Thank you very much. I'm going to begin with just a brief epigraph here. The
Fantasist, whether he uses the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the
younger ones of science and technology may be talking as seriously as any
sociologist and a good deal more directly about human life as it has
lived and as it might be lived and as one as it ought to be lived. After all,
as great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the
imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope. And I begin
with this quote from Ursula K. Le Guin because she is one of the preeminent
feminist science fiction writers, but I hope that by the end of this you'll see
that it's getting to part of what I'm trying to suggest about the role of
feminist science fiction and its possibilities. So I would like to begin
by thanking my friend and colleague Lars for the invitation and the
opportunity to speak to you all today. I'm truly honored to be included in the
company of scholars who have addressed you so far and those who will address
you in future lectures. It is of course only too fitting that this class and
this series of lectures take place by means of what would have once been
considered in the realm of science fiction. When science fiction writers
imagine or predict the future technologies and future sociological
developments, one of the things that we have discovered is that they are more
often than not too conservative in their predictions. That is to say the changes
they envision often appear sooner than they predict. However, historically
science fiction writers have been particularly behind the curve in terms
of sex, gender, and race, as you heard last week, and sexuality. At the risk of
committing an act of hubris, then I would like to begin rather as Virginia
Wolf does at the beginning of her book, A Room of One's Own, from 1929. When
contemplating the task in front of her, namely discussing the topic of women in
fiction, which was the charge of the series of lectures that she was doing,
Wolf pauses to consider the implications and variations of that phrase. She
thinks about the two terms, women and fiction, and the permutations thereof. For
us today, we face a similar task. What do we mean by feminist and by science
fiction? However, since you are now in the 11th week of the seminar and since
Professor Reeder began the seminar series with the question, What is SF?, I
will then focus on the question of feminism and feminist science fiction.
But, as Lourdes Liquez-Gwynn tells us, science fiction, like feminism, is a
powerful and useful tool for both social analysis and social change. So,
what is feminism? Defining feminism is a particularly challenging task, I think. For
one, the term as a political movement, as an analytical category, and as an
everyday lived experience is far from fixed. Feminism means something very
different for someone in the United States than it might for someone in, say,
Pakistan. Feminism meant something far different for Charlotte Perkins Gilman
from the US and Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin in the earliest 20th century than
it does for Rebecca Walker and Petra Joy and Birgitta Riba from Germany. In
different periods of time and within different cultures, the feminist beliefs
and practices vary widely. Although the term itself dates from France in the
1880s, its use spread throughout Europe in the 1890s and then appeared in the
United States for the first time in 1910. Within four years, the term had become
commonly used in newspapers, political discourse, and everyday parlance. Over the
past 100 years, though, countless definitions have been offered, some of
them quite serious, some of them quite trivial. However, in her history of US
feminism, which is entitled No Turning Back, Estelle Friedman offers a definition
and a belief that men and women are inherently of equal worth. And part of the
reason that she does this is that so many of the definitions prior to this had
talked about equality, and equality is a particularly difficult category to
define. What do you mean by equality? And so she tries to avoid that by saying,
well, they're of equal worth, which really just opens a new can of worms.
However, although feminism as a political movement and as an ideology
initially addressed the social, political, and economic condition of women
specifically, over time, the term has taken on a much broader significance.
Consequently, Friedman acknowledges that gender always intersects with other
social hierarchies, including race, class, and sexuality. One of the goals of
feminism then is to work toward a community, a society, or world, or I guess
in our case a universe, free from those intersecting oppressions. Feminism then
is not limited to considerations of sex and gender, but includes all heretofore
marginalized groups and individuals. And when we get to the very last section of
the lecture, we'll see how some of the ways in which some writers will argue
that a feminist text doesn't necessarily need to foreground the
question of sex and gender. So if we take that as our working definition for
feminism, then what about some of the possibilities for science fiction?
Although Darko Suven's work, and here I'm referring primarily to the
metamorphoses of science fiction, you've probably talked about this text a little
bit so far in the seminar, Darko Suven's work is by no means universally
accepted. Indeed, John Reeder, who began the series, has written an award-winning
article challenging the very usefulness of Suven's definitions. Nevertheless, I'm
going to go ahead and use it because, at least in part because it's been so
useful and influential within science fiction criticism. So despite its
shortcomings, I would like to mention it here briefly in order to point out some
of the ways in which science fiction as a form of literature holds possibilities
for feminists. So for Suven, science fiction is characterized by cognitive
estrangement. In other words, while non-genre fiction, mainstream fiction,
whatever you like to call it, represents or purports to represent a recognizable
world, science fiction introduces some new element that seems out of place or
that creates a sense in the reader that something is just not right here. Suven
calls this thing the novum or new thing. The novum can appear in one or more of
several different areas or fields, including the area of the actants, the
social order, the topography, and the topography he divides into two parts,
the environment or the setting and technology, and then finally natural laws.
