the female man – American Postmodernism

Paper

Disposable, renewable, impermanent.

In his initial dedication, Salvador Plascencia writes “to Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper.” He later cuts out this dedication, emphasizing his point.

We jump into the story with a little boy buying back his three pounds of feline and reconstructing his slaughtered cat Figgaro. The prologue sets us up for themes of destruction, loss, and subsequent rebirth or renewal. It also places us in a magical realism situation, where we must accept that people can be made of paper.

Plascencia takes us into a world of impermanency, one where people are constantly shedding skins or changing. In the most physical sense, there’s Merced de Papel, who “never allowed history to accumulate, her skin changing with the news of the world.” (164) Other characters are changing themselves physically (burning, cutting, patching, covering up in lead); fleeing their own lives and leaving dust; or altering their identities in some other way. People become non-people, or at least not themselves. Rita Hayworth, for example: “Margarita Carmen Cansino shed syllables from her name and velvet curtains from her stage, rising, leaving a tail of draperies and scraps of paper cut from her birth certificate, to emerge as a star” (56) Hollywood’s presence, in the form of carried winds and background music, is a constant reminder of temporality.

Salvador Plascencia becomes a non-person too. He forgets about his characters (poor Smiley…) and then shuts them out to the point where they are able to censor their thoughts from him and the readers.

But I think The People of Paper also ironically confirms the existence of some kind of permanency. His one paper character is the last of a dying breed. And this novel is Plascencia’s way of physically documenting history. Incriminating himself for casting Liz in a bad light, he leaves everything he’s already told us where it is and writes on without her, or rather, with just her presence hanging over him much like Saturn hovers over de la Fe. He hasn’t actually deleted anything or pushed her out of his mind (or ours). She just becomes the girl who can’t be named. Paper allows his version of history to live on and be consumed by voyeurs like us who, like he says, don’t even know these people.

He also makes us aware of the book and its physicality, its history and process, even its price. He goes so far as to imply some readers would lick it to simulate licking Merced de Papel. I found Plascencia’s author/book/reader relationship more thought-provocative than, say, Joanna Russ’s abrasive/defensive approach in The Female Man, even when Plascencia denies us access to the text by blocking it out or relating to us the inner thoughts of the mechanical tortoise in binary code.

In fact, I like the complementary nature of form and function (combined with imaginative, often heartbreaking writing) so much that is my favorite book we’ve read so far. Plascencia manages to insert himself as a character halfway through without making me want to throw the book into a door. And just when I start getting annoyed with his despondency, he goes ahead and starts over right in the middle. He is repairing his history with paper, like Merced de Papel repairs her skin, like Antonio repairs his butchered cat.

Family Life in Postmodern Literature

I think it’s interesting how the chapters in Tropic of Orange correspond with the characters. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly another expression of fragmentation, but it’s odd that she outlines it for us in the beginning. It almost seems like a key, in the way that some of the information in House of Leaves seemed like a key. Yamashita is, in a way, telling us how to read the book. She organizes the information, it seems, to help us make sense of the novel. Doesn’t this sentiment seem slightly anti-postmodern? However, I’ve never seen it done in another text, so it is an innovative technique. I wonder if anyone read the chapters out of order. I’d like to go back and reread this in a year, but instead of reading straight through, I’d read the chapters the way they appear in the outline. I wonder how that would change the meaning of the text.

I liked this book, in particular, because it gave me some ways to continue thinking about my research topic. Most of the books we’ve read don’t deal closely with family life. In fact, their seems to be a lack of families, or a tearing apart of families, in most of the books we’ve read. Pynchon doesn’t depict a family and gives very little weight to the one marriage in the text. In House of Leaves, the Navidson family is figuratively (and literally in the case of Tom) torn apart. There is one marriage in the Lathe of Heaven, but it is also made to be a background issue.

We do see marriage and family life in The Female Man, but it is completely different from the traditional idea of the nuclear family. In Belovedthere are families, but they are often separated by death and slavery. In this text, family members never seem to work as a cohesive unit, but instead stay isolated from one another. In Mao II, Bill, Scott, and Karen make up a sort of untraditional family unit. However, this family is also torn apart by the end of the novel. In The Tropic of Orange, Rafaela, Sol, and Bobby are at the center of the story. Although family members, such as Rafaela and Sol, seem to operate in normal ways, their are various abnormalities surrounding them. In this case, the family life is altered, not internally, but externally as the geography around them twists and turns from its natural state.

