The WisCon Chronicles

The Advanced Reading Copies for The WisCon Chronicles: Vol. 1 have just arrived here from the printer. We won't be officially releasing this book until August, but Aqueduct will be selling copies of it in the Dealers Room at WisCon and, in June, on Aqueduct's site.

The format is 7x10-inches, and it has 196 pages. Here’s the Table of Contents:

WisCon Chronicles: Volume 1

Edited by L. Timmel Duchamp

Introduction by L. Timmel Duchamp

“The WisCon Questions: A Coven of People Who Attended WisCon 30 Answer Random Personal Questions Posed by Eileen Gunn” (interspersed throughout)

Q&A--Julie Philips

“Wonder Woman: Lesbian or Dyke? Paradise Island as a Woman’s Community” by Trina Robbins

Q&A—Suzy Charnas

“Welcome Back to the Beginning” by Rachel Swirsky

“Feminist Think Tanks”—panel transcript notes by Liz Henry

“A Think Tank Thing for Feminists” by Rosaleen Love

Q&A: Carol Emshwiller

Q&A Mark Rich

Q&A Ellen Klages

“Lord of the Monsters” by Andrea Hairston

Q&A Ted Chiang

Q&A Ursula K. Le Guin

Q&A Liz Henry

“The Feminist Romance Panel: Notes” by Micole Sudberg

“Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory-Building Activity?”—panel transcript notes by Laura Quilter

Q&A Lisa Tuttle

“Piercy’s Gendered Cyborgs: Hope, Threats, and Blurred Boundaries” by Linda Wight

Q&A Diantha Day Sprouse

“Uncomfortable Politics in Feminist Writing”—panel transcript notes by Laura Quilter

“The Cultural Appropriation Panel: Notes” by Yoon Ha Lee

“Researching WisCon Stories: Revisionist History or Re-visioning the Past with the Future in Mind” by Joan Haran

Q&A K. Tempest Bradford

Q&A Spike Parsons

“Who Wants a Revolution? Will a Reform Do?”—panel transcript notes by Liz Henry

“We Aren’t Civilized Yet: Reflections from the WisCon 30 Panel on Women Warriors” by Nancy Jane Moore

“‘A Man Is Like A Nut’: Gender and Magic in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Later Earthsea Novels” by Sylvia Kelso

The Legendary Joanna Russ Interviewed by Samuel R. Delany

Q&A Jeanne Gomoll

“A 40 Year-old Con-virgin Goes to WisCon” by Stephen Gold

“Sympathy and Power: L. Timmel Duchamp Asks Samuel R. Delany a Question”

“Dry Eyes” by Nisi Shawl

“No Man’s Land,” an original story by Rosaleen Love

It's All About Him -- I Mean, Her

This is cross-posted at Alas, a Blog, where I'm doing a stint as a guest blogger.

Last semester, I was privileged to take a fiction workshop with Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead. In one of our later class sessions, we were looking at a beautiful story by one of my favorite writers in the workshop, Jill Wohlgemuth. The story was in the form of an informal essay about kissing, written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wandered away from her academic thesis to meditate on her own impressions of love and desire, framed around her burgeoning sexual attraction to a boy named Theo who she described several times as being incredibly smart -- which is ironic, because of course any thirteen-year-old girl who could write an essay as beautiful as this story was would have to be a prodigy herself.

Marilynne watched patiently as we students gave our opinions of and reactions to the piece. Then she sat back and said, "I've noticed a problem in the writing of young women."

Instead of giving character traits to their female characters, Marilynne argued, young women writers give those traits to male secondary characters -- in this case, repeatedly describing Theo as intelligent when it was the narrator who was brilliant.

I've been thinking about that comment a lot lately.

Now, I don't think that the particular story we were looking at was actually a black and white case of this happening. There are a lot of reasons why a particularly smart thirteen-year-old girl would fixate on describing the object of her affection as "so smart" -- I did that a lot as a kid, particularly with boys I had crushes on, because I had swallowed some line that men needed to be smarter than their female partners. Still, I think that Marilynne's observation is keen and insightful. Looking at broader media trends, it's definitely possible to uncover cases where a female character's personality is rendered through male characters, or not rendered at all.

Girl Detective talks about one such case in her review of Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. The plot of the novel literally revolves around the female main character, Lucinda. She acts as a middleman, conveying McGuffins (sought-after objects) and witnessing plot points. However, the story is happening to other people. Her characterization -- personality and praxis -- are deferred onto male characters.

Girl Detective writes, "Although Lucinda’s consciousness is what binds the novel together, her actual place in the story is minimal; her only motivation is superficial attachment and lust, and she spends the entire story either having sex, wanting sex, or masturbating while wanting sex. All the male characters in the story have traits, interests, and personalities... Lucinda, however, is completely devoid of any desires, aspirations, thoughts, or goals that don’t involve finding a penis to put into her vagina."

"What’s really sad," Girl Detective continues, "is that our culture is so ignorant of women’s inner lives (50% of the population, people! Seriously!) that this substitution of sex for psychology still very often passes for legitimate characterization in even the highest ranks of literature."

And now that I've discussed a high brow example, you know what this reminds me of? Lost.



First things first: I'm a couple seasons behind in watching Lost. I rented the first few seasons on Netflix with my fiance and my parents last summer, and I'm not sure whether I'm a year behind, or two, or three. The last series of episodes I saw had to do with them finding the survivors on the other side of the island. So if brilliant twists have hence ensued, I can't comment on them.

I also have to confess that Lost drives me kind of nuts. I mean, it's really entertaining, and I'll probably watch the rest of the series, but there are times when I want to throw things at the television screen. But -- all that aside -- I think Kate is a perfect example of a character whose own personality has been vitiated in favor of developing the men around her, Jack and Sawyer.

Up until the last episode I saw, Kate's main action in the present revolved around her atraction to both Jack (representing the "good") and Sawyer (representing the "bad"). Kate's character doesn't so much evolve as it does swing back and forth between these extremes. Her inner life is textually represented by which of these two men she's attracted to, or allied with, in any given episode. We see Kate as torn and ambiguous because we understand who Sawyer and Jack are. We watch Kate move between the two of them and understand her as somewhere in between Sawyer and Jack. Yet she doesn't have character development of her own; her good traits are displaced onto Jack (who fosters in her altruistic behavior) and her negative traits are expressed through Sawyer (who periodically lures her away, all sexy-like).

As I've written about before, I believe that literature reflects the narratives that we, as a culture, tell ourselves about ourselves -- both overtly, as in art, but also covertly, as when we meet someone and create a framework and story around that person. When writers sit down to create a world from their imaginations -- which is a damn hard thing to do -- their personal assumptions and prejudices come out clearly. You can't necessarily analyze each individual manifestation as meaningful, but when you detect a trend, either in an individual author's work or in literature at large, I believe that it is a significant tool for figuring out how we as a society are thinking about people and the world.

I haven't had time to fully consider all the ramifications of this particular phenomenon, but my instincts are that it reflects the limited number of roles available to women in our society. If women are seen to be limited to a certain number of stereotypes, such as mother, Madonna, whore, and so on, then when a writer wants to create a female character who is more complicated, they end up posed with a problem. They have to think their way around how to make up a woman, out of whole cloth, who defies the well-worn ways they are used to thinking about women.

If they were considering this consciously, it's possible that they could figure out a logical way out of the situation, or self-correct their tendencies toward cliche. But if it's happening on the unconscious level -- and I believe it almost always is -- then the subconscious offers a pretty easy solution. If it's hard to think of a woman outside roles A, B, and C, and you need to create one who is in role G, H or I, then create a male character who embodies G and H and let that character stand in for the female one via identification. This can create a kind of mirror character who reflects the complicated people around her (like Kate and Lucinda), or it may create a lot of slices of people, none of whom are fully developed.

It's not uncommon to find the latter situation in literature that was written before there was a popular concept of the subconscious. The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, features several different characters, all of whom can be easily interpreted in a post-Freud era to reflect various parts of the pscyhe.* Now that more people understand that individuals are a complicated mass of conscious and subconscious yearnings, played out in ways that are not always under their control, characterization like that which appears in The Monk seems quaint and out-dated. Our narratives about men have advanced further.