So when the dominant novum is in the realm of the actant, the narrative tends
to ask questions about humans, humanity, and human-ness. Or put another way, the
narrative asks questions about the other and otherness. Science fiction often
renders the metaphor of the other or alien as literal. Historically, the other
or alien has taken the form of the racial or cultural other, from Africans
to indigenous populations, to the Ram, to Digastarvaidr, to women, to the LGBTQ
communities. Ancient texts and ancient philosophers question the very human-ness
of women. Enlightenment thinkers spent vast amounts of ink and time and energy
on the woman question, including whether or not women were human, they were
citizens, whether they were capable of education and thought, and so on. If the
literal alien of science fiction, in fact, represents the social, cultural, political
alien of society, then it only makes sense that science fiction and science
fiction writers should consider the role and status of women within society. So as
an example, Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue from 1984, and I'll talk a little
more about this book later, closely aligns women's and aliens. The men within the
community of linguists consider the women as inscrutable as the alien species for
which they interpret. Or in Melissa Scott's Shadow Man from 1987, the
hermaphrodites from the planet Hera do not fit into the social and legal
definitions of human, and they are considered aliens. So if the dominant
novum, instead of the realm of the actant, is in the social order, then the
narrative tends to ask questions about the social and political world in which
we live, and examines the relationship of the individual, of the individual subject
to society. If we are raised into a, for example, democracy or a social democracy
or a socialist state, then we have a tendency to take that form of social
structure as the norm, and in some respects as inevitable. However, the
anarchist world in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed from 1974 is meant to
illuminate and critique the capitalist and patriarchal world, which bears a great
deal of resemblance to the United States at the time that Le Guin was writing her
novel. As another example, Octavia Butler's Owen Collie from the Xenogenesis
trilogy represent a non-hierarchical, non-binary social order, and they
illustrate the human attitudes and practices that lead to mutual
self-destruction. So by looking at these aliens of the Owen Collie, we can then see
our own social structures and begin to question them. When the dominant novum is
in the realm of the topography, and in this particular part, I'm going to focus
primarily on setting or environment rather than the technological. So when
the novum is in the realm of the topology, the narrative either asks
questions regarding the relationship of the self to the environment or examines
the ways in which technology shapes and determines our attitudes and practices.
As an example of this, Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance from 1995 illustrates
the ways in which the beings on the planet Tondu have adapted physically and
socially to the environment in which they live. The human scientist who finds
herself stranded among the Tondu, Dr. Jhundasari, learns over time the ways in
which the planet has shaped the Tondu and the ways in which they shake the
planet. And it's an interesting species of people because they don't have a
spoken or verbal language, but rather through a series of changes, they can
control and manipulate their skin and they make a series of symbols on their
skin. It has a lot to do with the fact that the world they live in and the
precarious state they live in and the kind of game that they have to hunt to
survive and so on. So the fourth one, natural laws, Suvan castigates the
possibilities of the Novum in the realm of natural laws. He calls a narrative in
which the dominant Novum is in the natural laws a mutated form. He calls it
science fantasy. However, both feminist and global science fiction writers have
shed light on this valuation and limitation of the realms of science. Many
writers rejected the limited forms of Western science because they negate and
invalidate the traditions and beliefs endemic to their culture. Feminist
scientists and feminist science fiction writers have demonstrated the ways in
which Western conceptions of science are grounded in very specific masculinist
perspectives. And of course, I don't know if you know or read the sort of field of
feminist science criticism, but Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway,
Vandana Shiva, and so on, all try to point out the ways in which what we think
of a science in the West is grounded in a very mass masculinist understanding of
the world and of the subject. So they have offered narratives grounded in other
kinds of ideologies. Right now we see writing from Native American writers, for
example, who question Western science and ground their science fiction in Native
American practices and beliefs and understandings of the world. South
American writers, you see many Mexican writers or indigenous writers of South
America. Indian writers, there's a just a huge burgeoning field of Indian writers,
both in the Indian subcontinent and living in the US. African writers and
Canadian writers, I'm going to talk a little bit later about Larissa Lye, who's a
Canadian Asian writer. They're all challenging the tenants practices and
limitations of so-called Western science. So whereas Suven wants to sort
of dismiss the possibilities of changing natural laws, we see a lot of feminist
writers, a lot of global writers really challenging the very idea and his
limited perception of what science is. So in some the very foundation of science
fiction narrative renders itself amenable to examining and imagining
other worlds, other societies, other beings in which the inequalities and
prejudices of our own histories are gone or altered and at the very least
differently structured. Science fiction as a form allows the possibility to
imagine worlds in which women are full participants. Science fiction as a form
allows the possibility to construct worlds or societies in which the wealthy
few at the top do not exploit the racial, ethnic, and religious others at the
bottom. One of the questions that has struck many of the feminist writers and
critics of SF has been, if that is true, then why has science fiction been so
slow to actually address questions of sex, gender, and sexuality? As at least a
partial answer, Brian Attaberry writes, quote, until the 1960s, gender was one of
those elements most often transcribed unthinkingly into SF's hypothetical
worlds. Even if an author was interested in revising the gender code, the
conservatism of a primarily male audience and the editors, publishers,
and distributors who were trying to outguess that audience kept gender
exploration to a minimum. And there's a fairly well-known quote from John W.
