========================================================================= Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 21:16:03 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: joanna goltzman Subject: Elisabeth Vonarburg Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Michelle Kendrick wrote: >I just finished teaching my summer course on women writers -- I focused >on women writing speculative fiction. The books we read were: >Frankenstein, Herland, The Female Man, Slow River and He, She, and It. I take it Slow River is by Nicola Griffith. Who wrote He, She, and It? I recently finished Elisabeth Vonarburg's Reluctant Voyagers. I was a bit disappointed with it. Athana was an interesting character in that she is a young female "diety" who needs advice from Catherine, someone she "created." Catherine, herself, is a strong character who can take care of herself sexually and physically. I enjoyed Catherine, but I got impatient with her two lesbian friends and her two gay male friends. These couples seemed like token characters except for Charles-Henri, one of the gay men, who had a bigger role in the book than just "gay man." I've heard that Vonarburg's In the Mothers' Land--also published as Maerlande Chronicles--is a great book. I'd be interested in responses to either book. Joanna ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 06:34:13 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Jennifer Broomfield Subject: Re: Elisabeth Vonarburg Joanna Goltzman wrote: > Who wrote he, She, It? Marge Piercy wrote this amazing speculative fiction. It is the book that sparked my interest in both computers and speculative fiction. I highly recommend it. Piercy is a prolific novelist and poet who cannot be categorized. Each of her novels is unique, with strong and complex women. Has anyone read Sarah Zettel? Am about to start Fool's War. Looks good. Jennifer ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 11:19:57 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Deb Lenk Subject: Re: Elisabeth Vonarburg He, She, and It was written by Marge Piercy...plan on comparing with Frankenstein for a master's thesis dealing with the issues of technology, feminism, creation of life. Any suggestions? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 09:49:51 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Re[2]: Topics of curiosity (was: yes, list is still here Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 1:36 PM 6/13/97, Susan Marie Groppi wrote: >I doubt that Susan Ivanova >would be significantly weakened by falling in love. I would love to see an exploration of a strong woman being in love, and I agree that in reality this need not weaken such a person (although given the sexism of this culture the challenges are immense); but I share the concern that on a tv series "falling in love" is generally seen as something that strengthens male characters (by giving them something outside themselves to "protect" or "revenge"), but weakens female ones (by making them dependent on the beloved, usually male, for protection). So we are talking on two levels here at once -- what may be true for real people, and what cultural norms dictate must be true for fictional ones. Suzy MC ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 10:00:31 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: SM Charnas on list! Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 9:30 AM 6/12/97, Maryelizabeth Hart wrote: >Welcome to the list Suzy! > >If you've been lurking before, I guess this is just a note that I'm pleased >to see you here! > >BTW, is it correct that you are the author of _The Ruby Tear_? Thanks, nice to be hear; and yep, THE RUBY TEAR is my very own. I badly needed a break from working on the final Holdfast book (right now on my other screen, p. 256); and I had an idea about a vampire, and some very old (now) but fond memories of a spring I spent in San Francisco helping get a play of mine on its feet; and I went for it. However, I didn't want anybody to think that (o boy o boy) here was a sequel to THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, by Suzy Charnas; so I picked a nom de plume for RT, harking back to the family heritage (Jewish) on my mother's side, which is masked in my own name. I hope to use that same name for other work in a lighter vein than, say, THE FURIES, and maybe for some raids into other kinds of fictional territory, even ("Milky" Paws, the cat detective -- no no, I swear, I won't, really!). Suzy MC ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 13:24:06 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Neil Rest Subject: Re: Elisabeth Vonarburg In-Reply-To: <970616063412_-792935322@emout01.mail.aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jennifer Broomfield asked: >Has anyone read Sarah Zettel? Am about to start Fool's War. Outstanding. Read it a couple of months ago, & shortly after, by coincidence, ran into her at a signing. (I'd had no idea what part of the country she's from. Turns out she's in Ann Arbor to my Chicago.) She's on my Watch For list from this first (I think) novel. Neil Rest ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 13:38:13 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Neil Rest Subject: was Re: And the course winds up... In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" (I'd hoped someone else would post the equivalent of this reply. No one has, and I can't let the misstatements go by with implicit assent or implied consensus.) About a week ago, Laura Wigod said: >However, there's some danger in pointing the finger at other cultures to >show how bad things still are _elsewhere_. In my mind, the only difference >between the experience of an American woman and that of a Saudi woman is >the matter of _degree_ of oppression. You are mistaken, and probably underinformed. >I'm always stunned to hear Americans >go on and on about the atrocities of female genital mutilation rituals in >Muslim cultures, while remaining blind to the fact that the American >proclivity towards breast enlargement and liposuction is pretty much the >same thing - body mutilation to meet a perceived societal standard. Liposuction is not "pretty much the same thing" as clitoridectomy. The assertion is false. Your statement suggests that you deliberately amplify the emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions, rather than try to recognize them. >I guess what I'm trying to say is that, as lucky as I feel to live in what >is probably the most progressive society for women, I am not satisfied with >conditions here by any stretch of the imagination. > >Laura "I'll Never Shut Up Until Everything's Alright" Wigod You're absolutely right, and none of us should shut up until everything's alright, but misinformation and distortions make things less alright, not more. Neil Rest ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 14:11:19 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Laura Quilter Subject: fast and dirty scholarship for $ (fwd) Comments: To: fem-sf@lists.best.com, feministsf@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'm forwarding this, because surely the feminist-sf community would have an interest ... Laura M. Quilter / lauramd@uic.edu Electronic Services Librarian University of Illinois at Chicago http://www.uic.edu/~lauramd/ "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution." -- Emma Goldman ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 13:55:21 -0600 (CST) From: Michael Levy at UW-Stout Reply-To: iafa-l@ebbs.english.vt.edu To: sfra-l@ebbs.english.vt.edu, iafa-l@ebbs.english.vt.edu Subject: fast and dirty scholarship for $ Some of you may be familiar with the various reference books published by Beacham Publishing, including their Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Kirk H. Beetz, the editor of the Encyclopedia, is looking for new writers to do reference articles for upcoming volumes of the series. These articles are written according to a strict format. Some are biographical while others deal with one or more specific novels. Although the Encyclopedia covers a wide range of authors and genres, Beetz is currently looking for people to do a number of fantasy and science fiction related essays. A partial list follows: Barker, Clive--Sacrifice, Weaveworld Beagle, Peter--The Last Unicorn Bradbury, Ray--Quicker than the Eye Bradley, Marion Z.