Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory Building Activity? (WisCon 30 Panel)
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[edit] Panelists
Karen Joy Fowler (moderator), Margaret McBride, Lori A. Selke, Joan Haran, Cheryl Morgan
[edit] Transcript Notes
This is a draft of a transcript. Ellipses (...) indicate missing text; question marks (?) indicate unknown speakers; and there could be plenty of unmarked errors. Other attendees are encouraged to incorporate their own notes and descriptions of actions (applause, laughter, etc.) into the transcript. External links, recordings, and the like can also be linked.
Original transcript notes by Laura Quilter - please correct or fill in or add commentary
mod KJF: What brought you to sf & feminism
MM: Subscription to science fiction book club as an adult.
LS: Learned both sf & feminism at mother's knee; getting Ph.D. In chemical engineering while she was growing up. Collision came when I read "When It Changed" ... I was 18, 19, 20; an adult but not by much. That was the first Joanna Russ I ever read.
JH: I also read sf & fantasy and all kinds of fantastic literatures as a child but once I went to college a sense of shame about that crept ... I continued to read fantasy. That makes no sense to me now. In early 90s I did a master's in gender studies. They gave us this very extensive reading list. This was my first encounter with feminism, was doing a master's in gender studies. One of the books was Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex. her thesis about taking reproduction outside the body seemed to me at that point incredibly attractive. The other thing she said was there was no utopian literature for women and I found that hard to believe. I thought that A) she was writing science fiction and B) there was other science fiction.
Piercy & Firestone, Piercy & Donna Haraway
CM: introduction.
KJF: Watching Tiptree Award process several years & something has repeated itself several times. Fresh jury begins discussing the kind of book they want, settles on the kind of book, the kind of experience they want. generally turns out they want to be reading The Left Hand of Darkness and want to be 19 years old. That's what they're trying to create. Many many months and books later they begin to scale down their expectations and look for changes that are more subtle & have a less profound change in their thinking. I've seen this so many times that i've wondered -- at our age, and with our reading histories, is it in fact possible to have that experience again?
KJF: When was the last time a book really profoundly rocked you? how long ago was that? and what sorts of impacts do you find when you read now?
JH: Sometimes reading a book doesn't have its impact on the first thing. I did work on Starhawk. Finally struck me that there was a male POV ... 1992, 93. The other text was Shadow Man - thinking about gender & sexuality, the way that Melissa Scott wrote about that, [thrtu], embodying relationships made sense to me. That queer theory for example you can slip off the page when you read about something ... The bodily experience of those characters has done as well as it is in Shadow Man. That helped me to imagine myself and to imagine other others in a way that makes a lot more sense. So again roughly the same time. and there have been texts that approach that since then but I think that for me but part of it is having the time to go over and over a text, because I read fast, I'm plot-driven to start with, I have to know how the story turned out, and then I go back and read parts again that occur to me; I can't do that the first time because I read to fast. Texts need to bear second, third, fourth, fifth readings to get rushes from them, to do theory-building. IMHO reading superficially one reading doesn't do that for me.
KJF: You said you came to these texts having been taught to read for gender issues - would you say you've been trained to do that or is it a more natural way for you to approach a text.
JH: No it's definitely training. my first degree was English history and the teaching was looking at a text in that context, and it was all class, come the revolution all will be solved, and gender was not an issue. Like that point of my life like many women of a certain privilege I hadn't come across gender as a disadvantage, but then once I went into the workplace I realized oooohhh - things are different for girl. Something about my social reality made it possible for me to realize reading differently - training - the other thing, in terms of theory building, it's not just about me reading the text, but about talking to other people about text, so it's not just about the text but about texts that can create conversations, and talking to other people who read differently, illuminates other stuff for me that I missed because of my own reading blinkers.