Campbell who was one of the editors of a number of magazines in the Golden Age of
Science Fiction, and he reputedly said to a writer that, I will publish, you know,
good science fiction as long as it doesn't deal with one of three issues,
drugs, blacks, or women. And, you know, whether or not John W. Campbell
exemplifies everyone's attitudes. He was a very influential editor, and it was an
attitude that was quite prevalent at the time, and so this is what Attaberry is
trying to get at is that there were this conservative attitudes within the
publishing mechanism that often kept the exploration of gender and women from our
stories and novels. So, what is feminist science fiction then? In her monograph
entitled, In the Chinks of the World Machine, Sarah Lofano argues that feminist
science fiction draws upon the literary traditions of the female Gothic and
feminist utopian writing. Lofano also contends that more recently, feminist
science fiction draws from the feminist, socialist, and radical politics of the
1960s and 70s. In the introduction to her 1974 collection, Women of Wonder,
Pamela Sargent contends that science fiction and fantasy are the only genres
that enable the author to envision women in new, different, or alternative
surroundings in social structures. Many critics, including Kingsley Amos in
1960 and New Maps of Hell, have noted that although science fiction texts
frequently speculate about technological innovation, they have not
speculated about social innovation with the same frequency. So, we like to think
about robots and spaceships and laser guns and things like that, but a
differently organized society. We see far less of that, particularly in the Golden
Age, and you really do begin to see much more of that with the with the
emergence of the New Wave in the 1960s. And that's, you know, part of the
psych-ice of the time when you have, you know, sex, love, and rock and roll. You
have all the sort of, you know, civil rights movements and second wave of
women's rights movements. It's very much about social innovation. We begin to see
that in science fiction as well. In her 1985 essay entitled, Yes, Virginia,
there's always been women's science fiction, feminists even. Diane Cook
defines feminist science fiction as SF that articulates an awareness of women's
place in a political system and their connectedness to other women, or which
has a primary and feminist focus on women's status. So, we see here for Cook,
she's very clearly and very explicitly saying it has to have a central focus on
women, women's role in society, and a critical lens on that situation. The
final suggests that feminism and science fiction are well-suited because feminism
questions a given order in political terms, and science fiction questions it
in imaginative terms. And that sort of goes back to the original quote from
Ursula K. Le Guin, that it is in this imaginary world where we are most
productive and offer the greatest possibilities. In New World's New Words,
Pamela Anness writes that SF in general and feminist SF in particular is more
useful than mainstream fiction for exploring the possibilities for social
change precisely because it allows idea to become flesh. Again, that's taking the
metaphor, making it literal. Abstraction becomes concrete.
Imaginative exploration becomes aesthetic reality. Within such working
definitions then, feminist science fiction authors have explored
patriarchal, matriarchal, and egalitarian social orders. They have constructed
alternative governmental and organizational systems. They reimagined
gender roles and the very idea of gender roles, undermined naturalized sex-gender
relationship, posited various means of reproduction, female, male, alien,
mechanical, have illustrated varied sexualities, human, animal, alien, and
mechanical, and considered the ramifications of both masculine science
and feminist science, which sometimes incorporates radically different notions
of science, which we might consider magic. As a consequence of the spectrum of
topics and the large number of feminist science fiction authors now
producing work, Veronica Hollinger has argued that the feel of the feminist
science fiction has become so large and so varied that feminist science fiction
is, quote, no longer well served by criticism that reads it as a unified
undertaking, which of course is what I'm trying to do here, but suggesting
that we have to sort of look at it and break it down into more specific things.
