Veronica Hollinger
Feminist Science Fiction: Construction and Deconstruction
Sarah Lefanu. In
the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction.
London: The Women's Press, 1988. 231pp. 5.95; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. $29.95
(cloth), $9.95 (paper)
To the best of my knowledge, the only currently available edition of Joanna Russ's The
Female Man is the one published as part of The Women's Press SF series. This series
also includes reprints of Jody Scott's Passing for Human and I, Vampire,
Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland,
and original material such as Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (1985),
a collection of short fiction co-edited by Sarah Lefanu. As an editor at The Women's Press
and a former teacher of courses on feminism and SF at the City Lit Centre for Adult
Studies in London, Lefanu is in a good position to offer readers a study which is at once
an overview of SF written by women over the last 30 years or so and a survey of the
intersections between this extremely heterogeneous body of texts and the often overlapping
but by no means always compatible series of theoretical positions which, for the sake of
convenience, we subsume under the terminological umbrella of "feminism."
Lefanu has accomplished this complex critical project with clarity, wit, and relative
evenhandedness. In the Chinks of the World Machine is detailed and
wide-ranging, frequently incisive, and always entertaining. In short, it really is
required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of SF and feminism, an area
which has not always been well served (when it has been served at all) by Anglo-American
SF criticism. It seems to me that too often we confine ourselves to New Critical or
humanist readings which are limited in the ways that they can produce meanings from texts.
Such readings often separate form from content and privilege the latter. One result has
been the neglect of texts which do not easily lend themselves to character or plot
analysis; another has been the reduction of quite disparate textual positions to one
overarching position termed "feminist SF."
Lefanu herself is concerned with what Teresa de Lauretis (building on Foucault's
analyses of the "technology of sex") has aptly labeled "technologies of
gender." She writes from within the framework of contemporary post-structuralist
feminism which theorizes gender as social and discursive construction and which is
skeptical of essentialist definitions of "feminine" and "masculine."
Lefanu's contention is that the plasticity of science fiction and its openness to other
literary genres allow an apparent contradiction, but one that is potentially of enormous
importance to contemporary women writers: it makes possible, and encourages (despite its
colonization by male writers), the inscription of women as subjects free from the
constraints of mundane fiction; and it also offers the possibilities of interrogating that
very inscription, questioning the basis of gendered subjectivity. (p. 9)
Lefanu develops her own readings in conjunction with theoretical and critical texts
such as Mary Ellman's Thinking About Women, Ellen Moer's Literary Women,
Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,
and Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing. In addition, she makes
frequent reference to essays on feminism and SF by writers like Russ and Susan Wood. As
early as 1971, as she points out, Russ called attention to the almost total absence in SF
of speculation about "the innate personality differences between men and women, about
family structure, about sex, in short about gender roles" ("The Image of Women
in Science Fiction," quoted in Lefanu, p. 13). Lefanu has taken her title from James
Tiptree, Jr's now-classic story, "The Women Men Don't See," a bleak commentary
on the position of women under patriarchy, who "live by ones and twos in the chinks
of your world-machine." The range of authors and works discussed here, however,
indicates that the situation, at least within the SF community and at least for the
present time, has changed dramatically.
In the Chinks of the World Machine is divided into two sections, the first of
which is an overview organized around a series of issues and areas of concern which
include considerations of representation in the SF text, examinations of varieties of
utopia and dystopia, an all-too-brief study of the treatment of romantic love in feminist
SF, and analyses of the ideologies of sex-role reversal narratives and of the tensions
between authority and sentiment in SF texts by women. During the course of these
investigations, Lefanu includes fairly detailed readings of works such as Marion Zimmer
Bradley's The Ruins of Isis, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time,
Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains, and Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of
the Universe"--readings which are almost always fresh and insightful. For many
reasons, not the least of which is the impressive range of Lefanu's coverage, this first
section is (at least from my point of view) the most interesting and rewarding of the two.
The second half of the book is comprised of four chapters devoted to close readings of
the works of James Tiptree, Jr, Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Joanna Russ. I
have mixed feelings about Lefanu's choices in this section, not least because they are all
American writers. One of the real strengths of her first section is the familiarity which
she brings to the works of British writers like Zoë Fairbairns and Naomi Mitchison, who
are frequently overlooked by North American critics. Admittedly, there is simply more
American than British SF, but the cultural differences between the two bodies of work
would seem to make it appropriate to devote at least one chapter to a writer like Angela
Carter or Tanith Lee.
