FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION:

IMAGES OF FUTURE WOMEN

Rajaram s. Zirange=
The present paper attempts to explore the concept of
Science Fiction especially the Feminist Science
Fiction and how Feminist Science Fiction challenges
the existing cultural values of the patriarchal society.
Further, it attempts to differentiate between Female
and Feminist Science Fiction. The attempt is also
made to discuss the typical characteristics of the
Feminist Science Fiction and the use of Novum in the
Feminist Science Fiction and its purpose.

F eminist Science Fiction is a development after the 1960s. In The

History of Science Fiction, Adam Roberts has noted that up to
the end of the 1950s, the female readership of Science Fiction was
negligible. Women felt that Science Fiction with big gleaming
machines, physical prowess, inter-planetary wars and adventures was
meant for the male audience. But there was a change in this situation.
Between 1960s and 1970s women writers of Science Fiction such as
Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton and Ursula Le Guin
successfully popularised the new mode of Science Fiction written by
them. They won large part of female audience. In the fiction of these
women writers emphasis changed from masculine aspect of
technology to the affective, personal aspects of life. This was another
important reason to invite the female readership. The Star Trek series
shown on TV also attracted considerable female audience to Science
Fiction. The Star Trek series became popular with women on account
of their emphasis on characters and situations conceived in human
and social interaction rather than the use of novel machines and

* Dr. Rajaram S. Zirange is the Head, P. G. Dept. of English, Bharati Vidyapeeth

University, Yashwantrao Mohite College, Pune
10 ASIAN QUARTERLY: An International Journal of Contemporary Issues I February 20/0

gadgets. The Star Trek stories mainly dealt with the encounter with
the aliens on the other planets. The 'difference' or the 'otherness' of
the aliens subconsciously appealed to the female audience because in
the patriarchal world of the male society they themselves had
experienced the 'otherness'.

Sarah Lefanu, Women's Press Editor, has explained the connection

between feminism and Science Fiction in the following words:

'Science Fiction is feminism-friendly. With its

metaphors of space and time travel, of parallel
universe, of contradictions co-existing, of black holes
and event horizons, Science Fiction is ideally placed
for interrogative functions. The unities of 'self',
whether in terms of bourgeois individualism or
biological reductionism, can be subverted.' (Lefanu
1988: 95).

The key expression here is 'the subversion on unities'. Feminism is

primarily interested in challenging the existing cultural values of the
patriarchal society. And speculative fiction, in its space and time
travel stories, in discovering parallel societies and lands, dismantles
the so-called 'real universe' and its unities of time and space.
Subversion of these unities and its character is at the heart of feminist
fiction. Feminism wishes to challenge the male superiority, which is
taken as natural in the patriarchal society. Science Fiction is the best
possible mode for the women writers to subvert and question of the
'reality' in the mainstream literature.

Female and Feminist Fiction

The historians of Science Fiction appear to club the female and
feminist fiction together. However, it is necessary to make a
distinction between the two. We can say that the precursor of female
writing in Science Fiction was Mary Shelley. Then during 1960s and
1970s a number of women writers were writing Science Fiction.
These women writers represent a body of Female Science Fiction.
The most prominent of them, as already mentioned above, are Marion
Feminist Science Fiction: Images of Future Women 11

Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norten and Ursula Le Guin. Their fiction

should be characterised as Female Fiction because they were writing
in the male tradition of Science Fiction. For example, Bradley's
earliest books in Darkover series have boys as heroes. Darkover
society is dominated by the male values of physical prowess and
manly virtues. The writers do not bother to challenge themasculinist
ideas in the novel. There are no notable female characters in the novel.
One woman in her novel, Stormqueen, who is going to marry a
nobleman just for protection, confesses to her son that 'life is not easy
for a woman unprotected' (Bradley 1978: 6), though this novel is
supposed to be more woman-oriented. Later, of course, Bradley
became more conscious of women's rights. All these, women writers
started writing Science Fiction making use of conventions of the
technological Science Fiction.