Is it a liberal feminist criticism? Is it a science fiction? Is it a radical
feminist science fiction? Is it a LGBTQ feminist science fiction? Et cetera.
There's just so much variation now. In other words, there are more things in the
feminist science fiction heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our
philosophy. Even so, in a 2006 post on the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Ruth
Nestvold and Jay Lake write an entry called Who Needs Feminist Science Fiction?
For one, they argue that feminist science fiction is both necessary for male
writers and readers and every bit is accessible to male writers and readers
as to female readers. This, of course, has always been one of the arguments
that publishers use is that, well, if I write feminist or if I publish feminist
science fiction, I lose half or more of my audience because males will never read
it. They're trying to make an argument here that it is accessible to males.
There are plenty of males who would be interested in reading it and they need to
read it anyway. They need to be jarred into new ways of thinking. In addition,
a 2007 post from a feminist science fiction publisher's blog, and this is
Aqueduct Press, who only publishes feminist science fiction. They have a blog
that's called Rambling Along the Aqueduct. Nancy Jane Moore sees a resurgence of
feminist science fiction, although some have claimed that the feminism of the 1960s
and 70s has done its job. After all, women have made tremendous strides across all
aspects of society. Moore contends that three social factors have contributed to
a resurgence of feminist science fiction. One, the confusion over what all the
changes of the past 30 years have meant, and she suggests that trying to think
about all these changes and what they mean for us as individuals, what they
mean for us as a society, is best worked out in fiction. You know, politicians
often get it all wrong. Every day discourse, education, whatever, but, you
know, the best way to think about these things and think through what the
ramifications of them are is to do it in fiction, and we can sort of see how
things might play out. Two, the second thing factor, she talks about the
groundbreaking discoveries in the sciences, and, you know, obviously in the
last 40 years, scientific breakthroughs have been enormous in terms of, you know,
brain science, in terms of biology, in terms of genetics, in terms of
understanding nature versus nurture, and so on. All of these have made us rethink
some of the things we've argued about feminism all along. And three, she suggests
the rise of religious fundamentalism, not in the United States and in Europe and
sort of all over. Now, to these three, I would add, at the very least, one of the
points that I began with. Feminism is not a fixed entity. It shifts continually,
and for many individuals today, what constitutes feminism would be anathema
to women and men working in the field 20 years ago. And in fact, well, I think
I'll try to show this later with some of the writers like Cameron Hurley. She
would take Diane Cook's definition of feminism. She would just reject it. She
would say that that's nonsense. So I want to look at some of the earlier things,
some of the precursors to feminist science fiction. Although the common
wisdom has long been that feminist science fiction emerged in full force
in the 1960s, and I sometimes hear that from my students as well, that feminism
started in the 1960s with the civil rights movement. A growing body of work
has examined the ways and the extent to which science fiction from the past has
been, even if not always overtly, feminist. Arguably, if science fiction
begins with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and many people make that argument, then
feminist science fiction begins there as well. Though I will say that some
critics like Gwyneth Jones, the British novelist, locates the genesis of feminist
science fiction with Margaret Cavendish's The Burning World from 1666.
Nevertheless, many people put it with Frankenstein. Susan Gubar calls
Frankenstein the origin of a humanist and feminist heritage within the genre.
Although written well before the term feminism existed, the novel does critique
the male usurpation of the creative and procreative power, and it does at least
allow us to see the silencing of women. However, I suggest that the claims for
Frankenstein as a feminist text must remain limited. The novel offers very few
female characters, and as with so much non-feminist SF, the females here are
largely props for male characters. They are the grounds for the action by men, or
in the case of Victor, often inaction. They are property exchanged between men.
