly subjectivized way of seeing is fur- and suffering. I was profoundly touched by the depth of emotion that they showed dur- ther destabilized when it is openly likened to the ing the regressions. I did my best to reassure very opposite of seeing: an incredibly blinding and to help them, but I felt almost as pow- searing white light. Moreover, for Ed, the block- erless as they did. (25) ing of his seeing enables a knowing that facilitates and is contingent on speech. When what he man- In these formulations, the repetition of the word aged to see, a type of seeing that is paradoxically ‘‘experience’’ signals the author’s attempts at in- described as a type of listening, starts to under- vesting it with a self-enclosed reference—as in, ‘‘it mine his speech—the temporary breakdown en- really is, really is, really is this’’—and experience capsulated in the repetition and circularity of ‘‘it is uncannily collapsed into abduction; abductees really is, really is, really is this’’—the alien inter- are renamed and become experiencers. feres and obligingly sets him back on the track of The emphasis placed on experience in these testimony. accounts is symptomatic of what Joan Scott has Indicatively, both the abductees themselves criticized as the use of the ‘‘evidence of experi- and the scholars who package their accounts seem ence’’: torn between grounding the reality of abduction whether conceived through a metaphor or on either visually verifiable evidence or the emo- visibility or in any other way that takes tive power of testimony. They resolve the issue by meaning as transparent, [the evidence of ex- emphasizing the role of an ‘‘experience’’ that is perience] reproduces rather than contests both divorced from and yet strangely authorized given ideological systems—those that as- by physical perception: ‘‘because of the relative sume that the facts of history speak for thinness of the physical findings [scoop marks and themselves and those that rest on notions of scars on the skin, burn marks left on the ground a natural or established opposition between, say, sexual practices and social conventions, by departing space ships] . . . a heavy burden of or between homosexuality and heterosexu- evidence for the reality of the abduction phenom- ality. (778) enon falls upon the reported experiences, or ‘wit- nessing’ of the experiencers themselves’’ (Mack In particular, Scott is criticizing the use of expe- 28). The abductees themselves, in turn, continu- rience as evidence in the writing of histories of ally stress the extremity of emotion they experi- marginalized identities, an endeavor she considers ence—be it fear, love, or hate—and claim that this paradoxical: ‘‘the evidence of experience then be- extremity must in fact testify to the truth of what comes evidence for the fact of difference, rather happened to them. Similarly, both Jacobs and than a way of exploring how difference is estab- Mack underscore that their studies depend on an- lished, how it operates, how and in what ways it ecdotal evidence that is authenticated by the ex- constitutes subjects who see and act in the world’’ tremity of emotion displayed by the abductee and (777). Mack, Jacobs, and the abductees them- transferred to his or her interlocutor. Mack points selves, in attempting to legitimize and authen- to the unprecedented ‘‘intensity of the energies ticate a much-ridiculed, although popular, 212 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005 phenomenon, seem caught in the bind of using the The packaging of these accounts, then, clearly very conceptual structures that essentialize the urges an unproblematized model of identification marginality of their stories. In the attempt to and empathy based on the strength of emotion ‘‘make sense’’ of these stories by turning them into generated by the experience. But the narratives ‘‘chronological narratives’’ with a ‘‘real sense of themselves, the actual words of the abductees, progression,’’ both the scholars and abductees when analyzed closely, further complicate this openly admit that they had to edit them to quell notion of experience by pointing to what the their ‘‘abrupt endings’’ and ‘‘wild, fantastic flights packaging of these accounts ignores: the power of fancy,’’ and omit anything that did not already dynamics and the forces of history that, as Scott fit the established abduction pattern ( Jacobs 23). would say, constitute us as subjects. The follow- In this erasure of the recalcitrant and incom- ing episode, included in the Sexual Activity and prehensible detail—what scholars have called the Other Irregular Procedures section of Jacobs’s unassimilable otherness of trauma (Van der Kolk book, reveals the complexities of the role of ex- and Van der Hart 163)—the packaging of these perience and emotion as portrayed in accounts