Jeanne Cortiel - Demand My Writing - Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies) (1999)

Demand My Writing
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
General Editor DAVID SEED

Series Advisers
I. F. CLARKE, EDWARD JAMES, PATRICK PARRINDER
AND BRIAN STABLEFORD
1. ROBERT CROSSLEY, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, ISBN

0–85323–388–8 (hardback)
2. DAVID SEED (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and
its Precursors, ISBN 0–85323–348–9 (hardback), ISBN
0–85323–418–3 (paperback)
3. JANE L. DONAWERTH AND CAROL A. KOLMERTEN (ed.),
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, ISBN
0–85323–269–5 (hardback), ISBN 0–85323–279–2 (paperback)
4. BRIAN W. ALDISS, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy,
ISBN 0–85323–289–X (hardback), ISBN 0–85323–299–7 (paper-
back)
5. CAROL FARLEY KESSLER, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress
Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings, ISBN 0–85323–489–2 (hard-
back), ISBN 0–85323–499–X (paperback)
6. PATRICK PARRINDER, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science
Fiction and Prophecy, ISBN 0–85323–439–6 (hardback), ISBN
0–85323–449–3 (paperback)
7. I. F. CLARKE (ed.), The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914:
Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come, ISBN
8. QINGYUN WU, Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias,
ISBN 0–85323–570–8 (hardback), ISBN 0–85323–580–5 (paper-
back)
9. JOHN CLUTE, Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews, ISBN
10. ROGER LUCKHURST, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction
of J. G. Ballard, ISBN 0–85323–821–9 (hardback), ISBN 0–85323–
831–6 (paperback)
11. JEANNE CORTIEL, Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/
Science Fiction, ISBN 0–85323–614–3 (hardback), ISBN 0–85323–
624–0 (paperback)
Demand My Writing
Joanna Russ/Feminism/
Science Fiction
JEANNE CORTIEL
Department of English and American Studies,
Universität Dortmund
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1999 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool L69 3BX
Copyright © 1999 Jeanne Cortiel
The right of Jeanne Cortiel to be identified

as the author of this Work has been asserted by her
in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise
without the prior written permission of the
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A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0–85323–614–3 cased
ISBN 0–85323–624–0 paperback
Typeset in Meridien by
Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd., Bolton
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Redwood Books, Trowbridge, UK
CHAPTER ONE
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Part One: Agency

Introduction to Part One 15
Chapter One: The Act of Telling: Who is the Subject of Narrative
Action? 17
Chapter Two: Acts of Violence: Representations of Androcide 46
Chapter Three: The Revolutionary Act: A Dialectic of Sex/Gender
in The Female Man 76
Part Two: Sexuality

Introduction to Part Two 95
Chapter Four: Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women
Loving Women 99
Chapter Five: Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female
Child 130
Chapter Six: Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority 155
Part Three: Indeterminacy

Introduction to Part Three 169
Chapter Seven: Patterns of Experience: Sappho and the Erotics of
the Generation Gap 174
Chapter Eight: The Great, Grand Palimpsest of Me: Fragmented
Locations and Identities 197
Chapter Nine: Vampires, Cyborgs and Disguises: Politics of the
Theatrical 210
Notes 230
Primary Bibliography 235
Secondary Bibliography 245
Index of Names 251
Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ 253

CHAPTER ONE
Acknowledgements
How many more than two are there. If they heard it at once and
at once was as afterward whom would they have to mention.
And leaves. This makes them wish—Gertrude Stein, A Novel of
Thank You
As customary and appropriate for a project of this size, which is nec-
essarily indebted to the minds of many people, I will make an attempt
to express my gratitude for the help and support I have received dur-
ing the long process of writing this book. I participate gladly in this
ritual because it positions me in a relation of thankfulness to a num-
ber of people who have been important in different ways during the
past five years of my life.
Helga Kellner’s enthusiasm for the embryo version of the book
helped me believe in its merit. I am thankful for the comments of Julie
Linden, Kerstin Holzgräbe, Jackie Vogel and Christine Gerhardt on
individual chapters and the project as a whole. Jackie’s dog Clyde
with his uninhibited zest for life cheered me up during a time when I
thought the book would never materialize. Lawrence Kane and ricki
wegner patiently read an early version of the manuscript and gave me
invaluable suggestions for revision. Judith Marco and Peter Cortiel
helped me with numerous details regarding my research, including
tracking down difficult-to-find texts by Joanna Russ. The critical sug-
gestions of the reader at Liverpool University Press helped me recon-
ceptualize the project in significant ways. Finally, Christine Gerhardt
and Stephen Watt meticulously proofread the last version of the
manuscript and forced me to clarify passages that my chaotic mind
had left obscure to any reader other than myself. Special thanks go to
Elisabeth Kraus, my first teacher of science fiction, and Walter
Grünzweig, who has taught and supported me far beyond the scope
of this project.
The list continues and this public statement of gratitude as any
other must remain incomplete in more than one way.
For Christine
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
One moves incurably into the future but there is no future; it