They are beloved objects lost to death. As Gwyneth Jones points out, it has
nothing overt to say about the rights of women. Perhaps all the more shocking
considering Mary Shelley's lineage. So some 60 years later, Mary E. Bradley Lane,
a housewife in Cincinnati, Ohio, published her novel Mazora anonymously. It was like
so many of these early novels serialized in a newspaper. She did not want her
husband to know that she was writing. In fact, he never found out until after she
died, and he was going through her papers in the attic, and he discovered the
original manuscript for this novel, which had run in the newspapers and been very
successful. So she did not want her husband to know that she was writing,
let alone that she was writing about an all-female utopia. Unlike Mary Shelley's
novel that says little about women's rights, Mazora is a utopian tale of a new
matriarchal state that emphasizes women's subjective experience of public
history in the terms of relationships, interpretation, and fantasy. Further, her
acquisition of a language solely for women alludes to the possibility of a new
symbolic order. The world of Mazora offers technological marvels, though one
of the uses of the technology is to produce a pure race of Aryans. But it is
written just after the Civil War in the United States. It is post-emancipation
and proclation. And as the blacks were freed in the United States, many of the
women said, well, what about us as well? And so she's very much in a historical
moment when people are thinking about women, women's right, and how society
might be organized differently. And so we see that her imaginative vision of this
in Mazora. Twenty-four years later and halfway around the world, Rokia
Sakwat Hossain, a Muslim woman born in Bangladesh, produced a short work called
Sultanas Dream, which is a feminist utopia which posits a world in which
gender roles are reversed. Women have taken over the public realm and men are
confined to perda. The social order that Hossain constructs is, like Lane's, a
world of technological marvels. Unlike Lane, who creates an all-female society,
Hossain simply reverses the gender roles of contemporary Bangladesh. Men are
sequestered in perda and women run the society, much more efficiently than men
ever did. Clearly, both Lane and Hossain employed the novum in the social order
to illustrate the disparities and inequities in their own world. A few
years later, Inez Haynes Gilmore produced Angel Island, which is of the ones I have
listed here, it's probably the least known, which Patrick Sharp suggests is a
feminist novel that critiques the scientific masculinity of Darwin and
others. And so where we have in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s all of these feminist
critiques of science, here we see Gilman in a novel in 1914 already engaged in
that work. In the Lost Race novel, The Winged Baby reflects the ideal of better
men and women as suggested by feminists. Finally, in her iconic novel, Herlan,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, like Hossain, reverses the traditional gender roles and
the mother, capital M mother, not the politician or warrior, transforms society.
Herlan offers a world in which humane social values have been achieved by
women in the interest of us all. However, Gwyneth Jones, who was critical of
Frankenstein is also critical of Herlan, she dismisses the novel as little more
than the naked description of a feminine but sexless and doctrinaire
totalitarian state. She didn't like it much. Even so, each of these early progenitors of
feminist science fiction were responding to the scientific, social, and political
conditions around them. And each of them was shaped and affected by whatever
version of feminism was available to at her time and in her place. And with the
exception of Shelley, they specifically used the novum in the social order in
order to highlight the social order and to advocate for social change. And here
I've just given you a few examples between 1666 and 1915. There are
hundreds and hundreds of books written by women, most of which were utopian or
dystopian novels. And I'm going to send you a document that was originally
created by Elle Timmel Duchamp, who is the publisher of Aqueduct Press, I mentioned
earlier. And she had gone through a whole lot of books and resources and compiled
this list of four or five hundred feminist texts or female utopian texts from the
17th to the early 20th century. So I have that list I've gone through, I've edited
it, I've updated a little bit and formatted it and I will send that to you, you can
look through it. There's some really, really, really interesting. And the other
thing is if you go to Google, to Google books, about a third of those books are
available for free download. Now they're not really very good copies, they're
just they simply scan them, they're just images of the pages, but they're there
and you can read them and a lot of them are quite interesting. So Galactic
Suburbia is the next section here. Apart from the late 18th and early 20th
century novels that draw upon the Gothic and utopian traditions, women also began
to work in the realm of science fiction nearly from the beginning. This claim
flies in the face of the common assertion that women were just not
involved in science fiction. By the 1930s, practice of publishing science fiction
in book or novel form had been supplanted by the emergence of the short
story published in magazines, in a collection of stories called New Eves,
Jean-Ré Frank, Jean Stein, and Forrest Ackerman argued that women writers were
published relatively frequently in the very earliest magazines, but the practice
was changed in the 1930s when the focus shifted toward men's adventure fiction.
However, by the end of the 40s, women writers were returning to science
fiction magazines and the 1950s saw quote an explosion of women writers. This
is from Lisa Yajic in Galactic Suburbia. She notes that many women experienced
the technologization of society quote through the industrialization of
the home. Housewives became domestic scientists and efficiency experts and as
Yajic notes some 300 women began publishing in the science fiction
community after World War II. And although she describes their work as
women's SF and not necessarily feminist SF, she does argue that, and I would
agree, that they are the progenitors of the boom of science fiction, feminist
science fiction that I'll talk about a little bit. Although Joanna Russ
originally offered the term Galactic Suburbia as a pejorative term for the
work of some women SF writers who seemed to replicate the tradition of
ladies magazine fiction and the sort of you know good housekeeping and better
homes and gardens and things like that which had fiction in it, stories about you
know the perfect domestic goddess and things, and Russ thought that they were
simply imitating that form of fiction. Yajic reclaims the term to demonstrate
how the women who are writing domestic fiction were in fact very much a part of
the science fiction tradition, very much a part of the valorization of science
and technology and very much invested in staking a claim for women in the
American future imaginary. Examples of writers and stories of this type would
be Judith Merrill's That Only a Mother which offers a strong critique of the
US military policy and the effects of radiation testing. The story highlights
both father's attitudes toward children born with birth defects as a result of
radiation and mother's attitudes toward their children and toward politics.
