>Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 12:24:15 -0800
>From: schant <schant@SCHANT.DEMON.CO.UK>
>Subject: Re: old thread- feminist dystopias/utopias
>
>Bridget wrote:
>>
>> Sorry everyone for bringing this up again, but I'm intrigued.
>> With regards to the issue of separatism (of the sexes) in novels such
as
>> Joanna Russ's The_Female_Man and Suzy McKee Charnas' _Motherlines_
what
>> does everyone think about its feminist consequences? Is it merely an
>> explorative and/or narrative tool or does it have wider implications?
>> Is it the separatism which makes these works utopic/dystopic?
>>
>I just read a book on "Feminist Utopias" by Frances Bartkowski. It
>seemed a bit limited in scope, but one of the points that did strike me
>was that while there are many utopias written by women which are
>separatist,there do not seem to be any by men which had no women >in
them. From the point of view of procreation, perhaps it's easier to
>envisage women existing without men than vice-versa.
Some of William S. Burroughs' novels seem to evoke an anarchic male
homosexual utopia...
If you read Leslie Fiedler's (sp?) _Love and Death_, he talks about a
domininant theme in American letters of small groups of men in the
wilderness forming egalitarian, utopian brotherhoods... as contrasted to
the civilization "back East,", which is associated with social
hierarchies, laws, and women... Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_ is the best
example of this, how Huck and Jim form a tight community of two on the
Missisipi away from the laws, slavery, and domesticity of shorebound
life. These masculine brotherhoods are usually not explicitly
homosexual (although often homoerotic), I remember some feminist author
called them "homosocial."
Certainly this idea of a small band of men facing dangers far away
from home, mothers and wives, is a strong theme in American SF as well.
I would therefore suggest that perhaps (as one of the consequences
of patriarchy) there is not much need for male writers to posit a
separatist utopia. Male characters can always be loaded onto a raft,
put on a starship, or sent to a war zone to get them away from women...
As for female separatist utopias, I can think of two basic reasons
for their frequency in feminist SF:
--it's the most basic gender-based "What if?" in SF, a simple thought
experiment.
--for not a few women, a woman-only world is a wish fulfillment fantasy
(and I don't just mean lesbians here. I know several married
heterosexual women who, thinking about the various crimes men have
perpetrated on them and their loved ones, think that life would be a lot
easier without men around).
Personally, as a man who reads a lot of feminist SF, I don't mind the
feeling that an author thinks I'm the enemy; what I do mind, very much,
is the feeling that the author thinks I'm stupid.
dkrashin
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