From Herland to Outland: changing anatomies of gender dystopia.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Baum, Rob
• Date: 22 September 2005

I do not know where to begin. The birth of each page suggests its end, an anatomy of discovery and desire. To begin is to think already of an ending, the knell of silence, to presage the kind of closure found in written stories, at least the place where the writing stops, the pen withdraws and the skin of the book heals over. As if this were also the time the thinking stops, an anatomy of the future. Where I stop.

Fredric Jameson poses the quandary thus:

In order for narrative to project some sense of a totality of experience in space and time, it must surely know some closure (a narrative must have an ending, even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of endings as such). At the same time, however, closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. (1) I begin anyway:

The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning. (2) In his landmark discussion, Jameson couples the genres of science fiction and utopian novels, describing their joint historical emergence in the 19th century. It is true that conventional science fiction narratives, like conventional utopian narratives, feature nations of men, politically and psychologically in charge of nonexistent realms. The difference between the genres is that in utopias the men of the future tend to look philosophically at the stars, whereas in science fiction men raid them for consumer capital. I recognize this as a simplistic interpretation, but feel it may resonate with feminist readers who experience wonder at the stories' imaginative plots and settings, but not at their politics. For in this regard science fiction novels do not depart from life on Earth, where male governance is taken for granted. In these fictions male control is presented as the desirable option given the alternative of extraterrestrial beings (male in construction if not countenance, and ever eager to take over the Western world) who must invariably be subjugated, like their earthly counterparts, women included.

Our most eminent utopianist is not especially interested in the feminist utopian genre, or what I call gynaetopia. Prodded about the absence of feminist concerns in his writings, Jameson is candid that gender has not been a primary focus. (3) In contrast to masculine sagas, the framing of feminist utopias seems to be wholly distinct from science fiction, and even science fantasy, in form, function and flavour. Gynaetopias do not creatively imagine the future as an extension of the present, but rather as an extension of a dimly remembered past, the age of the matriarchy perhaps, or of matrilineal society. One might think of the difference between these male and female futuristic fictions as that between Reinventing the Future (male prerogative) and Preventing the Future (feminist recourse).

Not far into the a-chronistic narrative of Les Guerilleres, Monique Wittig offers an example of female capability in a society of women that has superseded the need even for an Ur-myth of origins:

The women say that references to Amaterasu or Cihuacoatl are no longer in order. They say they have no need of myth or symbols. They say that the time when they started from zero is in process of being erased from their memories. They say they can barely relate to it. When they repeat, This order must be destroyed, they say they do not know what order is meant. (4) This might be another good place to start.

As Aristophanes hypothesized in Lysistrata, female governance suggests a world without war, torture or terror, a land of cooperation, collectivism and confidence. The desire for a world at peace has often led to the image of a world without men, and feminist utopias offer a variety of such worlds, often with a complete absence of males--even for the procreation of the species. For writers who do not simultaneously re-imagine the physicality and reproductive capabilities of women, these populations die out. Alternatively, men must be inserted into other kingdoms or tribes from the other side of a generally impassable mountain (symbolizing the gender divide) in order to be poached for stud. This is how the Amazons dealt with the issue, until the issue dealt with them: the warrior queen purportedly fell in love with a man, an act that led to her downfall.

Novelist Rochelle Singer avoids such military intercourse in The Demeter Flower (1982), through female ingestion of the eponymous herb to generate pregnancy. Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1975) offers an obvious solution, mixing the binary of gender in a single body. Given the period of their writing, it is unsurprising that women's reproductive technologies and their ownership remains at the heart of these feminist tracts; as Eve Sedgwick opines, 'a primary (or the primary) issue in gender differentiation and gender struggle is the question of who is to have control of women's (biologically) distinctive reproductive capabilities'. (5)

While unconcerned with offspring, the future of another species is at issue in Katherine Forrest's short story 'O Captain, My Captain': one of two protagonists, both female astronauts, the captain of the spaceship turns out to be both a lesbian and a vampire (which are not the same thing, despite the copious literature equating them). (6) The Captain has had the somatic intelligence, however, to evolve her womanly body from gothic blood-sucker into modern mother-fucker, making her a very attentive stone butch. Past voyagers (the Captain avoids typical lesbian entanglements by making one...