However the story is told entirely from the mother's perspective and within the
confines of the home. Another example would be Anne Warren Griffith's captive
audience from 1953, also told entirely from the wife and mother's perspective
and from almost entirely in the home except when they're in the grocery store
shopping for cereal. The protagonist stays at home and manages the household
and the children while her husband works for a prestigious advertising agency. In
this world ads have become pervasive and every product speaks directly to the
consumer all day long and Griffith demonstrates the ways in which the
mother, the wife or mother has very little say in the running of the
household and the raising the children but also is very much invested in being
sure that she provides the best home, the best care, the best medicine for her
children all of which is being force-fed to her through these ads that are
everywhere. As a final example of galactic suburbia, Carol M. Schweller's
story adapted from 1961 tells the story of a female alien on the planet Earth. In
order to survive the narrator passes herself off as an ordinary girl and then
as a housewife. However she illustrates keenly the feminine mystique that Betty
Friedan would make a household name just two years later. Betty Friedan's book by
that title The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. The narrator
understands that she has alienated herself from her own nature and that the
possibilities that were closed down to her but reassures her daughter that she
need not do the same thing to herself. So again we have woman as alien in society
made literal as an alien on the planet Earth. And this is not a story that Lisa
Asik talks about but there's a couple years later in 1976 Lisa Tuttle has a
story called Wives which also very much illustrates not so much the feminine
mystique but our cultural attitudes about beauty and sexuality are are
imposed upon these alien females so that they look and act like human female.
Alright so the boom and a lot of people will say what you the sort of the boom
this explosion of feminist science fiction 1960s 1970s and 1980s so I want
to talk about that a little bit. If the industrialization of the household
Asik brought many women writers into the field then Pamela Anis suggests that the
failures of technology to solve social ills and produces utopian society led
many including many women to question the suppositions regarding the role and
possibilities of technology. Furthermore the personal is political
zeitgeist within the 1960s feminism and you can trace that that idea of the
personal is political from the sociologist C. Wright Mills in the 1950s
to the 1960s feminist essay by Carol Hainish. So this idea of the personal is
political prompted women to re-examine their social position and to imagine
alternative possibilities. That is to say if the social structures are
responsible for the injustices and inequalities then the social structures
must change or be differently organized. Joanna's Russ suggests that the writers
of galactic suburbia tended to examine the effects of technology and patriarchy
upon women in contemporary society while feminist science fiction writers tended
to examine the effects of technology and patriarchy upon what women might be
in the future. So while the boom in science fiction feminist science fiction
drew upon a history of ideas from women's SF since Frankenstein the boom
was also response to contemporary conditions including the move towards
social SF which we see in the new wave and the emergence of the second wave of
feminism again beginning 1963. Frankenstein and Ackerman note that
feminism was just becoming a part of the popular discourse in the 1960s but
between 1969 and 1972 feminism became the main subject of discourse within the
world of science fiction. The ways in which and the extent to which feminism
dominated science fiction in the 1960s and 70s is well documented in Helen
Merrick's study the secret feminist cabal and it really is it's a social
history of feminism in the field of science fiction from in terms of fans in
terms of letters to editors in terms of stories and so on and there are all of
these exchanges of letters in magazines and newsletters all talking about what
feminism is and whether or not it should be in science fiction it's really
something that's very very much discussed in the early 70s.
While variation exists many of the boom feminist science fiction texts tend to
be grounded in a liberal humanist perspective of the self and in a
conception of society found in the first and second wave feminism.
So for example a number of the feminist science fiction texts of the 1970s
utilize the utopia dystopia form in order to
this is the slightly one I'm sorry utilize the utopia dystopia form in
order to either critique the extent of the extent social conditions or to
posit the conditions of possibility of another way to be among the utopian
dystopia novels are Monique Batyg's Legeriere,
Naomi Mitchison's Solution 3, Marge Percy's A Woman Only at a Time,
Marian Zimmer Bradley's The Shattered Chain,
Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wonder Ground, and Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale and among many many many many others.
