REVIEW-ESSAY
Wendy Gay Pearson
Sex-as-Discourse vs. Sex-as-Practice
Sherry Ginn and Michael G. Cornelius, eds. The Sex is Out of this World: Essays on the Carnal Side of Science Fiction. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 36. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. x + 249 pp. $40 pbk.
It is always exciting to see a new anthology dealing with sexuality in science fiction. The Sex is Out of This World also has a great title, although many of its chapters involve showing that the sex is not out of this world at all but rather is fully implicated in historical and contemporary discourses, practices, and ideologies. This is a notable collection, made more so in part by the balance of work on sf media versus literary sf: five out of thirteen chapters focus on film and/or television and one—on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973)—deals with the representation of sexuality in the author’s work primarily in terms of intermediality and technology.
Editors Cornelius and Ginn have assembled an interesting collection of articles on a variety of facets of sexuality in science fiction. While Ginn’s claim, in her conclusion, that this anthology is the first book on sexuality in sf since Donald Palumbo’s two 1986 anthologies is clearly incorrect (ignoring the volumes by Call and Pearson et al.), the anthology is nonetheless a valuable addition to work in the field. Indeed, many of the chapters add useful reflections to work that has mainly concentrated on literary sf. The anthology’s stated aim, in Cornelius’s “Introduction: Sexing Science Fiction,” is to attempt
to understand and explore the sexualized and sexualizing areas of “unreal reality” [Cornelius’s riff on the realness of science and the unrealness of fiction], to note ways in which our culture’s continually changing and evolving mores of sex and sexuality are reflected in, dissected by, and deconstructed through the genre of science fiction. The essays herein interrogate, challenge, and affirm the ways in which physical manifestations of sex relate to the genre of science fiction itself. (8)
Given that Cornelius begins his introduction with a discussion of the Hermat, a hermaphroditic species from the Star Trek: New Frontier series of novels (1997-), focusing on the fascination of “normal” binary-sexed species for how “‘it’ actually does ‘it’” (3), I am unclear whether the editors’ call for an interrogation of “physical manifestations of sex” refers to sex-as-biology or sex-as-practice. Although a number of the chapters do, in fact, have helpful meditations on sex/gender, particularly on questions of masculinity (despite Cornelius’s own exploration—never explicit and perhaps lacking the source material to become explicit—of hermaphrodite/cisgender intercourse),1 there is very little reflection in these chapters—with the specific exception of Clare Parody’s work on Ballard—on physical manifestations of sex-as-practice (which we might, less coyly, refer to as “sex-as-fucking”). This is unsurprising, given that only the Ballard chapter takes up the relationship between sf and pornography—which perhaps highlights a significant omission in the absence of any work on Samuel R. Delany’s oeuvre. Not a lot of sf is all that explicit about “doing ‘it,’” although sf film and television may—or may not—provide more immediate visual clues. Sexuality, the discursive practice that, Foucault suggests, came into being with the Enlightenment and was consolidated in the nineteenth century, is both the main way in which contemporary humans think about all of the issues that coalesce around various sexual desires and practices, as well as the subject of the most trenchant and penetrating (sorry!) critical approaches to the topic. Thus, the focus of individual chapters primarily on sexuality in general rather than on sexual acts in no way limits their usefulness as contributions to sf criticism.
The Sex is Out of This World is divided into two sections: “Alien Sex” and “Techno Sex.” As is invariably the case, this is a somewhat rough guide to the topics covered in the individual chapters. “Alien Sex” begins with Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin van Riper’s chapter on miscegenation in sf, which argues that representations of sex with aliens are rooted in historical discourses and legal practices surrounding racism and misogyny. The history they cite is rather specifically American; the “Breed the Black Out” policy embraced in Australia, while motivated by white supremacy, took very much the opposite approach to the politics of taint embodied in the US’s “One Drop” laws. Given that the majority of the texts they survey are in fact American, this is perhaps not a major flaw, although the chapter would have been stronger with a significant focus on a smaller number of films and tv shows (quite a number of which, incidentally, are missing from the capping videography). The most useful feature of this chapter is its attempt to taxonomize various ways in which miscegenation is represented in sf; the authors look at four main approaches: the question of being “nearly human” and the concomitant possibility of passing; relationships with visible Others; mixed-species children; and less-than-physical forms of interaction, such as the merging of memories. There is a great deal of potential here that the chapter really does not have the space to explore in full, leaving this reader, at least, wondering whether it might not have been more useful to focus in depth on just one of these issues.
