Title: Feminist Speculative Fiction: A Reflection of the Woman's Experience (s/t) [maybe A Reflection [or Exploration] of Gender]

1. Introductiona. define speculative fiction

i. "No category ever achieves consensus, as is evident in the very term for science fiction and fantasy favored by its writers, artists, and critics: speculative fiction or SF. The abbreviation in fact captures an important lack of specificity about what constitutes the genre at all, though many critics nevertheless begin with the hopeless task of defining it" (Canavan and Ward 238)

ii. "The initials 'SF' beg the naming question -- science fiction; speculative fiction -- as though embracing the intractable slipperiness of generic boundaries themselves -- calling to mind Paul Kincaid's essential observation that 'the more comprehensively a definition seeks to encompass science fiction, the more unsatisfactory it seems to those of us who know the genre.'" (Canavan and Ward 238)

iii. "The temporality of SF is often misleading. Although the genre often takes the future as its setting, alternative histories and the distant past are equally characteristic (especially when we assume the more inclusive definition of SF that encompasses fantasy and myth). The futurity of SF inheres not in its setting but in its insistent imagining of alternatives." (Canavan and Ward 241)

iv. "The chimerical speculations of SF, more than any other discourse, structure our collective imagination of what is possible." (Canavan and Ward 244)

v. "The most commonly cited definition reads: 'SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment' (Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979], 7-8). Suvin's famously restrictive definition -- which, it must be noted, he has significantly loosened in his more recent writings -- excludes not only fantasy, folklore, and myth but also the majority of what is published as science fiction as well. Ironically, Atwood uses the term speculative fiction to distinguish her work from science fiction, but her usage differs from what has become the more common one, which includes science fiction." (Canavan and Ward 248 note 5)

vi. "…speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy)" (Card p.6)vii. "Once, frustrated with the plethora of meaningless definitions of science fiction,

Damon Knight said, 'Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.' That may sound like a decision not to define the field at all -- but it is, in fact, the only completely accurate definition." (Card p.12)

viii. "The most complete definition will come to you only one way, and it isn't easy. You have to know everything ever published as speculative fiction or fantasy. Of course, you want to begin writing sf and fantasy before you die, so you know that you can't read every single book or story. You'll have to read a representative sample to get a feel for what has already been done in the field." (Card p.13)

ix. "Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality." (Card p.17)

x. "Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them." (Card p.20)

xi. "Here's a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it's science fiction. If it's set in a universe that doesn't follow our rules, it's fantasy. Or, in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be." (Card p.22)

xii. "sf can have a socially or politically critical purpose" (Shaw p.2)xiii. "sf offers potential futures whose most important function is to distance the

reader from, and thus offer a critical perspective on, her present." (Shaw p.2)xiv. "Suvin's definition of the genre as requiring the presence of 'estrangement and

cognition.'" (Shaw p.4)xv. "As Baudrillard has (now famously) claimed, 'SF…is no longer an elsewhere, it is

an everywhere.'" (Shaw p.5)xvi. "the writing of sf proceeds from a need to express a truth, a concept, a

conviction or a question which, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'important truths, needed but unpopular,' find their most potent expression through the invention of imaginary worlds in which the future has already happened." (Shaw p.178)

xvii. "The speculative, 'thought experiment' nature of the genre has fuelled a comprehensive breadth of innovation." (Makinen 129)

xviii. "But Wells, like Shelley before him, uses science fiction to raise questions about society, in relation to technology. In Britain, the fiction has been used as a form of social critique from its inception." (Makinen 131)

xix. "…despite its history, science fiction did have revolutionary potential because of its structural premise to question things-as-they-are. Sf's alternate paradigms could play off dialectically against the given reality to create a non-ethnocentric literature." (Makinen 139)

b. define feminismi. FEMINISM

1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism 2. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/11/3. "Sexist discourse defines, describes and delimits how men and women

must act in order to be considered masculine and feminine, how to be 'real' men and 'real' women in a patriarchal or male-dominated society (Kress, 1985 (A)). It similarly orders the interactions between the sexes, what constitutes normal or acceptable sexual behavior and, equally oppressively, what constitutes normal behavior for both sexes, in both private and public areas of activity." (Cranny-Francis p.2)

