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American Feminism and Joanna Russ's the Female This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge] On: 22 October 2014, At: 02:08 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women: A Cultural Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20 Unnatural acts: American feminism and Joanna Russ's the female man Amanda Boulter a a Lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies , King Alfred's , Winchester Published online: 19 Jun 2008. To cite this article: Amanda Boulter (1999) Unnatural acts: American feminism and Joanna Russ's the female man , Women: A Cultural Review, 10:2, 151-166, DOI: 10.1080/09574049908578385 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574049908578385 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions W AMANDA BOULTER Unnatural Acts: American Feminism and Joanna Russ's The Female Man Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act N 1973 Robin Morgan gave the keynote address to the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles. She began by asserting her own credentials, the aspects of her identity which gave her a right to speak about the Women's Liberation Movement. She was a woman, she was a feminist and she was a lesbian—a claim made in defiance of those who asserted her heterosexuality. These facts, she argued, gave her the necessary authority to speak about one of the many divisions in the WLM which Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:08 22 October 2014 threatened to damage the sisterhood, the lesbian-straight split. The theme of her speech was unity, but she spoke to an audience that was to become utterly divided. When Morgan asserted her identity as a lesbian she suspected that she was not the only woman at that conference whose self-definition was disputed. What she did not anticipate was that one of the delegates who 1 Adrienne Rich, 'The responded to her, who celebrated their own status as a woman and a lesbian, Phenomenology of Anger', in Diving into was a male transvestite. Over the next few days debate raged about his/her the Wreck Poems 1971- controversial presence and contested identity. This male transvestite, who 1972, New York: W. W. Norton, 1973, pp. 25-31 was in his own eyes a woman and a lesbian, single-handedly wreaked havoc (31). on the sisterhood. Morgan reports that the conference 'promptly split—over Women: a cultural review Vol. 10. No. 2. © Taylor & Francis Ltd 1999 152 • WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW this man' as more than half the women attending the conference 'demanded that he [the transvestite] be forced to leave', while others 'defended him as their "sister"' (Morgan 1978b:171). Robin Morgan presented this intrusion as an example of destructive and disruptive male behaviour that attempts to deny women their own personal- political space. And she made a convincing argument against this particular individual, suggesting, that he was indeed out for trouble. But what interests me, looking back on this, is not the motivations behind the disruption, but Morgan's response to the kind of gender trouble, to quote a phrase, that this man stirred up. She was neither prepared for it nor interested in it, and she point-blank refused to engage, even in retrospect, with the problems and contradictions that his presence at that conference threw up. For Morgan, the definitions of (sexual) difference were clear; and the binary man/woman demarcated the feminist frontier. She did not and would not recognize this cross-identification as significant for feminist sexual politics. The alien presence of the transvestite male woman (or female man) challenged the definitions of 'woman', 'lesbian' and 'feminist', which grounded feminism as a politics of experience, to raise uncomfortable questions about just whose experience and which experience counted. This man's intrusive presence exposed the problems of definition that trouble the heart of feminism and which Morgan preferred to ignore. He disrupted assumptions about an innate sexual or gender identity by implicitly asking what it meant to 'be' a woman. Could this identity be claimed or was it a natural fact? And, if not natural, did such transvestite identification then reconfigure both the potential subject and potential subjects of feminism? These questions are familiar in the work of postmodern feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway who celebrate the possibilities of sexual boundary-crossing. Butler's construction of gender performativity and Haraway's theorization of the cyborg both focus on the dissident promise of 'unnatural' identifications (see Butler 1990, Butler 1993 and Haraway 1991). But in 1973, when the differences between lesbian and straight women, women of colour and white women, rich women and poor Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:08 22 October 2014 women, threatened to fragment the illusion of global sisterhood, such questioning of the legitimacy of the category Woman was for many dangerous and unwelcome. 2 The Combahee River But, of course, such questions were being asked, and especially by those Collective, 'A Black who found themselves marginalized by the discourses of their own liberation Feminist Statement', in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia movement. The now famous statements by groups such as the Combahee Bell Scott and Barbara River Collective attest to many women's frustration with the reification of Smith (eds), All the 2 Women Are White, All feminist rhetoric into an exclusionary politics. Their (and others') demands the Blacks Are Men, But that the Women's Liberation Movement recognize itself as a white, middle- Some of Us Are Brave, class feminism influenced the theoretical discourses of both black and white New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. feminists in the 1980s. Questions about the differences between women were UNNATURAL ACTS • 153 pushed to the top of the feminist agenda from a number of directions, both philosophical and political. The subject of women's liberation was repre- sented not as Woman but as 'women, a pluralism which it was hoped would encompass the differences between and within women's identities. But arguments, such as Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller's, that 'multi- plication is no escape from reification' revealed the need for entirely new perspectives and contributed to a changing mood within academic feminism (Hirsch and Keller 1990:2). The articulation of global sisterhood and the assertion of the metaphorical figure of the Everywoman came to be seen as strategic but necessarily exclusionary discourses. Many feminist theorists rejected the search for an essence of womanhood and attempted instead to address the multiplicity of discursive and material practices which continu- ally de/re/construct women's identities. This 'shift of attention' away from 'women' to 'the process of ... "woman/women making"' was both a liberating and a dangerous political move (Hirsch and Keller 1990:2). For on the one hand it left the question of who or what constitutes the subjects of feminism open—as it should be—but on the other hand it threatened the pragmatic grounding of collective feminist agency. How should we negotiate the contradictory identifications of the female subject as both a 'dazzling collection of integrated fragments' and a 'theoretical, libidinal, ethical and political agent'? (Braidotti 1991:281.) Re-reading the 1970s: Feminist Science Fiction One way to approach these very contemporary conceptual challenges is to return to the creative texts of the 1970s. This is not to rehearse a series of exhausted political ideas or cliched literary strategies, but to reconsider the ways in which feminist writers used fictional texts as an imaginative space in which to interpret, critique and develop the theoretical and political agenda of the emerging Women's Liberation Movement. The explosion of feminist literature in the 1970s has made it the era of the 'women's lib novel', a literary Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:08 22 October 2014 hype which later critics were swift to dismiss or disown. But, beyond the media spotlight, feminist writers were asserting their presence in less obvious literary contexts. One such was the very masculinist world of science fiction which in the 1970s felt itself assaulted by an alien crew of new and emerging women writers who were determined to challenge the gender stereotyping of the genre. Feminists began (re)writing SF not only because they were tired of reading stories in which the women were either bimbos or BEMs (bug-eyed monsters), but because they recognized that the speculative mode of science fiction, what Darko Suvin termed the generic condition of 'cognitive estrangement', opened up new vistas for feminist fantasy (Suvin 1979:4).
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