Wow! I believed I had read feminist literature before, but nothing ever came close to The Female Man in absolutely crushing down on males and the nature of men’s interaction with females!
Reading Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” alongside TheFemale Man, I find that the latter also reads a bit like a manifesto. When the fourth ‘I’, Alice-Jael, which has been lurking behind the text since Part Two finally emerges, it becomes evident that she is the one who has actively searched for and brought together the three other versions of ‘herself’. Her reason for doing so is to make the other versions of herself aware of what is to her the Ultimate War, and to which purpose they should attempt to unite their efforts.
The text’s gathering of the different selves is explanatory both to the women characters and to the readers, as it reveals how different circumstances and attitudes towards life have shaped these genotypically analogous women. It exposes the extent to which male domination over women has been, are, and will remain constant if not challenged, as well as the rhetoric on which this power structure rests. Together these insights reveal to Jeannine, the ultimate frustrated feminine, the manipulative constructedness of the dream of romantic fulfillment through marriage. To Joanne they confirm her conviction that the only way for her to fully utilize her human potential is to become a ‘female man’. Because being a woman implies being not human, noting that is feminine defines her. As Julie pointed out in her blog, Janet represents a world in which women hold real power and influential positions in society. Inhabited by women only, Whileaway is a world without gender and gender conflict. The female god the inhabitants worship is not a unity, but a “jumble of badly matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradiction” (103). Hence Janet represents the Harawayan cyborg, and the ‘future’ world of Whileaway one in which the new notion of feminitity as partial and contradictory is fully developed. Interestingly, the Whileawayan genderless society is so peaceful and satisfying to its inhabitants that Janet is the only ‘self’ unwilling to join Jael’s mission.
Jael herself is the warrior turned hateful heartless and pitiless as a result of men’s violations. She has lost her outward human shape and become a murderer justified in the fact that as a woman (raped), she is always already guilty. (In fact, she rather resembles Janet’s image of self-hate.) Like her biblical namesake’s, Jael’s violence against men acts to liberate her ‘people’ from suppression. She works to defeat all men, and in her home man is the submissive object of desire that exists merely to provide pleasure. In what I thought was a very funny and significant passage, the rhetoric of gendered language is reversed to describe David as a creature of beauty with a consciousness void of everything “but the permanent possibility of sensation” (199).
Jael has gathered her other selves to awaken them to her call for action. She urges them to unite across the differences that separate them to fight for the liberation of womankind. Like the reader must try to unite all the shattered fragments of the text into an understanding of how its plot works, so women situated at all the different nodes in the network that constitutes feminine experience should try to unite in an understanding of what battles must be fought in order to do away with the limitations on the female experience: the social constructs that separate the female from the human. Because the author’s name is Joanna Russ, this makes it possible to read Joanna’s (the character’s) voice as the voice of the author. One of the ‘I’s whose consciousness pervades the text is also expressed to be the “the spirit of the author” in the process of constructing this deliberately feminist text, which she upon completion will let into the world to influence its readers (166). Through these two narrative techniques the text asserts itself, despite its wildly imaginative plot, as part of a real contemporary feminist discourse. The Female Man is thus a manifesto in the sense that it declares an ultimate goal for which women should apply themselves, and inscribes the text itself as vital agent in achieving this end.