Science Fiction and Frames of Gender
Science fiction has allowed discussion of gender in plenty of bent mirrors, especially after women started writing it. However, I shall begin with Asimov's Susan Calvin, a very masculine heroine, cold, intelligent, and assertive at a time when most SF heroines were pretty girls and great listeners when the male characters rambled on about the writers' pet theories concerning science and humanity. I wonder how much Susan Calvin was Asimov's avatar, and how he felt about speaking through a woman. It is unfortunate that the movie version of her adventures in the three laws of robotics turned her into a side kick of Will Smith's street smart cop, an inversion of Asimov's intentions if there ever was one. They say that SF movies are always behind the novels, which are always behind the short stories, but in some ways they never catch up at all.
However, women wrote SF before anyone knew it; eventually they came out of the closet and James Tiptree most famously turned out to be Alice Sheldon. She broke ground for Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Andre Norton. Andre Norton wrote male characters so convincingly that growing up I thought she was a French man; this was before the Internet allowed fan sites to pop up everywhere and enlighten us about their persons and personalities. LeGuin was, to my knowledge, the first SF writer who convinced Literature professors that SF wasn't ALL dreck. Octavia Butler is the youngest among them, winning awards all her own with her bleak with a light of hope themes.
In LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, the entire population of the alien world is usually genderless, but during certain times of the year divide in males and females to procreate. The main character is a man from our world who keeps calling everyone "he" because of their vaguely masculine appearance, despite the many clues that the culture is more feminine, such as the fondness for home life, the close community ties, and rarity of war. The hero is surprised to wake up one morning to learn his best friend is suddenly a woman in love with him. It is the SF way of illustrating how men can feel ambushed by the switching back and forth between the feminist and the feminine in a woman, in a backdrop of a world in which the feminine set the norms. Remember the saying that, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a God-given right"? Here, no one knows quite for sure who will end up pregnant, so women's rights and concerns are humanity's rights and concerns. (Obviously, I'm using humanity in an inclusive sense)
Women fans have played an unusually important role in the popularity of "Star Trek." It has the largest percentage of women fans outside of romance novels I know of, and at one point the Mr. Spock fan club was 90% women. Women write Star Trek novels, run fan clubs, and one even married wearing Vulcan make up. In part, this is because "Star Trek" took women and minorities more seriously than other SF shows. They served as officers, scientists, and warriors, and this improved as the series evolved. (Well, I stopped watching after Voyager, so I can't vouch for Enterprise). But Mr. Spock is also important; he was an alien in a human world, just as women in the audience go to work in a man's world. Mr. Spock was divided between his human half and his Vulcan half, and some women feel the tension of being a woman at home and having to act like a man at work.
While the core of most SF shows and movies is the plot, the core of "Star Trek" is the relationships between the characters. In the first series, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy have a friendship as deep as their differences. In "The Next Generation," an older, wiser (than Kirk) captain is raising his brash, young first officer, an intelligent, naive android, and an alien warrior into a command crew. In "DS9," the black, male commander has a second-in-command who is an angry woman from a planet where women are more violent than the men and a female science officer who used to be his male mentor. In "Voyager", a female captain has to unite two crews who were enemies into a single community. All this made the series more interesting than just killing monsters, especially when in Trek you never know when the monster was really the victim. The theme of victimization creating monsters was popular with the series.
Which brings us to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which is, according to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their book Mad Women in the Attic, a reframing of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, God creates man and woman, then leaves them alone in paradise where they are tricked by a jealous Satan into falling from God's grace into a cruel world. Eve is portrayed as more guilty than Adam, and both Sin and Death, Satan's demonic family, are female. Paradise Lost is not female friendly in characterization or metaphor, but it could be argued that really Milton was doing the best he could with a myth already created, and their real argument is with God.
In Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein plays god by creating a living being out of dead body parts. Horrified by the ugliness of his creation, he abandons it. The monster is left to his own devices in survival and education. The monster tries to make a woman, but when Frankenstein prevents him, the monster turns against him and his family. Thus, it is argued that Shelly is defending Eve by indirectly blaming God for failing his creation.
However, women wrote SF before anyone knew it; eventually they came out of the closet and James Tiptree most famously turned out to be Alice Sheldon. She broke ground for Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Andre Norton. Andre Norton wrote male characters so convincingly that growing up I thought she was a French man; this was before the Internet allowed fan sites to pop up everywhere and enlighten us about their persons and personalities. LeGuin was, to my knowledge, the first SF writer who convinced Literature professors that SF wasn't ALL dreck. Octavia Butler is the youngest among them, winning awards all her own with her bleak with a light of hope themes.
In LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, the entire population of the alien world is usually genderless, but during certain times of the year divide in males and females to procreate. The main character is a man from our world who keeps calling everyone "he" because of their vaguely masculine appearance, despite the many clues that the culture is more feminine, such as the fondness for home life, the close community ties, and rarity of war. The hero is surprised to wake up one morning to learn his best friend is suddenly a woman in love with him. It is the SF way of illustrating how men can feel ambushed by the switching back and forth between the feminist and the feminine in a woman, in a backdrop of a world in which the feminine set the norms. Remember the saying that, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a God-given right"? Here, no one knows quite for sure who will end up pregnant, so women's rights and concerns are humanity's rights and concerns. (Obviously, I'm using humanity in an inclusive sense)
Women fans have played an unusually important role in the popularity of "Star Trek." It has the largest percentage of women fans outside of romance novels I know of, and at one point the Mr. Spock fan club was 90% women. Women write Star Trek novels, run fan clubs, and one even married wearing Vulcan make up. In part, this is because "Star Trek" took women and minorities more seriously than other SF shows. They served as officers, scientists, and warriors, and this improved as the series evolved. (Well, I stopped watching after Voyager, so I can't vouch for Enterprise). But Mr. Spock is also important; he was an alien in a human world, just as women in the audience go to work in a man's world. Mr. Spock was divided between his human half and his Vulcan half, and some women feel the tension of being a woman at home and having to act like a man at work.
While the core of most SF shows and movies is the plot, the core of "Star Trek" is the relationships between the characters. In the first series, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy have a friendship as deep as their differences. In "The Next Generation," an older, wiser (than Kirk) captain is raising his brash, young first officer, an intelligent, naive android, and an alien warrior into a command crew. In "DS9," the black, male commander has a second-in-command who is an angry woman from a planet where women are more violent than the men and a female science officer who used to be his male mentor. In "Voyager", a female captain has to unite two crews who were enemies into a single community. All this made the series more interesting than just killing monsters, especially when in Trek you never know when the monster was really the victim. The theme of victimization creating monsters was popular with the series.
Which brings us to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which is, according to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their book Mad Women in the Attic, a reframing of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, God creates man and woman, then leaves them alone in paradise where they are tricked by a jealous Satan into falling from God's grace into a cruel world. Eve is portrayed as more guilty than Adam, and both Sin and Death, Satan's demonic family, are female. Paradise Lost is not female friendly in characterization or metaphor, but it could be argued that really Milton was doing the best he could with a myth already created, and their real argument is with God.
In Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein plays god by creating a living being out of dead body parts. Horrified by the ugliness of his creation, he abandons it. The monster is left to his own devices in survival and education. The monster tries to make a woman, but when Frankenstein prevents him, the monster turns against him and his family. Thus, it is argued that Shelly is defending Eve by indirectly blaming God for failing his creation.