CM: One of the things that first struck me when I read the title is that sure reading is a feminist theory building activity but coming to wiscon is a really serious feminist theory building activity. In terms of recent books & things it's getting hard, this comes back to a panel we had yesterday: is feminist sf so five years ago. and to a certain extent we decided it was because things have changed. Back when I was a teenager it was great to imagine a world with female pilots and presidents and fighter pilots and now all those things have happened. We haven't won the war but we're now fighting in the trenches not doing easy things like advancing across the land. but the type of book people can write now is different than the type of book people could write back in the 60s. Plus when you're 19 it's easier to impress you with the big ideas & when you get older you get more sophisticated & ask more from a book. Most of the books that have blown me away over past few years are literary style rather than content. Probably River of Gods by Ian Mcdonald because he introduces in that a character who has had a sex-change operation to become neuter; someone who elected to get out of the gender game altogether; and if you look at the book, it's all based on what actual transsexuals go thru, but rather than what someone goes thru mtf or ftm it's what somebody would go thru to have no gender at all.
LS: took a course in feminist theory in college taught by someone who was really really rigorous and I don't think then I've had that reaction to a story; because I'm hyper-critical, it's really hard to blow me away with a story; which is why I think we do it with a narrative to begin with rather than writing Shulamith Firestone - that's science fiction. Narrative is to slip the ideas in and make you think wow and have it come up later but that doesn't work any more. John Kessel / Stories for Men. I read it as a book before it won the tiptree. For me it really did make me - it was the first sophisticated treatment of what it would be like for boys; the other side of a feminist utopia. It wasn't oh this would be horrible; it was hmm there are some sophisticated subtle effects. Things I look for now yeah the big idea is great but what are some of the unintended consequences. and I can still be brought up short by that kind of book or story.
KJF: But less of a wow and more of a hmm.
LS: Yeah but that's okay, I'm really suspicious of a wow; I'm really suspicious of things that are supposed to blow my mind or things that really did blow my mind because I tend to think I'm being propagandized rather than really changing my thinking because I'm not being critical
MM: I teach freshmen in college; I'm still involved w/ the 19-year-olds. I'm teaching a class this time of juniors & seniors of all Tiptree winners & shortlisted so getting a lot of that this time. But for my own personal reading it is a little more of the "well that's an interesting question, hmm, where is that going to go and what would that do". So even if it's fairly subtle -- Troll did some interesting things. I was on that jury. And Troll did some interesting things for me as did Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer. Which is a YA and I hadn't read a YA which was doing -- it was very subtle yet still some interesting things. ... TROLL what made it work for me - a gay man in Finland who finds a troll and for various reasons falls in lust with the troll. How much is your sexuality affected by what you don't want to do, how much of it is a dark thing going on, and what really made Troll work for me is the Philippino mail order bride, and mail order brides, even though most of us would totally cringe, they're an accepted part of our society, and how do we juxtapose that with the fact that everyone is so concerned that he fell in love with a troll. ... as long as it's doing the Theordore Sturgeon thing, at least making me ask some questions, I'm willing ...
KJF: Joan talked about a kind of text that leaves room for the reader, a participatory sort of reading as opposed to a text that walks you thru it; I want to discuss & add to it something that Lori just said -- I wonder if part of being a feminist sf reader is a kind of innately confrontational reading, a sort of -- instead of slipping right into a book and being willing to go wherever the writer takes you, is part of the way we read is a kind of prove it, show me, let me think about it first sort of reading? Speak at will.
CM: I picked up on it when Lori mentioned it as well and was wondering whether being less trusting of "gosh wow" was actually an artifact of changes in society as much of changes in us becoming more suspicious and things. Back when I was a teenager there was only one source of news in the UK; the BBC; so actually having science fiction novels that said things that the BBC would never say was interesting & important. Now these days we have a lot of media, different versions of the news; possibly that's making us more suspicious in our reading & less willing to accept gosh wow.
KJF: Will point out there is no feminist news channel.
JH: One of the things I was thinking about when I mentioned that point was I think for me some of it is about narrative strategies in terms of leaving a space. It's not necessarily that you are engaged in a one-to-one conversation with the narrator. I personally love narratives with multiple POVs where in the interstices the gaps and the kind of disruptions b/w different narrative POV characters where you can see the stuff that doesn't fit - example - just because i've been working with it, Gwyneth Jones' LIFE, the narrative works backwards & forwards b/w these two different women; one a passive-aggressive scientist and this sort of Camille Paglia type cypher. Jones is using them to look at different aspects of feminism, so sometimes they work as real characters, and sometimes they are much more advancing a politics. but because she is giving you those different perspectives, and ... She's giving you as the reader multiple points of identification and also the opportunity to have either one and follow the narrative one way or the opportunity to move b/w those points of view & have a much more complicated way first time thru which I'm generally too stupid to do.