of accounts epitomizes the processes by which dif- alien abduction. The episode is introduced by two ference is both essentialized and redefined at the simple sentences: ‘‘A fifteen-year-old girl had the end of the twentieth century as that which un- traumatic experience of being forced into inter- derscores the cohesive power of humanity. While course . . . The aliens attached headgear to her and the Indian captivity narrative presented us with began Mindscan procedures’’: an inviolable white woman’s body and an au- thoritative experience that firmly established the Who is it that comes over first? inherent and unbridgeable differences between the races, the vulnerability of the body in ac- It’s another one of them, but he’s bigger. counts of alien abduction seems to present us with a model of multicultural union brought about He’s bigger? through the sharing of a universalized ‘‘emotion.’’ He’s bigger. He’s dark, and he’s bigger, He’s The use of emotion as a force that is both self- much more powerful than they are . . . The generating and uniting—the means by which both word that comes into my mind . . . is that addresser and addressee are made to realize a he’s much more advanced than they are. It’s common bond of powerlessness—creates a depo- like he’s the senior one . . . He’s looking in liticized model of identification based on a dy- my eyes and I can’t see. I can’t see. I can’t see namic of consumption and compliance: difference anything because he’s in my eyes. How can is pleasurably consumed through an empathetic he be in my eyes? He’s in my eyes. This is and appropriative listening. But this model of making me crazy . . . identification, for all its apparent and beguiling You mean, he’s staring into your eyes? democratizing and universalizing tendencies, is itself the cause of an implicit—and at times, very He’s in my eyes. He’s flooding my eyes. He’s explicit—anxiety; it links identification with loss completely penetrating me, every bit of me is and powerlessness. As K. Anthony Appiah points in my eyes. He’s in my eyes . . . I can’t do out in ‘‘Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,’’ even anything about it . . . He’s spreading into my though American culture is actually quite uni- brain . . . totally, he is invading me . . . Oh, form, people are extremely preoccupied with di- God. He’s in my mind. He’s everywhere. He’s absolutely everywhere. I can’t stand it. versity and ‘‘inclined to conceive of it as cultural’’ (31). He wonders whether ‘‘there isn’t a connec- Does this go on for a long time, or for a tion between the thinning of the cultural content short time? of identities and the rising stridency of their claims’’ (32). It feels like a horribly long time. The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 213

How does he withdraw? Does he do it grad- fate of a subject that is swallowed up into the ually, or does he just break away? moment of telling a story that is not hers to begin with. He finds a place that he wants to be for a The episode alludes to a paranoid vision of the while and then it’s not so complete. It’s not cohesive power of telling by utterly destroying so black. I can see a little bit. I can see sort of a shadowy gray. And he’s making me feel the seductive myth of the primacy of experience things . . . He’s making me feel things in my on which identification is based. Identification body that I don’t feel. He’s making me feel between the girl and the alien is complete when he feelings, sexual feelings. He’s making me feel completely invades her mind. The girl repeats that things. It must be that he’s making me feel the alien is making her feel things that she does them because I don’t feel them. And he’s in not feel. What is it to feel what one doesn’t feel? my brain. I wouldn’t feel them. He’s making Who is the one feeling in the equivocal statement, me feel them . . . And he’s there. He’s eve- ‘‘it must be that he’s making me feel them because rywhere. He’s in my brain, and he’s every- I don’t feel them’’? Who is the ‘‘he’’ that is making where in my body too somehow. That’s very confusing. (202–03) her feel things? Sensation is wrenched from its foundational position; it does not derive from the The girl goes on to describe actually being forced very essence of identity, but is, once again, iden- to have intercourse with an older human male tified as a construction, an imposition that clearly who is unconscious but is being manipulated by derives from the particular power dynamic that the aliens. pertains to the moment of interaction. Indicative- What is immediately and most obviously ap- ly, sensation is characterized by an unbridgeable parent in this episode is the interpenetration of gap, a spatialized image that emblematizes the different levels of narrative. The story of trau- disjunction of feeling what one cannot feel. It matic intercourse with an older man is preceded references the moment of impact that destabilizes and paralleled by the explicitly sexualized pene- the subject: ‘‘I can’t stand it,’’ declares the girl of tration of the girl’s mind by the alien—a penetra- this groundless space. tion that is, in turn, implicated in Jacobs’s own The girl declares, seemingly nonsensically, that interaction with the girl, since he too is figura- the large alien finds a place ‘‘that he wants to be tively attaching ‘‘headgear to her’’ and is involved for a while.’’ The girl’s slip of the tongue—a slip in his own brand of ‘‘Mindscan procedures.’’ This that is indicative of the disorienting slippage confusion of the different layers of narrative, in between different categories in alien abduction which the event reported acts as a parable for the accounts—is thus endemic to, and could be de- occasion and dynamics of its telling, identifies the scribed as, the clearest articulation of the logic of moment of telling itself—the interlocutionary this narrative of intergalactic contact. Bodies act—as a type of abduction, a forceful ‘‘invasion’’ no longer anchor identity; instead, they can only or colonization. In fact, the compulsion to tell, to find temporary shape and a small form of respite confess, is directly linked to the trauma of the within the rigid structures that determine the situation through the repeated allusions to sight ways that identity can be articulated. throughout the episode; the hypnotic eyes of the Accounts of alien abduction, our contempo- ‘‘therapist’’ (both Jacobs and the big alien), the rary form of captivity narrative, present us with one who both incites and elicits the story that is bodies that have been emptied of reference and trauma, penetrate the speaking subject. The re- are invaded by the very notions of history, peated linkage of seeing and telling in this episode progress, and the cohesive power of narrative identifies them as acts conditioned by a power that they helped authorize. Poised dangerously dynamic that betrays the loss of an origin—a on the brink between a mythologized past and controlling, omniscient subject—for the story that an unknown future, between the equally harsh is being told. Instead, the episode dramatizes the dictates of nature and technology, between the 214 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 28, Number 2  June 2005

violence of racial segregation and an equally 7. Brown suggests that alien abduction accounts are informed by frightening vision of racial amalgamation, these Cold War cultural history. The ‘‘form-fitting body suit’’ thus iden- tifies the ‘‘grays’’ as ‘‘the Communist menace made flesh.’’ Moreover, narratives testify to what Federic Jameson has the bodysuits also allude to a 1950s fitness rhetoric that linked called the ‘‘virulent contradictions’’ that charac- physical fitness with the health of the nation, and fuelled the notion that ‘‘domestic, private, even personal war could be waged against terize Western images of dystopia (155). As an enemies at home and abroad’’ (5). According to Brown, abduction outer space image of the alien (or series of aliens) narratives expose the ‘‘phobic rapture with the dark side of the in- evitable march toward efficiency, durability, and comfort’’ (7). that has always marked the borders and testified 8. See Arthur and Marilouise Kroker for a number of interesting to the consolidation of the United States as a na- essays on the relation of the fashion industry to the ‘‘disappearing’’ tion, this modern alien is a spectral return of the body in the postmodern moment. repressed, a haunting, accusatory image that frus- 9. Film and the alien abduction phenomenon are intimately re- lated. Much of the imagery in abduction accounts derives directly trates and threatens the utopian notion of a terri- from the many films and television series dedicated to this topic. In torially complete and racially unified America. As fact, the explosion of abduction accounts follows closely on the heels of the many science fiction and alien films of the mid-century. As such, accounts of alien abduction present us with Showalter notes, ‘‘In an op-ed piece in the New York Times in Au- the dilemmas in conceptualizing identity at the gust 1996, professor Wayne Anderson of Sacramento City College reported that half of the students in his astronomy class credited the end of the twentieth century by dramatizing the idea of a government to conceal UFOs, and cited tele- tension between a nostalgic evocation of the past vision programs as evidence’’ (207). and a horrifying view of the future to which it led—and is still leading. In these accounts, the Works Cited body is nothing but a cenotaph: haunted, torn apart, and embattled by its own absence.