4. "I thus adopt Alison Jaggar's formulation, which defines as feminist all those forms of theory and practice that seek, no matter on what

grounds and by what means, to end the subordination of women." (Felski p.13)

5.ii. FEMINIST FICTION

1. "In feminist fiction, including feminist genre fiction, feminist discourse operates to make visible within the text the practices by which conservative discourses such as sexism are seamlessly and invisibly stitched into the textual fabric, both into its structure and into its story, the weave and the print." (Cranny-Francis p.2)

2. "But why genre fiction?...As a conscious feminist propagandist it makes sense to use a fictional format which already has a huge market." (Cranny-Francis p.2)

3. "Feminist generic fiction is not simply masculinist generic fiction with female heroes telling stories of oppression; as such it would risk becoming an even more effective apology for patriarchy. Feminist generic fiction, like socialist generic fiction, is a radical revision of conservative genre texts, which critically evaluates the ideological significance of textual conventions and of fiction as a discursive practice." (Cranny-Francis p10)

4. "Feminist genre fiction…reveals genre as a social strategy on a number of levels. Feminist analysis of generic fiction has shown that genres encode ideological information. They have a specific social function to perform as the expression of conservative ideological discourses, though oppositional voices are often heard -- either within the same texts and in order to be silenced (but still there) or in self-consciously oppositional works by politicized writers (for example socialists or feminists)." (Cranny-Francis p.17)

5. "Feminist fiction can be understood as both a product of existing social conditions and a form of critical opposition to them, and this dialectic can be usefully interpreted in conjunction with an analysis of the status of feminism as a social movement within advanced capitalism. The emergence of a second wave of feminism in the late 1960s justifies the analysis of women's literature as a separate category, not because of automatic and unambiguous differences between the writings of women and men, but because of the recent cultural phenomenon of women's explicit self-identification as an oppressed group, which is in turn articulated in literary texts in the exploration of gender-specific concerns centered around the problem of female identity." (Felski p.1)

6. "As Peter Burger (u has two dots) points out, 'works of art are not received as single entities, but within institutional frameworks and conditions that largely determine the function of the works.' The focus of attention is thus directed at an investigation of the specific ways in which feminist approaches to literature both problematize and are influenced by existing ideologies of art. It becomes impossible to

examine the specific ways in which the women's movement has served to repoliticize reading and writing practices without the need to resort to a functionalist and reductionist aesthetic theory that simply collapses meaning into its current use-value for a feminist politics." (Felski p.10)

7. "My use of the term 'feminist literature' is descriptive rather than prescriptive and is intended to embrace the diversity of contemporary literary texts which engage sympathetically with feminist ideas, whatever their particular form." (Felski p.12)

8. "All these fictional societies are reacting to contemporary social pressures on women, thus highlighting what the isolated and alienated woman reader lacks in her life." (Makinen 140)

9. "Stableford argued feminists needed to incorporate the male reader in order to transcend the separatist ghetto and create a truly emancipatory subject. Lefanu replied that women have had to put aside their gender for years in reading sf, and questioned why Stableford could not do this in reading women-only utopias. Gwyneth Jones, Jenny Wolmark and Colin Greenland then each discuss Stableford's 'dated' reading position." (Makinen 145)

10.iii. FEMINIST SF

1. "Because of its estrangement from the everyday world of experiential reality, science fiction (and fantasy) can present women in new roles, liberated from the sexism endemic to their society even in its most emancipated state. In this way science fiction has a role in this task of imagining which is fundamental to change." (Cranny-Francis 42)

2. "My project will be to examine how specific scientific theories, current at the time of writing, have motivated women to imagine new female identities and social orders which present a re-evaluation of the place of science in women's lives." (Shaw p.2)

3. "it is my belief that women writers have, throughout this century, consciously or unconsciously, utilized the freedoms offered by the forms of sf (science fiction) to similarly expose the gender-based ideology which informs what counts as scientific knowledge and to offer surprising and often revolutionary alternatives to the future visions of their male counterparts." (Shaw p.2)

