Dead in Suburbia
This article, as do so many things in my life, has an odd history. I was in the middle of an abusive relationship that worked like a psychotic chess game. I had been forbidden to write anything without his permission. But of course submission was never in my nature. I wrote this article sitting in the park with my daughter. Laptops had not yet been invented, and so I was writing it all on a legal pad. One day he caught me and tore all the copies and drafts out of my possessions. He hid them to punish me.
I waited a day and then squeezed a bottle of expensive wine out of my grocery budget. I encouraged him with wine and sex into telling me where he had hidden the pieces. I found them, typed them up and then mailed it out. However, it was two paragraphs shorter than I had originally intended. I sent it off without them because I could not take the chance that next time he would burn the article as he had my novels.
Dead in Suburbia
Or whatever happened to feminism in science fiction?
by Janrae Frank
(Published in Thrust issue 28, fall of 1987)
It is a disquieting feeling to to write a long, thoughtful article and, just before pulling the last page out of the typewriter, discover that the whole premise upon which it was based is totally wrong.
Last year when I sat down to write an article on the egalitarianism of Barbara Hambly's brand of fictional feminism I decided that I needed to put her work into a historical perspective. Up until then I had believed that the 1980 bestowal of the World Fantasy Award for best anthology to Amazons marked the literary high water mark for feminism in science fiction and fantasy. But if that was the zenith it was a very short-lived literary movement for although swordswomen and sorceresses are still out there saving the world, we no longer see those hardcore feminist delvings into the natures of womanhood and femininity the search for definitions sexualiw and the essence of the female experience in a variety of cultures which characterized the New Wave writings of Le Guin, Russ and Charnas (to name but a few).
It has been absent for half a decade, unless you include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But Atwood is realy a mainstream writer dabbling in the conventions of science fiction So what happened to science fiction and fantasy feminism? If feminism began in 1975 with Russ's The Female Man and peaked with Amazons in 1980 and dropped dead the next year, then it was little more than a stillborn child. When a movement, political or literary, starts out it is composed of a few voices crying in the proverbial wilderness. When a movement first achieves power it is at its height; in literature this usually takes the form of an award and/or critical acclaim or even popular acclaim. And when it becomes generally accepted it has lost its momentum settled into the suburbs and quietly died. The essence of ferninisf writings has been to explore female realities, to question the nature of their sexuality and the dictates of biology, and to stand in open rebellion to repressive regimes (patriarchal and otherwise) and the status quo. In the earliest books, the writers were content to explore familiar patriarachal realms where men held the legal authority and were more of less passively repressive, the familiar phenomenon which operated in our own culture.
Their protagonists were strong women who either turned the tenets of the cutlure against itself or held themselves outsied its rules as outcasts and rebels. Gradually this changed as women looked for a means to bring the differences and the smiliarities of men and women (as they perceived them) into sharper focus.
For Ursula Le Guin this meant an exploration of androgyny, for Joanna Russ it meant the complete rejection of the male sex as a fundamentally alien (to women) species. In the end, all the outward trappings of feminism were adopted by the majority of women (and some men). We see women space pilots, warriors, wizards, and scientists by the score; but the heavy philosophical underpinngins are mostly absent, merely given lip service in passing. The mid-level writers have taken the "active" heroine into their hearts and their fiction, but almost no one is asking why or offering any keys to the universal uniquely female/feminist consciousness.
What happened to feminism? That first voice crying in the wilderness was probably C. L. Moore when she wrote of Jirel of Joiry and a scattering of other intriguing women protagonists. But she dropped out of science fiction in the late 50s, roughly a decade before the advent of feminism and the New Wave, and before there were enough screams coming from the wilderness of science fiction to consitute a movement.
Feminism landed in science fiction hand in hand with the New Wave. The women in both fandom and prodom have, in the main, been a peculiar breed: intelligent, often brilliant, eccentric and fiercely independent. It was inevitable that one day they would stop writing about male heroes and start creating female protagonists simply because they wanted to write characters which they, as women, could relate to and identify with, and that other women would want to read about for the same reasons. Eventually, this led to works in which the writers sought to explore their own inner dynamics, to exorcise the personal ghosts haunting their philosophies, and to define the nature of womanhood and the female experience.
Feminism really got started with Anne McCaffrey in the mid 60s. She started out writing stories with male protagonists such as Daffyd op owen in her Wild Talents stories for John W. Campbell. Her stories about the Ship that Sang, in which a female human is encased in the hull of a starship to give the ship intelligence and intuition beyond the abilities of mere computers occupy a period of change In her work.
In these stories McCaffrey explored the emottons of love, while denying the pull of sexuality, exploring more the nature of humanity than feminity. She made a gradual changeover from writing strong women as secondary characters to giving them center stage. The change was not missed by her main editor, Campbell and it must have bothered him.
According to Pamela Sargent's introduction to Women of Wonder he ordered McCaffrey to make the heroine of the story A Womanly Talent more traditional. She complied and Campbell bought it. The changes notwithstanding, It is one of her more memorable works.
Then, in 1967, McCaffrey made the breakthrough into feminism as one of her most intriguing and irresistbly strong-minded female protagonist not only siezed center stage, but a Nebula Award as well. This was Lessa and the story was Weyrsearch. Lessa, a telepathically talented young woman turned the patriarchal system against itself to contrive the death of her male oppressor and secure her own freedom.
In 1969, Ursula Le Guin took both feminism and the New Wave movement in a long leap to the literary heights in an unsettling journey into the nature of sexuality in The Left Hand of Darkness. The planet Winter is home to an alien race whose people are neither male nor female but change back and forth as they come into 'kemmer' or heat. It has been said by some feminism scholars, at least partly because the human protagonist is male, that The Left Hand of Darkness is not so much a feminist work as an achievemont of sexual satori, a humanist document.
However, it should be kept in mind that in 1969 the feminist movement had not yet embraced the conviction that A) femininism was a movement and ideology separate from that of humanism per se; and B) that a male could not be a feminist, and hence a story with a male protagonist could not be a feminist document.
But feminist, humanist or zen (as some scholars now insist), much of ideologically hardcore feminist fiction, such as Joanna Russ's When It Changed and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World – both works in which men and women view each othor as mutally exclusive species could not have existed if Le Guin had not pioneered the way in The Left Hand of Darkness.
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