Appadurai, Arjun. ‘‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization.’’ Public Culture 10 (1998): 225-47. Notes Appiah, Anthony K. ‘‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding.’’ New York Review of Books 9 (Oct. 1997): 30-36. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. ‘‘The American Or- igins of the English Novel.’’ American Literary History 4 (1992): 1. Mary S. Weinkauf, for one, has written about the paradoxical 386-410. reappearance of the Indian in contemporary science fiction. Wein- kauf argues that the Indian appears in many guises, and that certain Baudrillard, Jean. ‘‘The Year 2000 Has Already Happened.’’ Body depictions of aliens are actually contemporary reconfigurations of Invaders: Panic Sex in America. Ed. Arthur Kroker and Mari- the Otherness that the Indian represented in previous eras (308–09). louise Kroker. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987: 35-44. 2. See, for example, Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Burnham; ———. ‘‘Ballard’s Crash.’’ Science-Fiction Studies 18 (1991): 313-19. Castiglia; Fitzpatrick; and Kolodny. Brown, Bridget. ‘‘Alien Fashion: Inside the Alien Jumpsuit.’’ Verb- 3. As Phillips D. Carleton puts it, ‘‘If one takes a map of the ivore 3 (1997): 4-7. United States and begins to plot upon it the dates and places of Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in captivities, he will find a series of concentric arcs and places of American Literature, 1682–1861. Dartmouth, MA: UP of New captivities, he will find a series of concentric arcs going outward England, 1997. from the centres of settlement. He will see the arcs change to lines that stretch out along the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail till they Carleton, Phillips D. ‘‘The Indian Captivity.’’ American Literature disappear finally in Oregon and California’’ (170). XV (1943): 169-80. 4. In his seminal study of the different types of Indian captivity Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: narrative, Richard VanderBeets described this type of narrative as Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. one deeply invested in a nationalist propaganda that requires a tone ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. of ‘‘general Indian hatred’’ (19). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. 5. Clancy, who studied with respected Harvard psychology pro- Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture- fessor Richard McNally, claims in her study that people reporting Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to abduction by aliens are more susceptible to the fabrication of mem- Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. ory. Along with her collaborators, she also links the abduction phe- Clancy, Susan A., et al. ‘‘Memory Distortion in People Reporting nomenon to a number of sleep abnormalities, such as . Abduction by Aliens.’’ Journal of Abnormal Psychology 11 See Clancy et al.; see also Elaine Showalter. (2002): 455-61. 6. Scholars of science fiction have pointed to this paradoxical Dean, John. ‘‘The Uses of Wilderness in American Science Fiction.’’ return to a view of America as a natural wilderness as typical of Science-Fiction Studies 9.1 (1982): 68-81. contemporary science fiction in the United States. The wilderness in science fiction today ‘‘holds the promise of an ideal environment in Fitzpatrick, Tara. ‘‘The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the sense of nature’s original condition, the perceivable paradigm of the Puritan Captivity Narrative.’’ American Literary History 3.1 natural life’’ (Dean 78–79). (1991): 1-26. The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction  Patricia Felisa Barbeito 215

Handy, Bruce. ‘‘Roswell or Bust: A Town Discovers Manna Crashing Mulvey, Laura. ‘‘Film and Visual Pleasure.’’ Film Theory and Crit- from Heaven and Becomes the Capital of America’s Alien Na- icism. Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshal Cohen. New York: Oxford tion.’’ Time 23 June 1997: 62-67. UP, 1985: 803-16. Jacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of Scott, Joan. ‘‘The Evidence of Experience.’’ Critical Inquiry 17 UFO Abduction. New York: Simon, 1992. (1991): 773-97. Jameson, Fredric. ‘‘Progress versus Utopia; or, Can we Imagine the Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Future?’’ Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 147-58. Media. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Kolodny, Annette. ‘‘Among the Indians: The Uses of VanderBeets, Richard. The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Captivity.’’ New York Times Book Review 31 Jan. 1993: 26- Genre. New York: UP of America, 1984. 29. Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Onno Van der Hart. ‘‘The Intrusive Past: Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise Kroker, eds. Body Invaders: Panic The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.’’ Ed. Sex in America. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Cathy Caruth. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New Johns Hopkins UP, 158-82. York: Ballantine, 1994. Weinkauf, Mary S. ‘‘The Indian in Science-Fiction.’’ Extrapolation 20 Metz, Christian. ‘‘The Imaginary Signifier.’’ Film Theory and Crit- (1979): 308-20. icism. Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshal Cohen. New York: Oxford White, Luise. ‘‘Alien Nation—The Hidden Obsession of UFO UP, 1985: 782-802. Literature: Race in Space.’’ Transition 63 (1994): 24-33.