July 2008

Feminist SF: Then and Now
By Lettie Prell

I had the great pleasure of participating with Eileen Gunn in a Wisconsin Public Radio talk show this Spring, discussing feminist science fiction with the host of Here on Earth, Jean Feraca (listen here). We began by discussing the merits of naming Mary Shelley the mother of science fiction. Eileen noted that Aphra Behn, who predated Shelley by more than a hundred years, might be offered as an alternative.

Yet the first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously, and the pulp era, which brought science fiction to the masses beginning in the 1930s, was marketed toward young men. Women were not considered a target for adventure fiction. It was the feminist movement that spawned feminist science fiction, such as Joanna Russ' The Female Man, published in 1975, which featured a parallel world where women acted assertively—like men, as the culture of that time put it.

As the core values of the feminist movement gained legitimacy, and key ideas became adopted by the mainstream culture, feminism became less radical as a movement. There was a gradual move away from feminist science fiction that challenged traditional gender roles, to a broader speculative fiction that is increasingly "gender exploring," a term used by the Tiptree Award website.

We briefly discussed the 1968 movie, Barbarella. On the show, I assured the host we didn't have to take Barbarella seriously, and we talked about comedy treatments such this movie showing how far we've come. However, later I thought how the free sexual expression in the movie reflects early feminist thought extending back to Aphra Behn. Taking sexuality beyond traditional social mores was also a feminist theme, perhaps downplayed in order for the feminist movement to be taken more seriously, and pursue material gains such as voting rights and equal pay (the latter of which many are still trying to achieve).

What of women writers of science fiction now? Discussion ranged from how Ursula LeGuin faced the death of a main character and finished the novel without him to the three-dimensional Honor Harrington, who shows a broader range of emotion than her male counterparts in the military SF genre. Timmi DuChamp, who called in to the show, described how gender norms across cultures vary so differently, the Indian author Vandana Singh's novella, Of Love and Other Monsters, features a male character considered by some American men to be implausible, even feminized, because of his fluid nature.

What does all this say about feminist science fiction and gender roles today? Says Duchamp, "We see a wide range of takes on what gender is.... Now we're in an expansive state. There are stories that haven't been told before about women, or aren't told often.... That's a hard thing to do for a writer, to break away from the molds and models that we've grown up with."

That statement rings true to me. Yet it also brings to mind that women like Aphra Behn and Mary Shelley broke molds of their own long ago. And that in turn has helped encourage modern women to do so as well, because, like some occupations still behind in equal pay, there are molds yet to be broken.