April 27th, 2007
by
Liz Henry
Don’t miss Gwyneth Jones’ essay on A Door into Ocean, feminism, and SF.
The wall is when economically liberated women, readers and writers, have to face the fact that when patriarchy goes, we all go.
No one is born a woman. No one is born a man.
Jones has a very interesting analysis of what it means to write violence, oppression, and torture — “real violence” or “fantasy violence”.
I’d love to hear Joan Slonczewski, Timmi Duchamp, and Gwyneth have a discussion about feminist sf and violence and “the easy route” of pulp fiction with space babes or bitterness and essentialism or speaking truth to power or some combo of those things, because they all get deep into those questions.
Actually, put Mary Gentle (I am still reeling from the implications of Ancient Light) on that imaginary Wiscon panel as well…
I don’t think that as critics we have described canons and the literary movement of the 70s feminist sf that Gwyneth talks about. While there is a core of people who know what the heck she means, there are so many who don’t and it would be good to explain that very clearly.
Gwyneth goes on to say,
You can’t have the goals of feminism, if you want to keep the Great Divide. And we, we in the editorial and every other sense: everyone, including myself, we do not want to lose the Great Divide. Some greater force, some Invisible Hand is going to have to take that final step, and let the other shoe drop.
Here is where we go next, the other shoe dropping, but what do we mean by it if we say it? Somehow I don’t think my “Deconstruct Binary Gender” quite covers it. So right up to this point in Gwyneth’s essay I’m right there with her and at this point it becomes uncharted territory for me. There’s still a point with complicated books where I think “this is too much for me, I kind of see it, but I’m not there yet.” Across the Acheron is that way for me. I see a certain percentage but I know when I’m 60 it will look very different.
Thanks to kateelliott for the link!
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Liz Henry at
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Filed under Books & Literature, feminism | Comments (3)
I gotta read Golden Witchbreed, and then Ancient Light. Across the Acheron — had to Google it to find the author. Monique Wittig, yes? So many books, so little time…
Back to the topic Jones & you were addressing: my reading of Christine Delphy has been the most radical influence on my understanding of gender, lately. Because: what is gender? Where does the division come from? That’s the kind of question she’s asking, and trying to answer.
And I wish I had her book, Penser le genre, to quote from here, but I returned the library copy I read some time ago, and the one I ordered to purchase hasn’t arrived yet. There’s a passage in one of her essays where she talks about the necessity of utopias, of imagining what isn’t in order to understand what is. This touches directly on the importance of feminist SF.
* “Speaking bitterness in a society that oppresses women, but doesn’t know it (such as the sf community, as addressed by “seventies feminism”), is brave, but it’s easy.”
* “Celebrating the feminine, the womb above the penis, motherhood, lesbian starship captains, sexy cyberbabes, is easy too.”
* “It’s all easy, as long as la lutte continue.”
The thing that struck me about Jones’ Life and, often, strikes me about Tepper’s fiction: There are no easy solutions because there are no solutions that we can come up with. In a way, that’s the easiest solution of all: It’s “easy” because it’s deus ex machina. The only thing that can save humanity is something completely unforeseen and out of our control. In this essay, Jones seems depressed that we haven’t conquered the “Great Divide” — she even says that “Some greater force, some Invisible Hand is going to have to take that final step, and let the other shoe drop. This was the lesson I faced, personally, in the late nineties.”
I wouldn’t have put Jones and Tepper together before, but there it is, and it helps me make better sense of Jones’ fiction as I’ve been reading it over the years.
… But it struck me how Jones defines two other approaches to feminist SF and calls them “easy”. All the lesbian starship captains and the ass-kicking girl heroes and what-not: I agree it’s easy, but I’m not sure I agree it’s easy in the same way that Jones thinks. I think it’s easy because they are very precisely imaginings without gender. These works embody an imagined society in which only one thing has changed: gender and biological sex don’t matter any more except for their crudest biological function, reproduction (and in many books, the heterosexual romance that goes with it). Women can do whatever men do because gender doesn’t matter. The depoliticization of this “post feminist” world is, I think, easy. But I don’t see this as celebrating “essentially feminine values” and subbing female for male action heroes doesn’t actually engage with questions of gender and sex and society, really, at all. (Usually, anyway. Nicola Griffith did this quite deliberately in Ammonite: taking away men and revealing that, voilá, power structures and violence still exist because it turns out that women are human after all.)
And the pacifist-feminism in Slonczewski’s Door (and I would include Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing) is anything but easy. But I disagree with Slonczewski’s take on what Door is doing with gender (although she’s re-read it a lot more recently than me, so ….). I hear Jones saying that Slonczewski is “easy” (in terms of feminism) because they are associating all the good pacifist stuff with women and all the bad violent stuff with men. I disagree. I think she’s associating all the bad violent stuff with the patriarchy. Sure, Slonczewski eliminated the patriarchy by eliminating men, but that was all in the distant past; the struggle she shows in the story itself is clearly one in which men as well as women have to abandon the patriarchy. Ditto with The Ffth Sacred Thing: men as well as women have to abandon the (capitalistic militaristic environmentally exploitative) patriarchy. These authors aren’t reifying difference or glorifying the struggle; they’re abjuring violence in favor of pacifism. That style of pacifist-feminism has been a major trend in formal feminism for at least a hundred years, and I think it’s pretty distinct from an easy “men are the problem” approach.
