--At Alexandria's Eve, Nic has posted a thoughtful review of Nicola Griffith's With Her Body.
--Marjorie Senechal reviews Chandler Davis and Josh Lukin's It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, at length, for the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. I think I can safely aver that this is the first time an Aqueduct Press title has been reviewed in a mathematics journal.
--I'm going to the dentist this afternoon, to have a "tiny" cavity filled. More exciting is that I've just received, in the mail, this year's Clarion West tee-shirt. This year's class didn't put a brain with a fork on it, but it's not without its own particular moment...
--Eleanor Arnason's novella "The Mammoths of the Great Plains" is a finalist for both the Sturgeon and the Sidewise awards.
--Temporary Culture has announced the forthcoming publication of Wendy Walker's My Man & Other Critical Fictions, in October 2011.
--The Irish Times has an article by Danny O'Brien on Liz Henry's internet detective work, which revealed that two supposed lesbian bloggers (one of them, as everyone by now already knows, posing as a Syrian named Amina) as sock-puppets. According to O'Brien, neither of the hoaxsters knew the other was also a fraud, and actually flirted with each other online. O'Brien notes that Liz's knack for detecting internet frauds is, rather than being cynical, "to pay more attention to what these fictional constructs were saying, not less." In short, "If “Amina” had been listened to more carefully, as a human rather than just an exciting story; if her readers were listening to others in the region, and able to compare those experiences, the gaps in her story would have become more readily apparent far more quickly." (Link thanks to Josh Lukin)
--The Blue and White has published a speech Chan Davis made at Kansas State University on 28 April 2011. (This link is also thanks to Josh Lukin.) His speech discusses Malthusian issues:
I am not conceding that the authorities are sometimes wrong, I am insisting and reemphasizing that the authorities are sometimes wrong. This is not a reservation to my message; it is a part of my message. Where you think a specific detail in a forecast is doubtful, pick away at it and see what you can learn. The forecast consists of the details.
But please, please, do not use the uncertainties as an excuse for looking away from the future. This is the world we’re talking about, the real world. The denialists would have you pretend we can not wrestle with the world’s dilemma, but they do not have any other world than this. Do not kid yourselves.
The forecast is that the world will not produce enough food for seven billion people, and that the world population will be nine billion by 2050. So billions of people will live without food? I do not believe it. Or everyone will go on a very local diet? That will not work so well either. Seems the predictions do not jibe!
We hear these incompatible predictions every day, from the wise heads and politicians. How come most of them do not point out the incompatibility? Why are they shy about drawing conclusions from the contradiction? I sympathize with them. If politicians were frank about it, it would sound as if they thought that people need to be got rid of, and that is not going to be welcome to their constituents.
Some prophets of doom like Garrett Hardin do indeed say that shortages are inevitable. Garrett Hardin calls on the haves to harden their hearts (a pun on his name, maybe?) and refuse to share with the have-nots. He would let those who are without food go ever hungrier until they are no longer able to disturb us with their wails. I am asking you to face reality, but not to harden your hearts. I am more on the side of the Passover invocation, “Let all those who are hungry come and eat.” Maybe the doom-criers will class me with the soft-hearted. All right, let them. Soft-hearted? I can live with that.
But I refuse to close my eyes to our plight. You remember forty years ago a study of the world economy by Dennis Meadows and his team argued that the limits to growth would be reached in about forty years. The standard joke is that if you tell a politician to act because the end is coming in forty years, he will put you off and tell you to come back in thirty-nine years. I’m saying that in 2011– the time is up. We can not survive without food, and there is not enough food, there is not going to be enough food.
It's Monday! And I feel as though I've finally kicked the bug that's been plaguing me for so long. And so here are a few hot links:
--In his weekly column for TruthDig.com, Chris Hedges draws on the life and work of Chandler Davis to discuss The Origin of America's Intellectual Vacuum. He begins by quoting Chan:
"You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent-not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders," he wrote in his 1959 essay "...From an Exile." "You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back."