4. "It is my belief that the appeal of sf for women has always been that it allows opportunity both to express and explore alienation as well as to offer a fictional description of the kind of world that a gender-free or differently gendered society might produce." (Shaw p.6)

5. "I am primarily interested in discovering how the writers [both proclaimed feminist and not] have responded to the cultural and scientific milieu in which each text was produced and what this can reveal about women's particular relationship to science and technology." (Shaw p.6)

6. "Feminist science fiction has elaborated on all the major feminist debates from the 1970s to the 1990s: from the explorations of phallocentric language, to strong action-women agency; from ideal feminine communities, to the phallocentric dystopias; from explorations of the alien 'other,' to questions of identity with the cyborg." (Makinen 129)

7. "Feminist science fiction does not have a linear development so much as a simultaneous diversity of exploration." (Makinen 129)

8. "feminist sf has utilized 'otherness'." (Makinen 142)9. "feminist sf writers explored anti-patriarchal relationships, within a

genre retaining residual sexism in its conventions" (Makinen 142)10. "The book looks at the separatist communities created in feminist

utopias, the female heroes bringing agency to feminist fantasy, and the ways in which the fantastic allows expression of divergent forms of sexuality, via robots, aliens and cyborgs, and re-problematizes issues of mothering." (Makinen 144)

11. "Feminist sf challenges genre assumptions of sexism" (Makinen 145)12. "Kaveny concludes that the reason so many women writers have turned

to sf during the women's movement is that the genre's language enables the expression of radical and feminist ideas." (Makinen 145)

13. "Libby Falks Jones argues that recent feminist utopias use fictional techniques of reader identification to dissolve the boundaries of utopia, satire, apologues and sf, to produce new models of women's experience." (Makinen 146)

14. "feminist sf's strength is its emphasis on provisionality, as it destabilizes the dominant ideology by confronting the contradictions in gender representation. The subversive potential lies in undermining the boundaries, rather than in trying to re-inscribe the feminine, and this strategy is shared by both feminist sf and the postmodern." (Makinen 149)

15. "I wondered about patriarchal imperatives. My questions led me to feminist science fiction --literature that ranges beyond patriarchal reality and exaggerates 'acceptable' sexism." (Barr 3)

16. "Feminist science fiction…acts as a microscope in relation to patriarchal myths. In this volume, I read feminist science fiction as fiction that enlarges patriarchal myths in order to facilitate scrutinizing these myths." (Barr 4)

17. "Feminist science fiction is a key for unlocking patriarchy's often hidden agendas; the treasure is a woman's ability to use feminist reading positions as a means to live as freely as possible." (Barr 4)

18. "It is, after all, logical to think about women's disempowerment while reading feminist power fantasies." (Barr 5)

19. "Feminist science fiction presents blueprints for social structures that allow women's words to counter patriarchal myths." (Barr 7)

20. "Feminist science fiction can inspire real-world change." (Barr 8)21. "feminist escapism -- the ability to rise above the patriarchal real" (Barr

22)22. "Women need power fantasies: feminist nonrealistic fiction provides

women's only escape from a reality that brands them as Other." (Barr 24)

23. "This is a genre fiction written from a self-consciously feminist perspective, consciously encoding an ideology which is in direct opposition to the dominant gender ideology of Western society, patriarchal ideology." (Cranny-Francis p.1)

24. "Science fiction is to challenge the conventions of 'past literature' which place women, or female characters, in unremarkable roles….Science fiction will give the reader female heroes and it will represent social systems in which women are not subordinate, but may even be dominant." (Cranny-Francis p.43)

25. "For feminist science fiction writers estranging the everyday was a way of showing and deconstructing the operation of the patriarchal gender discourse of sexism. Sometimes…sexism and racism are found to function in unison…" (Cranny-Francis 61)

26. "the role of the alien is used in the deconstruction of contemporary gender ideology" (Cranny-Francis 67)

27. "For feminist writers this future setting [from extrapolation] offers a similar opportunity to project the future consequences of contemporary ideological practices, with particular focus on gender issues." (Cranny-Francis 68)

