The Portland Alliance, July 2002
In the spirit of the yearly tradition known as "light summer
reading," I decided I would put down my usual political nonfiction and
read same fiction. Sometimes it's good to pull away from the
blood-boiling polemics of my progressive peers for the sake of my
sanity, but I enjoy pondering issues of social importance so brainless
pulp novels were out of the question. Fortunately, there's a little
known category of genre fiction which invites readers to critique
pressing political questions while offering a radical break from the
world we know - speculative fiction.
Living in the shadowy place between science fiction and
literature, warring literati factions endlessly debate the value of
speculative fiction when determining why Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is shelved with science fiction but Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale goes in fiction.
To see what speculative fiction can provoke culturally and
intellectually, look no further than the uncountable references to
George Orwell's 1984 in recent years. As a literature of
possible alternative societies based on extrapolated modern ideas,
speculative fictions have been particularly effective at questioning
the interworkings of class, race and gender. Most speculative fiction
by men has paid little attention to the role gender plays in society,
focusing instead on making their male anti-heroes the archetypal
Everyman exploring some exaggerated aspect of the human condition. But
the human condition is also women's condition, and fiction
fantastically illustrating questions of sexual politics has produced
classics of modern literature like the Le Guin and Atwood works
mentioned above. For help with the reading list I consulted the website
of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual prize for science fiction
that explores gender, and discovered some forgotten feminist fictions
from the 70s. When the Tiptrees were created in1991, Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World (1974) and its sequel Motherlines
(1978) were honored with retrospective awards. These installments of
the Holdfast Chronicles take place in an indeterminately distant future
after the world's ecosystem has been destroyed by the pursuit of wealth
and war. In Walk To the End of the World, the all-white
residents of Holdfast are descendants of the few who emerged after the
ecological disaster of "the Wasting" to found a new society, and the
same toxic philosophies of the men whose errors killed the world's
animals and minorities construct this future as the ultimate expression
of masculinity. Violence, rivalry between older and younger men and the
utter hatred or women are the most salient features of Holdfast, where
there are no families and "fems" are considered subhuman beasts or
burden.
Charnas presents a dystopian world where traditionally
male characteristics of violence, hierarchy and aggression form the
central basis of society and women are valued only as workers,
breeders, and objects that either add to a man's display of power or
serve as easy targets. The strength of Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale is
how easily readers can see the current philosophies about women's roles
taken to their logical nightmarish conclusion, and Charnas's Holdfast
is remarkable in this same regard as the slave fem Alldera reveals what
life is like for women under this ideology that is too similar to
modern reality for comfort.
Having given us her opinion on what a world run even more on male
principles than our current one might look like, Charnas wrote a sequel
detailing what she thinks a world based primarily on women's ideals
would look like. The result is Motherlines.
Alldera meets the Riding-Women, a female-only grassland society
modeled on tribal plains Indians. Descendants of an experiment in
parthenogenesis, these women are able to conceive cloned daughters
using horse semen to trigger the process (a population of horses was
preserved for the experiment). Riding Women are brave
and skilled horsewomen living in harmony with nature and have no
hierarchical leaders or classist divisions of labor.
Some
anthropologists have pointed to the division of labor as a main cause
of sexism, where public activities are seen to belong to men while
private, domestic duties are women’s and inequality is based less on
biology than on the irrational devaluation of women's work. Many
feminist utopias posit that if child rearing, education and cooperation
were raised to the highest place in the social order, women's status
would rise with it. The lack of men in Motherlines is not a
call for radical separatism but for a society where traditionally
feminine qualities are valued more than traditionally masculine ones
insofar as they are positive goals for all humans; removing men is the
literary method to demonstrate a culture where masculine values are
sublimated to feminine ones.
Marge Piercy's 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time
follows a similar gender philosophy but Piercy's future includes men
who have learned to change their destructive ways. The story follows
Connie Camacho Ramos, a 37-year-old Chicana from Manhattan whose
reality is one of constant pain at the hands of the male-dominated,
Anglo world. After being raped, beaten and given an unnecessary
hysterectomy, Connie gets unfairly committed to a psychiatric
institution when she attacks her niece's pimp. While there she is
visited telepathically from the future by Luciente, a time traveler
excited about visiting "The Age of Greed and Waste."
When
Connie is brought to the future it starkly juxtapose the sexist and
racist culture of Connie's Manhattan with the idyllic culture of
Mattapoisett, a self-sustaining community in Massachusetts, year 2137.
In Mattapoisett, ecological soundness and equality are the
prevailing societal values. Traditional categories of gender,
sexuality, race and class have been eradicated but Piercy maintains diversity while avoiding hierarchical arrangements.
As we saw in Motherlines,
there is no division between the public sphere of remorseless commerce
and the private sphere of nurturing homestead because there are no labor specializations. Childbirth is equalized in this future where
each baby is incubated in a bottle for ten months until emerging to be
loved, educated and even breast fed by the three male and female
"mothers" each child gets assigned. As a warning that we must make our
future more equal or else, Piercy included a short but jolting passage
where an alternate future has taken a Holdfastish turn and women are purely sexual commodity slaves. The hope of Women On the Edge of Time
is that humans will someday arrive at something resembling the peaceful
future of Mattapoisett and never know what a sort of world
hypermasculine values out of control may produce in the future.
That's not to say hyperfeminized values automatically produce
utopian societies, for that would be putting women on a pedestal of
moral perfection no human being can claim. The Riding Women and
Mattapoisett still have conflicts, jealousies and violence to contend
with, but their methods of dealing with these problems rely more on
instructive punishment with redemption and less on humiliating
vengeance. Once again the values associated with domestic life are
applied to public life and the result is something akin to relatives
settling a dispute within the family.
Such conceptualizations
of a public life
modeled on the home is something feminist writers needed to address
because the more famous male speculative writers of the past ignored
questions central to women's daily lives. For example, Orwell's Oceania
has women working the same menial jobs they have always worked in
industrialized societies in addition to doing all the child-rearing and
household tasks. In relaying his fear of socialism eliminating privacy,
Orwell presumes that socialist totalitarianism or not, women will be
expected to hold jobs outside the home in addition to providing all
domestic duties. An alluring aspect of socialism for women is the communalization of homemaking drudgery that would essentially
make men do an equal share of meal preparation, laundry, bathroom
cleaning, daycare, and other chores that have fallen disproportionately
on women's shoulders.
I can understand why Orwell might find the idea
of doing some share of women's work unnatural and repugnant (I
understand why modern men feel the same way), but Orwell never bothers
to raise the question of how the publicization of private tasks unduly
foisted on women could potentially benefit humanity by promoting positive values of
cooperation and gender equity. Male speculists like Orwell have
presented male characters whose individualism is considered the
pinnacle of humanity, and feminist speculists continue to question if
that particular value is truly higher on women's charts than achieving
a less violent, more harmonious society.
1984 is not a feminist novel, but seeing Winston Smith
yearn for a world where mother's love and traditional domesticity
provide blissful comfort is proof that when men envision a utopia it's
often built on values currently considered, and hence currently
denigrated, as feminine. Feminist speculative writers have taken this
unspoken longing for wider acceptance of traditional female values and
asked why they can't be applied more often in public affairs to the
greater benefit of all. In a world where more money is spent on prisons
and weapons than on schools and healthcare, it is unfortunate that
Charnas and Piercy's holistic societies remain further from reality
than the dangerously close dystopian society of Orwell.
S.M. Berg is an activist with the Pacific Green Party and The Portland Alliance.
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