--Lady of Avalon Clarke, Arthur -- 3001 Coover, Robert--Briar Rose King, Stephen--Desperation, The Green Mile, The Regulators Kotzwinkle, William--The Bear Went Over the Mountain Lackey, Mercedes--Firebird McCaffrey, Anne--Freedom's Choice etc. etc. Essays pay between $35 and $100 depending on length. They're aimed at the general reading public. The reference series is highly regarded by librarians and is carried in most public libraries. They do a number of other reference books as well, and are also currently looking for people to write for their young adult volume and a general biographical volume. I've written for Beacham's off and on since my graduate school days back in the 1970s, as have a number of other SFRA and IAFA members, and I have found them invariably polite and trustworthy. These aren't major publications, but they're a good way for graduate students (or anyone else for that matter) to get something on their resumes while pulling in a few bucks. For more information, write Kirk H. Beetz, 1307 "F" Street, Davis, CA 95616-1101, or call him at (916) 756-6454, or e-mail him at KHBeetz@aol.com Mike Levy ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:37:34 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: Re: was Re: And the course winds up... In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970616133813.006d6418@tezcat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Neil Rest wrote: > Liposuction is not "pretty much the same thing" as clitoridectomy. The > assertion is false. Your statement suggests that you deliberately amplify > the emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions, rather than try > to recognize them. NH: Neil, you're right. Female genital infibulation is societally enforced mutilation; liposuction is not. Consider, however, that you could have made that simple statement to contradict Laura's without the loaded words that you chose. If I were Laura, I'd be wounded. I'd read them as a personal attack. I want to make a plea that we try to discuss, disagree and even argue with each other without trying to take it out of each other's hides. -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:42:31 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: Re: fast and dirty scholarship for $ (fwd) In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Tks, Laura and Mike! -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 15:48:54 CDT Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: "Mary Ann Beavis, IUS" Organization: The University of Winnipeg Subject: Article of interest to academic types For those of you of the academic persuasion, an article will be coming out in the June 1997 issue of the _Canadian Journal of Urban Research_ that may be of interest: "Do Feminst Utopists Have Something to Say to Urbanists About Work?" The journal is available from: Institute of Urban Studies 346 Portage Avenue Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3C 0C3 Tel. (204) 982-1140 Fax (204) 943-4695 Email ius@coned.uwinnipeg.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 18:00:37 -0800 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Laura Wigod Subject: Re: was Re: And the course winds up... In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Neil Rest wrote: > >> Liposuction is not "pretty much the same thing" as clitoridectomy. The >> assertion is false. Your statement suggests that you deliberately amplify >> the emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions, rather than try >> to recognize them. > Consider, however, that you >could have made that simple statement to contradict Laura's without the >loaded words that you chose. If I were Laura, I'd be wounded. I'd read >them as a personal attack. I want to make a plea that we try to discuss, >disagree and even argue with each other without trying to take it out of >each other's hides. > >-nalo Thank you, Nalo. Neil's response was so startlingly (is there such a word?) aggressive that I had chosen not to respond at all. It was far too tempting for me to respond to his attack in my own attack mode. And I hoped that my declining to get seduced into such an exchange would help serve as a model for self-restraint, something I Most Definitely Do Not excel at, in real life! (And I won't even TOUCH on how mysogynistic his "emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions" comment was! Egads! What year is this?!?! What planet am I on?!?!) However, as to your assertion that..... >Female genital infibulation is societally >enforced mutilation; liposuction is not. .....well to _that_ I take exception! :-) (naturally) How is it that neither of you can accept liposuction or breast enlargement or facelifts as societally enforced? I can agree that it's not _physically_ enforced, but just because no one's holding these women down and scraping off their hips with a jagged tin can lid doesn't mean their _motivation_ isn't based on societal influence. Do you _really_ think a woman going under the knife to have her breasts enlarged _isn't_ basing her body-image on the crap she sees on TV, in the movies, or, worst of all, fashion magazines? Ask any woman with an eating disorder if she feels influenced by our media. The average American woman is 5'4" and weighs 145 pounds. How many women like that do _you_ see on TV? Every time I hear a woman putting herself down, I ask her to ignore the media for a week. If she wants to compare herself to other women, compare herself to women in real life. Not one woman who has taken my advice and performed this experiment has ever come back to tell me I was wrong. In fact, they all come back to me feeling pretty damn gorgeous! As they should! I still stand by my claim that both the little African girl having her genitals scraped off and sewn up and the woman in Beverly Hills going in for a little tuck are still victims of the same bullshit - society telling women how their bodies should conform. Period. And that's _with_ my emotional preconceptions recognized, Neil! Peace, Laura ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 21:28:18 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: infibulation versus liposuction In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'm a 5' 5" 200 pound woman. I fight the body image battles every day. Yes, both infibulation and liposuction are social constructs designed to mutilate women. Yes, both are enough to elicit fury as a response. But