28. "As Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu put it: Science fiction…allows us to take the present position of women

and use the metaphors of science fiction to illuminate it. We may be writing about the future, but we are writing in the present." (Shaw p.3) Despatches From the Frontiers of the Female Mind

c. define realism/mimesis

i. "Literature does not merely constitute a self-referential and metalinguistic system, as some literary theorists appear to believe, but is also a medium which can profoundly influence individual and cultural self-understanding in the sphere of everyday life, charting the changing preoccupations of social groups through symbolic fictions by means of which they make sense of experience." (Felski p.7)

ii. "This analysis seeks to establish links between literature and the broader realm of social practice while avoiding the presuppositions inherent in a reflectionist aesthetic; feminist literature is understood as a form of meaning production, a construction of gendered identity which draws upon intersubjective cultural and

ideological frameworks rather than a more or less truthful representation of an unproblematically given female reality." (Felski p.9) [ummm]

iii. "The value of such texts [autobiographical woman-centered narratives] as a medium for working through contradictions in women's lives and as a source of powerful symbolic fictions of female identity is not dependent, I have suggested, on the frameworks. Rather, the literary text needs to be seen as one important site for the struggle over meaning thorough the formulation of narratives which articulate women's changing concerns and self-perceptions. Writing should be grasped in this context as a social practice which creates meaning rather than merely communicating it; feminist literature does not reveal an already given female identity, but is itself involved in the construction of this self as a cultural reality." (Felski p.78) [umm]

iv. "Thus while it is no longer possible to accept the epistemological claims of a naïve realism and to believe that a text can transmit an unmediated representation of the real, this does not negate the strategic importance of feminist writing as a medium of self-exploration and social criticism." (Felski p.79) [ummm]

v. "Largely because of the influence of feminism, women's writing has been one of the most important recent forums for self-analysis and autobiographical narrative. Insofar as this search for identity is often articulated through texts which attempt the 'close rendering of the ordinary experience,' and which tend to avoid irony, self-reflexivity, and other markers of self-consciously literary discourse, many examples of feminist writing can be described as embracing a form of realism." (Felski p.82)

vi. "On the one hand, this model of female community provides a means of access into society by linking the protagonist to a broader social group and thus rendering explicit the political basis of private experience." (Felski p.139)

vii. "novels were distinctly dangerous because distinctively realistic: while no one would be foolish enough to model his or her behavior on the wildly implausible fictions of earlier times (so the argument goes), this new type of narrative fiction, with its complex characters, its recognizable settings, and its broadly credible sequence of events, might dupe the sequestered and susceptible into believing it a reliable guide to the world. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this feeling that the novel matters because of its closeness to the real world; over the last three centuries, many claims for the novel's significance have rested on exactly this sense that, among all the literary forms, the novel -- for better or worse -- has an especially intimate relationship to ordinary life. As the novelist Milan Kundera has recently put it: '"'Prose": the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.' Although Kundera approves of it, this emphasis on the 'everyday' was once felt to be the novel's

most troubling characteristic. //The novel, according to Samuel Johnson in 1750, focused on 'life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.'" (MacKay p.3)

viii. "Writing around the same time as Auerbach, Georg Lukacs (accent mark on a) championed the realist novel because he believed that this was the only literary form capable of addressing the fractured conditions of modernity. So, whereas the ancient epic, one of the long narrative forms predating the novel, was the product of an epoch of stability and wholeness, the novel was the outcome of a less stable, no longer inherently meaningful world order, and 'an expression of this transcendental homelessness.' What Lukacs understood by realism was the type of novel that shows the subjective, private life in its relations with the public, exterior world of social, economic, and historical forces, and which presents the two -- the private self, the social self -- as inextricably bound together." (MacKay p.12)

ix. "the realist novel as a form: historically and politically vital…because it explains who we are, where we are, and how we got there" (MacKay p.13)

x. "Whereas the epic takes place in a world which knows its own unified literary language, and thus its own view of reality, as the only true one, the novel emerges in a modern world in which numerous languages meet and collide, and in which every living language is itself internally multiple. For Bakhtin, then, the many-voiced novel is the truest, most realistic reflection of the uncertain modern condition." (MacKay p.13)

