Science Fiction and American Culture » August 28: Gender Studies and Science Fiction

August 28: Gender Studies and Science Fiction

Don’t forget to do the Weekly Discussion post “Introduce Yourself” before Thursday at 11:00pm.

Plan for Today

Gender Studies and Absolutes

This subject is going to be difficult for many of us. We tend to live in a binary world: right and wrong, black and white, us and them, male and female…we have little patience to contemplate ambiguity, especially when it’s as “fundamental” as gender. The attributes and behaviors of men and women, our gender roles, seem to be essential to what’s masculine and feminine. If something violates our assumptions, at best, we think it odd, and, at worst, we hate it. Having absolutes is comfortable to us because we don’t like to have our worldviews predicated on shaky assumptions.

Voltaire has a nice quote to contemplate: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

Unfortunately, ambiguity, doubt, and relativity are cultural conditions. We might try to ignore that or even avoid those in favor of our concrete perspectives, which are often un-examined convictions. In a class like this one that covers how culture influences the texts we read (and their creation), no absolute should remain unquestioned.

Gender is such an absolute that many don’t want questioned: men are men; women are women…why? Before we get farther into the discussion, let’s define some words:

  • Feminism: the social and political philosophy advocating the equality of all people regardless of gender.
  • Patriarchy: male dominated society; the powerful group in a society elevates male privilege and subordinates women.
  • Sexism: attitudes, assumptions, and stereotypes directed at a particular sex/gender; especially when these are related to women.*
  • Heteronormativity: the attitude that recognizes heterosexual relationships as the societal norm and ignores other possibilities.
  • Heterosexist: the belief that the only valid form of relationship is the heterosexual union between a man and a woman.
  • Phallocentrism: power is held and wielded by those in control of the phallus, the site of male power; male superiority based on the legitimate use of the phallus.
  • Exogamy: practice of marrying outside one’s group (family, culture, “race,” species–this is a Sci Fi class. Btw, who’s seen The Shape of Water? Great film).

*There is a theory that only men can be sexist in patriarchal society because sexism is systemic–it’s part of the culture, part of the system and pervasive. There is no female equivalent to sexism, no reverse sexism, because a subordinate group doesn’t have the same prevailing power privilege.

As an introduction, let’s look at a scene from ABC’s Modern Family that can have multiple readings (interpretations). On the surface, it’s a funny story and a leading character triumphs. Below the surface, it’s a trite display of gender roles and gendered value in patriarchal culture. For a brief context, Gloria feels inferior to her ex-husband’s fiancee because she’s very well educated, calm, and a successful career woman. This threatens Gloria because she feels Manny (her son) will look up to the new stepmom more than her.  Check out Gloria meeting Javier’s fiancee. (Here’s a short article about the first part of the episode–Season 4, ep. 20). If we’ve got time, let’s check out Jay getting Gloria new shoes. (By the way, Joe Mangianello is Sofia Vergara’s actual ex-husband…)

Questions–Trish, the fiancee, sees the relationship dynamic differently from Gloria.

  • What motivates Trish’s reasons for locking herself in the room?
  • This comes at the end of the show, so what does the “resolution” value in femininity?
  • Is there a comment about a woman’s proper role?

Edward Said’s Orientalism

No, I didn’t assign this book, but a it is important for today’s readings and others in the future. Edward Said was a Palestinian American cultural critic. His book and scholars’ using his work have some important passages for our discussion. This is only a beginning look out what’s called postcolonialism.

…the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (1-2)

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, “mind,” destiny, and so on. (2-3)

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. Vintage Books, 1979.

This process is responsible for the reproduction of the Orient, a reproduction based on an initial distinction (West/Orient) and the values (positive/negative) associated with it. The Orient becomes accessible to the West precisely because the West invests resources in acquiring knowledge (details about institutions, languages, religions, history, customs) and telling stories (novels, dramas, scientific treatises, anthropological works, business brochures) about the Oriental ‘object’. To quote Said again: “Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into western consciousness” [6]. (Schirato 46)

Schirato, Tony. “The Narrative of Orientalism,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 1994, pp. 44-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24491918

For more information, I recommend Edward Said’s seminal text Orientalism, but here’s a quicker discussion from teenVogue.