During 1960s and70s, the critics (the male ones, of course) were
rather hostile and uncharitable to the female Science Fiction writers.
Lucie Amritt, in her introduction to Where No Man Has Gone Before'
relates this to the defensive and conservative attitude of the male-
oriented Science Fiction of the Golden Age. They hated any
progressive writing challenging the old order of the Science Fiction.
And the women writers of Science Fiction, who began to write about
this time, had come to realize the possibility of using Science Fiction
for socio-political criticism. In the history of literature, women writers
were supposed to be restricted to the lowbrow forms of literature such
as ghost stories, detective novels and romances. When they began to
write Science Fiction, the critics and writers like Suvin, Kingsley
Amis and Robert Conquest referred to them slantly. Suvin, for
example, comments on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as 'revealing
flawed hybrid of horror tale and philosophical Science Fiction' (Suvin
1979: 127). They resented incursion of philosophy, Feminist theory
and Satire on patriarchal attitudes in the Female Science Fiction. The
writers like Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin showed in their fiction
social and political consciousness, the role of women in the society
and tried to employ Science Fiction to express their concern about it.
 12 ASIAN QUARTERLY: All lnternational Journal of Contemporary lssues I February 2010

The Star Trek series on TV made women writers and readers aware of
their identification with 'alien' and the element of 'difference'. The
female Science Fiction after 1970s reflected this awareness. The
feminist angle became prominent in the female fiction in the works of
new wave of radical female Science Fiction writers.

Feminist Science Fiction

The feminist agenda in Science Fiction is stated in very clear terms in
a small note as a preface to each book published by the Women's
Press, whose editor was Sarah Lefanu:

'Our aim is to publish Science Fiction by women and

about women; to present exciting and provocative
feminist images of the future that will offer an
alternative vision of science and technology, and
challenge male domination of the Science Fiction
tradition itself.' (Webb 1992: 185).

The phrases 'provocative feminist images of the future' and

'challenge to male domination of the Science Fiction' are important
here, because the male-dominated publishing houses rejected feminist
fictions of this kind. Women's Press was, therefore, established to
challenge this male domination. It was the avowed aim of the feminist
Science Fiction to present alternative realities, question existing
cultural and social values, give women the role of a perceiver than
perceived, make them active agents of change, and question the
negative myths established by the patriarchal society to subjugate
women.

Utopian Feminist 'Fiction

The most prominent women writers in the 1970s were Joanna Russ,
Merge Piergy and Octavia Butler. Russ, as a committed feminist
writer, creates a utopian world while away in her novel The Female
Man (1975), in which there is population of women only. Russ
contrasts the free and self-dependent women of this ideal world with
the exploited and oppressed womanhood of this world. This novel is

-
Feminist Science Fiction: Images of Future Women 13

mainly a satire on patriarchy. Another utopian possibility is to present

the world where diversity or 'difference' is welcomed, which we find
in Butler's fiction. Octavia Butler is female as well as black writer.
Since the exploration of 'alienness' is the most important aspect of
feminist Science Fiction, her Xenogenesis series is a significant
expression of it. Xenogenesis is a triology, which uses 'genetic
engineering' as a 'novum'. The female protagonist in her fiction is
abducted by aliens, the Oankali, who have saved human beings from
nuclear holocaust. They are interested in borrowing human genes for
their own bodies. They like diversity, the 'difference', while human
beings fear 'difference'. Lilith, the protagonist, says in the novel
Adulthood Rites:

Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give
themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect
it. They need to keep themselves from stagnation and
overspecialisation (Butler 1997: 80).

Like Russ, Butler has also created a utopia alien society, which
believes that diversity is good.

Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is considered as

one of the classics of the mainstream Science Fiction. It has won two
prestigious awards, Hugo and Nebula, for this novel. Le Guin presents
a hypothetical world of Karhide, where there is no 'difference' in
gender. No one is male or female. Everyone has a monthly cycle
called 'kemmer' and every adult is capable of giving birth to a child.
In a way, this is a utopian world where man-woman distinction is
taken away, opposing it to the real world where women are exploited
as 'different' in the patriarchal society.