has to be created—Russ, On Strike Against God (85)
The struggle on the page is not decorative—DuPlessis, ‘The
Pink Guitar’ (173)
Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story ‘Nor Custom
Stale’ in the popular Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959,
when she was 22 and in her second year at the Yale School of Drama.
‘It is Miss Russ’s first story—’ wrote the editors in their introductory
note to this text, ‘first, we are confident, of many’ (75). Joanna Russ
has since not only written many stories, she has also accomplished a
few things that the editors might not have expected from this young
woman. Together with writers such as the French author Monique
Wittig, James Tiptree, Jr., Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin and others,
this promising young ‘Miss’ Russ would become one of the forces
which revolutionized the genre in the 1960s and ’70s. This revolu-
tion transformed science fiction from a bastion of masculinism to
one of the richest spaces for feminist utopian thinking and cultural
criticism.
Although Russ published two poems when she was 15 and went on
to study play writing, she chose narrative rather than poetry or drama
for most of her work. In an interview which Donna Perry conducted
with her in the early 1990s, Russ said that she had abandoned the
‘bare art’ of drama for narrative because ‘Too much of what I write is
internal’ (293). However, most of what Russ writes also reverberates
with a consistently radical political voice and is as much concerned
with its external effects as it is with exploring ‘internal’ spaces. The
title of this book, Demand My Writing, echoes this political urgency of
Russ’s fiction. Her writing always intensely engages with its audience
and specifically with the individual reader. One could call this
approach didacticism, but I prefer to call it political responsibility.
Russ’s concern with the reader correlates with her interest in writing,
particularly women’s writing. I stole the phrase I use in my title from
2 DEMAND MY WRITING
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s essay ‘The Pink Guitar’, from which I once
heard her read at a lecture. However, I had misunderstood what DuP-
lessis had actually said and it is this misunderstanding which makes
the phrase so appealing as an emblem for my reading of Russ’s work.
The passage in DuPlessis’s essay reads as follows:
I am not a writer, as such. I am a marker, maybe that is a way
to say it. All the signs that emerge on the page (I put them
there, they came here through me) (some were already there,
in the weave of the paper, no tabula rasa)
demand my reading. The responsibility for making words is
the responsibility for reading. The practice of writing is already
a reading, of the writing already written, of the saturated page,
smitten with that already-written, in
language, anguage. I am some character in a little folk tale,
call me ‘a-reading-a-writing’. (173)
‘Demand my writing’, as I had heard it, addresses not the signs on the
page, but the imaginary readers who urge the production of these
signs. Thus, the interrelation between my misunderstanding and the
original text crystallizes the ways in which Russ’s work interweaves
the processes and political significance of reading and writing. Like
DuPlessis’s essay, Russ’s fiction expresses no anxieties over the influ-
ence of the author’s reading; indeed, this reading is not so much an
influence on, as it is a precondition for, writing. The following chap-
ters will identify and analyse some of the multiple intertextualities in
Russ’s work. As a reader and writer, Russ is also part of twentieth-
century feminism. This book provides a narrative of Russ’s develop-
ment as a writer and analyses the ways in which her work
reads/writes itself into the discourses of Western feminism. As a con-
sequence, my interpretations rely largely on comparison. The two
major points of intersection relevant for these interpretations are
speculative fiction and feminist theory. The remainder of this intro-
duction will outline how these points of intersection become produc-
tive in my reading of Russ’s fiction.
Intersection: Speculative Fiction
Few critics feel comfortable with clear-cut definitions of science fic-

tion. When called upon to define what is meant by the term, writers
tend to seek refuge in roundabout vagueness. Ursula Le Guin in her
INTRODUCTION 3
introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction addresses this issue,