Though Hedges doesn't mention it, the essay is among those reprinted in Aqueduct Press's It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chander Davis, edited by Josh Lukin.
ETA-- The Truthout version of Hedge's column, unlike the version I linked to above, has a photo of Chan. You can find it here.
--And speaking of It Walks in Beauty, piper_of_dawn blogs about the book here. "This is an absolutely brilliant, stunningly moving book, by probably one of the most underrated science-fiction writers I have had the good luck to chance upon," begins the post.
-- And then there's NASA's exciting news: "Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old black hole provides a unique opportunity to watch this type of object develop from infancy." The black hole, the astrophysicists think, is likely a remnant of a supernova only 50 million light years from Earth that was discovered in 1979-- although NASA's press release says that "another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission. This would make the object in SN 1979C the youngest and brightest example of such a "pulsar wind nebula" and the youngest known neutron star. The Crab pulsar, the best-known example of a bright pulsar wind nebula, is about 950 years old." Both possibilities excite my sense of wonder, but I suspect that because science ficiton has made the whole idea of black holes so very familiar, it's harder to grok a "pulsar wind nebula."
--NPR's Laura Sullivan reports that the infamous Arizona Immigration law passed last spring has its origins in a scheme for providing inmates for a privately owned women and children's prison.
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
[...]
Instead of taking his idea to the Arizona statehouse floor, [Arizona state Senator Russell] Pearce first took it to a hotel conference room.
It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.
It's a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country...
You can read or listen to podcasts of Sullivan's reports here.
--Lately violence and death threats by right-wing extremists in the US seem to be proliferating at an alarming pace. I can't help but think that the right-wing demagogues ranting and raving against anyone who doesn't share their hatreds are provoking it. It seems pretty clear that the death theats made against the League of Women Voters in Illinois were directly incited by Glenn Beck's vitriol. Noting "that the League has been doing candiate forums and debates like the one Beck highlighted for decades," Mary Schaafsma, the issues and advocacy coordinator for the Illinois League, told ThinkProgress that "following the threats, the League locked the doors to its Chicago offices for several days and alerted the building management of the possible threat. 'I’ve been working in politics and nonprofits for a long long time and I never seen this level and pitch of vitriol,' she said."
--Over at the Feminist Philosophers blog, Jender quotes Jessica Nathanson on an everyday performance of gender:
I’ve assigned students the task of walking down the sidewalk and not getting out of men’s way and then reporting what happens. Several women have reported being bumped into. What was particularly interesting was hearing about this as learned gender behavior when one male student who was also trans talked about learning that he had to walk down the middle of the sidewalk, through crowded spaces such as clubs, etc., with his head up, eyes directly ahead, without saying excuse me or worrying about bumping into people. What my students and I learned from this exercise is that walking down the middle of the sidewalk is a male entitlement, as is expecting others to get out of one’s way in other crowded spaces. And – not only is it an entitlement, but it is also a way of performing maleness, so that NOT doing these things marks one as less than manly.
--On the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Medicine's being awarded for work on reproductive technologies, Julia Indichova 's IVF: The Heavy Cost of the Nobel Prize takes note of the lack of public knowledge of not only the consistently poor failure-rate of IVF but also of the long-term health consequences that are underplayed by the $5 billion industry that exploits women for the sake of profit. She cites in particular a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article and suggests that the IVF industry is an example of technopoly, "a system wherein technology is always viewed as positive and of value, with little consideration of its consequences."
Chan Davis and Josh Lukin will be at the Toronto Public Library, the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, & Fantasy, tonight at 7:00, doing one of their fascinating discussion sessions and (perhaps) reading from It Walks in Beauty.
As a whole, this book links up with the recent feminist cultural studies work on the subculture provided by Helen Merrick's recent book also published by Aqueduct, as well as the more formally academic books written by Justine Larbalstier. [...] It's a genuinely interesting history, and the more material that I read about it, the more complex and interesting the topic becomes to me.