Although “oriental” is a unartful, passé term, many scholars recognize Said’s use of “orientalism” as a critique of the stereotyping and violence of the West on the East. It is imperative that you scrutinize and find problems with the assumption of a definitive East-West binary. Remember, Said’s critique is of the ways Eurocentric values and epistemology frame or other Eastern cultures.

1972: Historical Context

Today’s stories were both published in 1972 during the apex of second-wave feminism. The landmark (now defunct) Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade was in 1973. Many legal roadblocks to women’s full participation were being struck down during this time–but none of this was overnight. Although that movement has been criticized as “white middle-class women’s feminism,” it promoted many ideas that were outside mainstream patriarchy, including questions of gender. The stories are products of the time period because they invert (or attempt to invert) the traditional male perspective, which dominated science fiction and nearly all media. The slogan a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, coined by Australian feminist and anti-nuclear activist Irina Dunn in 1970. Joanna Russ’s short story speculates on what a world of women would be like and their first contact with men.

Tiptree’s short story, while commenting on gender relations of the time period, is a different kind of “alien” contact. It might help to think about the story in terms of men being away from home working on an oil rig or distant location. What do the women on the space station do? What is the gender of the narrator (the reporter)?

James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972)

Alice B. Sheldon was pretty ahead of her time. She was promoted to the rank of Major in Army Air Force Intelligence and worked with (most likely) spy photos (1942-1946). She was also in the CIA from 1952-1955, but left to go back to college, and in 1967, she earned a PhD in experimental psychology and studied animal behavior. Although we can’t read an author’s work as a pseudo-biography, she was a very smart person who saw the world in complicated ways. As the editors of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction note, sexuality is a major theme of her work (517). She would definitely not subscribe to a binary but, rather, a spectrum of sexuality.

Clearly, humans aren’t in control in her short story. They appear to be obsessed with aliens and alien sexuality or, more accurately, the mystique of alien sexuality. Tiptree plays on the situation of eroticizing the “other.” There is a long history of Western culture having a fetish for those from other cultures. The space dock worker waiting for his wife even mentions “the Polynesians” to refer to the way a culture has been exploited and eroticized by a colonial power (pp. 522-523). Even today, consumerist culture sexualizes caricatures of indigenous women.

Let’s take a look at some main passages from the short story:

  • p. 518: Wristwatches on spaceships.
    • Past technologies will show up in scifi texts in interesting ways.
    • Notice the manuals in Isaac Asimov stories (later).
  • p. 518: “Go home,” he mumbled. “Go home and make babies. While you still can.”
    • Compare to these lines:
    • p. 519: “‘News,’ he said. ‘A message for the eager, hopeful human race. A word about those lovely, lovable aliens we all love so much.’ He looked at me. ‘Shocked, aren’t you, newsboy?'”
    • p. 521: “‘Go home, boy. Go home to your version of Burned Barn . . .”
  • p. 519: “I had him figured out now. A xenophobe. Aliens plot to take over Earth.” {Is that what the “red-haired man” is? Didn’t he seem a bit more xenophile?}
  • p. 519: “Little Junction,” dive bar in DC.
  • p. 520: Aliens as celebrities
  • p. 522: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes…”
    • Let’s unpack this because it relates to the poem.
    • Every heard the idea that you love what you can’t have?
    • Why not love what’s easy?
  • p. 523: “Man is exogamous–all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger.”
    • Interpret this from an imperialist lens.
    • Why the lament?
  • p. 524: “The station employs only happily wedded couples” most likely because they need the stability of marriage to keep the humans from going bonkers over the aliens. If they stray, they could disrupt the station’s business.

John Keat’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

I guess being an English professor means I have to explain the reference to Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady without Pity”…google translate used to claim it was “without thank you”). Of course, full disclosure, you know I’m not really that kind of English Professor, but I’ll wear that hat for a little while and explicate the poem…to a certain extent.

  • This poem is about a young man deserted and left bereft by a mysterious and magical lover.
  • The poem also could be a lament that the women died. Why are there so many narratives by men who seem to long for the perfect women?
  • Possibly a femme fatale, who seduces men and then destroys them.

This poem’s title was also inspired by an earlier poem: Alain Chartier‘s La Belle Dame sans Mercy, which is about courtly love.