CM: Everyone's too stupid to read Gwyneth's books.
JH: No this is why I have to read books over again because I do suspend my disbelief and I do get fully embodied, embedded in one of the characters, and it needs me to read it again to get those kinds of differences. In Starhawk novel I was talking about there are two main female POV characters and those were the only ones I could read the first several times I read the book; it was when I finally read it several times and heard the voice of that other character. Sorry I'm not just kind of rambling.
KJF: Life is a really complicated and interesting book and my first time thru it I had - there's a rape and another great injustice of another sort as well and I was so focused on expecting that to be resolved in some way, the perpetrator to be exposed, the woman to come to some sort of action, and just waited for that - so to me one of the interesting things about it was to think, okay, that's not a necessary part of the plotline any more. It seemed to me - I'm not saying this very clearly - it seemed to me in the end much more real & interesting that it didn't resolve in the ways I longed for it and waited for it too and left me with much more to think about because it didn't
MM: When I was thinking ... Of what I did with my students, that's what happens when they move from fiction to theory when they start to ask themselves what does this has to do with my life? Where do I see the fiction playing out in the things that have to do with me. again I'm working with fairly young people who often have read no theory so how do we move from the fiction to theory and I guess what I'm thinking is that the two work together - theory gives you language & a way to approach a particular issue and the fiction can also give you language & metaphor and a way to approach a particular issue.
KJF: this raises something i've been thinking about in terms of this panel & my life. When I had that early experiecne that your students are still enjoying, the books were very useful to me in terms of my own life. It's been hard. The kind of sexuality issues in particular about an aging woman which are for obvious reasons the kinds of things I'm interested in now it's very hard to find books about those kinds of things to find what I'm experiencing now. So along the same lines as when was the last time a book changed something for you i've also added when was a book really useful to me. When I was first married and reading all that feminist science fiction it was would change me so completely that I was utterly unfit to live in the real world, my husband would tiptoe around and say let me know when you've finished that book, and there would be a very painful process of readjusting. But maybe I just don't let it happen any more, maybe it was too painful.
LS: Some people use books for escapist purposes. finding something that speaks your language and lets you go somewhere else is a good thing. I don't get that experience reading but I'm also a writer and I do get it writing and that's why I do it.
MM: These were painful. I'm thinking of Kate Wilhelm's The Funeral - one of Ellison's anthologies, Dangerous Visions, and it was just PAINFUL to read because it felt uncomfortably true. And some of the other ones too where, they were very important for me, but also so discouraging of what I thought was going on in my life and what I thought was going on around me - I don't want hopeful books exactly but I want to feel what can I do with this book or this story that somehow changes the way that I'm thinking, changes the world around me, or sees a potentail way -- LIFE did some of that for me, made me think about things in a different way; it's not exactly a hopeful book, but at least it's not totally a funeral of all is lost, all is gloom, and funeral was that way for me.
JH: can I say something
KJF: please do
JH: One of the reasons I liked Life and it brings me back to other books - one of gold coast books / pacific edge - thinking about utopia as something fully formed and complete is wrong thing to do; utopia is about struggle forever; and that seems to me the best description of utopia that I can imagine; and I think for me that's useful because it is about process & struggle & movement. It's not perfect by any manner or means but it's - some of the things that she's doing with that are really useful, and that idea, struggle forever - so I think hope, hope is about, I think, being able to take action; you don't know how it's going to turn out but you think you can do. novels or any kinds of texts that help you believe you can do things are really useful. books aren't just useful to me to think about stuff, they're to help me hold myself together; that's one of the reasons I read to hold myself together because sometimes the struggle forever is about too hard. It doesn't always have to be theory; it can be about speaking to you or parts of you in ways that other parts of the world don't.
