Zoe, of course I can only speak for myself, but I describe myself as a feminist. Somewhat hesitantly, these days: I know the description pisses off some other feminists, who don’t think men have anything useful to contribute to a feminist discussion, and breeds contempt in the minds of some non-feminists, who think that all feminists are sexists themselves.
Speculative fiction is a great way, IMO, to explore ideas for different political/social systems. I’m not feeling eloquent enough to explain why, right now, but basically it offers an arena in which the effects of a system can be examined. And it can be a lot easier going down than a straight essay on politics can be, although I think that fiction and nonfiction are often best read side by side.
I have known a fair number of self-described feminists (and other political folks) who enjoy reading speculative fiction. And Le Guin is one of the best authors in the field.
Not only would I consider Left Hand of Darkness to be a feminist utopian novel; I would go so far as to consider The Dispossessed the same thing. Not that either novel’s central theme is a society in which women and men have equal rights; however, both novels describe ambiguously utopian societies in which gender relations differ markedly from our society, and both novels can seriously inform the feminist sensibilities of a reader.
Another novel by her, Four Ways to Forgiveness, is an equally interesting example: it discusses a society in which race relations are much improved, but where gender relations suh-huck. Definitely worth reading.
Lemur, I don’t think it’s at all true that “most feminist utopian fiction . . . imagines the only solution is enslavement and/or extermination of men.” I’ve read a good half-dozen or more examples from the field, and only one of those (an execrable book from Marion Zimmer Bradley) came close to describing a utopia in those words.
Look at Woman at the Edge of Time, Left Hand of Darkness, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, The Dispossessed, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and other books for counterexamples.
Sure, there’s some crap in the field; there’s even crap in the field whose craptacularosity has nothing to do with enslaving/exterminating men (Woman on the Edge of Time is a thinly-veiled rant with cardboard characters, in my opinion). But there’s also some great feminist utopias out there.
No. Far from it, in fact. Aside from Herland, The Gate to Women’s Country, and The Left Hand of Darkness, I think most of the books mentioned in this thread are fairly obscure. I don’t believe any but those three are particularly well known among young feminists, science fiction fans, or even feminist fans of science fiction. (And I’m saying this as former president of the Science Fiction club at a women’s college.)
Of the three exceptions I’ve noted, only Herland could really be considered a feminist utopian novel, at least if one takes “feminist utopia” to mean “idealized society run by women, with men either absent or inferior/enslaved”. As others have pointed out, in The Left Hand of Darkness the society isn’t woman-run…it couldn’t be, as there aren’t even any actual women there.
In The Gate to Women’s Country, the woman-run society seems fairly pleasant but is certainly not a utopia. It is presented as better than male-dominated neighboring cultures and probably better than our contemporary culture, but there are still social problems and there are still women who behave very badly towards both men and their fellow woman. The female leaders in The Gate to Women’s Country are also slowly attempting to work towards a better future where the women won’t have to constantly keep the men in check…a future where men and women can live together as equals.
While this may sometimes appear, I don’t think it’s close to the defining theme of such works. Look at the novels recommended by the WMST-L list folks. I’ve read the following novels on the list:
Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time: a novel in which men and women have equal rights, up to and including the right and ability to nurse children. Men are neither absent nor rare in the book’s utopia, and although most of the men in the novel’s present-day setting are assholes, the men in the utopian section of the book are almost all nice folks.
Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. Most of the men in the book are nice folks, and are an important part of the feminist-utopian society. The book also presents a male-dominated dystopia, but by the end of the book, even the guys from that society are assimilating into the feminist utopian society as equals.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents – these are more dystopias than utopias, IIRC, although a utopia might develop in the second book. At any rate, men are integral parts of the societies in these books.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; The Dispossessed; and Always Coming Home: Everyone has both genders in the first book (except for the male human narrator); the second book revolves around a male protagonist in a gender-equal anarchist ambiguous utopia in which men are just as much a part of society as women; and the third book has a female protagonist in a society with both men and women.
Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You: Not only has male and female characters living in an integrated society, but also has a male rapist as the protagonist – and he’s not an antihero, either. In fact, a lot of the book deals with his redmption and integration into the society.
I’ve not read all the books on the list, but of those I’ve read, not a single one contained the theme Andy suggests in the OP.
I think the unifying theme of feminist utopias is that they present a society with relations between men and women that the author considers to be fair and equitable - the goal of feminism, almost by definition.
Combative? I dare say you misread me. I was merely trying to get the OP to frame the debate. He hasn’t done so yet, but it looks like a debate has sprung up without him. Hope its the one he wanted to see.
“You are not Morg. You are not Imorg. What are you?”
– from “Spock’s Brain,” STOS.
