(no subject)
My friend Rahul recommended me Joanna Russ' The Female Man months and months ago, and I've been meaning to read it even longer than that - for a self-identifying feminist sff-fan, my background in, uh, actual feminist sff is pretty woefully limited. (I read an epic ton of Sheri S. Tepper in my teen years! For those of you who have never read Sheri S. Tepper: Sheri S. Tepper is a Very Eco-Feminist Author who is great at cracktastic plots, but approximately 50% of her books end with the heroine achieving some kind of unreachable divinity while her boyfriend muses on How He's Not a Douchebag Anymore. I'm not summarily rejecting this plot device in all cases, but, I mean, there are only so many times.)
Anyway. The Female Man. Written in 1970 and the fact screams out from every page, but that doesn't make it irrelevant or toothless. Inasmuch as the book has a plot, it's about the interactions of four women from alternate universes: Joanna, the author-avatar (or possibly just the author), a conflicted semi-hemi-feminist from our world struggling to survive as an independent person; Jeannine, a librarian looking for marriage in a version of the 1970's where the Great Depression never ended that still runs according to 1930's social mores; Janet, a cheerful and confident world traveller from an all-female sort-of-utopia called Whileaway; and Jael, whom the back of the book treats like some crazy warrior cat-lady when in fact she is more of a razor-sharp murderous politician. The book slides in and out of all of their heads at will, sometimes in first-person and sometimes in close third and sometimes in distant or scholarly anecdotes about Whileawayan history and sometimes in Joanna the character-or-author's furious and satiric rants about the role of women in her culture. It's almost impossible not to read the four characters as aspects of Joanna's struggles with her identity as a woman (Jeannine especially reads as a parody of the subjugated woman whose life revolves around feminine social mores) although, aside from that, the worldbuilding in Whileaway as a believably imperfect Utopia is actually pretty cool.
Much about the book bothers me, read from a 2010 perspective. There are huge awkward binaries in the way that female identity is discussed, there is some very weird stuff that I don't even know how to parse going on with alternative sexuality and gay and trans men in the parts of the book dealing with Jael's society, and the only time that racism is brought up is when Joanna appropriates slave language to make a point. Like I said: you can see 1970 stamped on every page in blinking neon letters. But all the same, oh are there parts that hit home.
Anyway. The Female Man. Written in 1970 and the fact screams out from every page, but that doesn't make it irrelevant or toothless. Inasmuch as the book has a plot, it's about the interactions of four women from alternate universes: Joanna, the author-avatar (or possibly just the author), a conflicted semi-hemi-feminist from our world struggling to survive as an independent person; Jeannine, a librarian looking for marriage in a version of the 1970's where the Great Depression never ended that still runs according to 1930's social mores; Janet, a cheerful and confident world traveller from an all-female sort-of-utopia called Whileaway; and Jael, whom the back of the book treats like some crazy warrior cat-lady when in fact she is more of a razor-sharp murderous politician. The book slides in and out of all of their heads at will, sometimes in first-person and sometimes in close third and sometimes in distant or scholarly anecdotes about Whileawayan history and sometimes in Joanna the character-or-author's furious and satiric rants about the role of women in her culture. It's almost impossible not to read the four characters as aspects of Joanna's struggles with her identity as a woman (Jeannine especially reads as a parody of the subjugated woman whose life revolves around feminine social mores) although, aside from that, the worldbuilding in Whileaway as a believably imperfect Utopia is actually pretty cool.
Much about the book bothers me, read from a 2010 perspective. There are huge awkward binaries in the way that female identity is discussed, there is some very weird stuff that I don't even know how to parse going on with alternative sexuality and gay and trans men in the parts of the book dealing with Jael's society, and the only time that racism is brought up is when Joanna appropriates slave language to make a point. Like I said: you can see 1970 stamped on every page in blinking neon letters. But all the same, oh are there parts that hit home.