Unfortunately, our narratives about women have not come as far as fast.**

As for Marilynne's claim that she finds this phenomenon specifically in the writing of young women -- well, I don't know what to say about that. Most of the examples I can think of are male-authored. I suspect that it may be possible to find a lot of what she's talking about in, for instance, the romance genre where heroines are typically passive or plucky, but I haven't read widely enough to be able to substantiate that (and I sincerely doubt that's where she's drawing her examples from). To the extent that it is happening more often with young women writers than with men writers, I wonder if it's because women are trained to view themselves as transparent and passive, and map those traits onto their characters. But I really couldn't say what leads Marilynne to that conclusion, because it doesn't match with my observations.

---

*I'm not endorsing Freud, just citing him as the founder of psychology.

**When I get involved in talking about poorly written female characters with other writers, it frequently happens that they (usually male) will bring up the fact that poorly written female characters (or poorly written minorities) are often written by people who write insubstantial white male characters, too. I don't think that anyone would make the argument that this is the case in Letham's writing -- at any rate, given his plaudits in the writing world, he seems to be acknowledged as at least a competent writer of character. I think there is some merit to this theory in regard to Lost since most of the characterization relies on established stereotypes with carefully placed "Gotcha!" reversals. (Though I should say I feel that most of the actors are able to cover for the poor writing by successfully hinting at an inner life that isn't present textually.) Still, I think the male characters in Lost have considerably more development than the female ones, with the possible exception of Ana Lucia who the writers seem to have generally dealt with by making her as masculine as possible and then giving her some pregnancy issues, in case we, the audience, should forget she had a vagina. The writers of Lost seem to be good with masculinity. Femininity seems to baffle them, so that the feminine characters come across as some variety of inscrutable (the French woman), passive (Sun, Claire), or non-present (Kate -- who is much more vital during the flashbacks in which she has access to violence and stereotypically masculine behaviors).

A Brief Conversation with Anna Tambour

Serendipity! Anyone who does a lot of reading knows how important serendipity is in directing one’s thoughts and attention. Serendipity, as it happens, has me musing on the Muse thing. It started last weekend with my brief conversation with Nisi Shawl. As I remarked there, I’ve never quite gotten the Muse thing & so tend to ignore it unless it gets right up in my face. A couple of days later, I came across a sharp-edged look at Charles Olson’s relationship with his Muse, Frances Boldereff, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (whose engaging book of feminist poetics, The Blue Studio, I’ve been slowly working my way through). Writing about Boldereff, DuPlessis notes,

Like a number of creative women from the 1930s to the 1950s (or even early 1960s) [DuPlessis means her generalization to apply to the US, not elsewhere], her relationship to her own powers was charged with her deeply held opinion of the impossibility or compromise of female achievement. At that time intelligent women felt highly exceptional. They hyperidentified with male triumphs, often feeling separate from women or dragged down by contact with women. They felt like traitors to their gender roles, not-women, or escapees; one response was the intensity of their conviction that female gender roles were their tragic fate. They often experienced outright economic discrimination. These are women whose ideological conditions of employment and self-divisions around achievement, not to speak of discouragement from the outside world, left them so battered that they visibly stagger in the ring, using up their power throwing wild punches (sometimes even at themselves),or go down for the count forever. Outside this, looking into all the historical poignancy and damage, one begs them to get up. But not all could or did.

DuPlessis thus explains Bodereff’s fanatical self-effacement and the “gender-martyrdom” she assumed in her role as Olson’s muse. DuPlessis’s powerful analysis fairly strong-armed me into doing a little thinking on the subject. (Among other things, it made me, as I often find myself doing, reflect yet again on aspects of Alice Sheldon that the Phillips biography illuminates with such clarity: this time, to wonder whether if a truly brilliant creative man had entered her life, she might not have fallen into the role of muse instead of artist: unless, perhaps, her mother’s example make that unlikely?) With all this on my mind, I emailed Anna Tambour an invitation to muse with me on the Muse. At which I encountered the third coincidence: discovering that Anna had herself been doing some writing on the Muse for her next novel. So here’s our conversation:

Timmi: In my Brief Conversation with Nisi Shawl, she said—alluding to her intentions for the story we were discussing—“"I wanted to give an account of an ordinary mortal's encounter with a Muse from the Muse's point of view.” On reflection, I realized that I had pretty much ignored that aspect of the story because I've always felt uncomfortable—and sometimes even impatient—with the whole idea of the artist's even having a muse. Traditionally, the Muse has been a female figure, most often conjured up in relation to the male artist. It's a quintessentially Romantic conception, even though it does of course predate the 19th century.

Still, women do sometimes speak of their Muse (and some women writing in the 19th century did, too). And when I try to imagine what “the Muse” might be, I can intellectually work out that it is probably a personification of whoever or whatever fills one with the desire to write (the desire to write or the inspiration that drives one to put everything into the work being what Samuel R. Delany in About Writing calls Begeisterung). And for some artists—for instance Charles Olson—the Muse figure is embodied in an actual person and is thus far more than a mere personification. And yet I find myself sunk in utter disbelief whenever I try to imagine someone actually having a muse. Obviously, I'm missing something.

So my question to you, Anna, is whether you have a muse, and if so, can you tell me enough about your Muse to make her/him/it/them real to me? And if you don't have a muse, why do you think that might be? Do you, for instance, think the possession of a muse is too much associated with traditional gender roles to be useful to a woman who seeks to assume a place that many people still (often secretly) believe can be held only by men? Or might there be some other reason? Can male figures be muses? But if they are, are they more likely to be mentors than handmaidens? (I.e., figures of authority rather than acolytes.) This inquiring feminist mind would like to know!

Anna: Thank you very much for even thinking of me for this wonderful venture. I am not sure that I'm ever much value for any of these kinds of questions, partly because I feel very unsure of saying stuff about my feelings personally in public, and secondly, because if I'm speaking seriously in public, I prefer not to talk about the process of writing because that adds to the amount of writing on writing that writers write and I'd rather read about woodchucks chucking wood.

I don't know what to say about this topic especially, because, well, see attached excerpts from a novel I've been working on, that give two points of view. (I would think they'd be too big to put on your blog, but if you'd like to, I certainly have no objection.)

I also feel “uncomfortable—and sometimes even impatient—with the whole idea of the artist's even having a muse.” In fact, those words are exactly how I feel, perhaps because I've never met her, the bitch. For though she has been cited as a mentor by some women, I have always thought her a ‘man's woman’, not that I have anything against men, but I think of her like a woman I met once who flaunted her long blonde hair and collected impressionable men of deficient value systems like black pants do, lint. When she wasn't hair-obsessed and complaining about how hard it was to be a beautiful natural blonde, she was quite okay. Once when she was in that okay phase, I happened to be at her house and, going to the toilet, washed my hands and threw the paper in the bin, where the paper fell lightly upon the box that made her natural. I guess it's that fakey goodness that I find yucky about Muses. After all, how many authors whose work was inspired by muses should be suing them instead of thanking them, it's so bad? As much as is produced by the unlovely brains of mortals, I reckon.

Timmi: I have to say that your novel excerpts are so to the point that I'm just astonished at the coincidence of my having decided to ask you that particular question! I do think I want to post them on the blog. Judging by the excerpts, the novel, by the way, sounds interesting. (& they do sound in some way akin to Spotted Lily...)

Anna: It's strange, isn't it, that your question is so spot-on with some thoughts I've had. This book has many different characters who live in various places and times, so though she has some elements similar to Angela in Spotted Lily, she and ‘Crandolin’ are both quite different to Spotted Lily. Not to say that I would trust this Muse one bit more than I would Angela! Or maybe I'm just miffed. She hasn't helped me no matter how much I've needed help.

Timmi: Thanks very much, Anna.