Sometimes the aspects that interest me most in a book are not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. There is an obvious absence of family life in the books we’ve read. This lead me to wonder – where do families (especially nuclear families), marriage, and love fit into postmodernism?

Women, Science, and Technology

First off, I apologize for this post being a bit late. But it’s fitting because this week we’re looking at technology, and the technology services Verizon provides to some neighborhoods is absolutely terrible and only works intermitently, when it works at all. I’ve been trying to connect all morning and resetting the router can’t fix this problem. So if anyone out there is thinking of switching to Verizon Fios: Don’t.

Since I’m a writer for the American Psychological Association, I thought it would be nice to see what psychologists were saying about women and technology at a time closer to the publication of The Female Man. While this post won’t relate directly to the book, I think it will provide some historical perspective about women, technology, and science. The article I will be discussing is called “Women, Science, and Technology” by Sheila M. Pfafflin and was published in the October issue of American Psychologist in 1984. This is about 9 years after The Female Man was published, but still 25 years before the present.

The article first points out that women, even back then with a work force prevalence of 45%, were missing from engineering and physical science fields with participation rates as low as 13%. Pfafflin points to four trends for why this is a problem: The equity issue turned women away because they were less likely to be encouraged to pursue careers and develop their talents in science and engineering. Human resource utilization comes from the failure of the equity issue the country then wastes a substantial portion of technical talent (women) which could lead to serious science and tech consequences. Discrimination against women in these fields, back then, further turned them away. And finally, policy-making in these fields, because of the low rate of woman involvement, was being made with low input from women.

I bring this study up, becuase it made me wonder: “Have women ever been participants in the science and technology fields?” What I mean by this, is this is an issue that we still hear about today. For some reason, I thought it was a recent development (like in the last 10 years), but apparently, for different reasons, it was also an issue in 1984. Pfafflin also makes the point that in the late ’70s the rates of women participating in science and technology were even lower. Prior the the ’60s, very few women were staying in the work place past marriage. Was there ever a time when women were participating in the physical sciences and technology more so than they are today? It doesn’t look like it.
While this is certainly cause for concern for social scientists understanding why this is the case, what I see here is really just the same old media trick of making big news out of old news. It seems like there is a new story a month about how women are avoiding science fields at ever increasing rates. How can this possibly be the case? The four things Pfafflin listed as the causes for concern and problems aren’t as big a deal in academia any more. Women are, with increasing frequency, affecting policy. Academic departments are constantly becoming friendly to both genders not to mention other ethnic and minority groups.

All of this is relavent because, while women may not be participating in science and technology fields at the rates some would like to see nowadays, they never really have. This brings us to Janet: “I’ve worked in the mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian” (1). It seems here that Russ is fully aware of the limitations and barriers that were facing women around her time (the ones listed by Pfafflin above) and made a simple point: For women to be included in fields typically dominated by men (the radio network, mines and farms) men cannot exist. Maybe that’s the case, but from what I gather from 20 years of psychological research, women have never participated at rates some folks would like to see. Of course, I don’t think there’s much any of us can do about it, because, after all, we’re English majors.

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.

Female Unity in THE FEMALE MAN

As others have been discussing, I, too, was struck by the “unity” of the women in the novel. There are several instances where Russ presents the idea of a dual-personality. For instance, Laura struggles with her wants and how they differ from societal expectations. (In fact, this idea of duality is clearly displayed as Laura’s name become “Laur” at points when her “other side” is most prominent.) When Joanna (?) discusses how she turned into a man she says that “knowledge is […] the perception of all experience through two sets of eyes, two systems of value, two habits of expectation, almost two minds” (137-138). Alice says “there are always two sides” (165), and Jael suggests that each woman has a Doppelganger (162). These women, mainly “the J’s”, seem to be compromised of two personalities: the individual they want to be, and the individual resisting society’s pressures and expectations. Each woman seems to have another “self”. Earlier in the novel, this other self seems to be in the form of some sort of spirit. (The “I” is confusing here, as its unclear if the spirit “I” is the other self of the same woman, or another woman all together. For instance, the “I” in the scene when Janet and Laura first become physically intimate seems to be some sort of an observant conscience of Janet.)

Throughout the novel I thought of Adrienne Rich’s poetry and her themes of the unity of all women. Like Karin, I found the multiple pronouns to be very confusing at times, but I do think that Russ is saying something about the unity of women, just as Rich does in her poetry. Both Russ and Rich use pronouns in such a way as to emphasize the solidarity of women and the shared female experience.

