Foremothers of Today's Feminist SF (WisCon 31 panel)

• 65 Foremothers of Today's Feminist SF

Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing SF&F•Caucus Room• Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m.

The Left Hand of Darkness broke ground when it was written, but to readers today who missed that period in history, it might seem gender-biased. Compare the original Earthsea trilogy to Tehanu, written later. Not only Le Guin's opinions changed, but the world in which she was writing had changed as well. What makes the feminist speculative fiction of today different from that of "First Wave" feminist sf? How do new readers see fiction from the "First Wave" and later? And is it important that they have a grounding in the genre's history?

M: L. Timmel Duchamp, Jeanne Gomoll, Lesley Hall, Lynn Kendall, Laura J. Mixon

Transcript by Liz Henry

Feminist Foremothers panel Sat. 1pm

( . . . ) (I missed the beginning of the panel)

Le Guin

L. Timmel Duchamp: The Left Hand of Darkness

Jeanne Gomoll: When I came into SF it was great just to have a woman astrogator. Now we have higher expectations. LHoD . Now expectations are different. People pointing out that thought people dont have gender they're always referred to as "he" and the story is still about men. Le Guin was resistent to that and she came around and went through the whole book ... or a chapter... and rewrote it. In the back of the new version you can see.

Timmi: She wrote an essay defending "he" as being gender neutral and years later she revisited that essay and inserted her comments on that criticism and decided that no, "he "is not gender neutral.

Jeanne: She wrote it three ways: he, she, and ambiguous. And it shows Le Guin's willingness to revisit her own fiction. The Earthsea world, she goes back to that world and walks around and had been there looking from a mountaintop but she goes back and looks at it from the kitchen and says why aren't there any women sorcerers and what historical events would have led to that? I created this world not thinking about it and there are now several women who were affected by the real history. I can't think of many authors who would do that.

Timmi: I can't either. It's like authors in the 2nd wave and authors who "rediscovered" women's history. It's a kind of revision that you don't see very often.

aud: Tales of Earthsea?

Jeanne: It starts with Tehanu. It's the first time we see that world from that perspective

Lynn Kendall: I had a problem with her when I first read it. She writes gorgeous prose. but I was much more on the Joanna Russ axis of the spectrum. Having read and reread and annotated The Female Man. And the first few chapters of LHoD put me off bc thery're so sexist! She started out as a very male-identified woman. All the protagonists are men. It is all about people doing public acts. That sledge journey .. no sense of domestic, private life, except the sledge journey. Great if you like arctic exploration. This is not going to be particularly feminist or revolutionary but the worlds are complementary. Joanna Russ and Le Guin communitarian sense of politics. Whileaway and the Hearth. What I love about Le Guin other than that utterly lovely liquid prose is the willingness to go back and change. She was born in 1929! She's 5 years older than my mother. She started out in the best of the patriarchy. A loving mother, a loving father, a great education, Ivy League patrician of the Berkeley hills. She has described herself as a princess. It left her whole in a lot of ways, but also blind in a lot of ways.

aud: quoted as saying "All I know is housework" so she didn't want to write about it.

gomoll: in fisher... acceptable plots are all about men fighting each other.

duchamp: my reaction to Le Guin was very similar to yours (Lynn's) but I came to appreciate her later. I didn't think of her as a real feminist until her later work. And also reading her essays.

Lesley Hall; I realized that it was reading LHoD that got me into science fiction. I read everything growing up including my brother's comic books. This would have been early 70s. One of the Earthsea books had just won something. I was looking for Doris Lessing. There on the shelf was LHoD and I picked it up and read it and by saying it's not a feminist book you're going too far but it's certainly not a manly book about hard manly objects hurtling into nothingness. *laughter* BANG SPLAT! It's about people in situations creating bonds between one another and if that's not a subversive act I'm not sure what is. What you say about Le Guin writing male identfied plots that is to some extent a historical artifact and Naomi Mitchison was writing plots which placed women at the center, and some of them were SF, and I'm wondering if there were different British and North American traditions here. A long tradition here of people of both sexes being able to write spec fic which was not regarded as a degraded genre. Hi Virginia! How is Orlando doing! So there is a tradition there. And Doris Lessing riffing off that as much as anything else. She and Mitchison were in the Soviet Union sharing a hotel room and I would love to hear the KGB tapes of their conversations. There ARE roots but they keep being forgotten, they are not known about, they are overpassed. We also in the united states have this movement from modernism on trashing women's rights. That didn't happen in Britain. Women writing were considered exceptional . . . Ursula herself told me in march . . . I wanted to ask her about her switch. My question was . . . about her switch. From the Julie Philllips bio. I said what made the difference? What happened with you? "My audience changed. I saw my audience differently. In the mid 70s when feminist sf was really flowering. The audience began to include women."