*

So here are the excerpts from Anna Tambour’s novel-in-progress:

6 The beloved at home

She tossed a clump of hair out of her eyes, jerking a tower of ash off her cigarette into the pot. What was left was too short to smoke, so she dropped it into an emptyish bottle and rolled another from the papers and leaf-litter in the pocket of her once-flowered apron.

The stuff in the pot---animal, vegetable or otherwise--smelt burnt. She huffed off the flame and reached for a full bottle, twisted its cork out, stuck her lips to the rim and pulled glugs till she had to unlock for air.

"Falleydo-hooh . . . ugchhh!" Her burp--racy, sweaty and pungent on the nose--resonated with almonds and flint to the fore, perhaps an unreasonable amount of broccoli coming through on the finish, but redeemed itself on the afterscent with a lingering note of something indescribable.

She tilted the bottle to her full lips and sucked again, and again till its contents were only a sludge unreachable to her long, experienced tongue. She murmured the judges' comments on that winning Sauvignon Blanc in the latest Sydney International: "Quite a cat’s pee . . . a lovely wine. Sweaty armpit character " Nick Kippax himself said that, declaring it "a great combination. "

"Ayee! This combination's greater."

The earth groaned with the egos of 'artists', staked out like graveposts from Vietnam to Antarctica probably, covering the ground in great vats and supercenters and little brick and wattle and daub and roadside tin and bubblewrap bistros, and glittering glass dumping grounds, and bottles bobbing in the—

"Gorgonna!" She pulled herself out of that spiral of complaint, something new she had picked up lately, from them. Never before had she realised that they could affect her. But all their exhibitionism, their competitiveness, had.

"What do I care what they think?"

She asked herself that constantly, but never got an answer. Was it possible to compete against them, to compete alongside them? What would Kippax say about this? Never before had she contemplated, but the great clouds of undeserved praise that rose from the earth these days had—

"Ruump! Quit your whinging, yar boofa sister!" She planted her hands on her hips and pushed herself up straight.

"Yow-ay o! You love to be loved," she reminded herself.

"Yor-mah o," she argued back. "But they don't love me!"

"Enough!" It was best not to think of that, or she might as well carry an axe to work.

To work.

She shrugged, and tossed her apron.

Time to put her face on.

They expected that of the Muse.

------------------------------------------

and later…..

------------------------------------------

11 Two thousand a session

The man gazed up into the woman's eyes as if he wanted to throw himself into their pools. But then his eyes wandered down her long throat, to the mountains—

"Before the time of Gwandurf," she said.

Her belly, so close to his head, was flat as—

"of Gwandurf" she said, with even crisper enunciation, though her voice was but a whisper. That voice, musical as—

"Don't sit there like flat beer!"

tap tap tap . . .

His fingers finished what she'd dictated, so he looked into her eyes again.

"You get more beautiful every--"

"Type or I'll leave."

"Okay, okay," he said, placing his hands over the keyboard. "Shoot."

"when the little people of Bungendore . . ."

The man was obedient for the rest of the session, and when the dictation ended at the 2,000th word, he dropped to his knees and clasped her legs (their shape peekabooing through the flow of her neo-classic robe).

"I can't live without you. Stay," he said, for the nth time. "Melissa can't--"

"Melissa can't what?" His wife's head appeared in the doorway, like an apple on a stick. "D'you want dinner or should I give it to the dog?"

"Melissa can't hear me when I say I'm coming," he said.

"And get up from the floor, Rick."

The man left his study backside first, kissing his open hand and extending it like a tray, mouthing as he backed out, "To you, my lady."

He squared his shoulders going down the stairs.

"I hope, I really hope," he loudly announced without actually speaking, "that someday, Melissa, you will see. And I hope that moment reveals to you: your husband, Richard K. Stubbs, in flagrant delicto with the only woman who does things for me, who does things to me: the Elusive One, the Supportive One, the Adorable One: The Muse Herself."

Lucky for him that Melissa Rowe-Stubbs didn't hear him. Nor did the Muse, now a lady in rubber, on her way to another call.

Story Recommendation: Karen Joy Fowler, “Always”

Last night I read Karen Joy Fowler’s “Always,” which can be found in the April/May issue of Asimov’s SF. I knew last night, immediately after reading it, that the built-in ambiguity of whether or not the story has a speculative (i.e., fantasy or science fiction) element would likely make it controversial in the same way “What I Didn’t See” was controversial. I also knew that beneath the apparently simple surface of a narrative written by an old woman who hadn’t finished high school (but since the woman attended high school in the 1930s, this of course means something different than it would for someone attending high school today) lay a sophisticated edifice and interesting subtext. As often happens with me in all matter exegetical, a night’s sleep brought some clarity. Karen Joy Fowler is always, of course, subtle. But I read this story as engaged in a conversation with the genre and its conventions, much as “What I Didn’t See” is—and again, written from a distinctly twenty-first-century feminist perspective.

I expect to be writing about this story at some point, probably in this space. But I won’t be able to do so without introducing spoilers. It’s very short—a mere ten pages long. Go read it, my friends. And then we can talk about it here.

"What Is An Author?"

This morning I reread Michel Foucault’s “What Is An Author?” (which I last read about twenty-five years ago) because I thought it might help me to think about the paper I’m writing for WisCon treating the difficulty—or not—that gender has posed for some women constructing themselves as writers of sf. (A while back I posted a few associated thoughts on the subject on Now What, at http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/gender-and-construction-of-authorship.html.)

At the time I decided to write this paper, I had a very clear hypothesis that I’d formed while reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon. But after I chatted in early March with Ursula Le Guin about the conclusions I’d drawn from some of the material presented in the biography, I decided I’d gotten it wrong. Further reflection on one particular thing Le Guin said to me set me off in another direction entirely. Since this new direction strikes me as excitingly (and therefore alarmingly) novel, I’m revisiting quite a lot of theory, at least partly to reassure myself that I haven’t lost my mind. (I feel this way often when I’m writing, so this fear is less in the nature of a personal mental crisis than a routine entertainment of my anxiety of discovering I’m a crackpot.)

Although rereading “What Is An Author?” didn’t offer much help for my paper, I did find a couple things in it of Aqueductian interest. In examining what the name of an author is and is not (the name of an author in our culture, for instance, isn’t the underwriter of a contract or the signatory of a private letter), Foucault notes that

The proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and, granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative function. Yet—and it is here that the specific difficulties attending an author’s name appear—the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between the author’s name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way.

Further, the presence of an author’s name “is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others.”

We in sf-land do that all the time. We talk about reading Tiptree, Le Guin, Delany, or Russ. Or Heinlein or Sturgeon. Or Cordwainer Smith or C.L. Moore. And so on. And everyone in sf-land knows what we’re talking about. Foucault doesn’t do so, but we could call the name of an author when it functions in this way a metonym. And yet as soon as we begin to think about this particular function, we know very well that it’s more than a metonym. The name of an author often determines how a text bearing that name is read. Gender doesn’t have to be an issue, but it sometimes is (as it was with the shift in how people read Tiptree after he was outed). Art historian Whitney Chadwick, discussing the case of painter Judith Leyster, many of whose works were attributed to Franz Hals until 1929 when Juliane Harms definitively established their attribution to Leyster, warns that although gender can be one aspect, it’s not the only one:

The finding during reattribution to lesser-known artists that works of art are "simply not up to the high technical standards" of the "Master" is common. The shifting language that often accompanies reattributions where gender is an issue is only one aspect of a larger problem. Art history has never separated the question of artistic style from the inscription of sexual difference in representation. Discussions of style are consistently cast in the terms of masculinity and femininity. Analyses of paintings are replete with references to "virile" handling of form or "feminine" touch.

I suppose we might say that in some ways the name of an author works the way branding does. Remove the brand, and the product becomes unworthy of the consumer’s attention.

The other point of interest in Foucault’s essay is his discussion of something every conscious writer must comes to terms with:

When discourse is linked to an author, however, the role of “shifters” [textual signs that refer to the author—personal pronouns, adverbs of times and place, and the conjugation of verbs] is more complex and variable. It is well know that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a “second self” whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the “author-function” arises out of their scissions—in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of “quasi-discourse,” but, in fact, all discourse that supports this “author-function” is characterized by this plurality of egos.

