Reading through the novel, obviously it’s hard to pick a “heroine” because the text itself seems so topsy-turvy (silly word). However, if I had to pick one, I’d go with Jael. She is the character who has taken her anti-masculine logic to an instinctive and combative level, and while I don’t think this hyper-oppositional stance is necessarily the best one, it is her efforts which ultimately bring together the other protagonists (spatially and, I think, ideologically), and allow them to understand their own failings or contradictions. And that is the element of her that I find specifically heroic. I think she is heroic especially in the fact that this effort affects some change in super-passive Jeannine, who seemed to be the one “thrown under the bus” and most change resistant throughout the whole narrative, frustrating the reader.
Additionally, I find her (Jael) heroic because she is the one character who has essentially determined her own path. Certainly, Jeannine hadn’t; Joanne had to sacrifice her own identity to become a “man” in a man’s world; and Janet seems like more of a product of her strange utopia then a utopian ideal. Also, we learn, or are lead to believe, that Jael’s hand in the struggle in her time created the later utopia. As ambivalent as I am on this utopia (and the idea of utopias in general), the idea of self-sacrifice and risk to create an ideal society is certainly heroic.
[Edit: I just realized that that seemed vaguely like a ‘hurrah’ for genocide (sexocide?)… oops.]
That’s all that comes to mind, for now.