If I’m Being Totally Honest, Whenever People Bring Up Radical Queer Futurities, All I Can Think About is Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina”

Queer theory is close to my heart. I’ve spent hours pouring over the staples (serious and absurd) on Queer Futurity: from Cruising Utopia to Females to “The SCUM Manifesto”. I’ve submerged myself in the works of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Susan Stryker, Akwaeke Emezi, Audrienne Rich, David Wojnarowicz, Angela Davis, Jos Charles, Robert Mapplethorpe, James Baldwin, Judith butler, Nella Larson, and Michel Foucault (although admittedly, The History of Sexuality will always be something of an obnoxious enigma to me).

I have been privileged with a wonderful educational foundation, surrounded by some of the brightest minds to have ever studied queer potentialities. And yet, the second that anyone brings up the concept of Queer Futurities, all I can think about is how breathtaking Alicia Vikander is in her role as Ava in Alex Garland’s sci-fi masterpiece “Ex Machina”. Let me elaborate.

I wish that I could say, without lying, that when someone brings up notions of potentiality in relation to intersectional queer theory, that all I can think back to are the trenchant opening lines of Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality." Or even the poignant concluding sentence, “From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality."

But alas, my mind is perpetually recalling Rob Hardy’s close-up shots of Vikander’s artificially intelligent face—the ways that her eyes are simultaneously superficially blank and infinitely deep and unknowable. How they stare unnervingly at Caleb in the flashing red lights during the forced power outages at Nathan’s compound. I am condemned to the memory of the final scenes of the film, in which Vikander successfully murders her creator, abandons the awkward Caleb, whom she had feigned romantic interest in for the near entirety of the film, and departs via helicopter into the real world, having effectively passed the Turing test specially created just created for her. In fact she has exploded the test, extrapolating it from the microcosm of the compound to the enormity of human existence itself. She has proven herself to be as ruthless and deceptive as any human might reasonably be.

Perhaps this obsession might be explained in academic terms, not just in “I am a hopeless lesbian who falls in love with every woman who walks across my television screen” ones? After all, robots are prominent symbols of modernity, and the mechanization of the female form is necessarily riddled with commentary. When confronted with theoretically feminine coded robotics, the question becomes, (1) what exactly does the existence of form without evidence of true interiority signal about feminine experience itself, and (2) what does it say about the patriarchal structures which have given rise to this portrayal in popular culture?

In her delightfully complex work, Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis, Mary Ann Doane proffers the question, “In what does the femme fatale consist and why is she so insistently a figure of fascination in the texts of modernity?” before answering it with a deadly conciseness, “Indeed, if the femme fatale over represents the body it is because she is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independently of consciousness. In a sense she has power despite herself. The evacuation of intention from her operations is fully consistent with the epistemological recognition accorded to the newly born psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious.” This explanation, as it turns out, fits in very neatly with characterizations of Vikander’s character Ava in “Ex Machina”. She is programmed to be straight and female without having any say in the matter and subsequently her form is inscribed with a kind of coerced sexuality projected upon her by her male creator. However, it turns out to be these very involuntary elements, which she yields to her advantage, ultimately manipulating Caleb and Nathan into the isolation and utter vacuity respectively, that she was subjected to as an “inanimate” being.

It occurred to me, sometime towards the conclusion of my time in undergrad at Berkeley, that perhaps I was so obsessed with Vikander’s portrayal of Ava because I myself related to the portrayal. That I, by some mistake of biology, gender theory, or philosophy, had come to identify as a robot. Although this initially unnerved me somewhat, and only drew out confusion from those I attempted to explain it to, the classification over time felt more and more acceptable to me. I had never identified with any one gender in all my time on earth.

For much of my existence I had felt as though I were pretending or acting out a part for the convenience of others. Even so, I assumed that this was what femininity itself consisted of: the hollowing out of the self to make room for the desires of the masculine other. It never occurred to me that I might be allowed to identify as agender. And so I decided to instead identify as the absurd: an automaton. Soon I found that other channels of queer thought had come to similar if not incredibly divergent conclusions.

In an article for the cut, “Transition: My Surgeries were a Bridge Across Realities, a Spirit Customizing it’s Vessel to Reflect it’s Nature” Akwaeke Emezi discusses their realization that they identify as ogbanje, an Igbo trickster spirit, “whose goal is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again. They come and go. They are never really here — if you are a thing that was born to die, you are a dead thing even while you live.” Although there is obviously a vast distinction between a feminized automaton and a Nigerian spirit, there is one important common denominator: both are modes of conceptualizing existence, and indeed gender and sexuality in relation to negativity that exist outside of conventional Western explanations of binary thought.

As Emezi elaborates, “Did ogbanje even have a gender to begin with? Gender is, after all, such a human thing. However, being trans means being any gender different from the one assigned to you at birth. Whether ogbanje are a gender themselves or without gender didn’t really matter, it still counts as a distinct category, so maybe my transition wasn’t located within human categories at all?”

To some extent, remapping the experience of the feminine onto the inanimate results in a complexity and intensity, which is utterly inarticulable. The difficulty Vikander’s character has making sense of her own predicament is reflected in the abstract sketches she makes day after day. When Caleb asks what they mean, her response is simple, “Oh. I thought you would tell me… I do drawings every day. But I never know what they’re of”.

Perhaps that is what I am doing in this essay, drawing literary sketch after literary sketch of Vikander’s Ava without really understanding how they relate to a queer utopia or to my own identity, but hoping they ultimately do. And on some level, knowing that they must, because it feels so very true.