Along with my frustration with the shifting point of view that I could not always follow (I really feel that I lost whatever grip I had with the introduction of Jael), I also had a love-hate relationship with Russ’s style. I enjoyed Russ’s acknowledgement of social expectations and their incorporation throughout the novel, such as on page 65 when she repeatedly states, “everyone knows”, adding emphasis to these stereotypes and expectations. I enjoyed Laura’s rebellion against “The Man” (65). I want a better understanding of the point of view changes, though. I also don’t understand why Russ uses what seem to be sub-chapters within her chapters and I’m curious as to the significance of this choice. I’m also curious about the significance of the moon. Jeannine and Janet’s first words were “see the moon,” and the moon comes up at other points in the novel.

As others have posted, I agree that in some ways The House of Leaves seems to have prepared us for the journey into The Female Man. I have to admit that I did find it to be a challenge, though, and I feel that I’m left with more many more questions than I have opinions and arguments.

Assumptions and Cyborgs

What impressed me most about The Female Man was the way Whileaway made me aware of my own habitual assumptions. Every time Janet would describe another aspect of life on Whileaway, describe another work category, I would have to stop short and reassess my automatic subconscious default provisional assignment of male gender. When Janet described riding on a train and mentioned the engineer, I assumed the engineer was male (80). I don’t know why it was so hard for me to remember that everyone was a woman – no really, everyone! But my brain kept trying to revert to the provisional assumption of masculinity for any person whose gender was not explicitly stated. Of course, one other solution to this assumption of maleness is to make the category of man available to women as well, as Russ asserts on page 140: “If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman.” This statement reminds me of the way that Susan B. Anthony by trying to vote herself challenged the implicit male assumptions in the categories of “person” and “citizen” in the Fourteenth Amendment’s granting of the right to vote.

One thing that puzzled me about Jael’s world was how the women still gave male babies to the men. Assuming the women have some kind of semen stockpile and have not advanced to genetic engineering, why would they give their enemy the very means of continuing themselves? The only answer I could see was that the women had an essential view of men as enemies – even baby men were still men and therefore enemies. Therefore nurturing them and indoctrinating them would presumably serve no purpose. Except for Davy (and who knows how common he is) and perhaps commerce, the women are not portrayed as desiring or needing the opposite gender or perpetuating gender roles like the men are. In making the male society so crude and disagreeable, Russ is creating a parody of the normal state of gender roles. Taken to the extreme, it’s easy to see how gender roles are only perpetuated by the males who benefit by them. Yet the women are no saints either, and their hatred leads first to the creation and perpetuation of the awful male society and ultimately, as Jael implies, to genocide.

Whileaway society definitely echoed aspects of Haraway’s cyborg utopia, and certainly the skill with induction helmets and other aspects of technology reflected the “intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceas[ing] to be a sin , but an aspect of embodiment” (180). Although Haraway’s vision of a cyborg worldview seems a utopia, she convinced me pretty well that cyborg imagery is a good place to start to escape the divisive use of dualisms and navigate our discourse more effectively and happily. Perhaps with a cyborg worldview, I wouldn’t make those assumptions of provisional male gender. Although cyborg theory itself is a totalizing theory (which Haraway condemns) in that she implies that everyone can be a cyborg, the extremely adaptive nature of cyborgs mean that cyborg theory in Haraway’s view will never be limiting or exclusionary.

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.

A Misandristic Proposal

What is the opposite of misogyny? Misanthropy? No, that’s the dislike of humankind in general, rather than the specific dislike of males. Try again. Misandry is the word. As I type it into Microsoft Word and hit the spacebar, it becomes underlined in red. Misspelled? Quite possibly. No, a quick trip to the Oxford English dictionary confirms spelling and definition. So misandry simply isn’t recognized by Microsoft technology. It’s unfamiliar. It’s defamiliar. Perhaps, this just represents one of many omitted words and names, or maybe it signifies something greater and more telling about (wo)men and technology. Regardless, it offers point of entry into discussing Joanna Russ’ The Female Man.

Though Russ’ The Female Man can fit into many classifications of literature (e.g. postmodern fiction, science fiction, a feminist work, etc.), I am interested in how it functions as a satire. At the end of the text, Jael proposes the women (Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna) “do business with [Jael’s] Womanland” (211) and to incorporate women soldiers from each of their individual realities to wage war on the men. Jeannine and Joanna quickly acquiesce. Jeannie states, “‘Oh sure, I don’t mind. You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over; I wish you would’” (Russ 211). The response is pert and off-the-cuff. Oh sure. Why not? Well, why not?

