A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

sensibilities, though one that would nonetheless mark an anticipation of the organic machine
promised by current developments in bio- and nano-technologies.
The emergence of the so-called gray is even more marked by its increased focus on
questions of the body. Here for the first time the imagined future of the human was cast in a
form repulsive to human sensibilities. Not only does the gray not incite feelings of admiration
and identification, it invites the opposite—loathing and abjection. Unlike the saucer, the gray
offers a vague semblance of the human—bipedal, roughly symmetrical features. This
resemblance heightens rather than undoes the gray’s uncanniness. The gray resists identification
both in its grotesque form and apparent emotional vacuity. The gray in itself does not suggest
the mobility of the subject as much as its absence or its radical restructuring. In terms of an
expanded field of play for race and gender, the gray seems to push that expansion to a moment of
collapse or disappearance. The gray is apparently without race or gender—a figure that
embodies the collapse or suspension of the distinctions entailed by those two categories. To
identify with the gray is a struggle for those who encounter them, a struggle that seems to capture
the emergent ability so prized by Kaja Silverman’s treatise on the expanded field of love—the
ability to identify with the socially disprized body.
In her essay The Promise of Monsters, Donna Haraway draws the reader's attention to the
importance of "inappropriate/ d others" in imagining what she describes as a post-human future;
"To be inappropriate/ d is not to fit in the taxon, to be dislocated from the available maps
specifying kinds of actors and kinds of narratives." 326
Haraway argues that in order to envision a
future that constitutes a radical departure from the present, it is crucial to both shift the
perception of what counts as an agent and to seek out narrative structures that take us
326 Donna Haraway, “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" in Cultural
Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992) 299.
236