other writers & their problems

Lynn: Change.... having children... she was one of the first women writers who was not an aristocrat and able to afford household help.

everyone: Noooooo!!!

Lynn: Oh, I guess Isabella Beaton...

Duchamp: Christine de Pisan...

Lynn: Caroline Norton writing to support her kids but her husband took her royalties, he had a legal right. That observation was taken from Tillie Olsen's Silences.

Duchamp: you need a support network, christine had her mother and probably servants too

Lynn: Having servants was like having refrigerators

Lesley: No it wasn't... they are always running around keeping Cook happy... human resources... that's a job too.

Lynn: You have someone else, you can go out and do the shopping... it was different...

Gomoll: I keep getting stuck on what you said about the audience. and Le Guin. and I had to do that GoH speech years ago and I always tell people whatever you say will be great. But whenever I would write a sentence a face would float up and I would think Timmi would say this so much more elegantly and profoundly. it was difficult to thnk of it as being a universal experience of writers.

Timmi: I'm giving a paper in the next hour and it will be about that!

women making space for each other

Gomoll: I love the idea that we as women just by our interest are giving women the opportunity to talk to us. we have space...

Timmi: a conversation... and WisCon is a huge part of that. when we come here we have all these books in common.

Gomoll: made it possible for Suzy McKee Charnas to write the Holdfast series to show her experience of the women's movement. 20 years in between the first and the other. When she wrote Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines it was unclear how we were going to reconcile the sexist holdfast with the free riding women of the prairies. I don't know... (at the time she said) I can't write the next book because if she could she could fix society now.

• general agreement*

how to change the world

Liz: Gwyneth Jones just wrote a great blog entry about that, about coming up against the limits of her political imagination and feminism and sf and writing Life and where to go from there?

aud: Pamela Sargent ... have we gone a little farther than that? (

Duchamp: oh yes we have.

aud: do books being published now give clearer answers to that problem or did we simply drop it like a hot potato?

Gomoll: great question. in the 60s 70s 80s women separated, Tepper and others. The only way we could see the future was to wipe it off and start over. And now, there are more roadmaps. And it doesn't have to be our great grandchildren. It could be us! We are looking at the process of changing the world. it is really inspiring.

Lesley: I'm not sure it is really a function of being in a particular time and space. Mitchison was imagining it in Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution 3. There is no fixed solution, you constantly have to make adjustments. You have to make it more fair, constantly, she's not writing strictly utopian fiction, asking questions. Getting to a more egalitarian society. I don't know if anyone has read The Cleft by Doris Lessing.. frankly don't bother  ! *laughter* biological.. people's inate sense of optimism about how they have experienced life. Mitchison had spent decades IN politics. Ruthless political strife, birth control movement, knew how politics on the micro level worked, and yet was STILL optimistic *laughter* about possibilities. So you can at least draw maps and put ideas into people's head about roots and directions.

fiction, writers & vision

Lynn: I don't think fiction gives answers, it asks questions... was married and liked Le Guin, but then split up and didn't anymore

Alan Bostick: Cut her some slack.... patriarchy... it takes the work of that book to make possible later on that there's something else.

Lynn: the more comfortable your box is the harder it is to get out of it. if you're in one of thse magician's boxes you either quit twisting and die or you get the fuck out of the box.

aud: Children of Men ... third world countries men's sperm count is higher... something or other....