asking: ‘Why are all the answers to that question either brisk evasions
or labored partialities?’ (20) Some critics have tried to get away with
flippant statements, such as the by now classic quip of Damon
Knight, which Ursula Le Guin also comes back to: ‘science fiction is
what [I’m] pointing at when [I] point at it’ (21). Probably more so
than any other genre, science fiction defies definitional closure, if only
because the transgression of genre boundaries is already part of its
unique tradition. Fantasy, romance and elements from other forms
such as utopian writing have always been used by science fiction
writers.
However, genre criticism has developed a terminology to deal with
these blurred distinctions. For the purpose of this study, four terms
seem to be particularly useful. I use the term ‘genre fiction’ whenever
I want to refer to popular forms such as science fiction, fantasy,
utopian fiction, detective fiction and romance, which have all been
appropriated by feminist discourse.1 Implied in this definition are the
characteristics which these forms all share: they are immensely pop-
ular and their readership is diverse, which makes them particularly
useful for ‘propagandistic’ purposes. Marleen Barr in her early work,
together with other scholars in the field, prefers the term ‘speculative
fiction’, which provides a more focused categorization and a slightly
different emphasis. In speculative fiction, according to Barr, political
appropriation of genre conventions is not only a potential, but a con-
scious practice, extrapolating as it does from a critical analysis of the
power relations in contemporary society (Alien to Femininity, xii). The
term as Barr defines it includes feminist utopias, science fiction, fan-
tasy and sword-and-sorcery.
Although Russ’s own speculative fiction does not always honour
the boundaries between ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’, she makes
clear distinctions in her critical work. Russ’s concise and accessible
provisional definition in ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’
(1971) will also serve as the basis for my discussion here:
Science Fiction is What If literature. All sorts of definitions have
been proposed by people in the field, but they all contain both
The What If and The Serious Explanation; that is, science fic-
tion shows things not as they characteristically or habitually
are but as they might be, and for this ‘might be’ the author
must offer a rational, serious, consistent explanation, one that
does not (in Samuel Delany’s phrase) offend against what is
4 DEMAND MY WRITING
known to be known. … If the author offers marvels and does

not explain them, or if he explains them playfully and not seri-
ously, or if the explanation offends against what the author
knows to be true, you are dealing with fantasy and not science
fiction. (79, italics in original)
Thus, although both genres use the speculative potential of the
human imagination, science fiction works within the constraints of
the scientific episteme. Traditionally, the plots of fantasy stories are
populated by creatures from pre-Enlightenment folk lore, such as
ghosts, vampires or dragons. Science fiction, on the other hand, gen-
erally positions its narrative worlds and protagonists in the future or
in outer space. Russ’s definition—like her fictional practice—allows
for broader conceptualizations of both genres. Since less empirically
rigid sciences, such as psychology or the social sciences, entered the
realm of popular knowledge, science fiction has opened its doors to
explorations of ‘inner spaces’ and social relations. Particularly femi-
nist criticism of science and society became part of ‘what is known to
be known’ in feminist science fiction.
Such definitional openness in science fiction criticism also rever-
berates through categorizations of Russ’s fictional writing. Science
fiction and genre scholarship has placed Russ’s work in a variety of
different, sometimes overlapping genre categories. The majority of
critical work focuses on Russ’s novels, most of which are primarily
science fictional. Such criticism consequently reads her predomi-
nantly as a science fiction author. More comprehensive appreciations
of her work, however, categorize it in broader terms as genre fiction or
speculative fiction, acknowledging her as a writer of fantasy—partic-
ularly in her short stories—as well as of science fiction (Delany 1976,
1985; Hacker 1977; Lefanu 1988). In placing particular emphasis on
Russ’s largely neglected short fiction, I will reassess these categoriza-
tions. Russ’s short stories span a rich variety of different sub-genres,
such as sword-and-sorcery, horror, ghost and vampire fiction, ele-
ments of which also become instrumental parts of her novels. These
distinctions therefore become important in my readings of Russ’s fic-
tion primarily to demonstrate the specific ways in which her work
transgresses genre boundaries.
Russ’s definition, which I quoted above, reveals a slightly higher
regard for science fiction than for fantasy which is particularly char-
acteristic of her earlier critical work. As Russ stresses in ‘The Wearing
Out of Genre Materials’ (1971), science fiction for her occupies a spe-
INTRODUCTION 5
cial place within genre fiction and may not even properly belong to
that category, since it has a potentially infinite supply of new conven-
tions from new scientific knowledge and is therefore less likely to
become fossilized in petrified narrative routines (53–54). However,
this assessment is convincingly contradicted by Anne Cranny-Fran-
cis’s study Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990).
Cranny-Francis suggests that feminist writers have successfully rev-
olutionized each of the popular genres. The detective novel, for exam-
ple, announced dead by Russ in ‘The Wearing Out of Genre Materials’
(53), has been remodelled and reactivated for feminist purposes.
Feminist genre fiction has found a supply of ‘new materials’ at least
as vast as that of science in its reinterpretations of women’s life sto-
ries, of culture, history and mythology. Russ’s own fictional work has
taken part in these reformulations and has created alternative images
of women that carry the imprint of women’s material existence
(Lefanu, 13–14). Science fiction has also changed drastically since
1971 when Russ critically surveyed the then largely male-dominated
field in her essay ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’. The essay
concludes: ‘There are plenty of images of women in science fiction.
There are hardly any women’ (91). However, feminist speculative
texts have generated more than just images of women that female
readers can recognize and identify with; they have resisted the repro-
duction of the stories patriarchal societies tell about women and
instead envision stories that thoroughly displace them.
I have so far used the term ‘feminism’ as if it were a homogenous
discursive ground. However, my readings of Russ rely on the many-
levelled contentions that exist among different feminist positions.
One such distinction separates feminist theoreticians, who devote
their energies to thinking about philosophical questions, from femi-
nist activists, who are primarily interested in changing the lives of
‘real’ women. This is also a question of access to privileged knowl-
edges. Recent feminist theory has been criticized for its inability to
address the needs of non-academics in a language accessible to peo-
ple who do not have a Ph.D. in philosophy. Feminist work influenced
by poststructuralism, especially, is largely incomprehensible to people
who are not at home with the rhetoric of Western philosophy.
Although this dichotomy between ‘theorists’ and ‘activists’, or ‘the-
ory’ and ‘politics’ simplifies the complexity of the issues, it does
delineate major lines of confrontation. Feminist writers have used
genre fiction to challenge these dichotomies as they have challenged
patriarchal constructions of reality. Their stories counteract sexist
6 DEMAND MY WRITING
manipulation in the areas where it is most effectively perpetuated:

