At 13:18 4/15/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Dear All, Apologies- I didn't read over my Female Man response well
>enough, leaving a sentence incomplete. The sentence concerned the
>novel's violence, which for many of my students was a key reason for
>hostility towards the novel. Women, should (as we all know) be ladylike
>and self effacing and NOT slam people's thumbs in doors, break arms, or
>kill idiot boss-men.Incidently, one way I tried to "sell" the book to the
>class was through the novel's humour. Judging from the blank looks in the
>class, I am the only person in the world who found the book funny.
>
>Mike Levy's comments on students, especially women's
>studies students, disliking The FM and The Women Men Don't See make
>things seem very bleak. And as for LIKING such stupidly romantic
>and grimly heterosexual nonsense as Anne McCaffrey's *The Ship Who
>Sang*......words fail, they really do. I
>found *The Ship* very funny in places, especially the moment where Neill
>tries to penetrate Helga's Hull in order to screw her non-existent (but
>genetically very attractive) body.I wonder if this notion of Helga as
>"essentially" really cute makes her attractive to male and female readers,
>where the women in Tiptree's "Women that Men Don't See" are after all
>plain
>and easily ignorable.Ironies, Ironies. Tiptree's defeatism on women's
>rights may be completely
>correct. Has the beauty myth won so easily? And to audiences
>that really should be critical? I have to wonder what sort of "women's
>studies" programme is being run at this university.....is feminism being
>firmly excised from it?
>
>Yours despairingly,
>
>Tanya.
>
Robin McKinley does a really powerful number on the "really attractive"
attraction in _Deerskin_ which is our final novel in the fantasy class
this semester. We have some students in the class with a feminist
orientation (Women's Studies minor), and some with a very traditional
outlook on fantasy. They are dissecting the "beauty myth" rather
cogently from that book...
Have any of you taught/read it? I find it very powerful (more so in a
way than Russ, because it's more psychologically sympathetic), but
absolutely ruthless. We're only just opening the conversation at this
point in class, but I expect things will get even more exciting soon.
Martha Bartter
Truman State University
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