And of course this is true for fiction not only of first-person narration but also of third-person. It’s only more apparent in first-person narration.

But now I’ve got to get my nose back to the grindstone.

A Brief Conversation with Lesley Hall

Timmi: Lesley, one of your passions, I believe, is literature by British women writing in the first half of the twentieth century, literature that has suffered critical neglect because it fell outside the canons of modernism (to which—judging by the almost entirely male-author reading lists of courses on modernism at US colleges and universities—critics have only grudgingly admitted stellar examples of modernism like Woolf, Barnes, Mansfield, and Richardson). You note in your profile of Naomi Mitchison (Conversation Pieces Vol. 15), for instance, that her work has not received its due at least partly because she chose to write in a variety of narrative forms other than those characteristic of modernism. Could you elaborate a bit, please, about this critical issue and suggest (a) a few works of nonfiction treating the subject and (b) a short list of novels you think would be of interest to feminist readers today?

Lesley: This is a question for which the answer could be very long indeed!

There were a number of women writing in the early twentieth century who are still very much worth reading, even though they largely fall outside what are considered to be the parameters of the canon as studied in literature departments, and until recently most of them have received little critical attention. I have a page on my website with some introductory links and comments on "British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s:The 'middle-brows'": http://www.lesleyahall.net/wmwrtrs.htm. Many of these writers also produced large amounts of journalism and reviewing, and wrote non-fiction of various kinds, from gastronomic memoirs through biographies of forgotten women of the past to political polemics. Their work also segues into that of the women detective novelists of the 'Golden Age' of crime fiction (Christie, Sayers, Allingham, March) with an interest in the psychology of crime and even occasional attempts at the thriller: critics such as Nicola Humble in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism and Alison Light in Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, have effectively incorporated consideration of the mystery novel into their surveys of the period.

The apparent transparency of their writing and the sheer readibility and popularity of their work has probably militated against their being taken seriously, but as a new generation of feminist critics is beginning to point out, there are depths and complexities which mean that these works hold up to repeated re-reading and reward critical analysis. They also foreground women's experiences, which still tend to be seen as less universal and important than those of men - even when the experiences themselves are not usually ones common to the average urban C21st male in the developed world - and a woman's perspective.

These writers were not nostalgic for an imagined past, even though they were often critical of the present day's attitudes and institutions. The shadow of the Victorian age still hung over them as a past they were glad to have escaped (Delafield's Thank Heaven Fasting, aka A Good Man's Love, is a depiction of the agonising pressures and stultifying effects of the Victorian upper-class marriage market). The various novels of the period which present either a sudden collapse of civilisation (e.g. Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die, or Barbara Wootton's London's Burning), or the rise of a fascist regime (e.g. Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night, Storm Jameson's In the Second Year, Dion's vision at the end of Mitchison's contemporary novel We Have Been Warned) either implicitly or explicitly emphasise the costs for women and the loss of their still newly-won freedoms thus entailed.

The historical novel, however, did provide a useful means of exploring issues around gender unconstrained by the realities of the present. At the moment the information on my website focusses predominantly on writers and works dealing with the situation of women in contemporary society, so it's not terribly helpful as an introduction to looking at what women were doing with the historical novel, but there is a wonderful recent study by Diana Wallace, The Women's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (2004) Critics such as Janet Montefiore and Gill Plain have also written very insightfully on how moving away from the present could liberate women's imagination. Besides Naomi Mitchison's historical works, especially the very long (but very well-worth reading) The Corn King and the Spring Queen, I'd strongly recommend in particular Sylvia Townsend Warner's amazing Summer Will Show set during the 1848 revolution in Paris.

Other recent critical studies I've found very thought-provoking have been Diana Wallace's Sisters and Rivals in British Women's Fiction, 1914-1939, Catherine Clay, British Women Writers 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship and Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H. Young - although it focuses on Young it has quite a lot to say about the strengths of the domestic novel and the work of her contemporaries working in that area. A very useful guide, including helpful short thematic and contextualising essays as well as entries on individual writers, is Faye Hammill, Ashlie Sponenberg, Esme Miskimmin, Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950.

For a taste of the kind of serious yet accessible writing that women of this period were doing, some of the novels in question are relatively easy to get hold of, having been reprinted by Virago or Persephone within recent years, and some have seldom or ever been out of print, at least in the UK: Winifred Holtby, South Riding, E M Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, E Arnot Robertson, Ordinary Families. I'd recommend all of these, even if I also think it's a pity that Delafield and Gibbons tend to be known only for these particular books, wonderful as they are, when they wrote a great deal more that is very impressive. A novel I wish someone would reprint is G B Stern's The Woman in the Hall, a wonderful study of a con-woman which is all about story-telling, truth, artistry, deception and self-deception; or her The Augs: an exaggeration about the increasingly pathological hostility of the permanent residents of a seaside resort towards the annual influx of summer visitors. I'd also suggest Lettice Cooper's The New House and National Provincial, Holtby's The Crowded Street, Land of Green Ginger and Mandoa, Mandoa, E Arnot Robertson's Four Frightened People, F Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow, Storm Jameson's Delicate Monster (included with two other short novels in Women Against Men). Rebecca West's outstanding work of the interwar period is the massive and magisterial Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an account of travelling through Yugoslavia that is also a meditation upon history, politics, gender, and the meaning and importance of artistic creation; a briefer introduction to her work might be the collection of novellas, The Harsh Voice, or her 1957 novel The Fountain Overflows

Timmi: I know only a few of the works you mention (though many of the authors). I, too, think Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show an amazing novel. (And now I want to sit down and reread it immediately!) I hadn't, though, heard of G.B. Stern: and now I'm dying to get my hands on The Woman in the Hall (such an unassuming-sounding title) and The Augs: an exaggeration (such a very provocative title). Thanks very much, Lesley.

More on Covers

The worst book cover I've ever had was for A Woman of the Iron People. A woman in a low cut dress, who appears to be southern European, possibly Carman or the gypsy in Il Trovatore who throws the wrong baby in the fire, holds a human or hominid skull toward us. The woman is not in the novel. As far as I can remember, no one in the novel ever holds a skull.

I asked my editor about the cover. It's been a long time, and I'm not sure my memory is clear. But I think I remember him telling me that my heroine was nonwhite; and in those days -- 1991 -- it was common wisdom that you couldn't put nonwhites on the cover of an SF novel. So they put someone else entirely on the cover. I assume she was holding a skull so readers would realize that the book was anthropological SF; and maybe it hinted at death and violence, always attractive in a novel. I assume her bosom was falling out of her dress, because it was common wisdom that SF is read by boys and young men.

Karen Axness at A Room of One's Own in Madison had to beg customers to buy my novel, because the cover was so repellent.

This year at ICFA David Hartwell explained to me how such covers happen. He was not talking about Woman, but Melissa Scott's Shadow Man.

You hire an artist who has done good work in the past. He turns in something ghastly; and you don't have money in the budget to commission a second painting. So you go with the ghastly cover, even though an intern with a Mac could do something better for free.

Well, that is one explanation, and doubtless it is true.

There used to be a cataloger at the Hennepin County Library System here in Minnesota. His name was Sandy Berman, and he was interested in how cataloging can be used to control information and make sure that unpopular information cannot be found, even though it is in the library, readily available to anyone who can figure out how to find it. Sandy had a national rep and the respect of many librarians, but he was not popular with his bosses and was finally pushed into retirement.

In any case, I keep wondering -- sour person that I am -- if novels are sometimes sabotaged more or less by accident, by making them difficult to find. Any number of people can do it -- the editor, the artist, people in marketing, buyers at chains...

The editor is the least likely suspect. Why would he sabotage a book he's bought? But the book's survival is dependent on so many people, and so dependent on fitting into the right slot.