Janet, the woman from the all-female Whileaway, alone, resists. Moreover, she refuses Jael’s retelling of the plague as an act of female aggression. It is unclear whether this resistance comes from inexperience with males, stupidity, or a more simplistic view of conflict resolution (or perhaps, like Microsoft, Janet does not have a word for this construct). Still, we don’t know why she would resist or why anyone should resist? At first glance, it seems perfectly logical.

What’s wrong with a rebalancing of power? In Jeannine and Joann’s worlds, when woman are not being infantilized by the men in the text, they are being raped or arranging their lives so that they won’t be vulnerable to rape. Clearly, a master-slave relationship is at work, dominating the women at every opportunity, denying them “adult independence—namely money” (118). It is only through technology that Whileaway and Womanland the women regain their power. Why not take this to the next level?

Given the endless possibilities of technology, an inter-dimensional war with men may throw the balance of power in favor of the women. Most of the characters find that idea fairly attractive. In fact, Jael’s logic reflects that of an oppressed people made free. Rather than preach the ills of subjection, the free must, in turn, oppress to maintain their freedom. Freedom cannot exist without oppression; oppression cannot exist without freedom. On second glance, it simply replaces one societal ill with another: misandry with misogyny. So what’s the point of this exercise? By promoting misandry, The Female Man would undercut all its previous points about the master-slave power in male-female relations. But it doesn’t just do that. Misandry defamiliarizes misogyny. It gives us a new word, a new point of reference, a new context to highlight an old referential.

A Little on Structure, Tone and Treatment of Time

You’d think after reading House of Leaves we’d all find the weird and erratic narrative structure of The Female Man a piece if cake. I personally had trouble understanding some parts of it, and the multiple narrators and the ambiguous “I” got me very confused at certain points. I don’t know if the division of the narrative into so many passages, pointing the shifts in times and places helped make it easier or made it more confusing. One thing I notice about the structure is its division into 9 parts; an interesting choice Russ makes, since the number nine is usually associated with maternity and, perhaps, femininity. In her demonstrations of possible worlds where the boundaries of gender are destroyed, there is only one thing females have that males still can’t have: babies! Women in Whileaway are able to conceive without needing male partners, while men in the other three worlds can’t make their own babies.

I find the ironic and aggressive tone of the book to be interesting. Russ is very much in your face, and I can imagine it being a buzz killer for some readers. She is really funny when she’s being ironically bitter. My personal favorite is on page 148:

Narrator to Jeannine on the danger of communication device: “It will explode in your brains and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other nice, normal things beginning with a D… You will be dead, dead, dead.”

With an emphasis on the D’s, I see an implied association between these things starting with a D and men. Jeannine is also threatened by her relationship with her boyfriend and struggles throughout the book to find her independence. “Dead, dead, dead” confirms the association, as men are all dead in Janet’s world. This makes me even more curious about the J’s and what it means to give all four female characters names that start with a J.

Finally, I want to briefly mention an important point the narrator makes in Part One- VI where she begins to introduce Whileaway to the reader. She explains that since there might be an infinite number of possible universes, and that there isn’t a single and clear line of probability, “the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present” (7). I think this and the rest of the passage says a lot about the treatment of time in postmodern works. Modernist writers, as Virginia Woolf, talk about the importance of time in manifesting realism in literature and explain that time is not linear, but must take the reader to the past as well as the present to provide insight on the histories of the characters, giving them a more realistic portrayal. Postmodernism takes this principle to a different level, as the treatment of time is more imaginative. It attempts to explore several possible pasts, presents and futures, and therefore generating numerous realities. The importance modernism places on the concept of realism is not only absent in postmodernism but is disparaged and rejected through this use of inconsistent and multiple time lines.

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…

Freud, Sex in the City, The Female Man, and Google

I am struck my the ever-shifting pronoun usage in this book. I can’t keep up–I, me, us, we. Who are these women? Clearly they have separate identities, but often they appear as one. In part three, Joanna takes Janet to a party; this section appears to be laden with one of the first instances of narrator disorientation. Joanna introduces Janet to her friends (whose names unexplainably all end in -issa) at the party as her Swedish cousin. Janet quickly enters into a discussion with the Ginger Mustache. From this point on in the chapter, the pronoun references are muttled. “She showed him all her teeth. He saw a simile. […] and he took us by the wrist.[…] ‘Let me go’ said Janet.[…] All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party.[…] enfolding us in his powerful arms (emphasis added 45). How can Joanna be observing Janet talking and then refer to her as part of herself?