popular culture and the media.
Speculative fiction, and specifically science fiction, thus has the
potential to break down distinctions between feminist theory, femi-
nist fiction and feminist practice, exploring as it does complex theo-
retical concepts in the terms of popular fiction. Feminist theory
becomes part of the ‘science’ in science fiction while feminist practice
motivates the text. In Alien to Femininity Marleen Barr uses the image
of two horses pulling together: ‘Feminist Theory and Speculative Fic-
tion appear in the critical arena pulling together as a team’ (xxi).
Barr’s objective is to form a link between feminist theory and specu-
lative fiction, so both can work together against the limiting and
restrictive social roles of women in patriarchal societies. Pointing out
that we live in an age in which primarily the mass-media reproduce
our realities and values, Barr also has a political message for literary
critics and educators: ‘We must give women critical tools to resist per-
vasive sexist media images’ (xx). At a historical moment in which
feminism is confronting the breakdown of the category ‘woman’
while none of the basic political objectives of feminist ‘identity poli-
tics’ have been sufficiently achieved, feminist speculative fiction may
offer discursive possibilities unavailable to other genres. For at its
best, speculative fiction can be a popular platform on which issues
related to such diverse fields as technology, science, social theory,
reproduction and ecology combine with feminist concerns to call into
question the social and ecological policies of (post-industrial) capi-
talist patriarchy.
Intersection: Feminist Theory
When there is a respectable, academically acceptable ‘femi-