A Handful of Links

You’ll find my review of Tricia Sullivan’s most recent novels, Double Vision and Sound Mind, up today at Strange Horizons. http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/05/double_vision_a.shtml

At <http://ktempest.livejournal.com/187256.html> Angry Blackwoman (aka Tempest Bradford) is seeking help with describing (for Gordon Van Gelder) what she means by the characterizations “penis” and “vagina” stories as she valiantly struggles to shed some light on the lack of space for certain kinds of stories in the genre’s leading short fiction markets.

This isn’t new, just new to me: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/054/merrick.shtml. This is a paper titled “Alien(ating) Naturecultures: Feminist SF as Creative Science Studies” by Helen Merrick, examining “the potential of feminist science fictions to act as ‘cross-cultural’ narratives in encounters between the humanities and sciences. Merrick argues that the conjunction of disciplines figured by the term “science fiction” bears re-examination as a resource for science studies, and a potential mediator in science-humanities dialogues.”

Those who’ve been reading the Marq’ssan Cycle will understand my interest in the World Social Forum. Here’s a piece by Walden Bello <http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4196> that argues that the WSF is at a crossroads, at least partly because of the nature of coalition politics (which are, of course, a vital aspect of all progressive activism).

And finally, perhaps because I recently reread Pat Murphy’s very fine “Rachel in Love” (with an accompanying essay by Joan Haran, in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, ed. Justine Larbalestier): William J. Kole’s AP story, “Activists Want Chimp Declared a ‘Person’” <http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/05/1000/>, about a court case involving a Viennese chimp who is in danger of becoming homeless because the animal shelter he’s been living in has just gone bankrupt. The activists’ definition of “person” is interesting, when considered vis-à-vis the Bush’s Administration’s policies: “We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions.”

More about Catagories (and Covers)

My second novel, To the Resurrection Station, is a science fiction gothic romance. It was written circa 1974 and finally came out in the mid 80s. Originally, it was supposed to come out from Baen Books. Betsy Mitchell was there at the time and commissioned the perfect cover. In the foreground was a woman in a windswept ballgown. Behind her and leaning gently toward her was a male figure. In the background was a house with a single lit window. The male figure was a robot, and part of the house was a spaceship, which was taking off. Everything on the cover, including the scrolling romance fiction font, was true to the novel's plot and tone. I loved it.

A week or two before the book was due to come out, Betsy called me and said it had been pulled from production.

Why? I screamed.

The buyers from Walden Books and Dalton's hated the cover. It looked like a romance novel. It would confuse the readers.

But it will be shelved in science fiction, spine out, with the word "science fiction" on the spine, I said.

We can't publish the book, if Waldenbooks and Dalton's won't buy it, Betsy said. We will have to come up with a new cover.

Well, as it turned out, I ran into trouble with Jim Baen over my next novel. He read it and spotted all the places where my politics surfaced, and wanted each political reference changed from left to right.

So my agent pulled both novels from Baen, and Avon published both of them with terrible covers, which say very clearly, "This is SF."

A Brief Conversation with Nisi Shawl

Timmi: Nisi, you have a new story out “She’s Only A Dream,” <http://www.trabucoroad.com/stories/only_a_dream.html> in the March issue of Trabuco Road. It’s a story told by “an old man named Roscoe,” reminiscing about a mysterious woman who goes by the name of “Laura,” who seems, among other things, to be a sort of shapeshifter more in the way that Jo(e) Sands in Kelley Eskridge’s “And Salome Danced” is a shapeshifter than, say Octavia Butler’s Anyanwu; only instead of altering the body’s sexual appearance as Jo(e) Sands does, she (and I do have the sense that Laura/Annie is fundamentally female, unlike Jo(e) Sands) alters the body’s racial appearance. That’s a very neat conceit. Another wonderful feature of the story is its evocation of a “Darktown” Kansas City jazz club and the flavor of its dialogue.

Because of the narrative structure in which the story is told and the swift transformation of characters’ identities, the reader is left with a lot of questions. Would you talk about that, and about how you got the idea for creating such a character? And—since she is so enigmatic—will you be writing more about her?

Nisi: Timmi, thanks for the questions. It's lovely to find out that someone so discriminating reads my work.

Story ideas, as you know, come at you from multiple places. Sometimes they seem unrelated; sometimes they accumulate over years.

When I was 11 I read Thomas Pynchon's novel V. I found the paperback in the bookshelf at the head of my parents' bed and figured it must be dirty, i.e. about sex, so I read it cover to cover looking for the good parts. You can imagine what that did to my grasp of the theme, etc. There are a couple of scenes in there about a woman named Laura that I can't recall at all clearly now, of course--got to get my own copy and re-read it. But I'm pretty sure that in one scene she's identified as white and in another as black.

That stuck with me because “passing” is a kind of social magic I'm deeply acquainted with as a light-skinned black woman. As a child, passing was mentioned in the sort of hushed, oblique manner reserved for sex: “She's passing now.” “Wouldn't be surprised if she tried to pass.” People who passed--who assumed a white identity though born black--were like vampires, alive but lost to the living. And in fact my paternal grandfather deserted his wife (my father's mother), moved from small-town Michigan (Vandalia) to Toledo, Ohio, and passed. I saw him once; he visited our suburban home in Kalamazoo wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a cowboy hat and playing a guitar. He sang country and western songs. His name was Vandeleur.

When Vandeleur died my father went to his funeral and shocked his half-sister with his obvious Negritude. Vandeleur had married a white woman, and had sired (as far as they knew) several white kids.

I know other stories like this. That's why I view race as both a very important category and one that's entirely mutable. I think that the power in “But She's Only a Dream” lies in the ability to move from one state to another. That's what I'm interested in, and that's what I focus on.

Listen closely, though, and you will hear me heave a virtual sigh when it comes to the charge of not answering readers' questions. I hear that one all the time! Maybe my childhood involvement with drama caused me to take too seriously the advice to “Always leave ’em wanting more.” I had never considered writing further about Laura or her supplicant. In fact, this version of “But She's Only a Dream” is greatly expanded from the original--it's about three times as long as my earlier attempt.

What I was trying to do in this story is something I think I failed to achieve. I wanted to give an account of an ordinary mortal's encounter with a Muse from the Muse's point of view. Nope. Didn't happen.

But I am glad you like the mood, which I cribbed entirely from jam sessions I sat in on in the basements of affluent white high school kids....How's that for racial shapeshifting?

Timmi: What you say emboldens me to suggest that “But She’s Only a Dream,” like the phenomenon of passing, offers a way into understanding one of the essential aspects of the category of race (which—since this fact can never be repeated too often—is cultural rather than biological, as the human genome study definitively proved), viz., its mutability (much more so than many of us have realized is the case for gender).

I also would like to add that it’s a Good Thing that the success and value of a story doesn’t hinge on an evaluation of its author’s intentions. Beyond that, I hope my reading isn’t responsible for your deciding you failed to achieve “an account of an ordinary mortal’s encounter with a Muse from the Muse’s point of view.” I did in fact get that, but my own lack of interest in the whole Muse thing (which I confess I’ve never really gotten) and thus my minimal ability to delight in a feminist subversion of it may be partly responsible for my not mentioning it in my question. It’s perfectly possible other readers will read the story as you intended. Or, indeed, in a completely different way than I read it or you intended it. In any case, I enjoyed the story, both for its aesthetic qualities and for it’s giving me something to think about.

Nisi: Timmi, I had decided long before I even submitted the story to be published that it failed to do what I'd originally wanted it to do. And that this was okay. I'll try again, maybe.

Did I mention how thrilled I am to have you compare it to "And Salome Danced"? Very.

Timmi: Why do you think we call it the grand conversation?

The first issue of the Aqueduct Gazette is hot off the press!

Now available for download from Aqueduct’s site: the first issue of The Aqueduct Gazette. The Gazette contains news about Aqueduct’s books as well as two essays: one by Rosaleen love on the uses and pleasures of satire and speculative fiction, and another by L. Timmel Duchamp on the author-reader relationship. Plus it tells you how to enter a drawing to win an Aqueduct book of your choice. To download the issue now, go to www.aqueductpress.com and click on the Aqueduct Gazette button on the left-hand frame.