xi. "Realism, then, has been the key term in most accounts of why the novel matters, and it has come to mean many things. But one point unites all these claims: that realism means more than juts representing what 'really' is. That is to say, the novel may act upon us all as cultural texts do, and thus potentially change the world in the act of describing it…Can a novel change the world simply by making people look at it differently?...novels are doing something by teaching you how to feel, and, in theory, when we 'feel right,' we act rightly." (MacKay p.14)

xii. "Nor, indeed, is it any less real: this form of novel reminds you that all fictional worlds are indeed fictional, that realism is no less fabricated than the fantastical." (MacKay p.149)

xiii. "In part, what drives magical realism and many other postwar fictional modes is a widespread sense that what purports to be realistic captures only the most consensual, limited versions of reality…realism, on this view, pretends that reality is something stable, single, and wholly knowable; in fact, the mid-twentieth-century French theorist Roland Barthes went so far as to characterize it as a 'totalitarian ideology of the referent.' The rejection of the realistic mode

might be understood as a gesture toward pluralism and relativism, an embrace of multiplicity, uncertainty, and possibility." (MacKay p.150)

xiv. "while we can still relate to the conditions which allowed Burdekin to extrapolate a future in which women are caged and silenced, and which prompted Sally Miller Gearhart and Caroline Forbes to claim planet Earth for women alone, our most productive readings of these texts refer not only to the theory of sexual politics, but to the very real conditions for which they are metaphors." (Shaw p.179)

xv. "women have always used [sf] to inscribe the forbidden, suppressed or silenced aspects of their lives" (Makinen 142)

xvi. "She [Jean Pfaelzer] concludes that in the profound restructuring of readers' assumptions about contemporary reality, feminist utopias do allow a political engagement with history." (Makinen 146)

xvii. "The injustices and limitations of the present become increasingly visible and intolerable. In other words this imaginative visualization of a different society is seen as a key element in the perception of the mechanisms of patriarchal ideology, the breakdown of its naturalization." (Cranny-Francis 43)

xviii. "In these non-conservative texts the difference between the society represented in the text and the reader's own society becomes the site of a political critique. The discourses mobilized in the text do not equate with dominant ideological discourses and that difference also constitutes the political critique. Readers are so positioned by these texts that the different society can only be comprehended if they operate non-conservative discourses and in doing so they are not only given a different view of the dominant ideology, but are also shown that it is an ideology, not a natural state. So the estrangement convention, operated by the reader in the process of constructing the alien world of the SF text, is crucial to the political activity of these texts, which is the deconstruction of dominant ideological discourses." (Cranny-Francis 61)

d. thesis sort of: exploration of how fiction, speculative fiction in particular, shows reality of gender stereotypes, particularly of women

i. "The feminist counter-public sphere cannot be understood as a unified interpretive community governed by a single set of norms and values; in reality, women are never only feminists but also many other things as well, resulting in a diversity of standpoints influenced by other forms of affiliation in relation to class, nationality, race, sexual preference, and so on. A sociologically based model of feminist theory and practice which grounds its analysis in a recognition of the empirically diverse constitution of this feminist public sphere rather than in an abstract model of a gendered identity or a gendered text is thus able to account for the plurality of feminist practices as shaped by the confliction

interests of its members." (Felski p. 10) [not just looking at white women, basically]

2. Case Studies

a. Russ

i. "Johanna Russ' 1975 fragmented selves and cyborg identity (The Female Man) challenges the idea that it is a development of postmodernism and Haraway, just as Butler's Earthseed utopias of the 1990s rethink the 1970s utopias of Piercy and Charnas. In this genre, the writers have also proved amongst the most influential critics, particularly Russ and LeGuin. Indeed, feminist criticism has at times proved relatively disappointing in the face of such exciting innovation in the fiction." (Makinen p.129)

ii. "Joanna Russ has been an influential feminist critic of science fiction, particularly at its outset, and also a feminist writer. Lefanu calls her, unequivocally, 'the single most important woman writer of science fiction, although…not necessarily the most widely read.'" (Makinen 152)