nism’ that has split completely from what women’s studies
used to be—Florence Howe once called us the academic arm of
the women’s movement—we will all be the losers. Once a rad-
ical politics (or literary criticism) is limited and diluted to the
point where it can safely become part of the establishment, it
can also be dispensed with. (Russ, ‘On “The Yellow Wall-
Paper,”’ 166)
Another major cluster of contentions that engenders diversity in fem-
inism corresponds to the confrontation between younger feminists
INTRODUCTION 7
and their predecessors and teachers. Although there are many other
types of diversity in feminism, and Russ’s writing is not coextensive
with its feminist politics, the historical development of Western fem-
inism is crucially relevant for an appreciation of Russ’s fictional work.
The historiography of feminism generally identifies three ‘genera-
tions’ in twentieth-century feminism. Julia Kristeva in her influential
and much-cited essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) differentiates these
generations based on their respective concepts of time. The first of her
phases presumes a linear temporality as unquestioned given, while
the second rejects this notion of time as inherently patriarchal, super-
seding it with a circular temporality. The third phase, then, reveals
both concepts as discursively constructed and historically specific.
The phases of feminism in her categorization thus either embrace,
reject or deconstruct the idea of time as linear, teleological entity. In
this delineation of feminism, Kristeva uses both the language of his-
tory, that is linear temporality, and that of spatial relations to repre-
sent developments in feminism. This choice of metaphor is
particularly useful for an analysis of speculative fiction, since it dis-
rupts monolithic temporality without completely negating the func-
tionality of its logic.
Kristeva begins her survey of feminism, in which she focuses on the
radical exponents in each ‘generation’, with the early Western
women’s movement. These early feminists strove to gain access to
the process of history and focused on the political and social equality
of women. European and American suffragists in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries and—in a so-called ‘second wave’—exis-
tentialist or materialist feminists in the 1960s and ’70s put forward
specific, political demands directed towards achieving an equal sta-
tus for women in society. In so doing, they identified with the domi-
nant logic of their respective cultures, globalizing the problems of
women under the label ‘Universal Woman’ (Kristeva, 18–19). In other
words, women—as members of a trans-national and trans-cultural
sex-class—sought to become men’s equals within the social order
created by patriarchal culture and to be recognized as agents in the
historical process. This feminist moment has the strongest narrative
force in Russ’s early work, particularly in her short story sequence
around the character Alyx. Kristeva associates this moment with a
linear concept of time. This position establishes causal relationships
between historical events based on the notion that time has a certain
direction, a telos towards which history progresses. Linear temporal-
ity, therefore, informs the materialist project.
8 DEMAND MY WRITING
This linear concept of time, according to Kristeva, was rejected by

a second generation of feminists, who, as a consequence, distrusted
the political dimension and demanded recognition of an irreducible
female identity without equivalent in the ‘opposite’ sex (19). While
the first generation of feminists fought for economic, political and
professional equality, this second current in feminism focused on the
question of sexual equality, or rather difference (21). This position,
which assumes an immutable female essence, has also been called
‘cultural’ or ‘essentialist’ feminism. Although there is as much diver-
sity within this generation as in both of the others, these feminists
generally celebrate sexual difference in the search for the specificity of
the ‘Female’ and of each individual woman. Reclaiming women’s cul-
tural heritage as a distinct historical category, this strand of feminism
repudiates linear History and dis-covers Herstory identified with a
cyclical temporality. In the attempt to recover and reconstruct a sepa-
rate sphere for women and to found a distinct women’s counter-cul-
ture, these feminists rejected the patriarchal ‘symbolic order’ as
inherently oppressive (see also Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 12). The
central strategy for this feminist generation is forging political, emo-
tional, and erotic bonds among women. Without giving up her mate-
rialism, Russ’s work in the 1970s puts a new emphasis on this
‘essentialist’ position.
The third generation, then, locates the dichotomies man/woman
and feminine/masculine in the realm of the metaphysical (Kristeva,
33). This generation sees both the concept of gender and the concept
of time as historically and culturally specific constructs (today, one
might add biological sex as well). Particularly criticism from non-
white and/or non-middle class feminists has been instrumental in
identifying the interests of the dominant culture in the call for a uni-
versal, all-encompassing ‘sisterhood’. Challenging the notion of a sin-
gular social and sexual identity, which had been at the centre of both
previous moments, these feminists focus on the ‘multiplicity of every
person’s possible identifications … the relativity of his/her symbolic as
well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific
symbolic capacities’ (Kristeva, 35, italics in original). In the 1980s,
particularly in the short story collection/novel Extra(Ordinary) People
(1984), Russ’s emphasis shifts towards this deconstructive feminist
stance.
This brief survey indicates the ways in which Russ’s work has par-
ticipated in the major transformations in Western feminism. The
remaining chapters will substantiate this assertion. Although femi-
INTRODUCTION 9
nism is not the only concern in Russ’s writing, it does structure