Another Gendered Narrative

By Nancy Jane Moore

Natalie Angier approached the work of the X and Y chromosomes in a highly entertaining gendered narrative in her column in this week's New York Times Science Times.

She began with this job description for the X chromosome:

Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world's illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don't exist.

I tend to have little patience with the all-powerful mother view as usually presented in our culture -- mostly because I think it's intended to make women comfortable with powerlessness -- but Angier is the best newspaper science writer in the business and I trusted her to do more with her metaphor. She did not disappoint.

After pointing out that the Y chromosome carries very little information compared with the X -- since its purpose is "male-making" -- she ended with this commentary:

Every daughter, then, is a walking mosaic of clamorous and quiet chromosomes, of fatherly sermons and maternal advice, while every son has but his mother's voice to guide him. Remember this, fellows: you are all mama's boys.

Immediately I thought of the overwhelming importance men have placed on having sons throughout history -- an image burned into my brain by countless books and movies -- and I began to snicker. The one thing that makes a fertilized egg develop into male instead of female does virtually nothing else to represent the male it comes from. The X chromosome, with its 1,100 characteristics compared to the Y's 50, does most of the work.

Now I know that only some characteristics are passed through the X chromosome and that we are all a mix of our biological parents, but still this particular gendered narrative amuses me: A son is supposed to be the most important thing in a man's life, and yet in making that child a son instead of a daughter, a man insures that some of his genetic heritage is lopped away.

Snicker.

Science, Speculation and Gendered Narratives

Timmi's post is weirdly coincidental as I was teaching a Masters session on Media, Health and Science at Cardiff University today, and one of the issues we were discussing was the distinction made in various 'factual' media forms between illegitimate speculation about the future - science fiction - and legitimate speculation about the future: the language of potential and promise or the use of modelling tools for extrapolation - and how sfnal is that? Legitimate speculation is authorised by the taken-for-granted expertise of the speculators - scientists, regulators and legislators heavily invested in the science = progress model, or of the genres in which they publish - although peer-reviewed scientific journals have come in for much criticism - external and internal - of late in the wake of significant scientific frauds such as the claim by Professor Hwang of Seoul National University to have produced patient-specific stem cell lines via therapeutic cloning.

But as to the gendering of this speculation, the ways in which biological processes are imagined and the effects this has on research programmes, check out the work of Evelyn Fox Keller. Her analysis of the use of gendered root metaphors in the conceptualisation of science can be found in the titles Reflections on Science and Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. Emily Martin's work in The Woman in the Body also points to the ways in which the process of fertilisation of women's eggs by men's sperm was rendered in biological textbooks as a narrative of romantic conquest with active questing sperm, and passive receptive eggs. More recent texts represent a more equal co-operative enterprise, only thinkable, she argues, once gendered inequality had been raised as a social issue. Apologies to Fox Keller and Martin for sketchy late night renderings of their work, but it is superb and highly to be recommended - along with the work of Rose and, of course, Donna Haraway for their sensitivity to the material impacts that narratives - linguistic and visual - have on the practice of science and on gendered social relations writ large.

Imagination, Language, and Narrative in the Practice of Science

Speaking of language, imagination, & the irresistible force of narrative—checking out the April 20 issue of Science, which has a special section on germ cells, I was struck by the prominent role imagination is playing in a piece of fascinating research being undertaken by a developmental biologist—and also by the narrative-laden language used to characterize cellular processes in a couple of the other papers and articles in the special section.

An article titled “A Close Look Urbisexuality: A developmental biologist takes aim at understanding the evolutionary origins of eggs and sperm in our 600-million-year-old ancestor” by John Travis invokes the power of imagination before it even mentions Cassandra Extavour and her work. What, you may wonder is “urbisexuality”? If you haven’t heard of “Urbilateria,” a “hypothetical organism that lived 550 million to 800 million years ago and was the last common ancestor of a menagerie that includes mollusks, worms, flies, mice, and people,” then you’re probably thinking it has something to do with urban bisexuality. Get ready for something completely different: Travis tells us that “scientists have vigorously debated whether [urbilateria] sported legs or antennae, whether it had a true heart, and whether its body was segmented.” In short, urbilateria is a sort of methodological construct, a fiction created by scientists, though not what we here in sf-land think of as “science fiction.” This speculative construct serves the serious purpose of helping biologists theorize how “the current diversity of bilaterians emerged form the twists and turns of evolution.”

Interestingly (perhaps significantly?), Extavour notes that although “so much of evo-devo over the last 20 years centered on what Urbilateria looked like,” no one ever wondered how it reproduced. After raising that very question, Extavour took on the task of answering the question. (& it is she who coined the term “urbisexuality.”) The rest of the article discusses Extavour’s work and its significance (including its prompting her to “rethink the evolutionary connections between primordial germs cells, which ultimately make sperm and eggs, and the stem cells that give rise to other tissues”). A far-ranging, disciplined imagination is obviously essential for the kind of science Extavour does.

That’s the most interesting piece, for me, in the issue. In a couple of the other articles and papers, though, the anthropomorphic language used distracted me. Here, imagination is neither free-ranging nor disciplined to the extent that applies anthropomorphic language to single, non-conscious cells. Take the article titled “The Mysteries of Sexual Identity: The Germ Cell’s Perspective,” for example. In the one-paragraph abstract at the top of the paper, the authors write: “…how do germ cells interpret those external cues to acquire their own sexual identity? A critical aspect of a germ cell’s sexual puzzle is that the sperm-egg decision is closely linked to the cell-cycle decision between mitosis and meiosis…” Cells, it seem, exercise agency: they interpret, they make decisions, they have sexual puzzles; in short, they are caught up in a dramatic narrative arc: which makes me wonder whether the authors of the paper really believe that individual cells possess consciousness. (But no, this is yet another kind of science fiction. It’s all about germ cells “choosing” their “sexual identity,” as the authors call it.) It gets better. In Figure 1, we see depictions of two models of decision-making: in the first model, “sex-specific control of meiotic entry is equivalent to the sperm/egg decision,” while in the second model “gender-neutral control of meiotic entry is modified by sex-specific regulators.”

“Gender-neutral”? Say what? Is “gender” not a term associated with culture? How can germ cells, which are presumably not sentient, have culture? I must admit that I’ve run into other uses of this before, where “gender” (not “sex”) is attributed to rats or dogs: a clear indication that scientists, like the general public, have simply substituted the word “gender” (which began to be used by feminist theorists to designate something other than a linguistic category) for “sex” because “sex” has become an uncomfortable word. (This substitution of “gender” for “sex” is often applied anachronistically to pre-1970s contexts. For instance, sometime back in the 1980s I saw a BBC episode of the David Suchet Poirot series in which a 1920s feminist was constantly talking about “gender.”)

Obviously, such anthropomorphic language is unnecessary (since not all the articles use it & at certain points in the article the authors shed the language of agency: “What molecular machinery inside germ cells directs their differentiation as sperm or egg?”); it seems such a risky choice to use it that I wonder why they do. Joan and Helen will know more about this issue than I, but I seem to recall that philosopher of science Hillary Rose has written about the ways in which the use of sexual narratives have demonstrably distorted science practice by obscuring what was really going on; these aren’t quite sexual narratives, but they are certainly anthropomorphic narratives.

Homophobic language and "femiphobia"

In today’s Los Angeles Times, Mark Dery, the editor of Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture has an op-ed titled “Wimps, Wussies and W: How Americans’ Infatuation With Masculinity Has Perilous Consequences.” (You can find a reprint of the piece over at Commondreams.org.) In the last paragraph he self-consciously notes: “OK, so maybe I’m overstepping the bounds of my Learning Annex degree in pop psychology,” presumably to beg some slack from the reader inclined to dismiss what he says as sheer polemic. But what he’s in fact polemicizing about is the typically polemical language of far right-wing pundits like Ann Coulter that gets a largely free pass from cultural critics and other pundits as long as it doesn’t cross certain lines (the way Imus’s recent remark apparently did). Homophobic language, for instance, gets a free pass, and that’s the focus of Dery’s polemic:

Our tradition of demonizing political opponents is founded on homophobic innuendo. Camille Paglia derided Al Gore for his “prissy, lisping Little Lord Fauntleroy persona” that “borders on epicene.” John Kerry was deemed too “French” — meaning too much of a girlie man — to be commander in chief. Now Edwards is too heteroflexible; only Straight Guys with a Queer Eye get $400 haircuts, right?