--Kimberly Todd Wade will be doing a book-signing on Saturday, October 9, at Mystery and Imagination Bookshop 238 N. Brand Blvd, in Glendale, which is in the LA area. She will aslo be signing in Austin, Texas, on October 23 at Bookwoman, a feminist bookstore. Both signings will be promoting her new novel, Thrall.
Then a couple of items about women and British science fiction:
--Tricia Sullivan talks about the women and the Clarke Award, noting a shift away from work by women making it onto the ballot since 2006 (link courtesy of Torque Control).
One comment, by Farrah Mendelsohn, is pretty stark: "I think the UK is extremely hostile to women sf writers at the moment. Given the decision of Illustrious (Eastercon 2011) to choose the first all male line up in some years (the first since 2002 when they had three guests, not the current four), I cannot see why this should change."
But another comment, by Jonathan McCalmont, is even more so: "It’s the fact that things seem to be getting worse that’s most unsettling. The image of a genre publishing world retreating into whiteness and maleness that has emerged from these discussions really is quite distressing. This problem is then compounded when you consider how few genre books get translated into English. At this point, it seems not unreasonable to say that if genre publishing in the UK were consciously racist and misogynistic then it would not be doing anything different to what it is doing today."
And finally, a few items on feminism and feminists:
--Over at the F-Word Blog, Jess McCabe interviws Jonathan Dean about his book Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics, which analyzes contemporary feminism in the UK. The F-Word itself was among the organizations and groups Dean studied. One of McCabe's questions: "Do you think ‘new’ feminists’ views, activities or concerns differ much from previous generations of feminists?" His answer fascinated me:
Obviously the ‘new’ feminists are quite a diverse bunch, so it can be hard to generalise. That said, I think there is an increasing move towards emphasising continuity between the present and the ‘second wave’. There was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when the ‘third wave’ was quite popular, and much of the feminism coming under the ‘third wave’ banner was quite keen to differentiate itself from the ‘second wave’. Interestingly, you don’t hear the ‘third wave’ being talked about so much now. Personally, I think that is for the best, and if you look at the current feminist scene, you see a lot of fairly clear continuities with the second wave: you’ve got Reclaim the Night marches, protests against the utterly abhorrent Miss University UK pageants, and organisations like Women’s Aid who are still providing services to survivors of domestic violence, just as they were 35 years ago.
There’s also recently been a lot of oral history research with participants in second wave feminism, so I think all of this can be seen as a willingness on the part of many younger feminists to acknowledge these continuities. That said, in some respects these continuities are quite depressing, as it is rather sad that there is still a need for the same kinds of activism. To be honest, though, there are other kinds of depressing continuities: my impression is that, after all these years, issues of race, class and cis privilege remain, within feminism, as delicate as ever.
There's much more in the interview that's interesting. Do go read the whole thing.
--Also at the Nation, Rebecca Traister notes that while the Republican Party is making a big deal about it's "CEO candidates and "maverick Mama Grizzlies, many Democratic women still relate to Abigail Adams's 234-year-old wry (and slightly pissy) plea to her husband, John, and his nation-building buddies to "remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors." Some of us find ourselves wondering why our party still shuns a public celebration of its female power and why it still appears hesitant to boost its strong female candidates." Traister pounds home the irony:
Left-leaning lady trouble is ironic, since by many measures women are the Democratic Party—or at least 57 percent of it in the 2008 election. Moreover, the party has long been tagged as feminine: focused on purportedly soft concerns like healthcare, reproductive rights, social programs and the economy, as opposed to the more testicular national security obsessions of Republicans. [...]
The gender quotas, (usually) female-friendly policy priorities and slowly but steadily improving stats are all terrific. So why are we not hearing the party own its commitment to women's progress by lending full-throated support to its female candidates?