iii. "The narrative [of Jael's role reversal of the 'Boss'], aided by the other selves' horror, problematizes the issues of role reversal as an effective feminist strategy, whilst bitterly explaining the attraction of such a course." (Makinen 153)

iv. "The Female Man is a book that employs textual aggression towards patriarchy, to fuel its narrative energy. Highly polemical and engaged, the narrative uses caricature and invective to delineate the normal mid-Western relationships between men and women." (Makinen 154)

v. "The 'Courtship ritual' of the party or the 'Great happiness contest,' or the little ink books and blue books that explain the codes of patriarchy, use satire to show how women are expected to be negative, incapable sex-objects, treated without respect in order to aggrandize men's shaky egos." (Makinen 154)

vi. "women within the workplace exist as neuters, trying to ignore their sex in order to be treated equally, but that they are turned into a negative construction of femininity by male denigration." (Makinen 155)

vii. "'Man' stands for humanity within patriarchal culture, so the narrator becomes part of humanity by assuming the nomial title of 'man' that allows her to inhabit all the positive binary constructions within the culture." (Makinen 155)

viii. "The text is not concerned to tell a story for its own sake, but to engage the reader in a consideration of patriarchy and the damage it does on women." (Makinen 155)

ix. the ideal woman (jeannine)

1. pines away for a man and a home life

2. "checking the lines around her eyes in her pocket mirror (I'm only twenty-nine!)" (2)

3. "She casts her eyes down, rich in feminine power. Had my nails done today. And these are good clothes, they have taste, my own individuality, my beauty." (16)

4. "Before Janet arrived on this planet...I spent my whole day combing my hair and putting on make-up...all I did was dress for The Man, smile for The Man, talk wittily to The Man, sympathize with The Man, flatter The Man, understand The Man, defer to The Man, entertain The Man, keep The Man, live for The Man" (29)

5. "Now in the opera scenario that governs our lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a man and there would have been something about that man...Later he would have comoplimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure...she would have gone out and bought mascara for the eyes that had been complimented by that man...She would have said: I Am In Love With That Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life." (30"

6. Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. (60)

7. The other day a man came up to me in the bus and called me sweetie and said, “Why don’t you smile? God loves you!” I just stared at him. But he wouldn’t go away until I smiled, so I finally did. (65)

8. Then he said I must understand that femininity was a Good Thing, and although men’s and women’s functions in society were different, they had equal dignity. Separate but equal, right? Men make the decisions and women make the dinners. (67)

9. Then I had a lady shrink who said it was my problem because I was the one who was trying to rock the boat and you can’t expect them to change. So I suppose I’m the one who must change. (67)

10. If she tells Cal about it, he’ll say she’s nattering again; worse still, it would sound pretty silly; you can’t expect a man to listen to everything (as everybody’s Mother said). (108)

11. She…pauses, catching sight of herself in the wall mirror: flushed, eyes sparkling, her hair swept back as if by some tumultuous storm, her whole face glowing. The lines of her figure are perfect, but who is to use all this loveliness, who is to recognize it, make it public, make it available? (109)

12. Your brother’s a firm, steady man who makes a good living for his wife and children, and Eileen wants nothing more in the world than her husband and her little boy and girl. (113)

13. You don’t want to be a dried-up old spinster at forty but that’s what you will be if you go on like this. You’re twenty-nine. You’re getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine…It’s all right to do that; you’re a girl. (114)

14. She: No. Why can’t you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can’t we deduct all those things [the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches] from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can’t earn a living? (118)

15. Jeannine ends up depressed from a lack of fulfillment – a lack of ability to fulfill the typical female role of falling in love, getting married, having kids, taking care of her home

x. what if women were in control?

