{"id":87,"date":"2005-10-03T15:25:40","date_gmt":"2005-10-03T19:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/?p=87"},"modified":"2005-10-03T18:32:45","modified_gmt":"2005-10-03T22:32:45","slug":"questioning-feminism-then-and-now-theirs-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/10\/03\/questioning-feminism-then-and-now-theirs-and-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"Questioning Feminism (then and now; theirs and ours)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joanna Russ’ Female Man<\/strong> challenged my previous views of feminism and the feminist movement in the U.S.  Perhaps I am fortunate to be a young woman forty years after the Women’s Rights Movement—I say this because there seems to either be a new form of female empowerment or a lack thereof among today’s American women  (we’re not burning our bras and protesting so much as my mother’s generation did).   Considering the novel’s ending—the literary punch in the face–and Russ’ inclusion of a savage female cyborg with claws and metal teeth, I’d say the novel aggressively argues for women’s rights as well as transgender rights.  What I responded to most was the fierce parody of male and female relations within the different spaces and times experienced by the novel’s character(s)—something I’ve never experienced to such extremes, though I guess that’s parody.  Or better yet, the “happy” women who compete within their traditional roles as mother\/wife\/servant, and who are bloodthirsty for any woman who challenges these roles (ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill).  Nowadays there seems to be a reversal; working women and the generation of women who fought for women’s rights sometimes hold a certain amount of resentment towards young women who choose to stay home, manage house and family, and make a career of being a wife and\/or mother.  <\/p>\n

Other parts of the novel that I am curious about are Russ’s parody of how some women depend upon “a man” for a sense of self.  For example, the narrative during Jeanine’s date: “His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist.”  Russ’s feminism in these passages seemed to be the places where the novel was postmodern—traditional modes of gender roles were\/ are not truly stable, and a woman, a transgender, and a man’s sense of self will continually shift.  When Jael points out that all four J women are each other’s possibilities in other spaces and times, I was struck by the arbitrariness of circumstances and the ambiguity of self had by these women (and well, all of us).    Who is saying Goodbye at the novel’s closing?  All the women and someone else?  Is it Joanna saying goodbye to the possibilities of her old self? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joanna Russ’ Female Man challenged my previous views of feminism and the feminist movement in the U.S.  Perhaps I am fortunate to be a young woman forty years after the Women’s Rights Movement—I say this because there seems to either be a new form of female empowerment or a lack thereof among today’s American women  … Continue reading Questioning Feminism (then and now; theirs and ours)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}