Two Aqueductistas will be appearing at a bookstore event in Buffalo on Wednesday. The Aqueductistas are Chan Davis and Josh Lukin, the bookstore is Talking Leaves, and the event is a celebration of the publication of It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, a book edited by Josh Lukin and published by Aqueduct Press. Chan and Josh will be reading and signing.
Samuel R. Delany, by the way, recently posted this comment on his Facebook page:
I'm reading a really fine book, of great interest to historians of the middle 20th century, people who like science fiction, and general fans of clear thought and good fiction: It Walks in Beauty: The Collected Prose of Chandler Davis, edited by Josh Lukin.
I do wish I were able to attend myself. I'm sure the discussion will be both entertaining and stimulating.
*Donald D'Ammassa has reviewed Tomb of the Fathers by Eleanor Arnason: Here’s a clever and quite original planetary adventure. A crew of humans and aliens is conducting research on a planet supposedly abandoned by its intelligent residents when a malfunctioning AI decides to strand them there. In short order they begin to uncover secrets about the decline of the alien civilization, which mixes the serious and the humorous in about equal measure, and yes there’s considerable social commentary mixed in with the laughs and surprises. It’s quite short – not much more than a novella – so the satire doesn’t get too long winded, and there’s an active plot as well. Have a few laughs and look at human behavior from a slightly different viewpoint.
*And Strange Horizons has posted Narrative Realities: A Symphony in Four Books by Matt Cheney, an essay that discusses Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Reality Hunger by David Shields, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson. On his own blog, Matt remarks:
All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies.
It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, edited by Josh Lukin, is now available through Aqueduct's website-- and, until July 1 (its official publication date), for $16 (which is a $5 reduction in price). As you may recall, I posted about this book earlier, previewing its table of contents and a lengthy excerpt for Josh's introductory essay. Here's a more general description, with blurbs:
Harvard awarded Chandler Davis a PhD in mathematics in 1950. Three years later, Davis was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment in 1962 at the University of Toronto, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. It Walks in Beauty collects several of his science fiction stories, which probe deeply into such social and political issues as nuclear escalation, gender roles, and eugenics, as well as a selection of his essays, originally published in venues ranging from The New York Review of Books to the Waging Peace Series of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The volume also includes a lengthy interview of Davis by Lukin; a speech Davis made at the February 1995 meeting of AAAS; and three essays by Lukin, taking a long view of Davis's work.
In addition to his lifelong activism as a civil libertarian, Davis has been a director of Science for Peace and is a trustee of the Davis-Putter scholarship fund, founded by his father in 1961 to award grants to students working for peace and social justice. A poet and composer as well as a long-time co-editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Professor Davis combined his artistic and scientific interests in the anthology The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science (Chandler Davis, Marjorie Senechal, and Jan Zwicky, editors. Wellesley, MA: AK Peters, 2009).
"Although Chandler Davis has published less than a score of science-fiction short stories, some of us have long treasured them as brilliant gems. Josh Lukin's thoughtful collection of Davis's fiction and nonfiction offers 21st-century readers a fine introduction to the work of this neglected and invaluable writer." — H. Bruce Franklin, author of War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
"This is a wonderful and unusual selection of science fiction and political/psychological non-fiction, a collection of writing by Chandler Davis. Informed by his personal life, his unwavering political activism over the last half century, his professional life as a mathematician, Davis's work provides invaluable insight and direction about what is to be done ¡V and always with wit, clarity, tolerance, and dissent. Whether writing imaginatively or factually, he shows how narcissism so destructively gets in the way of seeing others as real people and how it works against acknowledging what is unknown. Chandler Davis relates to past, present, and future times, always open to decipher the whole picture and to speak up." — Judith Deutsch, President of Science for Peace
"This is a terrific book. I can't remember the last time I have seen fiction, especially science fiction, put so richly in context. It Walks in Beauty introduces us to a remarkable man, gives us insight into the American science fiction community of the 1940s and 50s, and reminds us how much damage the McCarthy era of red hunts did to ordinary human lives and to American civilization. Among the stories, I especially like "The Names of Yanils," a thoughtful consideration of the relation of people to tradition, and "It Walks in Beauty," an utterly creepy and true description of sex roles in 50s America. I remember those sex roles, just as I remember the red hunts.We have not recovered yet. Nor will we recover until the ideas and integrity of people like Chandler Davis are incorporated into our history and culture." — Eleanor Arnason, author of Ring of Swords and A Woman of the Iron People
And if you're wondering why the avowedly feminist Aqueduct Press has published this book... Well, I recommend you read it to find out! You can purchase the book here. (Or you could nudge your local library to acquire it.)
