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Jun. 15th, 2010 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMy 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.
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Date: 2010-06-15 04:08 pm (UTC)And I kind of love the way they went at shit back. They just digressed and went crazy and told it. And the books were also so messy and so full of extra shit, but also slim. Probably 75% of my favorite SF writers come from this era, and this milieu: Le Guin, Delany, Disch, Brunner, Dick, Tiptree...and I read most of these books for the first time in college, so I am fairly sure that this isn't just childhood nostalgia talking either...
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Date: 2010-06-15 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 04:37 pm (UTC)I especially like Stand on Zanzibar alot and would call it one of my favorite novels despite being thoroughly non-immersed in its actual main plot or characters. If there was some way to disentangle all the good mosaic bits from main plotline I would be happy. Luckily Brunner's Shockwave Riders and Sheep Look Up had much better main plots.
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Date: 2010-06-15 04:44 pm (UTC)It is a good thing the library does not have limits on how many things you can check out over the course of your lifetime, let me tell you.
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Date: 2010-08-29 06:06 am (UTC)A couple of decades later, the two agents are sent to fix something or other in a pseudo-Arabian Nights-type world where women are totally oppressed unless they can somehow manage to beat all the men at the annual poetry contest despite being barely educated. (The penalty for trying this and failing is to be locked away in solitary confinement for the rest of your life.) The basic premise of this world is taken, with permission, from a much more conventional SF novel by Suzette Haden Elgin whose title I forget. In the Elgin novel, the beautiful young female prodigy wins the poetry contest and becomes one of the most revered people in the poetry-loving society, but is mildly discontented because all this renders her so freakishly unfeminine in her fellow-citizens' eyes that she is considered unmarriageable (though highly respected) and effectively becomes a sort of poetry-writing vestal virgin/nun. This does not thrill her. So the rakish projecting-telepath Federation agent hero sweeps her off her feet and provides her with the consolation prize of a one-night stand (without using his projecting-telepath powers to brainwash her, so it's not quite as sleazy as it sounds). This (along with other stuff that he's already done) fixes what he's come to fix--or at least he and his employers think so--so he leaves. The End, basically.
In "The Two of Them," a young woman from the oppressive pseudo-Arabian Nights society also enters the poetry contest, but loses and incurs the punishment of perpetual solitary confinement in her own home. She goes mad from loneliness. Meanwhile, her brother and his wife have a beautiful and intelligent daughter named Zubeydah who is just as discontented with her limited female lot as her unfortunate aunt was, and seems likely to take the same potentially disastrous drastic measures to escape it. Enter the two agents from the Cosmic Department of Fixing Things. They were sent there to fix something entirely different, but Irenee decides that she will instead concentrate on fixing twelve-year-old Zubeydah's sorry fate by taking her with them when they leave, the way her older male partner took her with him two decades before. Her male partner objects, but she ditches him with extreme prejudice and does it anyway. The rest of the book is basically about Irenee and Zubeydah on the run hiding out in 1970's (or whenever the book was written) American suburbia.
Also, because Irenee and her partner are dressed in identical severe black outfits and in this society the idea of a woman doing any kind of professional job does not compute, all the locals assume Irenee is male, too, and she is instructed to play along. So there's semi-inadvertant crossdressing.
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Date: 2010-08-29 02:53 pm (UTC)