Russ’s development as a writer. While Kristeva could not completely
foresee the feminist developments in the 1980s and ’90s, her basic
distinctions are still valid and will help me to identify major strands
and developments in Russ’s writing. It is important to note that Kris-
teva’s stages of development do not supersede each other in neat suc-
cession. Kristeva points out that her ‘usage of the word ‘generation’
implies less a chronology than a signifying space …’ and notes that this
definition ‘does not exclude—quite to the contrary—the parallel exis-
tence of all three in the same historical time, or even that they be
interwoven one with the other’ (33, italics in original). Since I put
more emphasis on the idea that these strands in feminism are inex-
tricably linked and depend on the interrelations with each other, I
prefer to use the term ‘moments’ rather than ‘stages’ or ‘generations’.
My reading of Russ’s work suggests that these moments may be
even more intimately interwoven than Kristeva’s categorization
admits. In Russ’s writing these three moments appear to be insepa-
rable, each deriving its specific force from the presence of the others.
These moments correspond to three major concerns which run
through and structure Russ’s fiction: (1) women’s agency, (2) female
sexuality, and (3) the indeterminacy of both of these categories. Even
though feminist theory seems unable to find common ground for
these concerns because of the perceived fundamental clash between
‘determinism’ or ‘essentialism’ and ‘deconstruction’, my interpreta-
tions of Russ’s fiction demonstrate that combining all three moments
is not only possible in, but an intrinsic part of most of her work. In
other words, although identifying and naming distinct moments in
the history of twentieth-century feminism suggests separation,
breakage and opposition, the fictional work of Russ as examined in
this study focuses on the continuities. Russ’s work links the radical
materialist ideas of the late 1960s and early ’70s with the separatism
of the late ’70s and early ’80s and also anticipates the poststruc-
turalisms of the late ’80s and ’90s.
I have organized my readings in this book around major thematic
clusters in Russ’s writing rather than in correspondence with the
chronology of her work. However, as I have said, Russ’s writing has
gone through major shifts in emphasis since the late 1950s when she
started to publish her fiction. Since these transformations are moti-
vated by the three major concerns which I identified above—agency,
sexuality and indeterminacy—the three parts of this book also
roughly correspond to three phases in her career as a writer.
10 DEMAND MY WRITING
Part One, ‘Agency’, focuses on the materialist aspect of Russ’s work

and underlines the way in which she creates images of women who
demand access to the symbolic order and to the process of history.
The chapters here read selected novels and short stories along with
Shulamith Firestone’s work, which analyses woman’s relation to
reproduction as constitutive of the gender dichotomy. Firestone
defines ‘woman’ not as a natural category, but as a sex-class. The sto-
ries of agency Russ tells are based on such materialist concepts and
operate within the logic of linear temporality.
Part Two, ‘Sexuality’, highlights the characters in Russ’s texts who
claim their sexuality and their body as their own and seek connec-
tions to other women in their lives and in history. Particularly lesbian
sexuality provides a space in which the woman’s body is freed from
male proprietorship and the debasing meaning attached to her by
patriarchal discourse. In associating with women in texts such as the
Bible or the Nibelungenlied, the stories about women examined in Part
Two implicitly reject the notion of linear temporality and replace it
with a cyclical notion of time. These chapters will explore the inter-
sections of Russ’s texts with radical separatist feminism and (femi-
nist) psychoanalysis.
Part Three, ‘Indeterminacy,’ analyses how Russ’s texts reformulate
the (post)modern crisis of the subject. Her writing always also sub-
verts the notion of a singular identity which is implicit in both mate-
rialism and separatist feminism, without however, nullifying these
positions. The fractured, multiple self in Russ does not negate the self
as member of a sex-class and the self reaching out to other women,
but supplements them. The new, fluid subjectivity created by the
simultaneous presence of a unified identity and its disintegration,
contains the (desire for a) utopian space beyond gender antagonisms.
Since these readings work with texts from diverse phases and polit-
ical affiliations and feminism is far from being a homogenous discur-
sive field, a number of preliminary terminological distinctions are
indispensable. I will, of necessity, use the simplifying term ‘oppres-
sion’, with which I refer to any position of disadvantage in a social
structure, not just overt suppression of human potential. Similarly, I
use the term ‘patriarchy’ to refer to a society in which women are
oppressed and subject to male domination. However, as I have indi-
cated, my readings of Russ’s fictional work will also require reference
to feminist concepts that reach beyond these clear-cut categories and
make the opposition between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ unstable.
More recent feminist work has examined the categories ‘woman’
INTRODUCTION 11
and ‘man’ and has extensively theorized the classic terminological

distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. At the same time, however,
there is also a great deal of vagueness and uncertainty about the out-
lines of and the distinctions between these two terms. Although all
signifiers are unfixed and shifting, words like ‘sex’ or ‘sexual’ are par-
ticularly slippery and shift over a variety of different signifieds, which
is why it is virtually impossible to pinpoint these terms even for the
moment of analysis. Since my focus is on textual analysis of fictional
writing, my definitions are based on how these two categories oper-
ate in written texts. ‘Sex’ in this study therefore refers to textual rep-
resentations of the male or female body, which I take to be historically
and culturally specific. This category is distinct from ‘gender’, which
signifies those aspects of the performance or role of a character which
belong to a set of characteristics that her/his culture (or fictional
world) identifies with masculinity or femininity. Although sex and
gender of a character are not entirely separable and both are produced
and reproduced in culture, a feminist reading of Russ’s work requires
clear terminological distinctions. Janet, for instance, a central charac-
ter in Russ’s novel The Female Man, has a female body but is—at least
partially—gendered masculine. Although the text implicitly refers to
her body as female, she is not a woman. Although her sexual relations
are exclusively with other female characters, one can argue that she is
not a lesbian either.
In order to locate Russ’s complex oeuvre in the discursive field of
feminism, Demand My Writing explores intersections between specific
representative texts in feminist theory and Russ’s fiction. It is not my
intention in this study to scrutinize how certain aspects of feminist
theory ‘resurface’ in Russ’s texts. Feminist writing in my reading is
not a matter of ‘reflecting’ or ‘illustrating’ political theory in fiction.
Feminist science fiction as a self-consciously political practice is part
of the feminist struggle, not its ‘reflection.’ I will re-examine radical
ideas of early ‘second-wave’ feminists such as those of Shulamith
Firestone as well as the work of ‘cultural feminists’ or ‘essentialists’
such as Mary Daly or Adrienne Rich. Examining the recent history of
feminist theory in relation to the developments in speculative fiction,
I will formulate connections, without, however, establishing exclu-
sive causal links between texts or events.
Joanna Russ was one of the first and one of the most radical writ-
ers in feminist speculative fiction. Her work demonstrates how femi-
nism can indeed become part of what the 1960s and ’70s called the
‘establishment’, without at the same time becoming apolitical and
therefore dispensable from a feminist activist point of view. Further-

more, her texts engage an analysis of the ways in which feminisms
are part of the dominant culture, and how feminists may make this
troublesome role politically useful. Experimenting with empowering
ways of transforming subjectivity, Russ’s fiction stands as a challenge
to feminist theory. The way in which she uses speculative fiction
lends itself to dislocating accepted ways of thinking, since it dis-
places the individual by having it venture into alien outer space and
explores the alienated inner space of the individual mind, defamiliar-
izing our most familiar categories. A careful reading of Russ’s texts
may reveal new strategies for radical feminist theory, which can pro-
pel it beyond the sex/gender antagonisms into a yet unthinkable new
utopian space.
Scholars don’t usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of
the library stacks.
But they should. They should. (Russ, On Strike Against God, 91)
PART ONE
Agency
THE WOMEN AFFIRM IN TRIUMPH THAT ALL ACTION IS OVERTHROW—

Monique Wittig, Les Guérilléres, 5)
Introduction to Part One
The story of feminism as told by Julia Kristeva in ‘Women’s Time’

begins with the utopian vision of ‘Woman’ as a self-knowing subject
who acts as an equal to all other individuals in the social system. This
is also the point where my exploration of Russ’s work will take off in
Part One, tracing the materialist feminist moment through her short
stories and novels. The main site of intersection between Russ’s fic-
tion and radical materialist feminism lies in both discourses’ desire
for women’s agency and knowledge of self. The epigraph for this
chapter from Monique Wittig crystallizes this impulse. However,
Russ—like Wittig—also challenges fundamental assumptions of mate-
rialist feminism such as the notion that ‘woman’ constitutes a stable,
universal social class.
In this context, ‘agency’ signifies the power and ability to effect
changes in the process of human history, combined with the recogni-
tion by others that the agent is indeed the origin of that change. In
other words, I am an agent, if I do something and society (which
includes myself) acknowledges the products of this activity as
effected by me. This concept builds on two premises: first, that the
actions of an individual constitute her identity and second, that
agency is prerequisite for human existence within the cultural con-
text. If I am denied this capacity, I do not exist as part of society. My
point here is not that agency is essentially and necessarily the basis
of identity, but that it has this function in a materialist feminist analy-
sis of society. From this materialist feminist perspective, a patriarchal
society is a society which fully or partially denies women agency. The
desire for agency underlies issues such as voting rights and repro-
ductive rights, as well as images of women in literature and the visual
arts—most of which are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.
This feminist moment, therefore, strives to create an equal existence
for women (and by extension all members of society) and to trans-
form the socio-economic framework.
In Russ’s fiction, agency as a political concept operates in complex
ways. Its availability or non-availability governs not only women’s
stories in Russ’s fictional worlds but also the ways in which the pro-
tagonists relate to the acts of narration and writing. Therefore,
authorship, narration and reading as sexed and gendered acts figure