1. jael's society

2. war between men and women

3. Manlanders have no children. Manlanders buy infants from the Womanlanders and bring them up in batches, save for the rich few who can order children made from their very own semen (167)

4. Perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid of their victims’ panties. (171)

5. Everybody knows that the half-changed are weak and can’t protect themselves; what do you think femininity is all about? (172)

6. And most women – not, you, of course; you’re different – well, most women aren’t used to thinking a thing through like this. They can’t do it systematically. (178)

7. a reversal of patriarchal society -- still dangerous

a. No business done today, God damn, but once they get that way there’s no doing business with them; you have to kill them anyway, might as well have fun. (182)

b. “I don’t give a damn whether it was necessary or not,” I said. / “I liked it.” (184)

c. Davy

d. I come and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bring all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman. (187)

e. proves need for equality

xi. what if a woman acts like a man?

1. joanna -- what if she takes up traditionally male roles? businessman? female man?

2. He: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You’ve kept your femininity. You’re not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You’re a woman. (94)

3. For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS!...If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away…I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else’s, so they split me from the neck up (133)

4. You told me ghouls were male. / Rodan is male—and asinine. / King Kong is male. / I could have been a witch, but the Devil is male. / Faust is male. / The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male. / I was never on the moon. (133)

5. For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. (140)

xii. what if we had no men?

1. janet's world

2. lesbians? what about being gay!

a. I’ve never slept with a girl. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. That’s abnormal and I’m not, although you can’t be normal unless you do what you want and you can’t be normal unless you love men. (68)

b. Jeannine: He’s awfully sweet but he’s such a baby…Then when he does it, you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that…Sometimes he likes to get dressed up…I think there’s something wrong with him. Is that what they call transvestism? (83)

3. "there have been no men on Whileaway for at least eight centuries --I don't mean no human beings, of course, but no men" (9)

xiii. "I tell you what," he proposed amiably, "I'll make you one you will like."

"But I don't like it," [Janet] said simply. You're not supposed to do that." (37)

"I haven't got anything against women's intelligence," said Ewing. "Some of my colleagues are women. It's not women's intelligence. It's women's psychology" (43)

"What you've got to remember...is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they're doing. They do it because they like it" (43)

"Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations" (43)

"Let me go," said Janet. / Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you. / Can't I rescue myself? / No. / Why not? (45)

"If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?" (45)

"The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he said ("You stupid broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down -- cries -- manhood vindicated. Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found: Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards." (47)

b. Atwood

i. women's value comes from her reproductive capabilities

1. only worth is the body (strangely similar to modern day, no?)

2. jezebel -- parade women around as trophies, to prove masculinity

ii. language to control thought, language to shape perceptions about traditional women events/abilities (birth, sex)

1. language is powerful

2. “Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see the night rising, not falling…Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes…Night has fallen, then.” (247)

3.

4. writing is powerful (women aren't allowed to write)

5. literacy is powerful (women aren't allowed to read, either)

6. "…Kristeva is at pains to point out that linguistic theories which do not acknowledge the inevitability of the constraining, legislative, and socializing aspects of language are naïve." (Felski p.34)

7. "Since language is a closed system unable to express women's perceptions, she [Suzette Elgin Haden, author of Native Tongue] explained that she had been driven to create her own women's language, and the only genre open to such a creation was science fiction." (Makinen 143)

8. "feminist sf has tried to challenge patriarchal language structures" (Makinen 147)

iii. sex is no longer a choice or a freedom

1. if the handmaids make their own sexual choices they are taken away by the eyes

iv. the Colonies: women are unfit for birthing children or being trophy wives

v. freedom! women have no freedom. they can only walk around in pairs to keep each other accountable

vi. trophy wives

vii. performance of gender roles

viii. victim blaming (when they were in school)

ix. women in competition

c. LeGuin

i. what if we had no gender?

1. androgyny

2. what if gender was seen as deviance? Ai is a pervert for being continually in kemmer

ii. femininity and masculinity -- what are they, what actions and behavior fall in each category, what connotation comes with each

1. Ai is disgusted by feminine qualities

a. thinks women are somewhat less than man

2. war! what is it good for?

a. proving masculinity, clearly

b. other social and political constructs derived from gender?

iii. narration from a male perspective

iv. kemmer holiday! but not a holiday for menstruation

v. pronoun usage

d. Butler

i. "Johanna Russ' 1975 fragmented selves and cyborg identity (The Female Man) challenges the idea that it is a development of postmodernism and Haraway, just as Butler's Earthseed utopias of the 1990s rethink the 1970s utopias of Piercy and Charnas. In this genre, the writers have also proved amongst the most influential critics, particularly Russ and LeGuin. Indeed, feminist criticism has at times proved relatively disappointing in the face of such exciting innovation in the fiction." (Makinen p.129)

ii. it's unsafe to be a woman

1. travel as a man

2. can't undress by the ocean bc unwanted attention

3. unwanted attention simply because of being a woman

iii. do women get special treatment?