CM: maybe I'm just old & cynical but i've gotten to the stage where nobody else is going to hold myself together but me and I read books for other reasons the style or whatever. They occasionally say interesting political things but I no longer expect solutions from them.
MM: but even if it's a light little touch that makes me go this story couldn't have been written 10 years ago - there's a very light-hearted story, kissing frogs, and it's a story where a person who is transgendering puts a want ad to meet somebody, and the story couldn't have been written, couldn't have been published, I think 20 years ago, and the fact that it can and even be listed for a tiptree makes me feel hopeful about the world.
KJF: what about it makes you think it couldn't have been published then?
MM: I don't think a character treated very lightly, very humorously, that's in the midst of transgendering -- could that have been published 20 or 25 years ago? a story that treats the whole concept of transgendering and going thru that so commonplacely that it's treated humorously, I don't think that could have been done.
CM: certainly there have been characters for a long time, angela carter, I think the point you're making is that the character is treated sympathetically.
MM: the author didn't have to do a lot of work; because audience accepted it; and I think that's a hopeful.
KJF: I think a theory is that perhaps I'm too cynical
LS: cynical
KJF: easy for me to forget how much progress really has been made since I was growing up then and now because in some ways the vision that I got from these books was a sort of all or nothing, either we win or we lose, and i've been very surprised in some ways by the focus on masculinity - something i've begun to hear a lot about. because in the 70s when I was first encountering this stuff & hearing about it it was very clear to me it was for both sexes; partly because I had children; very clear that the male role was oign to have to change for feminism to succeed the way I wanted it to. The shock of feminism that women would work outside the home & come home & do all the work there as well was not what I was envisioning. What I longed for was such a deep & profound change that it's hard for me to take the pleasure in things that perhaps I ought to take in the things we have accomplsiehd.
MM: at that point I needed to have my consciousness raised. I was a very young woman who had been raised in a very stereotypical world and I needed painful and needed the rug pulled out from under me. I actually had a young woman write to me who was 20 who had never thought much about gender. Student who wrote to her @ 20 had never thought of gender. I was probably there at 20 as well. problems int he world. I'm willing to read the painful works occasionally but I want them to raise questions for me. fantasy & sf for me are to disrupt reality but not to break it down so much that it can't be built back up.
CM: a couple of things in this clearly as you get older there's a lack of willingness to change, you have more to lose, the job the family all that kind of stuff. I like to think I'm not like that possibly because I don't have much to lose, no job, not much social status ... but I think after you've thrown yourself enthusiastically in something for 30 or more years everything involves people and everything involves people involves politics & is struggle & won't work the way you thought it would.
JH: don't know if it was what I said about masculinity you were thinking nabout. When I was reading WOTEOT and firestone it wasn't that men had to change, but it was that they had to change the way way I thought they had to change.
KJF: and so they should
JH: but I want them to change how I want them, not the way you - I don't care about you - and fiction reminds me of other POVs that are useful. but I'm a bit suspicious of linear progress models of history but also of subjectivity identity or whatever. but I have to keep learning and forgetting the same lessons over and over again. and maybe this is one of my kind of things about re-reading. a lot of the talk on the panel has been about fiction as a progression and I think you're making interesting and real and valid points about things being made possible that weren't possible before but going back to stuff written in another period of time is still useful now is one of the ways that I do theory. Stuff doesn't have to be novel to be useful. I'm going to stop there.
KJF: the always amazing UKL. The last time I read TLHOD a couple of years ago I had a different kind of thinking about it. part of which was to some extent it is literally true, and I can't defend this very well, and I would have to defend male and female in ways I am incapable of doing, but her aliens become male or become female depending on the outer stimulus that's provided at the time, and that's something that we fit ourselves in as well - something that I was taking purely as grounded & a thought experiment I can now take in a different way
MM: we need to keep this in print because there are still people coming up who are 20 who have never thought about gender & need the painful works.
vonda: MM said a little while ago that you weren't looking for hopeful books ; is it impossible for a hopeful book to pull the rug out for under you. (confusion about hearing im/possible)
LS & MM: oh yeah it's possible
VM: I get pages with 300 of abuse of women and with blurbs that say you'll love this book and I don't think people needed to write that book after suzy mckee charnas walk to the end of the world.