Jeanne Gomoll: I really really hated that novel. the people in these story never ask any questions. we never saw anyone try to figure out why this is happening... one of the things I like about feminist sf is that we ask questions. we find a place to stand I didn't know existed, and say, look at it from over here. Though P.D. James was talking about an interesting problem I kept feeling boxed in

• I started laughing because Lenny was snoring in the back row*

WOTEOT

Jeanne gomoll: Woman on the Edge of Time utopia she can't eat any food, it doesn't have any substance, she has to come back to her world but she gets inspiration

Timmi: except the problem is she can't change her world... she can change herself... but... through an act of personal violence. does it change her world? it's ambiguous . because it has to do with what her relationship to her world is.

Jeanne: utopia and real world

Timmi: she's a swing , a hinge, to the furture...

Aud / Aaron Lichtov: I haven't read the book in a while but as I recall she was one of a number of people who was a catcher, contacted fom the future. she wasn't the ONE.

Timmi: Marge Piercy wouldn't do that.. you're THE ONE... heh

Aaron: I love the "look at it from here" that's what I love about Woman on the Edge of Time. not about the violence but the scene between the people who have a lover in common and the whole community is miserable and the community goes here's two peanut butter sandwiches, go sit over there until you work it out. The Fifth Sacred Thing. that's the same crucial moment. chooseing non-violence

Niall: Children of Men. film. book. men going infertile. film women going infertile. They changed it.

aud: I missed that.

niall: the ultimate mystery, why are women infertile. *laughter*

dystopia / utopia

Jeanne: I don't think dystopias though they're dark have to have a hopeless feeling. By pointing that way, they're implicitly pointing the opposite direction.

Timmi: you can see the positive reflection. The two revolve around each other.

aud: The Telling. the utopian situation. by the end of the book there's a resolution going on. combinging the hot dystopian society with the cool society that they had tried to destroy.

what we take for granted

Timmi: I wanted to raise specifically the question of what we now take for granted in our reading of today's feminist sf, that we couldn't take for granted in the 1970s. I've read a lot of people saying that femsf now is mostly covert. It's gone underground it's no longer naked and aggressive. These words come to me because a review just characterized my writing as naked and aggressive and in that way not like other sf. Which I don't agree with.

lesley: assumption pervasive throughout society in the moment which is that we no longer need feminism. if you have women star pilots and stuff you don't need critiquing. because we have equal opportunity in the text. Except that's not the case and we have people coming in with power dynamics. We have people putting in what they believe are strong wome characters who aren't. Characters who are women who are doing something traditionally configured as male. They are leopard lcad ninja assassins but they are just set dressing. They don't have their own stories; they are background to a conventional story.

Timmi: women and their relationships with one another

Lesley: womn who are not using power in the trad masculine ways.

Timmi are those stories intelligible to other people who aren't feminist?

Lesley: or do they come across as being trad feminine stories, girly

aud: YA, chick lit, rather than being just like a male but they are ultra female coded like knowing everything there is to know about handbags. in film. The male gaze. I never know what that was. She coopted the male gaze and the camera... (who?) created diff paradigm. are they more self reflexive

boys who read girls who like boys...

gomoll: my mind went off on a tangent , thnking of women ... The Green Glass Sea ... It's being read by boys. in spite of the fact that the mailn characters are both little girls. ellen does lots of talks at high schols. overomcing resistance of men and boys to read books about girls.

aud: reading specialist. that is changing somewhat. male gang member teenager, picked a hillary clinton book, she's had it tough. she had a hard time with bill and he could learn something.

lesley: in the uk, stuff about boys not reading. suggestions that you would have a special section in school ibrarys that would be boys only. no soppy girls. it made my blood run cold.

timmi: girl cooties!

aud: even tho boys are reading The Green Glass Sea they are not girly girls. they're science geek tinkerer girls

aud: they're real girls!

aud: yes they are but they're over in the boys camp. It's complicated!

lynn: best women in fiction since Henry James, Terry Pratchett

aud: girl geek... became one of the boys.... years ago... it was very nice.

jeanne: they like a girl geek but won't read books about them

duchamp: Chip Delany told me he was crazy about Cherry Ames books and Nancy Drew.

lesley: "the child who lived in books" how he read everything and anything

what do we consider feminist sf

aud: I'm interested in problematizing what we consider feminist sf. LHod can we consider it femsf if she didn't when she wrote it? things written by men? things that are subversive in some ways but not in other ways? what counts?

jeanne: it's a moving target. even if this room we'd coming up with different lists. discussion I had with the Gwyneth Jones... not to be like those little blue.... smurfs... not to be Smurfette. I expect her to have friends and a life and a background. the extraordinary one the best in her abilities, is she the only one.

timmi: the queen bee, the only one...