As Lane, Hossein, Gilmore, and Gilman did before them
these writers of feminist science fiction argue
for a society in which subjects occupy a place within society
and they either illustrate the ways in which women have been excluded
or they reverse the old hierarchies. Traditional gender roles are challenged
in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Space Woman
which undoubtedly relies on Nassau's original plans
to use women as astronauts and Lisa Yazik mentions this in her book as well
but when Nassau was originally planning on putting people up into space
they originally planned to use female astronauts because they were smaller,
lighter, they were very much concerned about payload,
you know it takes a lot of fuel a lot of energy to get any kind of mass up into
space and so they thought well we'll use women they're smaller
plus they're in cramped quarters they're more nimble and then somebody said well
wait a second no no no no we can't have women going up in the space that's a
that's a masculine role and so they scrapped the idea and they
put men in the spaceship. Pamela Zoline's The Heat Death of the
Universe equates the stifling confines of gender with
the entropic winding down of the universe
and and it's it's what almost the only science fiction story she ever wrote
she actually is a forester she works out in a forest in
Colorado somewhere but she wrote the story in the
60 and 67 and it was a hugely successful. Monique Fatigue's Le Guerrière
suggests that masculinity is destructive the women of the new society
create a new history and eschew all things masculine.
Of course one of the gender roles that has long shaped women's lives and
experiences has been that of childbirth and motherhood.
Shulamith Firestone argues in The Dialectic of Sex
that the reproductive function keeps women trapped
in patriarchy. According to Firestone liberation for women
lies in technological or she calls it cybernetic birth.
For example we see this then played out in
some of the science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness posits
a world in which each person spends five six of its life without a
sex as a sexual potential. However when
camera occurs and camera is a sort of estrus
that person might become either male or female and therefore that person can
fulfill the male or female role in reproduction.
Consequently since at any one moment I could be male or female
discrimination based on gender is obsolete.
Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time all three children
all children I'm sorry are born of three genetic parents.
All children are gestated in mechanical wombs
and all children are breastfed by all three parents.
And what we recognize today as gender roles are subverted in her future world
of metaphysic. Piercy like Firestone suggests
that mechanization but not just random mechanization not
mechanization for the sake of progress but any sort of
wisely chosen and deliberately utilized mechanization
can be the key to equality. In Sherry Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country she
argues that gender can be altered by a genetic engineering program
in which male aggression is deselected.
Many of the boom writers of feminist science fiction argue that language
is tied to the constructions of self and gender
and this certainly makes sense given some of the contemporary arguments
by both post-modernist and post-structuralist in the way in which
we are we're text we read each each of us as text we're constructed through
text and through discourse. The Teague's Laguerre argues that
language must be remade for a new society. In writing a novel the Teague
creates a feminine form of the word warrior
and employs the non-existent feminine plural form l
yes throughout similarly Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native
Tongue from 1984. Elgin operates from a rather strong form
of linguistic determinism the kind of linguistic determinism
that's suggested by Sapir and Worf's hypothesis.
In the novel female linguists create a woman's language called
which can represent the reality of women's lives in ways in which they
argue that men's language simply can't do. Interestingly Elgin
has actually created this language, Ladan exists.
There is a grammar, there is a dictionary, there's a website that can help you learn
Ladan if you would like, it's all available.
In Pearcy's non-gendered society of Mataposit they use the personal pronoun
per which is a just shortened version of person
and so in both the the the the nominative accusative and dative case
for anybody no matter what it is it's per you know so per took per car to
per to the store so so it eliminates uh gender in in
the pronouns regardless of the sex or gender of the
individual. Infamously though Le Guin utilized the masculine pronoun to
refer to the non-sex Athenians in the left hand of darkness.
A strategy she later suggests was flawed because of the ways in which it
over determines the reader's response to the gender of the character estuarine.
So here we have three examples of writers who say
we need to change language because it does shape and influence how we see
reality. Le Guin chose not to do that and then
later realized that you know what they're right it really does affect how
we see things and so perhaps we need to use another language.
So since uh since the boom of the feminist science fiction in 1970s the
field has grown dramatically both in terms of the number
am I out of time Lars um all right I have a couple pages left.
Since the the boom of feminist science fiction in 1970s the field has grown
dramatically both in terms of the number of feminist science
fiction writers but more importantly in terms of their ideological foundations
assumptions and approaches to feminist science fiction.
While boom SF writer feminist SF writers tended to explicitly foreground
questions of sex gender and sexuality many post-boom writers of feminist
science fiction do not. If the boom feminist science fiction
writers assume a liberal humanist self then post-booms
feminist science fiction writers assume a far away in
cyborg self. In other words they're more likely to posit a world in which gender
uh equality is a functional given in which sexualities are fluid and
multiple in which all categories of identity
male, female, hermaphrodite, woman, man, androgyne, hetero, homo, bi, di, omni,
racial, ethnic, national, human, animal, machine all of these kinds of boundaries
are quite fluid. The old boundaries will no longer hold
certainly signs of this can be seen in earlier feminist texts.