Posted by DanielWithrow:
There was an episode of Sliders based on the same premise. The Sliders visit an alternate America where women are dominant. Rembrandt Brown gets picked up by a lady executive, moves in with her, and thinks he’s got a great thing going, until she starts treating him like . . . well, like a single male executive would treat his flavor-of-the-week girlfriend. Professor Arturo decides to shake things up by running for public office – mayor of San Francisco, I think. It’s interesting how they work in little asides that reverse our conventional wisdom about gender roles – e.g., even a male character notes that men can’t be trusted the way women can because they’re hormonally unstable, with all that testosterone sloshing around and messing up their judgment.
Can’t be a utopia without men… nope too boring. and much as I enjoy the company of my female friendsit have them there ALL THE TIME!. I’d go fucking nuts and run off looking for the owner of a penis!
Another novella is Houston, Houston, Do You Read?. Three astronauts (male) are flung into the future by a solar flare, and rescued by a spaceship with an all-female crew. A plague had nearly destroyed the entire human species, and the survivers were all clones of the last five humans left alive- all females. Their big issue with the astronauts wasn’t their being male but whether to go back to a society where every human was a unique prototype instead of a “time-tested model”.
I’m glad you clarified this, Krisfer.
Of course, considering what kind of fiction we’re talking about, the owner of the penis might be a woman – who harvested it herself.
I apologize for that, Andy. Or should I call you Satisfying? At any rate, that wasn’t the tone I was shooting for in my earlier posts. Returning to my earlier questions, which of the books in your OP have you read, and what in them did you find that merited debate?
Indeed. There was a feminist coughMargin* who had never heard of feminist utopian fiction and then accused me of lying about the existence of it. Now look how many people have already expressed their familiarity with it. (Of course, this same feminist is demanding that I supply a cite for the existence of affirmative action, so I suspect she is being deliberately obtuse – if she can hold her hands over her eyes, then nothing else exists.)
I think it is symptomatic of feminists that so many of them consider “fair” to be “anything that benefits me.” Putting the blinders aside, you can’t arbitrarily discount those novels in which the world is greatly improved because there aren’t any men in it. And you’re missing the point by trying to postulate some unifying theme, because the term “feminist utopia” is a pretty self-explanatory term. This field also has come to include feminist dystopia as the logical other side of the coin. Sometimes they’re polemics, sometimes not. There are the utopian polemics (“this would make things better”) the dystopian polemics (“this would make things horrible”) and the ones that just want to spin a good yarn.
In drawing up this very brief list of feminist utopian fiction, I was careful to be balanced and fair – presenting ones that fantasize about men ceasing to exist alongside books imagining better, fairer relations, and noting the non-feminist use of such themes as well. My list is brief, it’s hardly definative, but you can’t just kick out the “all men are gone” books, as they are central to the field.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DanielWithrow *
**Speculative fiction is a great way, IMO, to explore ideas for different political/social systems.
If it explored, say, how wonderful it would be if certain minority groups ceased to exist, we’d probably call it racism. When feminists write about all men ceasing to exist – it gets on a syllabus.
I think it is symptomatic of feminists that so many of them consider “fair” to be “anything that benefits me.” Putting the blinders aside, you can’t arbitrarily discount those novels in which the world is greatly improved because there aren’t any men in it. And you’re missing the point by trying to postulate some unifying theme, because the term “feminist utopia” is a pretty self-explanatory term. This field also has come to include feminist dystopia as the logical other side of the coin. Sometimes they’re polemics, sometimes not. There are the utopian polemics (“this would make things better”) the dystopian polemics (“this would make things horrible”) and the ones that just want to spin a good yarn.
In drawing up this very brief list of feminist utopian fiction, I was careful to be balanced and fair – presenting ones that fantasize about men ceasing to exist alongside books imagining better, fairer relations, and noting the non-feminist use of such themes as well. My list is brief, it’s hardly definative, but you can’t just kick out the “all men are gone” books, as they are central to the field.
If it explored, say, how wonderful it would be if certain minority groups ceased to exist, we’d probably call it racism. When feminists write about all men ceasing to exist – it gets on a syllabus.
No offense, Miller.
About the only one I’ve read and have any recollection of is LeGuin’s “Left Hand of Darkness.” And I do think it’s firmly on the list of feminist utopian fiction because it stems from the time when feminists were largely arguing that men and women are equal, and that most gender differences were ingrained by socialization. So LeGuin created a world in which people are literally both male and female – or rather, they are sort of neutrals who have sex by going into “khemmer” (spelling?), a process by which one person becomes female and one becomes male. The next time, they might reverse. The gender-bender fantasy is obvious.
I am not setting myself up as a scholar in the field. I stumbled upon it largely when trying to understand the anti-male forces who were getting so vocal at the time. It was interesting to me that feminists had this entire literary schtick going where they would make things “fair and equitable” by, variously, having men cease to exist, or moving them outside the gates of the civilized city, or having women rule – or sometimes by actually having men and women equal.
The irony is that the feminist utopia had already been put into operation – namely, the kibbutz, where initially children were not kept with the parents but were raised communally, and labor was supposed to be distributed on a gender-neutral basis.