1. women are excused from doing guard duty

iv. what good is a woman?

1. buy and sell wives, a slave market for women

2. valuable to have multiple wives to show manhood

v. is it okay for women to have power?

1. Lauren is the leader of the group; she's a woman but travels as a man

vi. literacy! language! writing! agency! for women

e. Jemisin

i. what about matriarchal societies?

1. Darr -- women are in charge, hold positions of power, are the warriors

a. men are more like trophies. men are weaker

b. society is considered barbarian and backwards for this

c. women gain power by going through a ritual involving sex & dominance

ii. what agency do women have? (power, politics, "strength", value) [what if women are strong? what if women have power?]

1. scimina has power -- gender doesn't seem to be as prominent in Sky

2. kinneth -- a woman who had enough political power to set off a chain of events that change the world

3. yeine -- was the vehicle of change for the world. housed enefa, used the stone, ended itempas's reign. yeine could choose who would succeed dekarta. also yeine is a goddess, essentially equal to the male gods

4. nahadoth: a male god but also a female god. and love between the two male gods is accepted

5. kinneth's mother -- was the sacrifice. without her dekarta couldn't have ascended to power

6. enefa herself -- posed a threat to itempas, her death caused the world to change. she commands life and death

iii. MOTHERS

1. the importance of mothers, of love to the mother, of justice for the mother, the power of the mother

f. Hopkinson

3. Conclusion

a. thoughts for further study

b. ok yes these texts do these things but WHY?? awareness? social change?

i. "the novel's capacity to effect change" (MacKay p.4)

ii. "Realism, then, has been the key term in most accounts of why the novel matters, and it has come to mean many things. But one point unites all these claims: that realism means more than juts representing what 'really' is. That is to say, the novel may act upon us all as cultural texts do, and thus potentially change the world in the act of describing it…Can a novel change the world simply by making people look at it differently?...novels are doing something by teaching you how to feel, and, in theory, when we 'feel right,' we act rightly." (MacKay p.14)

iii. "If this is true, we have to take novels seriously as potential agents in the world rather than imagining them as the innocently reflective surfaces that the term 'realism' implies. Are they agents for good? Yes -- and no. What makes Uncle Tom's Cabin such a useful example is that its considerable narrative power has notoriously proved a curse as well as a blessing. Which is to say that even though the novel professes a documentary aspiration in its rendering of African

American slavery -- its subtitle is 'life among the lowly' -- this book has looked less than realistic to many modern eyes; indeed it has seemed impossibly, even dangerously, sentimental. Thus the saintly Uncle Tom, who dies praying for his master/murderer, would become a byword for any perceived African American collusion with white racism. Stowe's powerful novel is an extreme example of the novel managing our minds as it moves our emotions, controlling our consciousnesses and acting upon our behavior, seeming merely to describe a world but in reality altering that world in ways that could never wholly have been desired or even imagined at the outset." (MacKay p.14)

iv. "Back in 1750, Samuel Johnson, you'll remember, worried about how a novel can affect real-life behavior because it seems to represent it so convincingly." (MacKay p.15)

v. "it is precisely because the novel is so intimately connected to real-world representation that it can do so much to shape the world it purports only to be describing." (MacKay p.15)

vi. "Bammer argues that feminist utopias are not unreal but voice a desire, a force that moves and shapes history." (Makinen 146)

What, and how, is it saying about:-women -of color -not of color -past, present-exs of what: oppression, stereotypes, inequality, etc-exs of how: brings attention to oppressive nature of language, [other specific methods/devices]

What is it encouraging? (a call to action? to effect change? by bringing awareness can readers bring change?) <--this could be conclusion