Joanna Ressa's The Female Man for example radically undermined the idea of a
unified self. Samuel Delaney's Trouble on Triton
offers multiple genders and sexualities uh
and I'll skip Naomi Mecheson.
So intersectionality while many of the progenitors
and and the boom writers foregrounded questions of sex and gender they were
frequently either remiss or worse quite regressive in
their racial and ethnic politics and you think about Mary Wollstonecraft
you know her sort of pejorative comments about the Hindu
and about the the savages in North America and so on.
Octavia Butler was one of the few African-Americans
writing science fiction in the 80s and 90s though the number of African-American
writers has increased in recent years. Butler
was a feminist, a self-proclaimed feminist, and her narratives offer strong
female protagonists and raise issues surrounding sex and gender.
Those issues are always complicated by questions of race,
ethnicity, and class. For example in Dawn, Lilith Iapo is a
Black woman who is selected by the Oinkali
to help prepare her fellow humans to interbreed with the Oinkali
and repopulate the earth. Her status as a woman
and as Black complicates her authority among the humans.
Her heritage as a Black woman complicates her own responses
to her role as a Judas goat. In the short story Blood Child, which I
believe you're discussing later, humans are maintained and nurtured in
captivity by the Tlix so that humans can help the Tlix breathe. While the
humans certainly seem to be held in a sort of benevolent slavery, Butler
denies that the story is about slavery at all.
Instead for her she says it's a love story.
Larissa Lai is a Chinese Canadian activist
sorry a Chinese Canadian activist, professor, and writer. Both of her novels
When Fox is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl combine
Chinese folk tales with the themes and tropes of science fiction in order to
create a hybrid text. Salt Fish Girl, Lai
retells and subverts Chinese creation stories and creates a near future
dystopian Canada to emphasize the ways in which
women of color in particular are negatively affected by global
capital and transnational pharmaceutical companies.
Nevertheless, Lai simultaneously demonstrates some of the ways in which
women negotiate the spaces of oppression and marginalization for their own
benefit. This is a big difference you'll see
between Larissa Lai, say, and Joanna Russ where Joanna Russ sees
patriarchy is quite oppressive and there's really no way out. You either
destroy it or you're trapped or you're oppressed.
Larissa Lai says well there are these gaps there are these aporia there's
these places within global capital within patriarchy where
you can be creative and productive and live these kinds of lives.
Cameron Hurley is one of the new writers in the field her debut novel appeared
in 2011 quickly followed by its sequel. The third
installment should appear this month sometime.
The debut God's War has been shortlisted for the Nebula War and has generated a
lot of internet chatter. So far I have been explicitly and
consciously not using the term post-feminist.
The term generally takes one of two meanings neither of which are all that
useful in my opinion as Lisa Yajic writes in an article of
the same title I'll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy.
However, God's War does in some ways fit into one of the definitions of
post-feminism. The novel takes place on another planet
which seems in in a number of ways to be have
descended from Islam. The novel features a strong well-armed
female protagonist Nixnissa who is a hired assassin. The narrative
centers heavily on fight scenes and violence
and the narrative expressly states that women can do everything that men have
done all of which in marine cage speller's
words seems a bit old-fashioned. Although Hurley features some
interesting bug-based technology and she actually
says that her fiction is bug-punk sort of
playing on cyberpunk and nano-punks and so on. And although she creates a world
that draws from several different earth cultures the gender politics
do seem post-feminist in the sense that she never considers the conditions or
structures that might hinder women rather she behaves as if they were never
there. And in this talk I've completely skipped
the burgeoning feel of young adult feminist science fiction.
There are so many texts I mean just there's so many texts right now that
are that are young adult science fiction and
young adult feminist science fiction. They would include The Hunger Game by
Suzanne Collins and The Matched series by Ali Condi.
But it's something that someone might want to look at. So just in conclusion
many feminist science fiction writers continue to critique the social
constructions of identity including sex, gender, class, race, and
sexuality. They argue for societies in which
individuals and groups are not marginalized or oppressed based on one
or more aspects of their identity and they challenge readers to question
their own assumptions regarding identity. However many
post-boom writers challenge the very categories of identity
represent all boundaries of identity as fluid and permeable
or assume a society in which these issues have been resolved.
Nevertheless these strategies do not suggest that feminist science fiction
has become obsolete rather it has just been born.
Thank you.