feminism – American Postmodernism

I’m Pro- Strong Women, really! Just not that into Ms. Russ

Look, i love strong women, digital or …analogue? well real. But The Female Man wasn’t my cup of tea.

I suppose the difficulties I had with The Female Man, aside from the obvious shifts and ambiguities in narrative (the vague first persons really dug into my skull, and the story, at that point wasn’t interesting enough for me to pay super-close attention to who the I’s in fact, were) was the fact that for the bulk of the text, there is very little, if any, plot. I kind of have the feeling that if Russ were to bring this manuscript into a typical workshop, putting the pronoun issues aside, she would get a lot of comments about needing to use the character and situations to drive the plot….it seems that a pretty hefty portion of the novel is spent merely getting the characters to a point at which they can interact. Janet goes from here to there…a few amusing scenes illustrate that shes a fish out of water…Jeannine/Joanna goes here, goes there..etc, all the while declaring their views/positions in this continuum of feminism rather straightforwardly, until finally all or at least 3 of them are together in a world not our own.

Simply as a reader who enjoys sci-fi for its imagination, I was really having a tough time getting into any of these narratives. I know I know…in 1971 there were probably a TON of males which would have been quite accurately depicted by Russ, but the male characters were so over the top to me, a modern day reader, that it was hard for Russ’ points to not feel a little cheapened by those depictions, and (Please, im not a misogynist, or even that chauvinistic I swear!) some of her “asides” or declarations were just a little too overt, as to be cliché ..”My brassiere hurts.” AND YES I KNOW, its TOTALLY unfair for me to read this and apply my modernist views to a book from 3, going on 4 decades past (especially one which WAS seen as controversial, radical, even avant-garde ) but I do believe a text should be able to stand up somewhere close to as well now as it did when it was published. Sure some details of Gertrude Stein (more recent) or Milton’s (pretty damn old) novels are antiquated, but those themes/ideas which bear the heft of the author’s point are timeless. Too much of The Female Man read, for me, as out of date. This is of course, not to say that feminism is or should be dead, nor is it to imply that women are treated equally anywhere, let alone everywhere, but her methods to illustrate such points just didn’t work for me. I’m sorry… don’t call me any names.

Questions I had: is there a purpose, and if so, what is it?, to the initial lack of plot and intense focus on character? Im asking this sincerely, not snarkily!

Why did this have to be a sci-fi novel? Would it have been just as effective (or perhaps more effective) in a different genre? Western? Horror? Elvish Fantasy? Again…sincere, not snark.

Role Reversals

Going off of the points made in “a misandristic proposal,” I sometimes found it hard to side with the women towards the end of the novel. At the end, the book’s message seems more woman based than society based. Although I am a woman and can sympathize with the plight to become a less oppressed sex, I am also a humanitarian. The turning point for me, where this book stopped being about the possibility of a Utopian community where women are free of oppression, was with the introduction of Davy. Davy, until we realize he is a machine, acts as the perfect subject for Jael’s misandristically driven motives.

Throughout most of the novel men are the voyeurs, watching the women and objectifying them with their gaze. Joanna, Janet, and even Jeannine are often disgusted with the men that crudely attempt to court them. They do not enjoy being looked at by these men, because the often only looked at as sexual objects, rather than intelligent, meaningful humans. At the beginning of Jael and Davy’s sex scene, the previous roles of voyeur and voyee are totally reversed: “I passed into his room barefoot and watched him cured in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks…” (196). Jael objectifys him, seduces him, and uses him until she is satisfied and goes off to handle business with the three Js.

Jael refers to Davy with diminutive terms, such as “little Davy,” which is another illustration of a role reversal between the sexes. In our male-dominated society, diminutive terms are typically reserved for babies and women, to show small, weak, and insignificant they are. In Jael’s world, these type of word seems to be reserved for the male house-pets. To complete the role reversal, the sex scene is finalized with Jael’s actually penetration of Davy: “that time I made him com by slipping my finger up his anus” (197). So much for Frued’s idea of penis envy. The penis has been reduced to a pleasure tool, that will eventually be eliminated entirely for the vibrators found in Janet’s world.

Men in Jael’s land are machines that live to serve. Davy is a mere puppy, controlled by “the implants in his brain” (199). It becomes clear that Jael does not simply want equality between the sexes, she wants totality. Woman as the sole rulers of the world. But Jael doesn’t stop there. She doesn’t just want one world, she seems to want women to have all of them. Although the conclusion of the novel does not spell out Jael’s plans, it does appear that she wishes to have soldiers on other worlds, which would inevitably lead to new wars.

By the end, I wasn’t sure what to make of Jael’s intentions and the creation of Janet’s world. I had previously found Janet’s world appealing. Like Janet, I was disturbed by Jael’s new information about how her world came to be. In a way, all the Js are feminists, but in varying degrees and temperaments. Perhaps the novel is cautioning us against extremist views like Jael’s. If this is the case, then Janet would be our herione. She is a fair feminist who knows when it has gone too far. She walks away from Jael’s plan to destroy the men, possibly altering the future of her own world and ending her women’s eutopia.