George W. Bush learned an unforgettable lesson about the anxious nature of American masculinity when Newsweek branded his father a “wimp,” a perception Bush 41 never really overcame. The resolve never to look like a wimp is the key to Dubya’s psychology: the you-talkin’-to-me pugnacity at news conferences; the Top Gun posturing on the aircraft carrier, in a crotch-gripping flight suit that moved G. Gordon Liddy to swoon — on “Hardball,” for Freud’s sake — “what a stud.”

Doesn’t all this machismo and locker-room homophobia protest a little too much? What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it produces Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, “Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!”

What particularly interests me is Dery’s citation of a book by clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity and his assertion that “The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it’s maintained by frantically repressing every man’s feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them.” Ducat, he says, “calls this state of mind ‘femiphobia’—a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that “the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.”

Certainly Dery’s conclusions are not at all surprising:

But the hidden costs of our overcompensatory hypermachismo are far worse than a few politicians slimed by pundits. The horror in Iraq has been protracted past the point of lunacy by George W.’s bring-it-on braggadocio, He-Ra unilateralism and damn-the-facts refusal to acknowledge mistakes — all hallmarks of a pathological masculinity that confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength. It is founded not on a self-assured sense of what it is but on a neurotic loathing of what it secretly fears it may be: wussy. And it will go to the grave insisting on battering-ram stiffness (stay the course! don’t pull out!) as the truest mark of manhood.

Here were are, faced again with the politics of narrative. (D'uh.)

“Femiphobia” is apparently different from gynophobia, though the distinction is not inferable from the context in which Dery uses the term, though I suspect it may have more to do with unconscious/subconscious fear of female cooties than with overt hatred for women. In any case, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the notion of “femiphobia” (or gynophobia or any equivalent thereof) used in quite this way to explicate the language of homophobia.

I wonder why it is that I have the lurking suspicion that “femiphobia” in the sense in which Dery uses it might be at play in some of the discussions raging elsewhere in the sf blogsophere latey.

Participating in a long tradition

I'm delighted to be a part of this blog, because one of my interests as a historian is in virtual communities before the internet. We tend to think of the way people relate in a computer-facilitated fashion as a completely new thing, but in my work on women and progressive movements during the earlier 20th century I've come across a number of phenomena that one could legitimately call 'virtual communities', involving connections and discussions between individuals who were not physically present to one another.

Many of these centred around periodicals. In Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' sequence, Martha Quest, living in a backward British colony in Central Africa, believes she has identified a kindred spirit when she discovers that the man she had just met is a reader of the New Statesman. But as well as providing a means of recognising sympathetic others, radical periodicals provided a forum for debate and connection in themselves.

In 1911 the suffragette Dora Marsden established The Freewoman to discuss a range of issues relating to women's position in society that she believed were being ignored by the suffrage organisations in their focus on obtaining the vote. It was regarded as a dangerous and subversive publication even among feminists, in particular because of its determination to discuss matters to do with sexuality. Its correspondence columns provided a vibrant forum for vigorous discussions, and the facilities it offered for the ventilation of seldom-mentioned issues eventually led to the setting up of real life, real time Discussion Circles. But it also provided a means by which isolated feminists could feel themselves part of a wider community.

Recently published in the UK, Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship Through a Secret Magazine provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a group of women who formed a correspondence club following a letter to the magazine Nursery World from a lonely young mother seeking other women interested in reading and discussing ideas and thoughts. These women, who at that time found no other outlet for their education and ambitions, wrote and circulated letters about their lives, commented on those of others, and kept this going for several decades. They wrote under pseudonymns, but one of them is identifiable as Elaine Morgan (The Descent of Woman) and another is known to be Rose Hacker, a politically active north Londoner who was involved in the marriage guidance movement and a pioneer in sex education. Bailey's book gives a tiny glimpse into the rich surviving archive of the Cooperative Correspondence Club and the importance of this kind of virtual community to its members. (There are reviews here, here, here and here.)

There are other examples of similar circles finding commonalties and sympathies over distance and through time independently of actual face to face encounters (though these sometimes resulted). The internet has certainly brought vast changes to the processes by which this has come about, but I think there is this longer history of people, and perhaps particularly women? reaching out to find the like minds that they did not find in their immediate vicinity.

The Resurgence of Feminist Science Fiction

By Nancy Jane Moore

In January 2006 I gave a talk at the Library of Congress here in Washington, D.C., on what I see as a resurgence in feminist science fiction. My thoughts on that subject seemed an appropriate way to start out my contributions to Ambling Along the Aqueduct, so here is a slightly edited version of my speech:

To talk about the current situation in feminist science fiction, I think it's necessary to look briefly at a history of feminism. One thing we frequently forget about feminism is how very recent it is. It dates loosely back to the late 18th Century and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women -- a little over two hundred years. Given that the human race has been around for several hundred thousand years, a couple of hundred years is virtually nothing. And in the reality of science fiction -- where we often extrapolate futures hundreds, even thousands, of years from now and frequently speculate on increased human life span -- a couple of hundred years is a mere blip.

Modern feminism started as a movement in the mid-19th Century. That first blitz of activity in the US ended with women getting the right to vote in 1920. To put that in perspective: When my father -- who is still hale and hearty at 88 -- was born, his mother didn't have the right to vote. The automobile is older than that -- both my grandmothers owned automobiles and drove everywhere before they were allowed to vote.

While women made some progress over the first half of the 20th Century -- changes in divorce and property rights law -- the next real wave of feminism was in the 1960s and 70s. That's all within the last 30 to 40 years -- not long at all.

There are lots of reasons for the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s. It was a time of great social ferment, including the Civil Rights Movement. And, in fact, the 19th Century movement was tied into major social change, too, with the abolitionists. But one key element of the new feminism of the 60s was scientific in nature: The Pill. That advance was tied in with activism, because most of the legal decisions that gave people the right to contraception came in the 1960s themselves, culminating in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Feminism is connected to science – particularly to biology.

And science fiction has always had a feminist connection -- the boys of the Golden Age notwithstanding. You can find a significant number of science fiction stories by 19th Century women authors, often about inventions that reduce the backbreaking work of pre-industrial housekeeping or about the relationship between men and women. Many of these fiction writers were also activists -- abolitionists and suffragists.

The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s produced an amazing amount of excellent feminist science fiction -- many consider the feminist work of that era the defining science fiction of the time. Obviously there's Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which is arguably the finest angry feminist novel in any genre of that time. But there are also Russ's other novels and stories, Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy, Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness (and also her short story "Winter's King," set in that same time and place, but playing with pronouns), Suzy McKee Charnas's work and --obviously -- James Tiptree, particularly in "The Women Men Don't See."

I was hungry for women authors back then and I read a lot of the mainstream feminist fiction. Most of it was so angry as to be unreadable. Only in science fiction were people able to channel that anger into good fiction. I suspect that may be partly the effect of the science -- or maybe it's just the quality of science fiction writers.

But that was 30 odd years ago. We've spent those years integrating the social change brought by feminism and other social change movements, and while things are far from perfect -- witness the U.S. Supreme Court's recent abortion decision -- things are considerably different. Women have options today that we only dreamed of in 1965.

So a lot of people want to tell us that feminism did its job, that we've achieved social equality, and that there's no need for any kind of feminist movement, much less feminist science fiction.