Psychoanalysis

In a different class, we’d probably discuss the Freudian stuff going on in this short story. Later in the semester, we’ll return to this topic, but we’ll set it aside for now. However, you probably notice the fetishization of aliens and the engineer’s libido. If we have some time, we can discuss (briefly as an introduction) libido and death instinct from Freud. How does the engineer appear to discuss his plight to have sex with the aliens? Is it a happy attempt at courtship? Wouldn’t it be easier to swipe right?

Joanna Russ’s “When it Changed” (1972)

Joanna Russ creates an all-female imagined world for us to think about gender roles. This all-female world has lived without men for centuries on the planet Whileaway. The main characters rush to meet the alien men who arrive…the women aren’t necessarily welcoming to the outsiders. As you read, consider how Russ portrays the men. The women aren’t impressed with them as macho astronauts, intrepid pioneers. Why? Why might they not be impressed with men in uniforms?

Russ wrote the novel The Female Man (1975) after this short story. It is out-of-this-world! The basic plot is the lives of four women thrust together from different time periods and world’s:

  • Joanna (not hard to figure out who this represents…) is from the 1970s Earth.
  • Jeannine is from an alternate past of the 1930s.
  • Janet is Whileaway, and the novel is written from her perspective.
  • Jael is from a different universe where a literal battle of the sexes is waged.

Social Construction of Beauty/Attractiveness

Even the words above are gendered to an extent. We usually don’t identify men as “beautiful,” but we interchange “beautiful” and “attractive” for women. Some might say a landscape or poem is “beautifully” written, which could led us into a deeper discussion on the word’s usage. For now, let’s concentrate on the ways Russ portrays the Whileawayans and the Earthmen.

  • “Men! Yuki screamed….”They’ve come back! Real Earth men!” (p. 509) Yuki exclaimed, “I thought they would be good-looking!” (p. 510)
    Later, Yuki’s excitement goes away when asked if she could fall in love with a man: “With a ten-foot toad!” (p. 514)
  • Janet sizes them up: “They are bigger than we are. They are bigger and broader. Two were taller than me, and I am extremely tall, one meter eighty centimeters [5’9″] in my bare feet. They are obviously of our species but off, indescribably off, and as my eyes could not and still cannot quite comprehend the lines of those alien bodies, I could not, then, bring myself to touch them.” (509)
  • What’s the role of violence on Whileaway?

Gender Roles and Stereotypes

This story imagines a world where the binary division between masculine and feminine is absent. Unlike stories of all-female worlds written by men, such as, Anderson’s Virgin Planet (1959), “When it Changed” envisions a world where women aren’t longing for the male other. In many stories, a male protagonist is used to save women–from a dragon, a band of savages, King Koopa, etc.–but Whileawayans need no saving because they’re doing fine. Clearly, Whileaway is on the verge of change, and Russ, writing in the early 1970s, was influenced by the effects of the sexual revolution and counter culture movements. I would be shortsighted to claim that those cultural events died by the 1980s, but there was definitely a return to more puritanical mores. The epidemic of STDs in the late 1970s and 1980s put a huge taboo on what was seen as reckless sexual behavior, and the rise of conservatism and right-wing religious clout in politics quelled much of the fervor of 1960s liberation. Then again, maybe the 1960s couldn’t sustain its revolution because it still operated under phallocentric assumptions. Heteronormativity is the dominant familial condition replicated in most cultures today.

Janet’s statement: “I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth” (514). Maybe Russ is commenting on the fact that men in patriarchal culture think there’s equality, but, being from a position of privilege, they can’t see inequality. This situation is referred to as “male privilege.”

What’s in a Name?

Janet tells readers at the end of the story that Whileaway used to be called For-A-While before the men were killed off by disease. What’s the significance of the names in relation to the story’s title?

  • What does it mean to whileaway your time?
  • Consider the line “All good things must come to an end.”
  • “Faust’s words: Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don’t change.”
  • Usually translated as “Stay a while, you are so beautiful”

Next Class

We’ve got some fun this week! Keep up with the light reading this week and read Isaac Asimov’s “Reason” (1941) and Robert A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” (1959). Monday is Labor Day, so there’s no class on 9/4/2023…good time to catch up on the reading. Of course, don’t forget to do the Weekly Discussion post “Introduce Yourself” before Thursday at 11:00pm.