. Father in Crisis, Mother Rises?
. Father in Crisis, Mother Rises?
2. (Extra)biblical Scenarios
In James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, the main protagonist, Dr Aaron Kaye, senses that his sister and the alien are in some way ‘in league’ with one another. The story's posthuman setting accommodates a choric fantasy, an ambivalent fantasy of a union with the mother that is desirable but also terrifying. This chapter examines the collapse of the patriarchal-phallic order and the emergence of the maternally connoted alien in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. It shows that the alien in the story points not only to the maternal but also to the divine. The chapter turns to the Bible as well as to Julia Kristeva's views on the so-called archaic mother to gain insight into particular fantasies that appear in the story, focusing on the Wirkungsgeschichte of biblical mythology. Finally, it discusses Kristeva's theory of abjection, and how it relates to the history of Judaism and Christianity.
Keywords: biblical mythology, James Tiptree Jr, Taste of Being, alien encounter, alien, divine, Bible, Julia Kristeva, archaic mother, theory of abjection