Problem of Gender / Technoscience papers (WisCon 31)

87 Feminism and the Problem of Gender for the Source, Voice, and Identity of the Woman Who Writes/Feminist and Science Fictional Resources for the Cultural Critic of Technoscience

Academic Papers•Conference Room 3• Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.

1) “To learn to write at all, I had to begin by thinking of myself as a sort of fake man,” Joanna Russ wrote to James Tiptree, Jr. Among the many aspects of Alice Sheldon’s life that Julie Phillips discusses in her biography is one that lay at the heart of Alice Sheldon’s writing identity and voice: the problems that gender often entails for the woman who writes. And yet not all women writing sf before or at the onset of the second wave of feminism have found it necessary to write as a man or from a male pov (e.g., Carol Emshwiller, Judith Merril, Kate Wilhelm, and Naomi Mitchison). This paper will consider the problem of gender at the source of writing and how the gendering of narrative voice continues to influence and in some cases overdetermine the writer's options — or not.

L. Timmel Duchamp, Joan Haran