Table of Contents 6.2
EDITORIAL REMARKS
BATYA WEINBAUM
Editor's Notes
CRITICISM
J.ANDREW DEMAN
Taking Out the Trash: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and the Feminist Voice in American SF
The mere presence of the feminine perspective is an intrusion upon a key escapist element of masculine science fiction in America. To the majority of the pre-pubescent
boys who represent the key demographic to which science fiction in America is marketed, there are few real-world terrors that they are more eager to escape
than the terror of real-world women. Thus, the female characters of male-oriented SF tend to become the vessels through which the young male consumers of science
fiction vicariously live-out their fantasy ideals of sexualized, romanticized, or fetishized women. It is thus the challenge of the female science fiction
writer to legitimize depictions of sex and sexuality, while at the same time enabling the same escapist element that is the benchmark of science fiction.
In Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed, the world of SF is introduced to a complex female character in the form of the maternal shape-shifter, Anyanwu. Butler's
depiction of womanhood through Anyanwu defamiliarizes the construction of women in science fiction. In Anyanwu, Butler demonstrates the wealth of potential
for characterization in science fiction, while at the same time operating against the male-oriented science fiction tropes that have traditionally excluded the
voice of such strong female writers as Butler, along with complex female characters as Anyanwu. The result is that gender construction becomes a little more uncomfortable
for the male, pubescent readers of science fiction, a little more identifiable to the othered readers of the genre, and, as a whole, science fiction becomes
a lot more real, a lot less 'trashy.'
SCOTT A. DIMOVITZ
Cartesian Nuts: Rewriting the Platonic Androgyne in Angela Carter's Japanese
Surrealism
Angela Carter defined speculative fiction as "the fiction of asking 'what
if?'" , and elsewhere defended her generic methodology by claiming that all fiction used non-mimetic techniques in one form or another. Through fiction,
"speculations about the nature of our experience on this planet [could] be conducted without crap about the imitation of life getting in the way, because
whose life are you supposed to be imitating? Obviously a trapeze artist has got as much claim to be alive as a solicitor". Her first allegorical speculative
novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, was published the year she returned from Japan, where she lived between 1970 and 1972 after her divorce
from Paul Carter, and it is useful to divide Carter's writing career into pre- and post-Japan. Heroes and Villains (1969), while also exploring an alternate
reality, differs greatly in the manner of construction, formal properties, and methodology of thematic and symbolic explorations. While playing with popular
post-apocalyptic conventions in 1950s and 60s science fiction, it never moves beyond a general and vague critique of structural anthropology and Rousseau.
The allegories are a bit ham-fisted in comparison to the later work (Eve at the end of the world gets bitten by a snake but does not die, et cetera), even
if they explore many of the key themes that recur in a more developed form in her later fiction. In her otherwise largely realist fiction before Japan, Carter
often used a male protagonist (Shadow Dance, Several Perceptions, Love), and her feminism consisted mainly of female characters' exploitation and final destruction
(Shadow Dance, Love) or violently taking the role of the male characters (The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains). This binary, as it happens, informs Carter's
analysis of Sade's work, where women are classified into two types: Justine, passively suffering, the martyr at the hands of patriarchy; and Juliette, replicating
the male libertines in their brutality towards women, the woman who learns to run with the wolves.
LINDA J. HOLLAND-TOLL
Bluestockings Beware:Cultural Backlash and the Reconfiguration of the Witch in
Popular Nineteenth-Century Literature
What cultural work is underway when the image of women as witches is used
to discuss educated women, women to whom the mildly opprobrious epithet "bluestocking"
has also been applied? How does the popular reading of a culture influence and
reflect the ways in which that culture thinks? One site to explore such questions
is a group of stories in which bluestockings, i.e., educated women, were associated
in some manner with witchcraft. The linkage is interesting, but contradictory.
Most bluestockings were middle to upper class urban women with formal education,
while the most common, but not necessarily the most accurate, cultural archetype
of witches was the village granny or the wise woman of the woods, good for spells
and charms and herbal remedies as well as for the practice of evil in association
with the devil. On the face of it, these knowledge bases are so different that
no immediate connection springs forth. So how did this conflation come to be? To examine this idea, the author decided to view four nineteenth-century short
stories that reflect this cultural linkage through the looking glass of narratives
of American witch-hunting, Puritan theology, and the history of women's changing
roles in mid-nineteenth century America. The main conflations stand revealed
as possession of knowledge inappropriate for women, i.e., religious learning,
or book knowledge or knowledge of healing. Women who were "cunning women,"
i.e., healers (midwives in particular) or fortune-tellers, and who could compete
in wit and education with men were often at risk of being labeled witches.