James Tiptree Jr., (actually a woman called Alice Sheldon) in her story
The Women Don't See (1973) presents women as 'other' . The men
and women in the story encounter space aliens in a jungle. The men
are terrified and fire the guns at them. But women's response is
different. They are prepared to go with the aliens. Ruth, the
14 ASIAN QUARTERLY: An International Journal of Contemporary Issues I February 2010

protagonist, explains that the aliens are just as men are on the earth.
She is not horrified by the aliens because she herself is an alien in the
patriarchal male society.

Merge Piergy's Women on the Edge of Time (1976) is another utopian

Science Fiction in which she presents a world without gender
distinction.

Female Revenge Fantasy in Science Fiction

Science Fiction is preoccupied with male dominance, and as a
reaction to it, Feminist Science Fiction employs Science Fiction mode
to gratify the feeling of revenge. Joanna Russ's The Female Man
(1975) shows Janet, law-enforcement officer from an all-female
planet who throws a male-antagonist making advances to her and
breaks his arm in the fight. In another situation, Jael, an emissary from
a woman-land kills the Boss-man from the man-land using her teeth
and claws. This use of female violence against man, as a revenge
motif, is seen in the story Boobs (1990) by Suzy McKee Charans. In
this story, the protagonist Kelsey is teased by the aggressive
schoolboy, Billy. Kelsey, at a full moon, exchanges her form for a
werewolf and rips the throat of Billy and devours his body.

The stories of Tanith Lee in the collection Women as Demons (1989)

presents adolescent girls and women transforming themselves into a
dangerous animal to punish the oppressive male, a brutal husband or
a rapist. In An Alien Light by Nancy Kress, the patriarchal society is
inverted. The women adopt the male-code of dominant, oppressive
behaviour, treating males as slaves, with contempt and great violence.

Aliens in the Feminist Fiction

Feminist writers have been attracted to the element of aliens in the
Science Fiction, because the concept of alien enables them to
understand and analyse their own situation in the male-dominated
patriarchal society of this world. Aliens can be used as an effective
means to express women's experience in this world. Besides, thte
mainstream Science Fiction has already popularised the concept of
Feminist Science Fiction: Images of Future Women 15

the alien from outer space. The aliens presented by Wells and others
in their fiction are the tentacled monsters, which are destructive,
without any compassion or sensibility. They are opposed to human
beings in every way. And in the mainstream Science Fiction to be
human is understood to be male. Therefore, the male response to the
aliens is to fight and kill.

In the Feminist Fiction, however, the element of 'alien' has a different

function. In her book A New Species (1993) Robin Roberts explains
how this element has been used in the women's writing to encode
female experience. The feminist response to the alien is quite opposed
to the one we find in the fiction by the male Science Fiction writers
like Robert Heinlein. In Heinlein's Science Fiction Starship Troopers
(1959) the aliens are giant insects, repulsive and wicked, without
culture, compassion, intelligence and spirituality. But the alien
'novum' introduced by feminist Science Fiction is altogether
different. In the male Science Fiction, the alien amounted to a
metaphor for communists in 1950s and 1960s. The feminist writers of
Science Fiction, on the other hand, suspected that the mainstream
Science Fiction included woman and the race (black) among aliens.
The invisibility that the black experienced in the white population is
powerfully expressed by the writers like Richard Wright.

