Farah Mendlesohn wrote:
>Heinlein isn't so much protofeminist as "first-wave" feminist
(if you
>accept that the first wave of modern feminism is in the late
>nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries -- I know a number
of
>historians who woudl start muttering about the seventeenth).
Try Christine de Pisan, ca.1400, _The Book of the City of Ladies_:
it's an explicit feminist attack on Aristotelian-based sexism,
& imagines-- allegorically-- the building of a city for ladies
whose walls & foundations are the bold brave women of history
(as well as some current women, including a woman teaching (behind
a curtain) law students in Bologna.
<snip>
>I accept some of your arguments about boredom, academic study
>and depth, but it is my duty to encourage the reading to be fun.
After
>students came in complaining about Delany's Time Considered as
A
>Helix of Semi-Precious Stones this week I was very chuffed to
have it
>turn out to be the most productive of the three short stories
we were
>looking at (the other two were not sf) and students left muttering
that
>they must read it again.
Let me add another dimension to this discussion about young people
& how they respond to feminist sf (in this discussion, largely
within the context of the classroom). I found Andrea's post helpful
& fascinating; it confirmed what academic friends of mine teaching
history have to say about their students' assumptions about feminism
as retro & unnecessary. It raises the point that what readers
(of any age) need & want at any given moment determines how receptive
to being provoked & stimulated by anything they might read. When
I first encountered feminist writings (though not fiction) in
the early 1970s, though the first stage involved intense pain
(followed swiftly by anger & determination), I could not resist
going through that painful stage required by feminism, because
what I read helped me to understand certain trainwrecks that had
been making havoc of my life. (For example, there were no words
for sexual discrimination in 1968, when I desperately needed such
a concept.) It seems that many young women today don't feel a
pressing bewilderment for explaining what is happening to them.
The explanations provided by the culture at large (& whatever
subcultures they belong to) are apparently "fitting" the puzzles
of their experience-- so far. The second point I wanted to raise
is that obviously not all young women are going to feel satisfied
by the images & protocols for understanding that are floated on
television, in film, & by other sources of mainstream culture.
For these women, feminist sf is going to not only help them make
a certain sense of their experience, but allow them imaginative
expansion & a different license for pleasure in violation of the
status quo.
I realize the discussion has been mostly about the difficulty
of teaching students critical skills, & don't intend to suggest
that that isn't important (I myself am incapable of reading anything
without an immediate eye to its structural intricacies). But
I want to quote Dorothy Allison here, writing about her reading
of sf in general (but feminist sf most often) for affirmation
& recognition of her own difference as a young lesbian in desperate
need of finding breathing (& thinking) space. Though she's not
of Generation X, there's no reason not to think that this old,
old problem for young lesbians, especially adolescents, is not
still typical:
"The honest-to-god truth is that I spent most of my adolescence--
and I'll admit it, even my twenties-- jacking off to science fiction
books, marvelous, impossible stories full of struggle and angst.
"As a girl I read Robert Heinlein's _Podkayne of Mars_, C.J. Moore's
_Jirle of Joiry_. the Telzey books by James Schmidt, _More Than
Human_ by Theodore Sturgeon, and all of the Alyx stories by Joanna
Russ. Each and every one of them stayed with me long after I
put the books down. Their worlds were the worlds where I went
to get away from the one in which I had been born, and those worlds
were lush, adventuresome, scary, and deliciously satisfying.
I'd buckle Jirel's sword across my hip and wipe the demon's kiss
from my lips, mourning the lover I had been forced to murder but
borne by up by pride and outrage. I would turn my cat-calm eyes
on the huge dangerous creatures that captured me and wanted to
use me like the Aliens were always doing to Telzey, and like her
I would outplot the bad guys and walk away triumphant in the end.
Later there were the Joan Vinge books, C.J. Cherryh, Vonda McIntyre,
Susy [sic] McKee Charnas, and Elizabeth A. Lynn. I became the
child thief captured and flogged in McIntyre's novel, the riding
woman cleaning my knife while listening to the runaway slave who
had walked to the end of the world, one of those fascinating perverts
Elizabeth Lynn seemed to understand so well... Justice happened
in those books-- justive, revenge, vindication, compassionate
philosophy of life. I am as much a creature of those books as
I am of my family, my region, my sexual desires. I am the wages
of pulp."
She talks then about reading Joanna Russ's essay, "Pornography
By Women, For Women, With Love," and notes, "After reading Russ's
essay I began to reconsider what my life as a teenage science
fiction fan had really been about. I found myself thinking of
the levels of meaning I took from science fiction-- not just the
straightforward adventures, but the symbolic and political lessons
I abstracted. After all, I ate up science fiction books like
candy, until I was living more in the worlds of fantasy than in
the small Southern town where I was born. Yes, the women and
girls in those books had aventures. They had great passions,
terrors, successes, and narrow escapes. Their minds were working
constantly and almost never in the ways traditional fiction told
me women thought. They weren't wondering what the men and boys
thought of them; they were worrying about survival..."
There's more of the above, & then she talks about Russ's _Picnic
on Paradise_, & Delany's _Babel 17_, & "Time Considered as a Helix
of Semi-Precious Stones"-- "the first story I read that actually
had recognizable, almost conetmporary, gay characters. ... the
story made me thinking about my own romantic imagery... when I
finally admitted to myself why I so loved that story; how I saw
myself in it, more than my erotic imagination shifted. My everyday
human-to-human relationsips were altered as well. I began to
think that perhaps it might be worth the risk to touch another
being, to allow them to touch me back."
I extracted all the above quotes from "Puritans, Perverts, and
Feminists," which can be found in her collection essays _Skin:Talking
about Sex, Class, & Literature."
Timmi
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