Although pacifist-feminism, and Jones, associate pacifism with traditional feminine values, that is not the same thing as lodging responsibility for violence within men. (Tepper’s Gate and much of her other work work from that premise, though.) It certainly doesn’t celebrate the struggle in the vive la différence style that seems problematic to Jones. I see pacifist-feminism as much more about recognizing the hard truths that Jones talked about in her essay: that violence is awful; that it creates awful behaviors in its victims as well as its perpetrators; and that it is sex-biased in its perpetrators and victims. As Aung San Suu Kyi said, the fear of power corrupts those subjected to it, as well as power & the fear of losing it corrupts those who exercise it (paraphrased). The only way out of that struggle for pacifist-feminism is to commit to pacifism; to put pacifist practice first. I don’t think it’s easy at all, in practice or in fiction, and it’s certainly not “easy” in terms of feminism or feminist practice. Maybe she just means it’s easy in terms of attaining feminist goals because no specifically feminist practice is needed?
….
Hell, maybe it’s a nuance. I don’t want to pick nits. So what if I have different takes on what these various writers are doing in relation to gender. My real point is where is Jones going with this?
Journeys are deeply fascinating to me. How people deviate from, or not, the paths they’re set on by their parents and personal history. So Jones’ report of her journey to some sort of feminist existential despair is fascinating, although it’s really depressing. Reading Life and this essay, Jones has spent all this time living feminism only to discover that while gender is the problem, the only way to get rid of it is by getting rid of sex with a deus ex machina. I get that she’s not happy with the feminist visions of the gender-doesn’t-matter of the ass-kicking girl crowd or the easy essentialist visions of some SF or even the easy (or hard) choices of the pacifist-feminist crowd.
And clearly from a political and activist sense she’s not satisfied with either the stitch-and-bitch crowd “speaking bitterness” or the corrupt m/patriarchies — hey, who would. I see that she, like many of us, reads SF for its visionary potential — the old sense of wonder, and applying that imagination to visionary activism, steering our world toward this and away from that.
So where did Jones go on her journey? In this essay, she says that we can’t get there from here. We can’t do it for ourselves; we can’t change the world. We need an invisible boot kicking us in the butt to effect Real Change.
But what’s so strange to me is that on some level, Life was saying something very different than Jones is saying in this essay. In Life, there’s sexism, but there are also real people changing with the times. Setting the course of their own lives despite the pressures of the patriarchy, and showing real growth and change in individual consciousness even within the patriarchy. Isn’t that the revolutionary change? Isn’t that what life is? That’s what I took from Life: the way to live is with daily, personal struggle — yes it sucks on a daily basis but it’s ultimately revolutionary.
…
Well, even if you don’t buy the personal-struggles-make-the-revolution story I took from Life, Jones posed the question for us with her deus ex machina in Life: What’s the post-sex scenario? I guess imagining the post-sex scenario is pretty hard, but it’s not the singularity — we can make some pretty good guesses, and aren’t all these different writers giving us different pieces of the puzzle? Carnival by Elizabeth Bear and Donna Haraway’s cyberfeminism and Le Guin and Wittig and Dorsey’s Black Wine and Spencer’s A Brother’s Price and Butler and Duchamp and Bujold and Justina Robson and Liz Williams and Angela Carter and Kelley Eskridge … etc. As for what the post-gender thing will look like when it’s really here — well, I think it’s like porn; we’ll know it when we see it. It won’t be an up-against-the-wall-motherfucker come-the-revolution moment. It’ll be a moment of reflection when we say hey you know what? Despite the daily frustrations of life in the USA, I’m in a helluva lot better place than my mom was.
Michele (my girlfriend/semi-legal spouse) was at a passing-the-torch women’s movement event the last couple of days. She said some people wanted to keep studying the problem, but the scientists were all like, We know what the problem is already; let’s just fix it. I guess I’m having that moment too: Our SF is doing important work, helping us each in our own journeys — I don’t discount that importance of vision at all; I spend gajillion hours on it every year. That’s what literature is good for: reflecting and imagining. But after reading, then we’re in charge of booting up Visionary Activism 2.0. We know what the problem is, and we even know how to fix it, and actually, you know what? Despite Anthony Kennedy’s retro judicial paternalism and the ongoing bass-ackwardsness of religiousity in the world, we actually are fixing things. In all these small pissy annoying tedious going-to-meetings kinda ways, we’re seeing problems and we’re fixing them.
Screw the deus ex machina. I don’t think we need it anyway.
“real people changing with the times. Setting the course of their own lives despite the pressures of the patriarchy, and showing real growth and change in individual consciousness even within the patriarchy. Isn’t that the revolutionary change? Isn’t that what life is? ”
Oh beautiful! So, yes, I agree, in every way it can be true, but without falling into individual-choice-leading-away-from political and collective action, by some magic act of balance.
“feminist existential despair” does describe what I feel I face in my own future and what Wittig addresses in Across the Acheron. (Not that she has a magic answer; it’s just well described.)