CHAPTER 5 DWARFS, HERMAPHRODITES, LOVERS: FANTASTIC SEX
The preponderance of strong female leads in the novels of the three Fantasy authors under discussion (Pratchettʼs Angua, Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching; Pullmanʼs Lyra Silvertongue and Marisa Coulter; Miévilleʼs Bellis Coldwine and Ann-Hari) is merely the tip of the iceberg of their interest in sexual politics; for these authors utilise the full Fantasy ʻarmouryʼ in their attempt to make us look at gender issues again. On the simplest level, they frequently map the domain of the (historical/ongoing) struggle for sexual equality onto their Fantasy worlds. In Pratchett, there is the struggle for equal opportunity in Equal Rites and the battle against gender stereotyping in the ʻdwarfen arcʼ;1 in Pullman, there is the combating of religiously justified patriarchy; in Miéville, there is the fight for sexual liberation that is one of the battlegrounds in Iron Council. And moved against a new background, the Pragmatikos, we can see, of course, these struggles in a new light... However, it is when these maps are combined with gender transformed by the power of the Allos that the deepest insight is gained. For each of the three modes of transformation is utilised by each of the three authors to disrupt essentialist notions of gender, to problematise the notion that biological sex is identical to socially/psychologically constructed gender and that (therefore) biology is destiny. Ontological transformation of the sexual psyche; ʻpurificationalʼ transformation of gender as performance; experimental transformation of the sexual body and constructed gender: Fantasy literature is, as represented by Pratchett, Pullman and Miéville, in a unique position to call attention to the inadequacies and dangers of hegemonic, essentialist views of sex because it is in a position to de-stabilise the secure, fixed notions of ʻmaleʼ and
1 Feet of Clay (1996), The Fifth Elephant (1999), Thud! (2005), Unseen Academicals (2009), Raising Steam (2013)
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ʻfemaleʼ, ʻmasculineʼ and ʻfeminineʼ, upon which these common- sense views rely. This Chapter, then, will explore how (in turn) Pratchettʼs dwarfs, Pullmanʼs hermaphrodites and Miévilleʼs Lovers not only overtly support the ʻrealʼ struggle for sexual equality but also indirectly suggest that the key to the winning of that struggle is a recognition that sexual identity is not a simple given or ʻnaturallyʼ based upon anatomy. Yet, it can also be apprehended for the first time in this Chapter that there is a cost attached to the operation of political Fantasy in the register of the eye, for it can begin to be discerned here how the process of defamiliarisation that constitutes the modus operandi of the three writers, the process of producing insight through the engendering of a strangeness that makes us look again which is the mode of their political exegesis, seems also to generate an excess. Too much should not be revealed here but the consequence of this, as will be shown, is that the chosen instrument of Fantasyʼs political aggression also ultimately becomes the very vehicle for its self-subversion.
Pratchettʼs Discworld dwarfs, to give the first instance of how Fantasy can challenge essentialist views of sex, are an inimitable take on the notion of gender as performance or play. On Discworld, gender is everywhere and nowhere in dwarf culture because all dwarves perform as males: They all have beards, they all wear chain-mail and iron helmets, they all carry battle-axes and they all quaff beer and sing songs about gold. Female dwarfs, we are told, can do anything the men do, “ʻprovided [they] do only what the men doʼ”2 and can “ʻbe any sex [they] like as long as [they] act maleʼ”.3 This is an ʻactʼ performed to perfection for, not only do all dwarfs appear male to humans (“of course, everyone knew that somewhere down under all those layers of leather and chain mail, dwarfs came in enough different types to ensure the future production of more dwarfs”),4 but they also all appear male to other dwarfs (a situation that gives rise to “points in a courtship when embarrassment might […] arise”).5 It is a mono-gendered culture, moreover, reflected in and sustained by the dwarf language, in which “there was no such thing as a dwarfish
2 Pratchett, Feet of Clay, 113 3 Pratchett, Feet of Clay, 193 4 Ibid., 268 5 Ibid., 268