After this section, I was left wondering if they in fact are just one woman inhabited by many. Come to think of it, Cal even acknowledges this morphing when he says to Jeannine on page four, “The vanishing woman [referring to Janet]. That’s you.” She doesn’t deny it. Just for the sake of experimentation, I can’t help but try out the theory that they are actually one woman. I have heard it said that the four woman on Sex and the City aren’t really four distinct women, but rather alter egos of Carrie: Miranda, the career-driven one, Charlotte, the uptight prude, and Samantha the over-sexualized woman. While the stereotypes don’t align perfectly with Joanna, the fiercely independent 1970’s feminist, we have Jeannine, the mild-mannered woman waiting to marry; Janet, the futuristic Whilawayean who challenges all gender stereotypes; and Jael the warrior. So instead of Sex and the City, couldn’t these women in The Female Man be parts of Freud’s theory of the id? If I had to label the id, the unconscious pleasure or need of instant gratification, it may be Janet in her sexual desires for other women, or her Jael in her animalist tendencies. The ego, whose job is conscious and ready to mediate between the id and superego, may be Joanna as she tries to explain society to Janet. And the superego, who seeks to act in socially appropriate ways, may be Jeannine confined by her expectations to her family, to herself, to society to marry, to make something of her life. Again, not a perfect fit, but it might prove to be useful in our discussions.

To the question about Women in Technology:

Here is a NYT piece on Marissa Mayer, 33 year-old first female engineer for Google and now VP of search product and user experience. I thought the angle of this piece was fascinating. It didn’t just report on her work, but dabbled into the personal, including what her apartment looks like, the talk shows on which she appears, her hobbies, her Yelp interviews, etc. Mayer herself seems to be spearheading her own publicity, but I find it fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Here is another article about her from a San Francisco paper:

http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/adventures-marissa

After these articles appeared, Gawker ruthlessly tore Mayer and the articles apart.

http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure

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?

Technology in the Female Man

In the Harraway article that we read she expresses hope in the possibility that we can be saved if we all learn to live as cyborgs, a blending of the human and the machine. Joanna Russ would appear to agree with this idea as her Utopian society Whileaway in The Female Man is made up almost entirely of cyborgs.

The people on Whileaway are trained to become one with technology from birth, and eventually it becomes a part of them. Although its description seems rustic and pastoral, the society of Whileaway is only possible through their use of and coexistence with technology. I have no idea what an induction helmet is, but it must be pretty awesome if “with their induction helmets on their heads, their toes controlling the green peas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, their abdomens the water supply,” (51). Not to mention that at some point they figured out how to not only have babies without any males, but to genetically modify those babies to an almost perfection.

My question is this: Is technology necessary to conquer nature? Not only trees and butterflies nature, but human nature, or more specifically female nature? Russ spends a great deal of time explaining to us that the idea of “female nature” or “maternal instincts” are just social constructs that are meant as a mode of domination by males (and other females as well). Men in the novel constantly assume that it is part of a woman’s DNA that she will be happy with pretty clothes, or that all she wants to do is sit on the couch and eat bon bons while her husband Climbs Everest (what is a bon bon anyway? I’ve always wondered that). So why is it so necessary that technology be so ingrained in her idea of a utopia. Women are only seen as strong enough to exist on their own on Whileaway, and only with the help of all their technology.

Janet would be considered the most advanced J, or most enlightened, in a way. However, her and the rest of the people on Whileaway are completely dependent on advances in technology to survive. Jael would be the strongest J physically, and the one could argue the toughest. However, she relies on her robot boy-toy for pleasure. Also, the women of Womenland are dependant on technlogiocal advances to survive using it as a means of commerce, namely baby farming and time travel. Jeannine seems to be the most connected to nature, with her cat (Mr. Frosty!) and her plant, but she seems to be the weakest of the J’s to me.

If Russ was attempting to get across the point that women can do whatever men could do and that the differences between the sexes is illusory, why this emphasis on technology?

I may have completely misread the novel. I am assuming that Whileaway is meant to be a utopia. It is possible that it was not meant to be and therefore everything I said above would be pretty much worthless.