Dear all, I've been quiet for a while, too. Like others no doubt I'm
really
busy tangled up in the thoes of academic requirements for a PhD (where the
main impetus seems to be to make you do all kinds of stuff you don't want
to do and keep you diligently from everything else). I'm up for special
fields exams in a few months (I'm on Bk 7 of Paradise Lost) and then I'll
finally be allowed to WRITE MY THESIS which is on women in imaginary
worlds. My basic idea is to test out whether the ability if
sf and fantasy to imagine new systems of sexual politics beyond those of
"the real world" works in the late 16th century to about 1667: the last
date is there because I wish to do the fabulous and wonderful
(not to mention wierd) Margaret Cavendish. Unfortunately this has also
meant Paradise Lost. A query to another sf page on possible definitions of
the "fantastic" and the "imaginary" provoked a flotilla
of answers, mostly saying that the "fantastic" did not exist untill the
enlightenment as some sort of objective reality is needed as a
counterpoint before the fantastic can exist. Any ideas on this?
Apart from this I am a New Zealander, exiled to the freezing wastes of
Toronto for the interim. I'm going to be doing my first conference at the
MLA in Toronto this Christmas on Donna Haraway's Manifesto for
Cyborgs...I've been feminist for ever (I remember being stunned at school
asking all my girlfriends what they wanted to be when they grew up and
finding them all answering "get married" or "be a nurse." All I knew is
that I wanted to make real money to buy all the sweets and candies I
wanted and I knew becoming a nurse was not the way to this!).
As academia is not the route to sweets and candies, I have obviously
experienced a few changes in my world view since I was 7!
Thanks to she who intitated this discussion: I'm really impressed with how
many techies there are out there reading feminist sf. Dale Spender once
emphasised how vital feminist techies are, to stop women from being edited
out of the data bases of the information age.There is light in the gloom,
hurrah!
Tanya
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:21 PDT