KJF: there's your blurb right there: "didn't need to be written; go read some suzy mckee charnas"
VM: 300 pages of wallowing in the abuse of women to prove that abuse of women is bad, which, duh. he kept pestering me; publisher said but you don't understand vonda the way you can tell the bad guys is that they're abusing women.
MM: I agree with you but there are people who haven't read suzy charnas but they might read something new. So I think there are still some reason for those books to be written.
VM: but shouldn't sf go beyond that and have some attention paid to it beyond that's a hopeful book & I'm too cynical to read it
CM: I think there are plenty of good books around; that's not an issue. but at the same time I think there are people who need to be shocked out of their complacency, realize they aren't as well off as I am.
LS: hope is great it's the actual -- rearrange my thinking doesn't happen, and if it were to happen I would have to realize that someone was snowing me, but hope -- pandora experience here are tons of things being thrown at you
KJF: I would turn that around and ask you suzy mckee charnas' book aside, is there a book without hope that could still be a valuable book or would that not be a helpful experience.
VM: a book without hope (stuttering)
KJF: I'm thinking that would be a great title
VM: you can write it
KJF: I can write it, I can read it, I can publish it
VM: i've had the experience of writing what I thought were hopeful books nad being told I'm not a feminist. "You're a feminist?" not serious ... maybe the light at the end of the tunnel, light shining on us for last 30 years, is having an effect
gavin: thinking of Laurie Marks' fantasy series, bad things happening to men and women, yet hope that people will live together - trying to get beyond the cynical thing.
VM: not trying to say there shouldn't be bad things happening or even drama or melodrama in a book, but the assumption taht bad things happen because you're female or a kid, I just with my own work I want to get beyond that.
CM: laurie's book are an excellent example - in them, people working hard on politics, trying to learn from each other; that's particularly helpful because someone learning what needs to be done.
aud: add to that short story series of matter of seggri; I found that to be very powerful & very hopeful
aud: theory-building - lots of different aspects. One of them is 19yo experience, getting in touch w/ inner 3yo and make you say "why" - book sthat get inside me and shake of my theoretical base are books that see something that i've never seen even tho it's right in front of me - for me gwyneth jones WHITE QUEEN & north ... did that for me
LS: troll did that for me. I can't articulate my response to troll in any meaningful way whatsoever but it did make me go hmm.
MM: I'm not sure I can say why but the first thing that came to my mind were the stories that retell fairy stories and that made me go hhhh-- why was that particular trope always there in the fairy tale and what happens when we come at it from another point of view
KJF: it's not a text so I don't know if it's a fair responsen to your question or not but I have been of course as many of us have been living in the US for the last several years and i've become very conscious of the whole war narrative, we're going to war, we've been attacked, and the tremendous power of that storyline, and my reaction has been very much, what an unnecessary part of the world war seems to me to be but how much the people who aren't actually going toff to do the fighting seems to thrill to that storyline. not so much of the war itself but over the power of that narrative.
CM: I think a lot of the really interesting stuff i've read of late has to do with state of world, gender politicds. Thinking of short story that --? wrote about iraq war; about bulldozing iraqi soldiers alive in trenches.
aud: in terms of where is tarted as a feminist sf reader to do and where I look for and what I look for -- id idn't know vonda was there -- but I started with dreamsnake, and it struck me as a very humane, and it was incredibly helpful, and it was a young woman character taking action in her universe for change, in a very loving & assertive way, and that was earthshattering for me at the time. and here I am 25, 30 years later, and having studied women's studies in college, the world around me today has become a place where the % of things that I thought were movable issues compared with the % of things I thought were intractable and things I thought were given have completely changed. I used to believe early on, that everything was movable and changable, and some intractable and I didn't have a bead on them and then they'd be movable. and I sit here today and look at the world - touched by venom did a lot of controversy - and part of the story is that women are horribly treated, and is this news, and I don't think it's news, but the reality is you don't need a book to find it, it goes on in places of war, poverty, etc. So now I find myself not just a place of movable intracdtable etc but hopelessness because maybe given is a bigger % than i'd ever considered based on biology & nature of universe and that's what has me reading now for things like joan said holding myself together as a person, as opposed to wows, because I'm getting wows for the world, and I'm all for a hopeful telling, and I think laurie marks' is a very hopeful view of the universe, but that given is scary.
matt austern: congentical agenesis of gender ideation - a story I recently read that said something about gender i'd never seen before. The first story i'd seen that asked what kind of mind you'd have to have to not see gender beofre.