I suspect many readers of this blog may not know who Chandler Davis is (though some may have guessed he's historian Natalie Zemon Davis's husband). I wrote about one of his stories, "It Walks in Beauty," in "Old Pictures: The Discursive Instability of Feminist SF" (The Grand Conversation, 2004), a story that was first published in 1958 and was reprinted by Ellen Datlow on SCIFCTION.COM in 2003. Chan published most of his science fiction stories in the 1950s, and one in Crank! in 1994. But the particulars of his situation are complicated.
Harvard awarded Chandler Davis a PhD in mathematics in 1950. Three years later, hes was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment in 1962 at the University of Toronto, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics.
It Walks in Beauty collects several of Chan Davis's science fiction stories, which probe deeply into such social and political issues as nuclear escalation, gender roles, and eugenics, as well as a selection of his essays, originally published in venues ranging from The New York Review of Books to the Waging Peace Series of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a speech he gave at the February 1995 meeting of AAAS. And, of course, the three meaty essays by Josh Lukin I mentioned in my last post.
Here's the Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION
History, Heresy, Hegemony: On the Relevance of Chandler Davis—by Josh Lukin
ESSAYS AND LETTERS
Critique & Proposals 1949 . . . From an Exile Two Open Letters: (1) “Violence and Civility” (2) “Imprisoned Mathematician: J.L.Massera” The Selfish Genetics From Science for Good or Ill “The Untimely Rhetoric of Chandler Davis’s Essays”—by Josh Lukin
STORIES
Last Year’s Grave Undug Adrift on the Policy Level It Walks in Beauty The Statistomat Pitch The Names of Yanils
SPEECH
“Shooting Rats in a Barrel”: Did the Red Hunt Win?
INTERVIEW
“Trying to Say Something True”: The Paradoxa Interview with Chandler Davis
AFTERWORD
"Alternatives to Reverence"—by Josh Lukin
EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
You may well be wondering why Aqueduct Press, which focuses on feminist science fiction, has chosen to launch Heirloom Books with a title by two men. Here are a few snippets from Josh's "History, Heresy, Hegeony: On the Relevance of Chandler Davis," the essay that introduces It Walks in Beauty:
It Walks in Beauty: Selected prose of Chandler Davis is the first male-authored book to be published by Aqueduct; it includes three stories with all-male casts; and its articles most often focus on male victims of oppression. Its aptness for a feminist press is, then, not immediately apparent; so I hope to make a case for it on biographical, literary, political, and theoretical grounds. Davis’s feminist life and the strategies he developed in his battles with the Red Hunters could be of particular interest to feminist readers; a look at his work is also important to more general issues of ideological struggle and of recovering ideas and texts from progressives of the past –hence my emphasis on the fact that US Communism from 1935 – 1955 was a fruitful source of feminist thought, which provided a milieu that supported Davis’s values. The relevance of Davis’s work to several present-day political battlegrounds will also, I believe, become evident in the course of my argument.