The original, feminist version of kibbutzism fell apart, and a great deal of the pressure behind its fall was that the women wanted to resume those “oppressive” old tradition roles of raising children themselves and staying in their own individual homes to do it.
So the feminists had to grind out more and more fiction, because it’s pretty darned difficult to have the building code inspector check the soundness of castles in the air.
They aren’t being arbitrarily discounted, they’re being put into their proper context as a minor part of the feminist canon. BTW, which specific novels in your OP do you feel advocate the idea that society would be improved by the removal or reduction of the male population?
Is it? Someone else has put forward the definition of “feminist utopia” as “a society in which both genders are perfectly equal.” Somehow, I sense you would disagree with this definition. Rather than simply state that the defintiion is self-explanatory, perhaps you could offer your definition of the term?
I suppose this is semantics, but wouldn’t a feminist dystopia be an oppressive society ruled by women? When people call 1984 a communist dystopia, they aren’t implying that it’s a bad society to be a communist in, they’re saying it’s a bad society because of communism. Properly speaking, a feminist dystopia would be a bad society because of feminism. A book like The Handmaid’s Tale would really be a masculinist dystopia, as it portrays a society that is oppressive because of men. Well, like I said, just a minor semantic point.
Again, which of the novels that you listed in your OP fit into which of the categories in the quoted section above?
Are they? I don’t think you’ve shown that to be true. Example: You mention Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, apparently as an example of anti-male feminist fiction. (If this isn’t the case, I apologize. As I’ve said, I found your OP to somewhat ambiguous) However, the book is anything but: the “all-female” world is primitive and barbaric. Literally: one of the major subplots involve an all-woman barbarian invasion of (also all-woman) settled lands. Another character is a hunter who makes her living hunting down the last few sentient, aboriginal inhabitants of the planet, and using their body parts as tools and clothing. (You really don’t want to know what she made her purse out of). You might not have meant this as an example of anti-male fiction, but the fact that you included it at all in a list about feminist utopian fiction, when there is absolutely nothing utopian about it, makes me question how many of the other titles you mention ought to properly be included in this thread.
Maybe, maybe not. It all lies in the execution. There’s a short story, “Love’s Last Farewell,” by Richard Bamberg, where a “cure” for homosexuality is discovered. The story’s basically a conversation between the last living homosexual and a young reporter. The reporter has a lot of reasons why the “cure” was a social good, none of which are really refuted in the story, but the author makes it unmistakably clear that the “cure” was nothing less than genocide, even if no one was killed to effect it.
Similarly, I wonder how many of the novels that present an all-female world that is “better” than the current one are necessarily promoting that as social policy, or are instead trying to present a “peace, but at what cost?” scenario. Probably not many, but it’s not a decision I would want to make without first hand experience of the individual text.
And, all of that aside, which specific work of anti-male feminist fiction is being taught in colleges? You’ve provided a list of novels, and a conclusion, but you haven’t shown that any of the novels you listed support that conclusion. Which specific books have you read that lead you to the conclusion that anti-male sentiment is a significant portion of feminist speculative fiction?
I disagree with terming Left Hand of Darkness as “feminist,” for the simple reason that I think a prerequisite for feminist literature should be the inclusion of at least one female. Certainly, the novel is informed by gender politics, as the central theme is what society would be like if they did not exsist, but I did not come away from it with a specifically feminist impression. I don’t think that the novel can be said to necessarily support the idea that the differences between men and women are purely from socialization, because the subjects are not, strictly speaking, human. They’ve been genetically altered to share physical characteristics of both genders, there’s no reason to assume that they weren’t also altered to share mental characteristics of both genders. I don’t think the properties of the society portrayed in the novel are meant to be transferable to our society.
I will say that the novel challenged a lot of my preconceptions about gender, or rather, showed how many of my preconceptions about people were based on their gender. I don’t think that makes this novel specifically feminist, though. I certainly don’t think the novel has any place in a thread about utopianism, because again, the societies presented in the novel are anything but. In fact, the only society in the book that even comes close is the peaceful, spacefaring culture that the protagonist comes from. Said protagonist being male, which I think is significant in a discussion of this novel’s status as feminist in general, and feminist utopianism in particular.
I don’t think the above applies in any way to Left Hand of Darkness, Griffith’s Ammonite (discussed above) or The Handmaid’s Tale (which, admittedly, is a horse of an entirely different color). Perhaps it applies to other books you’ve listed. I don’t know. But, as you’ve just admitted, neither do you.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the connection you’re trying to draw between feminist science fiction and these failed communes.
What information I have on the subject of “feminist utopian literature” and feminist speculative fiction is totally from this thread. (Okay. I confess. I am an AGING feminist who has trouble concentrating when I read.)
Is it my imagination or do many of the feminist utopian novels feature women who are aggressive in what I would describe, accurately or not, as the traditionally male sort of way? Which of these novels feature admirable characters as strong nurturers?