The next two chapters, Anca Rosu’s “Alienating Sex” and Echo E. Savage’s “‘We Pair Off! One Man, One Woman,” take rather different approaches to sex and sexuality in Octavia E. Butler’s writing. Rosu looks at both the Patternist series (1976-84) and the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89), concluding that “[t]he notion of sexuality that emerges from [Butler’s] work is a paradigm for power struggles in which players vie for control” (47). Savage might not necessarily disagree with Rosu’s conclusion, although her own focus is on arguing that Butler’s work—and Xenogenesis in particular—reinstates a heteronormative imperative even as the novels struggle to reimagine sexuality. For Savage, this is an important failure because she understands Butler to be creating “powerful descriptions of the future [that] have an ability to draw us toward them, to command us to make them flesh” (Kodwo Eshun, qtd. 60). Savage argues for the need “for more discursive, deliberate efforts … to make space in the future for representations of queer subjectivity that exist as comfortably—and free from the threat of systemic violence—as heterosexual identities do today” (60). Both of these chapters provide useful insights, but only Savage speaks specifically to the question of heteronormativity in Butler’s work—and, by implication, in sf more generally.
The next three chapters look at the film Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Josh Whedon’s two tv series Firefly (2002) and Dollhouse (2009-10), and the sf stories of Primo Levi. While the first two essays, by Allison Whitney and Heather M. Porter respectively, provide carefully argued readings of their subjects, the latter, by Robert C. Pirro, offers a fascinating and highly psychoanalytic approach to an author not well known for his science fiction (indeed, I did not know Levi wrote sf at all). Pirro’s argument revolves less around sexual development (the Oedipal) than around masculine relations to maternity (the pre-Oedipal): he reads Levi’s work as fascinated, and perhaps horrified, by the maternal figure from whom the male infant must seek individuation. Ultimately, Pirro sees Levi’s sf as a meditation on the possibility for human autonomy (or perhaps male autonomy) located specifically within modernity and informed not only by Levi’s own familial relations but also by his experiences in Auschwitz. While Pirro really does not speak to issues of sexuality directly, the chapter provides an apt closure to the first section, in part because it offers a connection between deeply personal views of sexuality and reproduction (the psychoanalytic relationship with the mother) and the question of whether or not technology is intrinsically dehumanizing—a question that emerges from the historical encounter with Nazism. Chapters in the second section, “Techno Sex,” take up aspects of this connection in a variety of ways.
In “Patriarchy, Paternity and Papas,” Erin Sapp argues that, although sf imaginings of technological alterations to human reproduction may help to bring about gender equality (her exemplars are Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time [1976], Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X [1960], and Katharine Burdekin’s The End of this Day’s Business [wr. 1935; pub. 1989]), they do so at the cost of fatherhood. Sapp contends that “little is more unpopular … than sympathetic acknowledgment of the sacrifices required of men for gender equality to exist” (132) and accuses these novels of failing in this acknowledgment to varying degrees. Yet it seems odd to ignore that men may also gain from the dismantling of patriarchy: a loss in power and status is offset by acquiring freedom from the constraints of traditional masculinity as well as the right to express supposedly “feminine” traits. Still, Sapp raises some interesting questions about the nature of fatherhood (as opposed to parenthood) and brings Burdekin’s relatively unknown work to bear on readings of two sf classics.
The next two chapters address novels by H.G. Wells. Thomas A. Cole looks at the science-fictionality of The Island of Dr Moreau (1897) in relation to the historical connections between early feminism and the anti-vivisection movement, persuasively reading Moreau’s experimental animals—especially the Puma—as standing in for the New Woman, while Moreau himself represents both a traditional and an anxious masculinity attempting to prop itself up on the suffering of those who threaten it. Larry T. Shillock, in “Are We Not Men?,” reads The Time Machine (1895) in terms of both future sex and theories of degeneration, finding in the Time Traveller’s lack of overt desire for the Eloi female, Weena, a figure for the paradox of evolutionary “descent.” Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1971) used this term for “man’s” evolution “upward,” yet the Eloi and Morlocks demonstrate descent as degeneration. The paradox the Time Traveller finds himself in is that he, like all humans, “possess[es] a sexuality whose generative force may eventually compel [him]” to devolve rather than evolve (168). Sex in the long term may be as destructive a force as it is productive.