Liz: Bechdel Test.

jeanne: full lives. i epxect them to in a way that doesn't mean thye'r good, or the best, or nice, but expect them to be fully developed. that's what I mean when I say strong woman character. but I have the sense that to british feminists that phrase has gotten an american tinge. we can't all be muscle bound....

lesley: Dorothea Brooks... secretly the vampire slayer of her days....not excactly ass kicking. strong dynamic and engaging char and ass kicking.

jeanne; she was talking about Fiorina in her series... and she said to me...

timmi: this is the ... love story...

jeanne: she's had a lot of thing happen to her and sh e's been battered around.

Lynn: doesn't pass the Bechdel test .. at least women chars, do they talk, not about a man

aud: what I'm seeing in both female and male writers is the attempt to create whole person with yin yang characteristics. in Ryman, in Charles de Lint, in women writing today, in your work Timmi, in Karen Joy Fowler. To have both that continuum within the character and it seems to me that that's more honest.

gomoll: The ultimate example this year our Tiptree Award winner, siamese twins with lots of conflict within themselves.

lesley: possible to write femsf where chars are male. all chars are male, 6 foot tall muscular hero, look at construction of masculinity, way that manhood is strongly inflected by social position and social status. and so I think that that's something that gets left out of discussions of what is feminist writing. possible to write about men in a feminist way.

aud: Geoff Ryman's Lust is a feminist novel though the male character is gay and there are no major female chars in the book the main char Michael is struggling to come to terms with the feminine in himself. at one point he makes love to a simulacrum of himself and sees himself as being feminine. who are ...

lots of examples

Duchamp: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland. Christine de Pisan. The Book of the City of Ladies.

Lesley: Margaret Cavendish

lynn: Mary Shelley. Talk about childbirth, she wrote Frankenstein while she was pregnant! The whole fear of producing a monster. Language compelling

Jeanne: [[Virginia Woolf|Woolf], and [Madeleine L'Engle|L'Engle]. A Wrinkle in Time changed my way of reading; suddenly I could identify with a smart girl.

Lesley: what, no Jo March?

Jeanne: well yes but not sf.

Alan B: what about Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, C.L. Moore, C.L. Goldsmith.

Timmi: I came to those later.

Lynn: Judith Merril

Liz: Me too. and Kate Wilhelm.

aud: recognizing stuff in you...

Jeanne: I've gotten scared of going back to stories I loved when I was young im standing in a different place now and I get so angry. I can't go back.

Liz: I hated ... HATED... A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid.

(someone): Jane Langton, concord murder mysteries, great detail. ( . . . )

Lynn: Open raw anti-feminism is no longer acceptable.

Liz: But that's not true! Actually it's rewarded... if it's noticed at all. People are blind. It's not acceptable to who!

Lynn: It's like the end of [[[slavery]]... It's not that there's no prejudice... certain fictions now have to be kept up.

Timmi: In the 1960s women couldn't own property because realtors wouldn't sell it to them. And it would say, "No women need apply for this job". In the want ads. Different men's and women's columns in the classifieds. In the 60s! For a loan, you had to have a male co-signer.

aud: In 1972 I could not open a checking account in my own name as a married woman. Now it's easier.

Jeanne: In the whole world though, we think of the U.S. and we could easily slide back. I worry about the fun feminism, having fun with trappings of sexist 50s, high heels and bustierres, and thinking of the whole world context.

Timmi... the attack on contraception just in the United States... we don't have to go anywhere else.

Jeanne: and we are in danger of losing abortion

aud: We could easily lose them. They're handshake agreements.

aud: I object to that as a younger woman. I grew up never questioning I could do any job I wanted. It's not about my gender, not an issue. And a lot of the women I know my age feel that way. I'm not used to the idea of someone else telling me what I can and cannot own.

Jeanne: You could walk into walmart and ask for a prescription contraceptive and be refused. Right now. Next year you might not be able to get an abortion. Those rights can be taken away.