Transitioning from Danielewski to Russ

So, I’m relaxing over spring break, recovering from the marathon that was Danielewski’s House of Leaves (thoroughly enjoyed nonetheless), and I start in on Joanna Russ’ The Female Man. After having finished the novel (shall we call it a novel?) a week later, I reflect. At times I thought the book was brilliant; the subversion of the science fiction, manipulating the genre to fit what she was trying to address on the feminist ‘front’, was outstanding. The Faulknerian use of stream of consciousness and first-person narration is also commendable. But then there were parts of the novel that became burdensome for me; in other words, at a certain point, I felt like the book’s entire discussion (the question of a woman’s role/freedom/right [I hesitate to provide a label for fear of a Jael-like counterattack] in the world) became repetitive; and I would guess if you go searching for criticism against The Female Man you might find a similar complaint somewhere…

…but really you don’t have to look any further than the book itself:

Shrill . . . vituperative . . . no concern for the future of society . . . maunderings of antiquated feminism . . . selfish femlib . . . need a good lay . . . this shapeless book . . . of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond . . . twisted, neurotic . . . some truth buried in a largely hysterical . . . [and so on and so forth]. (140-41)

Within the book, Joanna Russ has provided the reader with criticism for the book: The Female Man is its own worst critic. What does this tell us about Joanna Russ and her intentions? Is she mocking these critical voices; drawing attention to the very biases that they reinforce? Is this critical inclusion a form of self-deprecation of her novel? Is it a little bit of both?

Whatever answers we might conclude to these questions, this section of the book got me thinking about Danielewski. Of course, after three weeks of House of Leaves, we are all familiar with Danielewski’s tactics, his self-proclaimed preemptive strike against any form of literary criticism, or any attempt to disassemble the book. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Joanna Russ was trying to actively prevent criticism like Danielewski is, but she is certainly anticipating responses towards the book.

With House of Leaves already in the discussion, I also thought of another interesting comparison between the two authors. With the construction of numerous levels of ‘authorship’ (i.e. Zampano and Johnny Truant), Danielewski effectively ‘distances’ himself from the text. Conversely, Joanna Russ eliminates any separation between her and The Female Man by identifying herself in the book as both character and author, crossing the conventional line between author and text. I wonder what this accomplishes for the book. As the ‘1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man’s world’, what can we say about The Female Man Joanna and the author Joanna? I’m thinking it’s important to remember that she is only one of the four female ‘representations’ in the book.

…As you can tell, this book has left me with more questions than it has provided answers.

Side-note:

With all the references to the moon, it will be hard not to think of The Female Man whenever I listen to Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Now, I keep thinking of ‘Us and Them’ in terms of Jael’s version of Earth with warring male and female societies. Try it; it just about fits…

Harlequin romances equilvalent to Mills & Boon?

That might be the funniest thing about this article.

I read an earlier essay version of this chapter in a feminist criticism anthology for a class last semester, so it was interesting to see how Haraway changed her approach from the essay to the chapter.

I think one of the challenges to reading this chapter is getting a handle on Haraway’s envisioning of cyborgs. Haraway writes: “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism: in short, we are hybrids” (Haraway 150). I don’t think that Haraway is talking about literal cyborgization (although that’s becoming more a reality, in particular I’m thinking of the new prosthetic limbs developed by military medical researchers that are controlled by electrical pulses in the remaining muscle tissue) but more about the way we function and utilize machines. However, I think Haraway’s essay needs to come with a few more caveats. It seems to me that Haraway’s envisioning of the cybernetic/cyborg future is an extremely limited one in terms of really only applying to certain societies, namely Western/technologically integrated ones. I think it is an overgeneralization to claim that there is a universal cyborgization of global society.

That being said, Haraway has some fascinating things to say about “women’s work.” She points out the global changes in employment/industrial trends and how the global workforce is becoming increasingly “feminized.” I think this is useful to discuss in counterpoint to Russ’ book because of the conflict between Janet’s idea of work (on Whileaway everything is of necessity women’s work) to the ideas about employment expressed by Jeannine and Joanna.

What I found rather ironic was the juxtaposition of Haraway’s assertion that “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds us” (Haraway 155) and her argument that earlier feminists’ eagerness to create a universalizing feminism was actually totalizing contrasted with the dedication in Russ’ book: “this book is dedicated to Anne, to Mary, and to the other one and three-quarters billions of us.” Still, I would argue that even if the drive to create a universal or “global” feminism (for which, of course, Western educated and largely white middle/upper middle class women would serve as the spokespersons) is in fact imperialist, it was mostly born out of political necessity-a movement that lent itself to getting coopted by other groups for other means and ultimately capitalized upon.

But going back to The Female Man, one thing I’m very interested in discussing is why Russ structures the book the way she does? This sort of narrative-slippage and constant digression seems rather typical of the postmodernist literary aesthetic now, but I imagine that it was rather revolutionary (or at least less expected) at the time of its publication. So why would Russ structure the book as what seems to be a series of argument and exchanges between the four characters rather than a linear narrative?