Mary Shelley onwards women writers of Science Fiction have tried to

represent 'alien' as the 'other' -different from humanity, but akin to the
feminine. Judy Scott, in her novel, Passing for Human (1986) has
created an alien, Benaroya, who is a young anthropologist from the
aquatic planet Pysemns. Benaroya cannot come to the earth in her
body. She therefore, takes an 'earth body' of a model. She causes an
accident and comes across a lawyer, who helps her to weep and
blubber and apologise, but she does not behave like an ordinary earth-
woman. Benaroya is surprised learning the human condition and
prejudices. We .can see how the alien is used here to contrast the
'otherness' of women in the male-dominated patriarchal society. Judy
Scott makes this alien protagonist go through a variety of sex
 16 ASIAN QUARTERLY: An International Journal of Contemporary Issues I February 2010

experiences, lesbian affair as well, to contrast the notion of sexuality

in the world. J

The alien community presented in the Feminist Science Fiction is

either sexless, or women-only or android. Since the primary function
of the Science Fiction is to challenge the existing notions of reality,
the Feminist Science Fiction reverts the role of male-female
relationship, or creates society where there is no difference between
the sexes, and therefore no domination. For example, in The Female
Man of Joanna Russ, the population is neither male nor female.
Another way is to present female as strong, violent and active rather
than submissive, weak and passive as in the real world. The female in
such Feminist Science Fiction is identified with the monster. Creating
a kind of hybrid, neither man nor woman, is one of the devices of
presenting alterity in the Feminist Science Fiction. In Sheri Tepper's
novel Grass, a planet where the human beings hunt 'foxen' are the
alien monsters. The horses used by men for hunting are also aliens.
They are called Hippae. The protagonist, Marjorie, rebels and runs
away with one of the 'foxen', the beast. It is his very bestiality, the
'otherness' that attracts her. She finds that the men on the planet hunt
the foxen to prove their manhood.) She perceives the likeness between
herself and the foxen in being persecuted by the male of the human
society.

The Use of Novum in the Feminist Science Fiction

Outer Space
There is a variety of 'nova' used by the Feminist writers of Science
Fiction to illustrate their themes and present the aspect of alterity or
otherness. One such novum is the parallel society in the outer space.
In Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) is located on the planet
Whileaway where there are only women.

Cyborg
Cyborg is partly human and partly machine. Donna Han-away in her
. essay 'A Cyborg Manifesto, Science, Technology, and Social-
feminism in the Late 20th Century' (Harraway 1991) quotes a number

, =
Feminist Science Fiction: Images of Future Women 17

of examples of the use of Cyborg as a feminist icon in the Science

Fiction. She argues that we are already Cyborg, because we rely on
machinery so much in our life that the boundary between Science
Fiction and reality is blurred.

Transmogrification
In many Feminist Science Fiction the notion of a young girl' changing
into a dangerous and a powerful creature, has been used as a Novum.
In Tanith Lee's Wolfland, a persecuted woman becomes a werewolf.
In Jody Scott's fiction a girl turns into a vampire. In the story 'Boobs'
(1990) bySuzy McKee Charanas, the girl Kelsey changes herself into
a werewolf.

Psycho-Social Device of Change

In Josephire Saxton's Science Fiction, The Travails of Jane Saint and
Other Stories (1986), the protagonist, Jane, wishes to change social
values, and undertake psychic journey into the collective unconscious
to find and subvert the feminine archetype that makes women believe
in male-domination and repression. She installs a capsule in the
Universal Thought Library to act upon not only the future but also
even the past. So that the capsule of the archetype installed by her will
make men respect women.

A number of such 'novas' used in the Feminist Science Fiction point

to the aim of the feminist writers to interrogate reality, subvert the
patriarchal society and' present the image of future women.

REFERENCES
Lefanu, Sarah. 1988. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism
and Science Fiction. London: Women's press.

Bradley, Marian Zimmer. 1978. Stormqueen. Bristol: Severn House.

Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: on the

Poetics and History of a Literary Genre.' New Heaven: Yale
University Press.
18 ASIAN QUARTERLY: An Internntional Journal of Contemporary Issues I February 20/0

Webb, Janeen. 1992. 'Feminism and Science Fiction'. Meanjin, Vol.

51/1, Autumn. Butler, Octavia. Adulthood Rites. New York:
Warner Books.
Harraway, Donna. 1991. 'A Cyborg Manifesto, Science, Technology,
and Social-feminism in the Late 20th Century', in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free
Association Books.