Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction and Gender Theory

OPEN UNIVERSES: CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION AND GENDER THEORY Pamela Bedore, B.A.H. Queen's University. 1996 B.Ed. Queen's University. 1997 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL NLFTLJMENT OF THE REQUREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English O Pamela Bedore 1999 SIMON FRASER UNTVERSRY August 1999 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without petmission of the author. 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Abstract If science fiction has a major gift to offer literature, I think it is just this: the capacity to face an open universe. Physically open. Psychically open. No doors shut. (Ursula K,Le Guin) The 1980s and 1990s have seen a major influx of women writing and publishing science fiction that makes use of the genre's extrapolative potential in order to embody ideas around gender ilnd sexuulity. Using im evolutionary model of gcnrc development, I explore the new genre of feminist science fiction as a rich and fluid pedagogical tool for teaching and learning about the critical debates that surround gender and sexuality in the late twentieth century. The advent of hypertext. made familiar by growing access to the World Wide Web, provides us with a complex metaphor for considering the multiplicity of fluid and dynamic positions that coexist symbiotically within gender studies. This complex Wlweb of ideas is productively embodied in several recent works of feminist science fiction, which I discuss in relation to various feminist and queer positions. My desire to elucidate the dynamic relationships between various theoretical positions is accompanied by a wish to add some focussed literary analysis to the modest. but growing, body of work that treats feminist science fiction. I rely heavily on the pioneering work of Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, who have contributed enormously to the emergence of this genre through their fiction, literary criticism and teaching. I have chosen not to engage in detailed analysis of their novels in order to examine works which have received less critical attention, namely: Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves (1972), Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, (1987,88.89), Vonda McIntyre's St~irfiirers series (1989,90,92,94), Leona Gom's The Y Chromosome ( 1990), Elisabeth Vonarburg's The Maeriande Chronicles ( l992), and Carolyn Gilman's Halfway Human ( 19%). To my mother and father . I thought how I have learned, more of less well, three languages, all of them English: and how one of these languages is the one I went to college to learn. I thought I was going to study French and Italian, and I did, but what I learned was the language of power4 social power: I shall call it the father tongue. Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only. inevitably, to distance it-to exclude it. It is the other. inferior. It is primitive: inaccurate, unclear. coarse, limited, trivial, banal. It's repetitive. the same over and over, like the work called women's work; earthbound. housebound. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a work the root of which means "turning together." The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation. relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange. relationship. It connects. The third language, my native tongue, which I will never know though I've spent my life learning it: I'll say some words now in this language. First a name, just a person's name, you're heard it before. Sojourner Truth. That name is a language in itself. But Sojourner Truth spoke the unlearned language: about a hundred years ago, talking it in a public place, she said, "I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all." . In Sojourner Truth's words you hear the coming together, the marriage of the public discourse and the private experience, making a power, a beautiful thing, the true discourse of reason. This is a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness that I've been calling the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement that I've been calling the mother tongue. This is their baby, this baby talk, the language you can spend your life trying to learn. Ursula K. Le Guin, Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, 1986 Acknowledgements My first acknowledgement must certainly go to Dr. Mason Harris and Dr. Mary Ann Gillies, who have been incredibly generous with their time and insights in their numerous readings of this manuscript in progress. As well, I would like to extend warm gratitude to my friends who read portions of this thesis at the Thesis Revision Picnic. and have generally provided invaluable emotional and intellectual support: Graeme Campbell, Mike Hrycyk, Phyllis Mancini, and Shauna Reist. And for being there since I read my first feminist science fiction novel. I thank Scott Stoness. Table of Contents .. Approvalpage ......................................................... 11 ... Abstract .............................................................. 111 Dedication ............................................................ iv Quotation .............................................................. v Acknowledgements ..................................................... vi Table of Contents ...................................................... vii Speculative Genders in Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction ............. 1 Why Feminist Science Fiction? Why This Thesis? ..................... 4 DefiningmyTerms .............................................. 6 Contextualizing Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction asaNewGenre ............................................ 14 My Literary Examples ...........................................29 The Mother Tongue: Difference-Based Feminisms and the Feminist Separatist Utopias ................................... 35 The Other Tongue: Androgyny. Similarity and the Nuclear Family .........65 4 Gorgeous Generativity: Tri-gendered Aliens and Queer Theory ............ 101 Conclusion ...........................................................135 Bibliography .......................................................... 143 vii Chapter 1 Speculative Genders in Contemporary Feminist Science Fiction Science fiction deals with scientists working at science in the future. (Isaac Asirnov. 1960s) Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to change in the level of science and technology. (Isaac Asimov. 1978) Distancing, the pulling back from "reality" in order to see it better. is perhaps the essential gesture of SF. It is by distancing that SF achieves aesthetic joy, tragic tension, and moral cogency. (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973) If science fiction has a major gift to offer literature, I think it is just this: the capacity to face an open universe. Physically open. psychically open. No doors shut. (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974)' In his introduction to his new magazine. Asirnov's SF Adventure Mugcrzirre (1 978). Isaac Asimov notes that the demographic make-up of science fiction readers has changed significantly since the genre's rise to popularity in the first half of the twentieth century. He characterizes the science fiction reader of the 1920s through 1950s as being almost exclusively under eighteen, and his use of the masculine pronoun instead of his more frequent gender-neutral pronouns quite appropriately denotes a male teenager. Readers of the '60s and '70s. though, tend to be older, something he attributes to a tendency in the adolescent readers of the '50s to continue reading science fiction into adulthood, and to fiction's losing battle with television in commanding the attention of young readers (On SF 36). This new. more respectable. reader. being somewhat older and perhaps more 'The Asimov quotations are both taken from (Asimov on Science Fiction 22). The L.e Guin quotations are taken from (The Language of the Night 19,206). 2 demanding of quality in his fiction, is in part responsible for science fiction's emergence into relative respectability in the last half of the twentieth century. Asimov does not consider the impact of women writing and reading science fiction, an omission which is hardly surprising considering that this trend has only recently come to be examined by science fiction critics.' According to Ursula Le Guin's agent. Virginia Kidd, about one in thirty science fiction writers in the mid-1970s were women (Le Guin, Language 228). In 1999, women make up roughly one third of published science fiction writers. Although tabulating a reader

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