no-one woke me out of a peaceful sleep on my tenth birthday, forced my legs apart, and dug out my external genitalia (or for that matter, removed masses of tissue from my thighs). Yes, I agree that women in this society are subtly and not so subtly encouraged to mutilate their bodies to conform to some Barbie standard. But girls in societies that practise infibulation are often forced, not just encouraged. You've said that you see that as a matter of degree. I see it differently, and I'm content with that difference. Seems to me we both agree on the *meaning* of both acts. -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 01:29:13 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Hope Cascio Subject: Re: He, She, and It I'm so glad to jump in when we're discussing a book I've actually read! I'm making a list, y'all, and in about a year I'm finally going to have something intelligent to say about Dune or something like that, totally out of left field. Anyway, about He, She, and It. I was really saddened by the connection Piercy makes between the golem and the android, how they are creations of man (man, not woman) and serve man, behave and feel just like men, but are not entitled to the rights of other men. Bringing in a comparison to Frankenstein suggests that it's not right to treat living, feeling creations of men as if they are not men, but the feeling I got from He, She, and It was that it was proper to treat the golem and the android as if they were no more than clay and metal. In the society in which they live the people, especially the women like Shira, are often treated as pawns as well, and this is treated as a grave injustice. Is Piercy being ironic, and wants me to follow this train of thought, that we act as if it's all right to treat some people without power like they are disposable, and we should be saddened and angered at this treatment? Hope Cascio ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 12:52:36 -0700 Reply-To: ltimmel@halcyon.com Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: "L. Timmel Duchamp" Subject: Re: infibulation versus liposuction MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------28D941B14CC" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------28D941B14CC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Nalo Hopkinson wrote: > . But girls in societies that practise > infibulation are often forced, not just encouraged. You've said that you > see that as a matter of degree. I see it differently, and I'm content > with that difference. Seems to me we both agree on the *meaning* of both > acts. > Nalo, I agree that infibulation is uniquely severe. But I think most people don't understand the extent to which young girls in our society are damaged. --------------28D941B14CC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; name="FEM.TXT" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline; filename="FEM.TXT" The problem of the hatred of the female body in white middle-class US culture is far more serious than Laura's notice of liposuction & breast implants would suggest. What makes me nearly despair about it is that it's not solely the media's doing. Like footbinding & infibulation, US white middle-class versions of it are manfistations of those disciplinary phenomena that its targets (I deliberately & pointedly don't say "victims"), themselves enforce. At question in this discussion, of course, is whether psychological damage (beginning at or before the age of six, when damage is most thorough & formative) is comparable to physical damage at an older age (say 10). (Though sometimes physical damage results from the psychological damage-- as with the rising incidence of anorexia nervosa & bulimia, & the falling age at which it occurs-- with many, many cases now occurring well before puberty.) = As a fairly ordinary concrete example, let me describe what I have witnessed in my own (extended) family. Almost ten years ago now, I met my mother at the house of my brother who was a rising corporate executive at the time, in Connecticut, for a sort of mini-family reunion. My brother & I hadn't spoken for several years, so I was anxious to avoid conflict with him. (This was difficult, because he was constantly citing Pat Buchanan & David Duke as the wisest men in the land, & constantly baiting me as a bleeding-heart liberal.) Despite my brother's playing the role of authoritarian paterfamilias, I was at first impressed with his emotional closeness with his two daughters, one just turned six, the other an infant. He was absolutely devoted to them, & A., the six-year-old, was a classic "daddy's girl." The flip-side of this mutual devotion, though, was A's inordinate desire to please her father, whether with her reading skills, or her dress (& she tended to flaunt & vamp explicitly for him), or her plying him with flattery. These latter two disturbed me a little, because they showed such calculated use of manipulative techniques (aka "feminine wiles"), but I didn't understand their full import until, on the Sunday morning at brunch, he verbally abused & humiliated her for asking for a second helping of pancakes. Suddenly she was a pig, a fat pig, & a bad girl, & he was raving that good girls don't eat second helpings of pancakes that good girls are careful of their figures, that daddies couldn't love fat little pigs, & blah blah blah, blah blah blah. There were references to her diet (& how she hadn't been following it), & what a little creep she was & on & on, a stream of excessive beratement to the effect that she was a worthless little pig, that was obviously not unusual. (I not only couldn't eat any pancakes after that, I had to leave the room before I exploded.) My mother considered these reproaches appropriate, of course (though she would have been gentler in her comments-- more "persuasive" than "negative," with "pancakes will spoil your figure, honey," or "don't you want to look pretty?" etc etc). = My mother has a hatred of the female body & believes that every "self-respecting" woman (& girl) will keep it from being "overweight" (a judgment that has nothing to do with health & everything to do with normative values: hence, for the female body, what is "overweight" is in constant fluctuation, & is generally a social value judgment). A., of course, was presented with split values. On the one hand, her father & paternal grandmother have had her dieting from her earliest memories. On the other hand, her mother's Italian-American family values food & the pleasures of the body & thinks dieting is perverse & believes that children should be unconditionally loved. (A's mother was always dieting, but with tongue in cheek, quite ruefully, without the serious reverence my brother & mother give to standards of acceptibility in female appearance. She didn't hate her body (which in my eyes was quite lusciously desirable, & she didn't hate her mother's body-- which was perhaps 180 pounds. A proper hedonist, I'd call her.) I =0C was raised with a similar split. On the one hand, my mother was a monument to an indifference to food & hatred of the female body (& openly avowed hatred for her mother, who perhaps not coincidentally was huge-- at 4'8" over 300 pounds) & could only look at food in terms of whether or not it was "fattening"; on the other hand, my German-American father & paternal grandparents taught me to love food & honor the body, themselves a monument of