Eroismo femminile e integrazione culturale: una genealogia gender della ‘final girl’

Through the analysis of Lt Ripley’s character in J.-P. Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997), the paper aims at highlighting the cultural genealogy of the so called ‘final girl’, the typical heroine of contemporary slasher and horror films as defined by Carol Clover. Ripley’s peculiar profile and inner contradictions (killer of monsters vs. related to the monster) are tracked back to her being heir to two different mythological patterns, the culture hero and the Πότνια θηρῶν. The function of this strangely polarized background can be understood thanks to Harvey Sack’s Membership Categorization Analysis, which enables us to see how female heroism, as a particular case of woman’s integration into the social order, is subject to conditional approval by the patriarchy. Woman’s integration into culture is therefore to be understood basically as self-disavowal and can be granted only in exchange for the woman’s willingness to give up her culturally constructed deep connection with monstrous otherness.