Josh then considers the biographical, literary, political, and theoretical aspects of the relevance of Chandler Davis's work for Aqueduct Press readers. Under the literary rubric, Josh writes,
I have argued elsewhere that, in an era in which the grossest misogyny in life and literature passed unremarked or celebrated, even small anti-sexist gestures were worthy of notice. Chandler Davis was in the minority of SF writers who sought consistently to create female characters with competence, authority, and agency. In the stories for Astounding Science Fiction that first made his reputation, we see a female Congressional staffer whose competence and quick thinking helps avert nuclear holocaust (“To Still the Drums,” 1946), a revolutionary cell on Ganymede in which men and women have equal authority (“The Journey and the Goal,” 1947), a female leader of a revolt against a eugenicist autocrat (“The Aristocrat,” 1949), and a planetary research team in which men and women collaborate as scientific peers (“Share Our World,” 1953). But Davis’s most penetrating anti-sexist statements are his later works set in patriarchal societies –not only “It Walks in Beauty” but also the oft-reprinted “Adrift on the Policy Level.”
Jean Smith, in a tribute to Davis, characterized “Adrift on the Policy Level” as “about scientific advice getting shuffled aside in a corporation,” which suggests that the story’s theme is bureaucratic incompetence in the world of commerce. While broadly true, that characterization elides the story’s most innovative social, psychological, and political attributes. Politically, it matters that the setting is not “a corporation” but “The Corporation,” a quasi-governmental entity that not only runs on marketing but administrates large geographic regions; psychologically, the story’s satirical punch owes much to the way in which The Corporation has by the end imposed a blissful false consciousness on the protagonists; and socially, the story offers a novel depiction of how an oppressive society uses gender to further its ends.
The subtleties of the story’s approach to gender may not be immediately clear to a reader today, as the piece plays with three commonplaces that are rooted in the era of its creation, viz:
(1) The Fifties (and indeed the preceding and following decade) saw a huge expression of anxiety that managerial jobs were emasculating or feminizing men, both because they were not rugged individualist forms of self-assertion and because they entailed “emotional labor” and attention to the minutiae of pleasing others, tasks that were thought of as more appropriate to women.
(2) SF of the Fifties (and the Forties and the Sixties) had rigid conventions in which women were allowed authority. Luise White famously observed in 1975 that “ . . . active, vigorous women characters [in SF] invariably worked either directly for the state, or for some male-run institution that controlled so much power and revenue, it might as well be the state itself” (Delany 167); she noted that these women included the heroes –Kathy in The Space Merchants, Rydra Wong in Babel-17, and many others– as well as the monsters, such as Hedy in The Space Merchants and Olivia in The Stars My Destination.
(3) Mainstream literature was less ambivalent: women with authority in political or bureaucratic milieux were pretty consistently monsters along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate’s Eleanor Shaw, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Big Nurse, The Ugly American’s Marie MacIntosh, and (from Humbert’s point of view) Lolita’s Miss Pratt. Such women, however, were unsexed or sexually grotesque. Historian Robert Dean points out that The Ugly American, for example, “warned [that] women could subvert the imperial project from two directions: from within, as indolent luxury-loving ‘Moms,’ and from without, as alien sexual temptresses” (29).
The Communist line on gender may also be relevant to an understanding of the story, as Communists regarded female empowerment within the constraints of capitalist institutions as no success at all, a goal of bourgeois feminism (today we would call it a Third Wave approach). An attentive Communist would also have been aware of (albeit not necessarily in agreement with) Popular Front era arguments about “sexual servility” like Rebecca Pitts’s, which is also relevant to “It Walks in Beauty”:
To get a husband (even lovers, even admirers), [woman under capitalism] must please the dominant male –“normally” an undeveloped egotist who regards her as a means to his own pleasure. It becomes her business, therefore, to arouse desire; to play by means of sex-allurement, dress, and personal charm upon male ego-sexuality. Instead of being a rounded, creative personality, she is warped and twisted . . . It is proof of a strong urge in woman that so many really do –in spite of this terrific pressure from bourgeois society –lead creative lives. (324)
Pitts does not use the word “business” casually; she is consciously in a tradition of criticizing the commodification of Sex Appeal. And while Chandler Davis seems loath to depict any woman as unconsciously “warped and twisted,” his work is remarkably aware of the sexist pressures that Pitts and other thoughtful Reds described.