In fact, Lefanu herself points out that Carter "is a writer that science fiction
fans can boast of for taking SF out of the ghetto and revealing its seriousness to a
sceptical world" (p. 79). She is also a writer who has been sadly neglected by the
American SF community. While Natalie M. Rosinsky includes a rare discussion of Carter's The
Passion of New Eve in her Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's Speculative
Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), she barely mentions Carter's
wonderfully baroque post-apocalyptic novel, Heroes and Villains. Lefanu's
absorbing analysis of Heroes and Villains in her chapter on "The
Vicissitudes of Love" is, therefore, particularly welcome.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the four in-depth studies included in Lefanu's
volume is that they develop as dialogues with the writers she is reading. She makes
frequent and cogent use of their own commentaries so that, for example, we are treated to
details of Tiptree's commentary-in-disguise written for the 1975 symposium on "Women
and Science Fiction," which was subsequently published as the double issue Khatru
3 & 4. The success with which Tiptree sustained her masquerade (a term which perhaps
too easily implies a division of "reality" from "appearance") led to
her eventual withdrawal from the symposium: "the women found her male persona too
irritating to deal with" (p. 106). Excerpts from Le Guin's essays in The Language
of the Night, from Charnas's "A Woman Appeared" (collected in Marleen S.
Barr's Future Females: A Critical Anthology [1981]), and from various essays and
stories by Russ provide a fascinating counterpoint to Lefanu's own analyses of the SF
works of these writers.
As Lefanu demonstrates, SF can offer feminist writers a particularly useful narrative
form through which to construct imaginative resistances to the limitations of gender
representation which seem to constrain realist fiction. She relates this to the ability of
SF to estrange aspects of the "real" in ways which indicate its contingent and
arbitrary nature, and which, at the same time, can both challenge and criticize the
structures of the "real." For feminist writers, then, SF provides a space in
which to construct female subjectivity while providing as well a space from which to
deconstruct that same subjectivity.
As Lefanu observes, this is one of the most paradoxical facets of the various projects
of feminism, one which has given rise to a fair amount of conflict and contradiction. In
her discussion of "The Heat Death of the Universe," she indicates the particular
problem posed for feminists by structuralist and post-structuralist theory: "the
radical, or transgressive aspects of the structuralist subversion of the subject do not
allow for an analysis that shows 'woman' never to have been the subject in the first
place" (p. 98). Thus, while her own position assumes that gender is constructed
rather than innate--i.e., that it is the production of legal, religious, literary,
commercial, and political representations--Lefanu also recognizes the value of works which
establish strong unified subject positions for their female protagonists--works like Woman
on the Edge of Time and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for instance.
Lefanu herself, however, is strongly anti-essentialist; and for this reason some of her
best readings focus on texts which work against essentialist representations. This
position also leads her to differentiate among novels which are sometimes approached as
part of the same critical project, e.g., Russ's The Adventures of Alyx and
Bradley's The Shattered Chain, which both fall into the category of
sword-and-sorcery; or Carter's Heroes and Villains and Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake,
both of which are post-apocalyptic narratives; or Sally Miller Gearhart's The
Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women and Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères,
both of which can be read as feminist utopias. In each case, Lefanu's theoretical
skepticism towards essentialization activates significant ideological differences between
these paired texts, differences which more humanist theoretical discourses are sometimes
unable to take into account.
This leads Lefanu to distinguish feminist SF from what she refers to as
"feminised" SF. According to her, feminist SF is marked by a lack of
sentimentality and a "profound scepticism: of the 'naturalness' of the patriarchal
world and the belief in male superiority upon which it is founded" (p. 93). She
argues that when women writers replace the "masculine" world with
"feminine" worlds, "there is a danger...that this SF might slip too much
into sentiment, and become ghettoised precisely as 'women's SF'" (p. 92)--i.e., as
works that reverse but fail to deconstruct the oppositional hierarchies organizing the
phallogocentric universe.
Lefanu concludes her first section by observing that:
Feminism questions a given order in political terms, while science fiction questions it
in imaginative terms....If science fiction demands our acceptance of a relativistic
universe, then feminism demands, no less, our acceptance of a relativistic social order.
Nothing, in these terms, is natural, least of all the cultural notions of 'woman' and
'man.' (p. 100)
In its awareness of the paradoxical inscription of the concept of subjectivity in
feminist writing--as something which must be both constructed and deconstructed--Lefanu's
study invites some inevitable reflections on the nature of its own enterprise, which is,
after all, the construction of what has been more of an absence than a presence in the
critical scene: the "subject" of feminist SF. Her theoretical position invites
the reader to conclude that asimultaneous deconstruction of exactly that subject may also
be in order. And in its recognition of the many and various manifestations of feminism in
SF, In the Chinks of the World Machine effectively demonstrates the potential
critical rewards of just such a deconstruction.
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