indifference to standard US middle class notions of female attractiveness. (My paternal grandmother was a great strong working woman who in her healthier days had no trouble tossing around 100-lb sacks of potatoes.) I see this split as culturally- rather than gender- based. Mothers are often the main enforcers of the discipline (as in my case), though fathers can be, too (as in A's). & one's peers-- whether one is in the seventh grade, or an adult-- are far more important enforcers than the media. = Over the years, as I've looked back at that scene involving my neice, I've come to characterize it as psychological torture. A six year old child is defenseless against the judgments of the most important person in her life. What, I've asked myself, can such harrangues do to a child's self-esteem? Though my brother & I haven't spoken since that "family reunion," I'm certain that scene was repeated frequently, since whenever my mother talks about my neice, it's always with reference to how her dieting is coming along, what kind of "figure" she has, & so on. It's been widely reported that it's commonplace for girls in the second grade, without any health problems, to start dieting because they're worried about their "figures." It's also the "thing" now in L.A. for middle class white women in their early-to-mid-twenties to undergo cosmetic surgery repeatedly, even when they're conventionally pretty (or even "classically" beautiful)-- shaving a hundreth of an inch off the nose here, heightening their cheekbones there-- & of course resorting to either breast implants or breast reduction (depending upon their perceptions of their breast size, WHICH IS NEVER RIGHT). (A young woman I know says she is the only woman in her circle who hasn't had cosmetic surgery: & her friends consider abnormal for it.) Cosmetic surgery is THE growth sector of the medical industry. Computer visualization serves that industry well, conning women into taking risks with their healthy, usually pretty faces that can end in tragic mutilation (since how tissue heals cannot be accurately predicted, & varies from person to person). = So tell me. What does it mean that bright young women, just out of college, spend all their disposable resources on marginally improving their looks (while risking disfigurement)? Is this what young women should be devoting themselves to at that stage in their lives? The way I read it, such women can only think of themselves as objects being presented for others' approval. (How else get so obsessed with shaving a hundredth of an inch off their noses? Or enlarging a C-cup to a DD-cup, or reducing a DD-cup to a D cup?) When they look at themselves in the mirror, they see what they think the most censorious person they can think of would see. Ditto, now, for many girls at puberty & younger. = Hatred of the female body takes many forms. Some are more violent than others, but surely they're all damaging. = Timmi --------------28D941B14CC-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 15:56:51 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Anny Middon Subject: Susan Calvin Since this is my first post to the list, I'll introduce myself. My name is Anny Middon. I have absolutely no qualifications to participate in this list, save a love of science fiction and a strong feminist philosophy. (Query: How many on this list are old enough to remember when Feminism was more commonly known as Women's Liberation?) Actually, I ask that for a reason. I'd like opinions on Susan Calvin, Isaac Asimov's recurring robopsychologist character. When I first read most of the stories, back in the late 60's and early 70's, I loved them. I think this was largely because I was so happy to see at last a strong female character (and a scientist, to boot!) in an sf story. But if I read them now, the blatant sexism in them makes me a little queasy. Although Dr. Calvin held an extremely important position at US Robots and Mechanical Men, she was the only woman to do so. Even the middle management ranks were staffed entirely with men, and when she retired she was replaced by a man. The defining characteristic of Dr. Calvin, mentioned at least once in every story in which she appears, is her unattractiveness. At some level (and I think this may be directly stated in at least one story) Asimov seems to be saying that the only reason Dr. Calvin is a success in her field is because she couldn't attract a man. The other characters (all male) typically react to her in an intimidated and scared manner, but also pity her. The only characters she seems to connect with are the robots, and this is often remarked on in the stories. (There's a big part of me that feels that, given the people she had to deal with, who can blame her?) OK, in the years since these stories were written, I've changed, times have changed, ideas about women have changed. If we view these stories in the light of the times in which they were written, do they seem so sexist? Did Asimov have to make Calvin unattractive and acerbic so that a woman in such a high position would be believable to his readers? On a broader scale, why did it take science fiction so long to embrace a view of the future in which women and men were equals? It seems that most science fiction written throughout the 60's and well into the 70's presented futures that included the same old same old, with men in the active and powerful roles and women as helpmeets. _The Feminine Mystique_ was published in 1963, the National Organization for Women was formed in 1966. How come it took so long for science fiction to regularly see the future in nonsexist terms? (Apologies to those who have heard me rant on Dr. Calvin on another list [SF-LIT]. But I admit to a fascination with this character.) Anny Middon AnnyMiddon@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 15:11:41 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Neil Rest Subject: Re: was Re: And the course winds up... In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Laura Wigod answered me: >>> Liposuction is not "pretty much the same thing" as clitoridectomy. The >>> assertion is false. Your statement suggests that you deliberately amplify >>> the emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions, rather than try >>> to recognize them. >> >Consider, however, that you >>could have made that simple statement to contradict Laura's without the >>loaded words that you chose. If I were Laura, I'd be wounded. I'd read >>them as a personal attack. I want to make a plea that we try to discuss, >>disagree and even argue with each other without trying to take it out of >>each other's hides. >> >>-nalo > >Thank you, Nalo. Neil's response was so startlingly (is there such a >word?) aggressive that I had chosen not to respond at all. Your original statements (I am not saying *you*; I said, very narrowly and specificly, "your statements") were so wrong that they took my breath away. >It was far too >tempting for me to respond to his attack in my own attack mode. And I >hoped that my declining to get seduced into such an exchange would help >serve as a model for self-restraint, something I Most Definitely Do Not >excel at, in real life! (And I won't even TOUCH on how mysogynistic his >"emotional preconceptions which cloud your perceptions" comment was! >Egads! What year is this?!?! What planet am I on?!?!) Did I say that your statements were wrong "because you are a woman"? No. Did I say your statements were wrong in a way which men's statements aren't? No. Did I associate my opinion of your accuracy with your gender in any way? No. > However, as to >your assertion that..... > >>Female genital infibulation is societally >>enforced mutilation; liposuction is not. > >.....well to _that_ I take exception! :-) (naturally) > >How is it that neither of you can accept liposuction or breast enlargement >or facelifts as societally enforced? Dreadful as the pressures may be, liposuction is not indispensable for adult status. 'Successful' liposuction doesn't leave the patient crippled and maimed. They *are* different. (General semanticioans forgive me.) >I still stand by my claim that both the little African girl having her >genitals scraped off and sewn up and the woman in Beverly Hills going in >for a little tuck are still victims of the same bullshit - society telling >women how their bodies should conform. Period. And that's _with_ my >emotional preconceptions recognized, Neil! There are wide, major similarities in the social pressures, and, even more importantly, in the male emotions behind the social pressures. Liposuction and clitoridectomy are still not the same. Neil ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 13:36:52 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Bonnie Gray Subject: Re: Susan Calvin Susan Clavin was one of the first female characters I ever read about in sf (next to some of Heinlein's). Does anyone else remember one story in particular where Susan ineffectually tried to wear make-up and look attractive to a young man? I remember the tone was amazingly pitying of her (unsuccessful) attempts. Even as a pre-pubescent, this disturbed me enough that it has remained with me. Also, I suspect (although, being born during this time, I may be wrong :) ), that sf in the 60's/70's wasn't liberated because a lot of unliberated people were writing it still... although, we can't forget the many fine feminist sf books written then. Bonnie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 15:34:22 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Laura Quilter Subject: Re: liposuction etc. In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970617151141.0069e128@tezcat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Warning from moderator: The discussions about liposuction and infibulation are getting a) heated and b) not specifically relevant to SF. Laura M. Quilter / lauramd@uic.edu Electronic Services Librarian University of Illinois at Chicago http://www.uic.edu/~lauramd/ "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution." -- Emma Goldman ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 16:46:54 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: Re: infibulation versus liposuction Comments: To: "L. Timmel Duchamp" In-Reply-To: <33A6EB04.7CB4@halcyon.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: MULTIPART/MIXED; BOUNDARY=------------28D941B14CC This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. --------------28D941B14CC Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=us-ascii On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, L. Timmel Duchamp wrote: > Nalo, I agree that infibulation is uniquely severe. But I think most > people don't understand the extent to which young girls in our society > are damaged. > NH: I'd agree with you entirely. The damage is extensive and so all-pervasive that most people don't see it as such, and I can get pretty passionate myself when I get to talking about it. I'm not trying to say that psychologically-inflicted torment of women and girls is somehow *better* than physical torture. I'd rather that neither happened at all. -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" --------------28D941B14CC Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=iso-8859-1; NAME="FEM.TXT" Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Content-ID: The problem of the hatred of the female body in white middle-class US culture is far more serious than Laura's notice of liposuction & breast implants would suggest. What makes me nearly despair about it is that it's not solely the media's doing. Like footbinding & infibulation, US white middle-class versions of it are manfistations of those disciplinary phenomena that its targets (I deliberately & pointedly don't say "victims"), themselves enforce. At question in this discussion, of course, is whether psychological damage (beginning at or before the age of six, when damage is most thorough & formative) is comparable to physical damage at an older age (say 10). (Though sometimes physical damage results from the psychological damage-- as with the rising incidence of anorexia nervosa & bulimia, & the falling age at which it occurs-- with many, many cases now occurring well before puberty.) = As a fairly ordinary concrete example, let me describe what I have witnessed in my own (extended) family. Almost ten years ago now, I met my mother at the house of my brother who was a rising corporate executive at the time, in Connecticut, for a sort of mini-family reunion. My brother & I hadn't spoken for several years, so I was anxious to avoid conflict with him. (This was difficult, because he was constantly citing Pat Buchanan & David Duke as the wisest men in the land, & constantly baiting me as a bleeding-heart liberal.) Despite my brother's playing the role of authoritarian paterfamilias, I was at first impressed with his emotional closeness with his two daughters, one just turned six, the other an infant. He was absolutely devoted to them, & A., the six-year-old, was a classic "daddy's girl." The flip-side of this mutual devotion, though, was A's inordinate desire to please her father, whether with her reading skills, or her dress (& she tended to flaunt & vamp explicitly for him), or her plying him with flattery. These latter two disturbed me a little, because they showed such calculated use of manipulative techniques (aka "feminine wiles"), but I didn't understand their full import until, on the Sunday morning at brunch, he verbally abused & humiliated her for asking for a second helping of pancakes. Suddenly she was a pig, a fat pig, & a bad girl, & he was raving that good girls don't eat second helpings of pancakes that good girls are careful of their figures, that daddies couldn't love fat little pigs, & blah blah blah, blah blah blah. There were references to her diet (& how she hadn't been following it), & what a little creep she was & on & on, a stream of excessive beratement to the effect that she was a worthless little pig, that was obviously not unusual. (I not only couldn't eat any pancakes after that, I had to leave the room before I exploded.) My mother considered these reproaches appropriate, of course (though she would have been gentler in her comments-- more "persuasive" than "negative," with "pancakes will spoil your figure, honey," or "don't you want to look pretty?" etc etc). = My mother has a hatred of the female body & believes that every "self-respecting" woman (& girl) will keep it from being "overweight" (a judgment that has nothing to do with health & everything to do with normative values: hence, for the female body, what is "overweight" is in constant fluctuation, & is generally a social value judgment). A., of course, was presented with split values. On the one hand, her father & paternal grandmother have had her dieting from her earliest memories. On the other hand, her mother's Italian-American family values food & the pleasures of the body & thinks dieting is perverse & believes that children should be unconditionally loved. (A's mother was always dieting, but with tongue in cheek, quite ruefully, without the serious reverence my brother & mother give to standards of acceptibility in female appearance. She didn't hate her body (which in my eyes was quite lusciously desirable, & she didn't hate her mother's body-- which was perhaps 180 pounds. A proper hedonist, I'd call her.) I =0C was raised with a similar split. On the one hand, my mother was a monument to an indifference to food & hatred of the female body (& openly avowed hatred for her mother, who perhaps not coincidentally was huge-- at 4'8" over 300 pounds) & could only look at food in terms of whether or not it was "fattening"; on the other hand, my German-American father & paternal grandparents taught me to love food & honor the body, themselves a monument of indifference to standard US middle class notions of female attractiveness. (My paternal grandmother was a great strong working woman who in her healthier days had no trouble tossing around 100-lb sacks of potatoes.) I see this split as culturally- rather than gender- based. Mothers are often the main enforcers of the discipline (as in my case), though fathers can be, too (as in A's). & one's peers-- whether one is in the seventh grade, or an adult-- are far more important enforcers than the media. = Over the years, as I've looked back at that scene involving my neice, I've come to characterize it as psychological torture. A six year old child is defenseless against the judgments of the most important person in her life. What, I've asked myself, can such harrangues do to a child's self-esteem? Though my brother & I haven't spoken since that "family reunion," I'm certain that scene was repeated frequently, since whenever my mother talks about my neice, it's always with reference to how her dieting is coming along, what kind of "figure" she has, & so on. It's been widely reported that it's commonplace for girls in the second grade, without any health problems, to start dieting because they're worried about their "figures." It's also the "thing" now in L.A. for middle class white women in their early-to-mid-twenties to undergo cosmetic surgery repeatedly, even when they're conventionally pretty (or even "classically" beautiful)-- shaving a hundreth of an inch off the nose here, heightening their cheekbones there-- & of course resorting to either breast implants or breast reduction (depending upon their perceptions of their breast size, WHICH IS NEVER RIGHT). (A young woman I know says she is the only woman in her circle who hasn't had cosmetic surgery: & her friends consider abnormal for it.) Cosmetic surgery is THE growth sector of the medical industry. Computer visualization serves that industry well, conning women into taking risks with their healthy, usually pretty faces that can end in tragic mutilation (since how tissue heals cannot be accurately predicted, & varies from person to person). = So tell me. What does it mean that bright young women, just out of college, spend all their disposable resources on marginally improving their looks (while risking disfigurement)? Is this what young women should be devoting themselves to at that stage in their lives? The way I read it, such women can only think of themselves as objects being presented for others' approval. (How else get so obsessed with shaving a hundredth of an inch off their noses? Or enlarging a C-cup to a DD-cup, or reducing a DD-cup to a D cup?) When they look at themselves in the mirror, they see what they think the most censorious person they can think of would see. Ditto, now, for many girls at puberty & younger. = Hatred of the female body takes many forms. Some are more violent than others, but surely they're all damaging. = Timmi --------------28D941B14CC-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 16:54:47 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: Re: Susan Calvin In-Reply-To: <970617155342_-1362571323@emout14.mail.aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Anny Middon wrote: > On a broader scale, why did it take science fiction so long to embrace a view > of the future in which women and men were equals? NH: Don't have much to say about Susan Calvin. I'd probably have a similar reaction to yours were I to re-read those stories today. But in answer to your question above, I'd guess it didn't start happening until women started writing our own sf stories. -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 17:18:11 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Sean Johnston Subject: Re: Susan Calvin In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Anny Middon wrote: > > >> On a broader scale, why did it take science fiction so long to embrace a >>view >> of the future in which women and men were equals? > Anny, I'm not sure it did take very long. Top statement seems like a very 'glass if half-empty' approach. If you look at it from the opposite view, you can compare the SF world to society in general and say, 'you know, proportionally speaking, it didn't take SF all that long.' I mean, it took a while, but there are, I think, other literatures that still adhere to traditional male/female behavioral models. Myself, I, as I said, agree that it took a while, but it's here now and we should enjoy it. Intellectually, though, I can see why one would ask this: to understand. If I were to posit an 'intellectual' answer, I'd point to society in general and say that, as SF is reflective of society both good and ill (attitudes of society are reflected in SF and it is with this view that one tempers the other view that SF is some sort of utopia where people are terribly progressive and stuff), it makes sense that SF had to wait until women either had enough interest in SF to write or were encouraged/empowered enough (referring partially to Nalo's point). Or both (interested and encouraged/empowered--and not necessarily by males). Translation: because it took society this long. -Sean ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 17:15:21 -0400 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Nalo Hopkinson Subject: Re: liposuction etc. In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Laura Quilter wrote: > Warning from moderator: The discussions about liposuction and infibulation > are getting a) heated and b) not specifically relevant to SF. NH: Oh, okay. 'Nuff said. -nalo "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the stars/Were near." -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 20:01:57 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Michael Marc Levy Subject: Re: Susan Calvin In-Reply-To: <970617155342_-1362571323@emout14.mail.aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'd suggest that for her day and within her own context Asimov's Susan Calvin character was about as good a strong female character as the (male writers in the)field was (were) capable of producing back then. Nonetheless it's worth noticing that Calvin does fit a stereotype of the era, the dedicated woman scientist/teacher/business woman, married to her job, manless (and mannish), sexless or possibly lesbian (this last implicit and hidden under a lot of deep coding). See Janet Reno for the current variation on the theme. Mike Michael M. Levy levym@uwstout.edu Department of English levymm@uwec.edu University of Wisconsin-Stout off. ph: 715-834-6533 Menomonie, WI 54751 hm. ph: 715-834-6533 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 18:14:59 +0100 Reply-To: bernip@ix.netcom.com Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Berni Phillips Organization: The Huntingdon Library Subject: Re: Susan Calvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Anny Middon wrote: > > (Query: How many on this list are old enough to remember when Feminism was > more commonly known as Women's Liberation?) > Hi, Anny. I certainly do. While I'm not old enough to have been a suffragette, I'm definitely old enough to have been a Women's Libber, as they liked to call us then. > Actually, I ask that for a reason. I'd like opinions on Susan Calvin, Isaac [snipped for brevity] > > The defining characteristic of Dr. Calvin, mentioned at least once in every > story in which she appears, is her unattractiveness. At some level (and I > think this may be directly stated in at least one story) Asimov seems to be > saying that the only reason Dr. Calvin is a success in her field is because > she couldn't attract a man. Maybe he was also trying to make it clear that she was not a bimbo. Women had little place in many of the early SF stories, and all too frequently they were just the stereotypical mad scientist's daughter, there just to provide an excuse for the expository lump and to need rescuing from the brave (and always male) hero. In some ways, it's easier, even now, for a non-attractive woman to be taken seriously by men (speaks the fat, conventionally unattractive woman). Perhaps Dr. Calvin's more beautiful counterpart was unable to get such a job, men being convinced that anyone that good looking could also not be so intelligent. > > OK, in the years since these stories were written, I've changed, times have > changed, ideas about women have changed. If we view these stories in the > light of the times in which they were written, do they seem so sexist? Did > Asimov have to make Calvin unattractive and acerbic so that a woman in such a > high position would be believable to his readers? > I would not consider them sexist, given their context. I've mentioned why I thought she may have been written to be unattractive. As to acerbic, who wouldn't be in her position? Another thing which helps support this, I think, is the lack of medical studies that have been done on women as compared to those done on men. Unfortunately this has not been evened out. However, I heard Dr. William Dement of Stanford, a sleep specialist who has been studying sleep stages and various sleep disorders since the 1950s, speak recently. One of the things he said was that after having studied so many men, he approached whoever it was that was handing out grants back then about having a study involving women. They were appalled at this. He wound up using his own wife (he joked about getting married so he could have a female subject) for these sleep studies since he couldn't get funding to pay any outside women. > On a broader scale, why did it take science fiction so long to embrace a view > of the future in which women and men were equals? It seems that most science > fiction written throughout the 60's and well into the 70's presented futures > that included the same old same old, with men in the active and powerful > roles and women as helpmeets. _The Feminine Mystique_ was published in 1963, > the National Organization for Women was formed in 1966. How come it took so > long for science fiction to regularly see the future in nonsexist terms? > I don't mean to male bash, but let's face it, most of it was written by men, and men in love with science and technology. For many of them, social changes such as women's equality probably never occurred to them, or if it did, that wasn't what they were interested in writing about. For the women writers, I can see how they felt like they were not in a secure position and maybe didn't want to rock the boat. And again, maybe it never occurred to them that things could change. Social conditioning is strong stuff. Berni Phillips bernip@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 17:22:00 CST Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Gabrielle Bate Subject: Re: Elisabeth Vonarburg > >I recently finished Elisabeth Vonarburg's Reluctant Voyagers. I was a bit >disappointed with it. Athana was an interesting character in that she is a >young female "diety" who needs advice from Catherine, someone she "created." >Catherine, herself, is a strong character who can take care of herself >sexually and physically. I enjoyed Catherine, but I got impatient with her >two lesbian friends and her two gay male friends. These couples seemed like >token characters except for Charles-Henri, one of the gay men, who had a >bigger role in the book than just "gay man." > >I've heard that Vonarburg's In the Mothers' Land--also published as >Maerlande Chronicles--is a great book. > >I'd be interested in responses to either book. > >Joanna Elisabeth Vonarburg is one of my favorite authors and _In the mothers' land_ (original title - Chroniques du pays des meres) is one of my favorite books. It's a feminist semi-utopia where, due to a genetic defect, 90+% of the population is female. I particularly like it from a linguistic point of view. It was originally written in French with the feminine being dominant throughout the book. (French, like all romance languages, is a gendered language. If you have a group of women the word for they is elles, a group of men is ils, and a mixed group, even with 30 women and 1 man, is always ils. In this book, a mixed group, is always elles.) This was incredibly refreshing to me after years of being told no native speaker would ever find a gendered language sexist. The translator, I thought, did a very nice job of making up words to get the idea across in English. I found myself forgetting, at times, that there were in fact men in this world. My experience with Reluctant Voyagers (or Les voyageurs malgre eux) is somewhat unique, I think, so I can't really say very much about it. I bought it in Quebec in French with the idea of reading it in a year or so, when I would be ready. Instead I found myself reading it in the coffee shop in the bookstore, missing about every third word, but still more or less able to follow the story. This led to a very surrealistic reading of a very surrealistic novel. I enjoyed it greatly, but it's hard to say how much of it was excitement over being able to read a novel in French. I also found myself very much identifying with Catherine, who also often found herself not having any idea what was going on. I am looking forward to rereading it one of these days. Gabby ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 23:57:18 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: DAVID CHRISTENSON Subject: Re: Susan Calvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii -- [ From: David Christenson * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] -- Maybe an old thread already, but I thought I'd toss in a bibliographical note about Asimov's Calvin character. As near as I can figure from internal evidence in my Asimov paperbacks, the first Calvin story was "Liar!," first published in 1941. In this tale, the "Liar!" was a mind-reading robot who lied to Calvin about her prospects for romance with a colleague to spare her feelings ("a robot may not injure a human being..."). Calvin set out to destroy the robot Captain Kirk style, by talking it into suicide via one of those HAL contradictions. In "Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots," the latest date on a Calvin story is 1958. This is "Lenny," which ends with Calvin teaching a robot to call to her: " 'Mommie, I want you...' And the footsteps of Susan Calvin could be heard hurrying eagerly across the laboratory floor toward the only kind of baby she could ever have or love." BTW, I love SF from this period, but I don't quite go along with the sentiment that excuses stereotyping in the Golden Age, because I don't accept the popular idea that the 1950s was a uniculture. After all, de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" was published in English by 1953, and by the time Susan Calvin had hurried after her surrogate baby, Doris Lessing had published four novels, the Civil Rights Movement was well underway in the south, and even French and Italian women had the right to vote for over a decade. -- David Christenson - ldqt79a@prodigy.com Ray Goulding: "Suppose someone on the radio said, "What are you doing now, in this Atomic Age?'" Bob Elliott: "And you would answer, 'No.'" "You'll say reality is under no obligation to be interesting. To which I'd reply that reality may disregard the obligation but that we may not. " - Jorge Luis Borges ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 10:25:02 -1000 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Daniel L Krashin Subject: Re: Susan Calvin, Dress Codes, and more Hi everybody! I just got back from my vacation to Japan and have been catching up on the list. I just wanted to throw in my $ 0.02 on a few recent topics: About the Susan Calvin stories: they are horribly sexist, but I think others on the list were right in saying that Calvin is pretty much a stock character of pre-70's SF (and other genre literature), and as such fits in well with the rest of Asimov's characters, especially in his earlier work. Reading these stories as a kid, I was much more impressed with Calvin's intellect and her acerbic manner than I was concerned about her stunted emotional life. She seemed a type of female Sherlock Holmes to me. I don't think it's fair to lambaste Asimov on the grounds that Simone de Beauvoir was already available in English by that time -- from my historical understanding (caveat:I was born in 1967 and don't remember anything prior to Watergate) feminism, or women's lib, was off the cultural radar screen in America until the late 60's/early 70's except for a small minority of people... Two:Harkening back to the discussion on coding characters as homosexual in stories, and being seen as homosexual in real life -- I think a lot of the ambiguity can be understood purely in terms of communication problems. In a stable, stratified society, you can "read" a person's appearance very effectively. In the contemporary urban American scene, the relationship of outer appearance and identity seems much more fluid... for example, when I was young there was a widespread belief that having an earring in the right ear, in men, meant you were straight and on the left meant you were gay. That code broke down a long time ago, though. Another example: I used to be a (nonracist) skinhead, as was my best friend: living in Detroit, people thought we were thugs, and some people thought we were Nazis. When we visited San Fransisco and had breakfast on Christopher Street, the waiter assumed we were lovers... The determined person can always wear a pink triangle, or the notorious "I'm here and I'm queer" T-shirt which Army regulations specifically prohibit... On the literary side, In _Trouble and her Friends_, I thought it was pretty obvious that the main characters were lesbians even before the sex scene. I think a passionate kiss is effective, too (A la _My Beautiful Laundrette_ -- that's the point in the movie where my dad figured out the two guys were together). Now, I've got nothing against lesbian sex scenes and I strongly suspect they are good for sales, but I don't think they're necessary o get the point accross. You also lose some of the YA market by doing that, and there are some readers who just don't like explicit sex in their stories, for whatever reason. Three, and finally, I wanted to point out that societies do not fall out as points on a line ranging from "very repressive" to "utopian" -- reality is a bit more complicated. One thing I saw in Tokyo that really impressed me was the sight of little girls, about 8 or so, going to school via the subway without any adult escort. I cannot imagine any western great city where such a thing would be possible. WHen I talked with an American woman living in TOkyo, the first thing she mentioned about living there was the sense of safety... surely that is a good thing, that women can leave the house without fear. On the other hand, women in general are not supposed to have careers, are supposed to walk behind their husbands, etc. etc. Another example: in Czechoslovakia before 1989, women got a year of paid maternity leave guaranteed by the state. On the other hand, women were systematically excluded from some parts of the education system. So I think any comparison of cultures in terms of "who's got it worse" is a gross oversimplification. Every shoe seems to pinch somewhere, and some pinch very badly indeed. Daniel Krashin "My opinions do not represent or resemble the US Government in any way" ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 20:32:30 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: DAVID CHRISTENSON Subject: Re: Susan Calvin, Dress Codes, and more MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii -- [ From: David Christenson * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] -- Mr. Krashin says: > Reading these stories as a kid, I was much more impressed with Calvin's > intellect and her acerbic manner than I was concerned about her stunted > emotional life. She seemed a type of female Sherlock Holmes to me. I think when we're young we tend to take out of our reading what is valuable, and the nonsense is forgotten - one of the benefits of pre- critical thinking. > I don't think it's fair to lambaste Asimov on the grounds that Simone de > Beauvoir was already available in English by that time -- from my historical > understanding (caveat:I was born in 1967 and don't remember anything prior to > Watergate) feminism, or women's lib, was off the cultural radar screen in > America until the late 60's/early 70's except for a small minority of people... Not my intent to Asimov-bash, really. I've always liked Asimov. There were male SF writers of the '40s and '50s who were better at drawing unstereotyped female characters - Sturgeon comes to mind - but the list of such writers is small. It's interesting that a genre on the cutting edge in some ways is/was so backward in other ways, and it seems contradictory that the genre could contain the real Judith Merril, but also a host of fictional Susan Calvins, fantasy slave women, etc. Seems to me one good conversation with Merril or her creative peers should drive all the stereotypes out of one's imagination. -- David Christenson - ldqt79a@prodigy.com "What is life? Life is stepping down a step or sitting on a chair, "And it isn't there." - Ogden Nash