So “Adrift on the Policy Level” is the work of an author whose stories have begun, perhaps thanks to the political persecutions or social changes he is observing, to grow more caustic and satirical; and it is the product of a creative mind that has already, in “The Aristocrat” and “Share Our World,” shown the ability to circumvent SF conventions concerning the position of empowered women. Unlike Davis’s earlier stories, “Adrift” cannot offer a character who is conscious of its society’s problems and points the way toward freedom. The premise of the satire –that The Corporation is a total institution, exercising all of its hegemonic powers to preserve the status quo– obviates the possibility of a liberating figure. Instead, the story does its political work by burlesquing the ideological norms of mid-century US society and fiction. If the emotional labor and inauthentic “other-directed” poses that the managerial world requires are “feminizing,” it asks, wouldn’t the perfect corporation have them done by women using the skills of “manufactured femininity”? If the tools of the sexual temptress are so powerful, wouldn’t female agents of authority use them, rather than being starchy and schoolmarmish termagants? Isn’t gender and the ability to perform it in the hope of manipulating one’s superiors something that men have also, such that Mr. Demarest’s style of masculinity can change “from Viking to Roman” as the occasion demands? And, pace SF traditions, how likely is it that a corporate-political functionary under capitalism can use her “active, vigorous” character and her suasive powers for anything other than being a Company Woman and maintaining the institution’s homeostasis?
And from the concluding section of Josh's intro:
Chandler Davis’s fiction is, like his accounts of Red Scare survival and his nonfictional broadsides against conservative views of human nature, a model of hopefulness. Demystifying the processes by which oppressive structures are naturalized and legitimized exposes those structures as contingent and reversible. If history has been purged by human beings, it can be recovered by human beings; if we have lost sight of the human origins of ideologies, we can regain it; if the forces of reaction create alluring new subject positions for people, so can the forces of liberation; and if subjection to ideology does not mean that people are stupid, they can change their minds.
Heirloom Books is about not only preserving past pleasures in danger of being lost, but also about recovering the history that matters to feminists. Canons are useful, but as we all know, they never tell the whole story.
Back in 2003 ParaDoxa published an illuminating interview with Chandler Davis in its special issue on Fifties Fiction, edited by Josh Lukin and Samuel R. Delany. The interview, "Trying to Same Something True," is now available online through Ray Davis's Bellona Times Repress. Chandler Davis, though known principally as a mathematician, published several sf stories back in the fifties. (In fact, I discuss one of them, "It Walks in Beauty," which was reprinted by Ellen Datlow at SciFiction.com and could be called Tiptreean avant la lettre, in my essay "Old Pictures: The Discursive Instability of Feminist SF.") Interestingly, Chan Davis also published a proto-Writing-the-Other essay in a fan magazine.
In his intro to the interview, Josh writes:
For all that Herb Philbrick led three lives, the indefatigable Horace Chandler Davis puts him to shame, leading at least seven. He is Chan Davis, the writer of a dozen science fiction stories that probe deeply into social and ethical issues; he is the renowned mathematician Chandler Davis, longtime editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and innovator in the theory of operators and matrices; he is an anti-war activist, having coordinated international protests against the war in Vietnam and been a director of Science for Peace; he is a composer, having cowritten the music for Theodore Sturgeon's song "Thunder and Roses" as well as more recent works; he is a member of the mighty intellectual family that includes his wife, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, and his daughter, the literary and cultural critic Simone Weil Davis; he is the author of several acclaimed poems; and he is a lifelong civil libertarian who has organized for freedom of expression in Eastern Europe as well as North America.
In 1953, Chandler Davis was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of HUAC. His subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment at the University of Toronto in 1962, where he continues to work as Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. He and his wife have each written articles and given lectures recounting his case in the context of the Red Scare years.
— H. Bruce Franklin, author of War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies 