delete
Content
Title: Feminist Speculative Fiction: A Reflection of the Woman's Experience (s/t)
[maybe A Reflection [or Exploration] of Gender]
1. Introduction
a. 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
viii.
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xii.
xiii.
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xix.
decision not to define the field at all -- but it is, in fact, the only
completely accurate definition." (Card p.12)
"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)
"Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a
setting contrary to known reality." (Card p.17)
"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)
"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)
"sf can have a socially or politically critical purpose" (Shaw p.2)
"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)
"Suvin's definition of the genre as requiring the presence of
'estrangement and cognition.'" (Shaw p.4)
"As Baudrillard has (now famously) claimed, 'SF…is no longer an
elsewhere, it is an everywhere.'" (Shaw p.5)
"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)
"The speculative, 'thought experiment' nature of the genre has
fuelled a comprehensive breadth of innovation." (Makinen 129)
"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)
"…despite its history, science fiction did have revolutionary
potential because of its structural premise to question things-asthey-are. Sf's alternate paradigms could play off dialectically
against the given reality to create a non-ethnocentric literature."
(Makinen 139)
b. define feminism
i. 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
6.
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8.
9.
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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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." (CrannyFrancis 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 actionwomen 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 selfexploration 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 selfanalysis 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-twentiethcentury 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 nonconservative 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
x. what if women were in control?
1. jael's society
2. a reversal of patriarchal society -- still dangerous
a. 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?
xii. what if we had no men?
1. janet's world
2. lesbians? what about being gay!
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. writing is powerful (women aren't allowed to write)
3. literacy is powerful (women aren't allowed to read, either)
4. "…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)
5. "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)
6. "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
[maybe A Reflection [or Exploration] of Gender]
1. Introduction
a. 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
viii.
ix.
x.
xi.
xii.
xiii.
xiv.
xv.
xvi.
xvii.
xviii.
xix.
decision not to define the field at all -- but it is, in fact, the only
completely accurate definition." (Card p.12)
"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)
"Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a
setting contrary to known reality." (Card p.17)
"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)
"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)
"sf can have a socially or politically critical purpose" (Shaw p.2)
"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)
"Suvin's definition of the genre as requiring the presence of
'estrangement and cognition.'" (Shaw p.4)
"As Baudrillard has (now famously) claimed, 'SF…is no longer an
elsewhere, it is an everywhere.'" (Shaw p.5)
"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)
"The speculative, 'thought experiment' nature of the genre has
fuelled a comprehensive breadth of innovation." (Makinen 129)
"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)
"…despite its history, science fiction did have revolutionary
potential because of its structural premise to question things-asthey-are. Sf's alternate paradigms could play off dialectically
against the given reality to create a non-ethnocentric literature."
(Makinen 139)
b. define feminism
i. 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
6.
7.
8.
9.
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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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." (CrannyFrancis 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 actionwomen 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 selfexploration 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 selfanalysis 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-twentiethcentury 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 nonconservative 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
x. what if women were in control?
1. jael's society
2. a reversal of patriarchal society -- still dangerous
a. 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?
xii. what if we had no men?
1. janet's world
2. lesbians? what about being gay!
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. writing is powerful (women aren't allowed to write)
3. literacy is powerful (women aren't allowed to read, either)
4. "…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)
5. "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)
6. "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
