Exploring feminist science fiction with The Female Man

The Female Man By Joanna Russ Beacon Press, 1975 It's been a summer of suicidal white women. I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, failed to convince my mother of Edna Pontellier's triumph in drowning in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, leafed through The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and watched "The Hours," where a triumvirate of internally tortured women each in turn consider the meaninglessness of life. But don't get me wrong–I've enjoyed every minute of it, feeding the morbid streak, periodic depression, and feminist rage in me in one big homage to the season's hot and humid, war-filled days. But when the little green book called out to me from betwixt its thick, ominous neighbors on the library shelf (for this was the science fiction section), it wasn't the voice of a light summer read, a break from it all, or even a continuation in the same blood-sucked feminine vein. When the slick, gold letters mounted on a maroon square The Female Man called out to me, it was, though I could hardly know it at the time, the voice of bittersweet redemption. I glanced through the introduction, looking for key words and phrases to give me some clue, some reason to push through the rest of the book. I found them scattered throughout, snippets like "conference on women's literature," and even better, a quote from the text: "I'm not a girl, I'm a genius!" Satisfied, I checked it out and began my meanderings in the unknown terrain–feminist sci-fi of the 1970s. What followed was delightful, shocking and beautiful. Russ's book spoke to my wildest dreams and beyond, to feminist possibilities I had never before imagined. The Female Man tells multiple stories from multiple voices–four genetically identical women living in alternate worlds, in the not-quite past, present and future of each other: Janet Evason who comes from an all-female society on a distant Earth, Joanna from our world circa 1975, Jeannine from a dystopian version of the sixties, and Jael, a woman warrior caught in a literal battle of the sexes. The lives of these women intertwine, clash, and meld together and so, too, do the notions and customs of their respective societies. The reader glimpses life on Whileaway, the female-only future Earth. Interestingly, Russ is careful not to construct a flawless society, only a highly efficient, individualized and technologically advanced one. When Janet travels as impromptu Whileawayan ambassador to the worlds of Jeannine and Joanna, struggling to free themselves from the strangling hold of femininity, her consciousness, free of gender construction, utterly impermeable to sexism, infects her stunned and reluctant hosts. What Russ does not convey through her characters, she interjects herself, as narrator and author and omnipresent commentator. Her attack on patriarchy is relentless, thorough and unremorseful, and she leaves no stones unturned. Polarity itself, male-female, good-evil, writer-reader, is tossed out the window, and interspersed with the text and narrative is screenplay, one sentence chapters and poetry. The book has a self-consciousness as contagious as Janet's humorous, absurdist outlook on femininity and masculinity, and it reawakened in me a livid hopefulness, a healthy anger, a living, breathing, fuming and rejoicing female man. To classify Joanna Russ's masterpiece as 1970s feminist science fiction, is simply symptomatic of the same marginalization that Russ wrestles with so lucidly in her book. How about rearranging the library stacks for once? I can propose a new category to encompass most titles from Classics, History, Literature, Philosophy, etc.: Fantastic Ramblings of the White Male Consciousness. That should make room for the rest of us–Russ, Gilman, ranks of martyred women writers, thousands of invisible Others–on the shelf of Human Experience.