But if that's the case, why are we seeing so much feminist science fiction? And even some feminist fantasy -- especially urban fantasy? There are several reasons:

1. As I said before: These changes are really new. We've have a sea change in the legal rights of women in the last half century and we're only now beginning to figure out what it all means. That confusion is working itself out in fiction.
2. We've made equally mind-altering progress in biology and, based on that, in medicine. The human genome project, cloning, genetic modification, sex change operations as a regular medical practice -- all of these things have the capacity to raise fundamental questions about the real meaning of gender and they're just the things that are already going on. (I've commented before -- and I'm far from alone -- that we're actually living in the future predicted by the Golden Age of SF.) Science fiction is the most obvious place to work out those issues, because you can take the facts just a few steps beyond what we can do now and open up a brand new can of worms. And there's the potential of taking this a few hundred years into the future and coming up with some very different conceptions of gender.
3. Religious fundamentalists -- from many different religions -- are attacking women's freedoms. This ranges from the Christian right here in the US attacking birth control and abortion to the fundamentalist Muslims who require women to wear the burqa and otherwise limit their actions. Certainly there have been some major changes in religion brought by feminism, but those changes have energized the fundamentalist opposition.

The feminist science fiction being published these days is not nearly as angry as The Female Man. It's also not as focused on some old ideas of the differences between men and women -- with an assumption that women are superior (though there certainly are scientific discussions these days on our differences). And it's not just being written by women.

I see four types of feminist SF and fantasy out there:

1. There are a lot of stories that fall into the "Sword and Sorceress" format – meaning they are similar to the short stories Marion Zimmer Bradley bought for that series. Sword & Sorceress was fantasy, but similar stories exist in space opera: essentially adventure stories in which women have the major adventures. As someone who loves adventure stories, and who grew very tired of having to identify with the male characters, I love these stories. Women wrote a lot of them in the 80s and 90s, and now a lot of men are writing them as well. Many of these stories don't exactly provide thoughtful feminism, though; I recently tried to read one of the Honor Harrington books and gave up in frustration. Here we had this future society in which women supposedly had full equality, coming up against a throwback sexist society, and Honor reacts with all the issues and concerns of a modern day female government official dealing with Saudi Arabia. I'd like to think that after a few hundred years of gender equality, both women and men would be confused and puzzled by such a throwback, that their reactions would be something completely new and different.
2. There are a lot of more complex works that tell the stories of women acting in the world in a much broader scope than the roles allowed them in the past. I'd put my book Changeling in that category. It's a coming of age story, but the coming of age aspect involves learning to deal with power -- that of others and that of oneself.
3. There are many stories by male authors, and about male characters, that are looking at gender issues as well. It's no accident that several recent Tiptree winners, John Kessell, M. John Harrison, Matt Ruff, Joe Haldeman, and Geoff Ryman are male. These issues are no longer of interest only to women.
4. And finally, there is some very sophisticated science fiction that takes up the possibilities that are opening up from biology -- and artificial intelligence as well -- and makes us re-think everything we've ever thought we understood about gender. We no longer need to come up with aliens who have different genders -- one or three or half a dozen or none; we can create all these variations for ourselves out of human beings.

All of these types of stories are important, because all of them are helping us figure out what our social changes mean. But it is the last type that really use science and fiction to help us work out what gender will mean in the future. I've played in this area myself -- in fact I have become very fond of creating humans who are both male and female. But my favorite example of this type of SF is Gwyneth Jones's book Life (pictured above). This book is set in the future of the day after tomorrow, so the characters are struggling with the integration of the changes brought by the feminist movement. The main character, Anna, a biologist, is also studying what she calls "transferred Y" -- a chunk of bases from the y chromosome moving over to the X. The book is ultimately about what such changes on the genetic level mean for human beings, as well as being about the life of Anna and some of the people she knows in a complicated world just a few years from now.

A new heyday of feminist SF is upon us -- not just because of movements for social equality, but because science is raising the same questions. Coupled with the rise in the small presses and the better online publishing experiments, we're going to see more and more fiction that challenges us to think about what it really means to be human -- and what, if anything, -- gender has to do with it.

Life on the edge

I was going to call this 'postcard from the edge' but decided it was more appropriate for me to steal from a Australian feminist cartoonist (apologies, Judy Horacek!*) rather than a Hollywood blockbuster. Thinking I had better get my first post over with before I got too overwhelmed by everyone else's erudition I want to share some thoughts about feminist/sf community here from my little spot in the 'most isolated city in the world'.

Until a few weeks ago, if you had asked me about my feeling of connection with the feminist sf community the reply would have been limited at best. Apart from continually buying what books I can, and lurking on fem-sf , my connection was really only sustained by the broader sense of the 'grand conversation' that Timmi talks of - aided in no small measure by the wonderful texts Timmi and Aqueduct have made available (and they ship my goodies so quickly too!) Things changed over the easter weekend, when, for the first time in a long time, I attended our local sf convention, Swancon. (Yes despite our isolation, and the fact that Perth's population is only just over 1 million, we have a very healthy con that has been running over 30 years - this years GOH was Elizabeth Moon! and we've even had Lois!).

I'd missed the last few years due to very advanced pregnancy, then having a one year old, etc.. and the last few I had attended hadn't engaged me, as it seemed the feminist and women's content was diminishing. What I discovered this year was that it hadn't disappeared, it had just gone underground. A group of long term and younger fans were running a simultaneous 'gynaecon', which in good feminist fashion was running in the interstices of the con, in rooms and - deliberately calling on femmefannish history - being advertised by daily notes in the women's toilets (bathrooms). I couldn't make any of these panels (such as fat, feminism and fandom) but connected with some wonderful women, all of whom attended my 'paper'. It was meant to be a formal paper, but we ended up in a big circle (with babies and toddlers in the middle) talking about women, science, biology while I raved about the wonders of Gwyneth Jone's Life. Many of these women are also involved in running a 'femmecon' - a women only conference/retreat to talk about feminism and women's issues in general- later in the year.

Suddenly I feel revitalised! All the thing I read, research and write about, but rarely discuss with anyone (except close friend and sf writer Tess Williams, also in Perth) were important to people outside my little academic hideyhole. Even though I could have gotten into such discussions on various online forums, it has made a difference having local connections, and I'm not quite sure why. It could be the fact that so many feminist sf forums are predominantly American, or the fact that given my 'online load' at work I rarely want to spend 'fun time' online. But it can't quite be that, as I'm spending more time online now reading the local women's LJs... Perhaps it is just the pull of co-location and the potential for ftf meetings which supplement and enrich online communities.

In any case, I won't feel quite as sad and wistful this year when I read about wiscon (having only managed to attend one wiscon over 10 years ago now) and all the fun you'll be having. That's the trouble of living in the most isolated city ... it costs a lot to get anywhere else :-)


* see more of Horacek's wonderful cartoons - she has a new cartoon 'topic' every month. Get her books if you can - they are fabulous!

Categories

I'm posting a brief note to show that I am in fact here, and to mention two thoughts that came to me in Barnes and Noble on Sunday. Why was I in a B & N? Because that's mostly what we have left, though two fine SF bookstores do survive in Minneapolis. But I was in Bloomington at the Magamall, and the B & N was convenient.

One thought was that fiction categories seem to be blurring more and more. I was thinking this as I tried to find books that might be in SF or mystery or even romance. My friend Lyda Morehouse, writing as Tate Hallaway, is doing vampire chick lit that can be shelved as either romance or fantasy. Liz Williams' wonderful Inspector Chen fantasies are shelved as mysteries in the Minneapolis Public Library. They are mysteries -- with Chinese demons and ghosts and gods. Jennifer Stevenson told me that she is writing fiction for an SF line, which is going to be published with romance on the spine.

The other thought was -- for me, SF is like literary or fine art or whatever you want to call it poetry. (I thought this as I bought a collection of Adrienne Rich's poetry.) My friend Ruth Berman has been selling to literary magazines for years. She says she always has trouble with her stories, because they aren't realistic. But her poetry is easy to place, even though it is often SF or fantasy.

In the US, poetry is not popular, but SF is. I suspect they serve much the same purpose.

I suspect categories are important or were important. What does it say that they are breaking down and have been breaking down for years?

Traditionally, there was a class component to categories. There were kinds of fiction aimed at working people and other kinds aimed at educated middle class people.

Blog posts should be short. I will stop here.

I know this post is obvious. Maybe I will find something insightful to say on the topic later.