Mala, My thesis on Tiptree was entitled "The Female Man: The Feminism and
Utopianism of James Tiptree, Jr." This was a few years ago now, and its
extraordinary how the memory fades....But I did (oddly enough) use
Harraway (haven't read her new book yet but will) who considered Tiptree
one of her cyborg theorists, mostly on the basis of Tiptree's masquerade
as a man, ignoring Tiptree's own conviction that male and female are
indeliably biologically differentiated. But on the other hand Tiptree did
have a diffcult relationship with her own female identity- apparently
considering herself both inside and outside the female species. I also
used essentialist feminist theorists like Mary Daly- although they differ
radically in many ways they still share an underlying biologism.What stuck
me about Tiptree's utopian writing is how it had to exclude men to suceed
(as in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read"), and is basically untenable in the
real world which includes men ("Your Faces, Oh My Sisters...").Gloom.
gloom. Even in Up the Walls of the World, happy utopian striving inside
the space entity os only possible because all the entities within are
disembodied.
Incidently, Harraway also considers Octavia Butler as a cyborg theorist,
and writes about Butler at lenght in her "Primate Visions" (the two do
indeed have an affinity- although there are also many differences between
them- Haraway would not share Butler's conviction that males are
inherently violent as seen in the Xenogenesis trilogy, for example).
Cheers!
Tanya.
PS I take the points about the Bujold series. Serves me right for
commenting on them when I've only read 2 books and the summaries at the
end of these two books detailing the rest of the series. None of the
summaries mentioned Cordelia at all.It really did seem to me that the
heroine completely vanished- and obviously she does not. But I do think
Cordelia is a heroine- even if she (quite rationally) tries to refuse the
label.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:05:58 PDT