CARLEN LAVIGNE
Space Opera: Melodrama, Feminism and the Women of Farscape.
Lynn Joyrich has outlined in some detail her theories regarding how television
melodrama, gender and affect in soap opera coax a "feminine" viewpoint.
At the same time, Tania Modleski has criticized soap operas for directing female
anger at female power. While soap operas have never been lauded as ideal purveyors
of a feminist ideology, elements of the soap opera have been freely used elsewhere
in genre television. Soap operas themselves remain, for the most part, unchanging,
while melodrama-which supposedly appeals more to a feminine viewpoint-has been
spreading, and as such, has the potential to be utilized as a strong tool for
feminism when combined with, and used to subvert, other conventions. The science
fiction series Farscape (1999-2002) figures aesthetically as a science fiction/soap
opera hybrid, which works toward increasingly empowered female representation,
which this author discusses.
MEGAN MUSGRAVE
Phenomenal Women: The Shape-shifter Archetype in Postcolonial Magical Realist
Fiction
This article provocatively explores the usefulness of the construct of magical
realism in the context of post-colonial oppositional narrative strategies, in particular by feminist authors.
GERARDO RODRIGUEZ SALAS
E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton's Covert Anti-Feminism in The Coming Race
In The Coming Race, E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton envisages a highly unusual utopian
model where he criticises, sometimes humorously, sometimes bitterly, issues
related to socio-economic, political, cultural, and religious aspects of contemporary
society. In the present article, however, I shall restrict myself to the analysis
of gender relationships as depicted by Lytton in his novel. In doing so, I shall
analyze this novelist's quasi-feminist work by connecting his focus on the so-called
"Woman Question" with his choice of the dystopic sub-genre, ultimately
presenting Lytton as a highly original writer, whose strategy lies in wrapping
the traditionally misogynous utopian genre in a quasi-feminist cover.
FICTION
KATHIE AUSTIN
Orion
A woman in a motorized wheelchair struggling with a painful virusand delivering her own meds by push button faces her fear of death, remembering the shy girl
she had been even as one of her country's most respected scientists and as member of a top secret research team.
SHARON KING
Quiescent
A futuristic story about a loss of a family member due to an unauthorized power outage follows the life of protagonist Claire as she shuttles home to the half-under-water
Venice, the ancient city enchanting at Christmastime amidst the flutterings of snow over houses, bridges and the relentless gentle waves. Flashing memories
of child hood laced with messages sent to Archive Adjustment supervisor, "Grieftime requested" explores the intertwining of advanced technobureacracies and
family life, a theme of sf since the late 1920s.
CAROLE SPEARIN MCCAULEY
Crone's Revenge
In the science building, Helgart's 26th attempt to repair the auras of her expensive chinchillas had failed again. The bright life spikes of healthy aura
were fading, and the healer is called upon to use her powers of mindstreaming to diagnose and heal. The talent magician had worked all night to save her animals
sudden pneumonia. At 61 she had spent all her savings in buying the latest at the morning's Corporate and Patent Fair, thinking her husband, Geflen, in the
traditional school of magic, which had few old lady enrollees, would be proud of her.
ART
MARION EPSTEIN
Feminist Speculative Art
This nearly life-long Clevelander, now deceased, had displayed during her life time work in numerous exhibitions both juried and international. Artist, printmaker,
and educator, she used the gum bi-chromate printing process to create images that made statements about family, civil rights, world peace, and the Holocaust.
Through her art, she developed a visual vocabulary that allowed her to express ideas as well as aesthetics. A Brooklyn native, she considered her work concept
driven from the beginning of the process. She received degrees from Cooper Union, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland Institute of Art. Her art reproduced
here depicts the splitting of the internal woman from the object of the male gaze, the free spirit from collective female bonding at any age, and the internalization
of the subject/object split that paralyzes an individual, isolated woman who contemplates her alter ego.