KJF: impact on me, because how had I not noticed the gradations, 2 sexes, 3, four, and then I read that book and think oh right it's 25 or 30. also thinking about flexibility of sexuality in that book/story
gavin: read john varley short stories i'd never erad before, amazed to find, closest person to have written kissing frog story in 1976 if tiptree wasn't doing things like that. john varley now seems to write heinleinian space opera for kids with some gender stuff but ...
CM: I haven't read JV's stories myself but 2-3 years ago we had a panel w/ transgender issues and the message I got was it was superficial
gavin: and yet you can't change the gender of the charadcter even superficially without changing expectations of reader etc because you don't know waht author intended
gavin: another thing is there much of gender stuff in new or old space opera
CM: character in -- ? cass? city by Al Reynolds (alastair) - character mentioned having changed sex a long time ago
JH: justina robson's occasionally on edges of that & I think she's really interesting but I don't have time to read enough fiction in the way I want to. I've started reading her and am interested. I don't want to get into progress models but I do think different generations do things in different ways - different generational models. Want to say something about feminism, not just about gender; sexuality ,race, class, and multiple other hierarchies of oppression, and so it doesn't have to be about - that doesn't have to be the lens to consider feminist theory-building to be organized about it necessarily
LS: gavin are you suggesting that space babe is a feminist building
CM: "living next door to the god of love" character who is a god
KJF: eleanor arnason's ring of swords is one of the texts I reaturn to a lot
MM: "light" which won the tiptree has elements. Sometimes space opera that has so much going on if I were to look @ gender I would have to read again there's too much. but to go back to the point about gender not being main aspect of feminism; I sat down before this panel 7 said what have I read about in theory; and I made a list and I think you will be able to come up w/ sf that does something with every single one of those bodies - technology - nature environment & assoc w/ feminism - language - race & colonialism - boundary & borde rblurring - power issues categorizing & universalizing -
KJF: is it possible to love a book which is absolutely offensive on its sexual politics. can you give me an example of a book that you love despite every moral fiber of your being.
MM: I find them useful & use them in my classes ... eg: 1972 a sentence that is not a character, a male writer wrote this, very well-known sf writer, the universal voice, "she handled the car skillfully, ofr a woman, particuarlyly for a beautiful woman."
aud: the fmeale man / Joanna Russ - does wonderful things for politics in terms of women's state of being, but also nasty things to say about transwomen that come straight out of janice raymond ...
LS: the first earthsea book. I actually have that more these days with movies.
KJF: my family is completely looking at me these days, 'are you crying?' of course not! nonsense
JH: sheri tepper's gate to women's country which I do love, but her feminism a deeply troubling feminism, eugenic, totalizing, that's scary, but there are aspects that are very seductive because of the parts I think she gets right, but I think she gets it right based on a completely dodgy & biologist premise that I wouldn't want to indulge for a minute. but when people represent it as a utopia I want to (slap myself on forehead); have you read it? some books that areally fucked but are also really satisfying to my feminist totalitarian, but I want other books that make me
MM: I will be trapped, because yes I have great problems w/ GTWC, but from stylistic, with the play, it works for me, and it also works as a teaching tool
CM: I do tend to react particularly badly to books that I disagree w/ the obvious politics of it but if the politics are bad I tend to hate the book but I have this awful feeling that there all these books that I really enjoy that if I sat down to think about the politics & gender assumptions I would hate them.
KJF: well we will go from here and work on our level of outrage and hopefully on our level of hopefulness.
(the end)