In “Space Apes Want Our Women,” Matthew H. Hersch does a thorough job of outlining the history of human fascination with inter-primate sexuality, from the Middle Ages to the The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Fairly obviously, primates stand in for people of color within a colonial, white-supremacist worldview; at the same time, Hersch points out the imbalanced gendering of interspecies sex in the “space ape” stories: the male ape, depicted as supremely virile, cannot withstand the attraction of the white woman, who is, in turn, rendered as a submissive eroticized fetish. Women are generally blamed for the apes’ attraction to them—a fairly obvious stand-in for the blame white women have historically received for becoming objects of desire for people of color. The “space ape” thus becomes a floating signifier for the specific gendered and racialized anxieties of any given cultural moment, as well as a way of punishing women in particular for their attempts at sexual autonomy and the expression of desire. Hersch’s argument is convincing and insightful, but it might have been interesting to see him tackle alternative—notably feminist—perspectives on the “space ape” figure, the obvious choice being Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” (1987).
Informed by Eve Sedgwick’s work on the triangulation of desire, Cornelius’s own chapter looks at male dyads in boys’ series from the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Cornelius uses close readings of three male dyads in three different series to build a convincing argument that these technophilic works replace the female in the usual triangle with technology; technology thus mediates male desire, allowing for a great deal of implied homoeroticism and expressed interest between members of the couple. My only quibble (and it really is just a quibble) has to do with the generic status—and hence the relevance—of these three texts. In one case considered by Cornelius, the two boys were members of a secret FBI teen unit, which is not inherently an sf scenario. I would have liked to see more focus on the specifically science-fictional nature of the technology that enables the homoeroticism of these relationships, particularly on the question of whether future (imagined) technologies are more effective enablers of this desire than machines extant at the time of the series’ writing.
The final substantive chapter, barring Sherry Ginn’s discussion of sf texts that can be understood as exemplifying the principles of evolutionary psychology, is Clare Parody’s subtle and powerful analysis of the two Ballard novels. Parody makes a very sophisticated and impressive argument for understanding The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash as intermedial texts that at once deploy the methodologies of media (e.g., collage/montage) and engage with the increasingly mediated relationship between humans and sex. As sexual beings living in a media(ted) world, particularly a world dominated by visual media and celebrity culture, our sexuality is increasingly divorced from immediate experience and refigured as a simulacrum. In Crash in particular, sexual desire is displaced from the flesh onto the machine, so that the protagonist (provocatively named “James Ballard”) sees his partner’s body as an array of automotive parts. The technophilic nature of contemporary culture, as well as its focus on the spectacular (not only the spectacle of celebrity but also the spectacle of the visual itself), renders sexuality ever more pathological; at the same time, Parody argues that Ballard’s intermediated texts make the reader complicit in cultural and social systems that the work diagnoses as “diseased” (219).
Of all of these chapters, Parody’s is the one that comes closest to a focus on sex-as-practice rather than on sexuality as a disciplinary regime (although, in Parody’s case, there is a nice balance of attention to both factors). The different chapters vary widely in their methodologies: Rosu, for example, foregrounds Foucauldian notions of an “order of discourse” informing sexuality, while Porter uses both content analysis and interviews with audience members to understand the portrayal of sex workers in Whedon’s later tv series. This variety, although it certainly lends itself to an uneven reading experience, is actually one of the anthology’s strengths. One of its more obvious weaknesses, however, is the lack of attention to lesbian and gay thematics, beyond Cornelius’s reading of male homoeroticism in boys’ book series. Another is the lack of discussion of some major figures in the field: Delany’s omission I have already noted, but writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, and James Tiptree, Jr. are also conspicuous by their absence. One can argue, of course, that such absences are simply in the nature of anthologies—and that is true.
Let me finish where I started: it is always exciting to see a new book on sexuality in science fiction.
NOTES
1. While the term “cisgender” is never used in the anthology, it has become standard usage in Transgender Studies, not to mention among trans people generally, to distinguish between the trans—or gender non-normative—and the gender normative. Furthermore, terminological usage differs between the US and Canada; in the latter, “trans” (rather than “transgender” or “transsexual”) and “cis” (rather than “cisgender” or “cissexual”) are the inclusive terms. For a discussion, see Enke.
WORKS CITED
Call, Lewis. BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Enke, A. Finn. “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies.” Transfeminist Perpectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Ed. Anne Enke. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2012. 60-80.
Palumbo, Donald, ed. Eros in the Mind’s Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film. New York: Praeger, 1986.
─────. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. New York: Praeger, 1986.
Pearson, Wendy Gay, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon, eds. Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Back to Home