prominently in Russ’s writing. Another, related concern of Russ’s
work is to explore how fictional representations of women’s lives cor-
relate with the actual life stories and material bodies of women—
specifically white American women—outside the text. This
correlation is not one of simple equivalence.
Part One will analyse how women’s agency—or its lack—functions
in specific texts, such as ‘My Dear Emily’ (1962), ‘Life in a Furniture
Store’ (1965), the sword-and-sorcery short story sequence The Adven-
tures of Alyx (1976; 1983),1 or the novels The Female Man (1975) and The
Two of Them (1978). In these readings, I rely on the humanist, stable
concept of agency outlined above in order to position Russ’s texts
within the context of early second-wave materialist feminism. This
approach is based on the belief that to identify and explore the inter-
sections among different feminist texts, one needs to keep these
texts’ own logic intact for the moment of analysis. Therefore, the
readings in these chapters partially suspend the fundamental inde-
terminacy that governs more recent feminist thinking. Instead of
emphasizing breakages between the feminist ‘generations’, I will
highlight the continuities.
CHAPTER ONE
The Act of Telling:
Who is the Subject of
Narrative Action?
What can a heroine do?

What myths, what plots, what actions are available to a female
protagonist?
Very few.—Russ, ‘What Can a Heroine Do’ (83)
One way to conceptualize agency in narratological terms is to assume
a homology between the linguistic structure of a sentence (subject-
predicate [-object]) and the structure of human behaviour (agent-
action [-object]). An agent (subject) performs an action which may
affect an object. A similar homology exists between the logic of a nar-
rative text and the stories of people’s ‘real’ lives (or rather the ways in
which people construct/invent their own lives as stories). Without
this structural similarity (which does not suggest complete identity),
narrative texts could not be comprehensible.1 It is this analogy which
renders stories plausible. Conversely, the stories an individual creates
about her (or his) own life will be shaped in complex ways by the nar-
ratives available to and permissible for this particular individual in a
given culture.
It is at this juncture that Russ’s writing becomes identifiably mate-
rialist. The stories of women’s agency created in her texts are not
politically significant in and of themselves, but rather in how they
strive to relate to the material existence of women outside the text.
The act of reading connects the flesh and bones of real women to the
acts of writing and narrating as well as to the acts performed by char-
acters in the narrative world. Accordingly, Russ’s early short stories
develop three levels of narrative agency: (1) the agency of the charac-
ters in the narrated world; (2) the agency of the narrator; and (3) the
agency of the (fictional) author. All of these concerns remain relevant
in her later work.
In this delineation, the stories around Russ’s sword-and-sorcery

heroine Alyx, collected in The Adventures of Alyx, occupy a threshold
position, presenting as they do a woman who positively asserts her
ability to act as an independent individual. The radiantly assertive
character Alyx represents a straightforward assault on the male bas-
tion of heroism. By contrast, the stories published before the Alyx
sequence concentrated on making women’s lack of agency tangible. A
reading of two short stories, ‘My Dear Emily’ (1962) and ‘Life in a
Furniture Store’ (1965), will illustrate the ways in which the charac-
ters’ (lack of) agency interrelates with the narrator’s agency and (in
the case of ‘Life in a Furniture Store’) with the agency of the fictional
author.2 These early texts employ comparatively sophisticated narra-
tive techniques to conceal their hidden agenda of empowerment,
while The Adventures of Alyx makes agency a conspicuously visible
structural element of the text.
Designs of Becoming a Destiny: ‘Bluestocking’
… there is one and only one way to possess that in which we

are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that
which we want. Become it. (Russ, The Female Man 139)
In the iconoclastic short story ‘Bluestocking’ (‘The Adventuress’3,
1967), the first story in The Adventures of Alyx, Russ introduced the
character Alyx, who was to permanently change the possibilities of
imagining women in speculative fiction. Alyx, a ‘small, gray-eyed
woman, … a neat, level-browed, governessy person’ (9), lives in a
sword-and-sorcery world whose social structure is a form of pre-cap-
italist, feudal patriarchy. However, one aspect of this society which
clearly sets it off from other male-dominated societies makes her
emergence as an exceptional woman plausible: Alyx’s world tells an
alternative myth of creation, in which the first man was shaped from
‘the sixth finger of the left hand of the first woman’ (9). In this world,
in spite of male supremacy, women do have the advantage of having
been created half an hour before men. The first woman was also the
first human. She does not give birth to the first man—the text avoids
the conventional reference to Mother Nature—but, in an ironic rever-
sal of the biblical story, relinquishes an extraneous part of her body.
Alyx is an exceptional woman in the terms of her own society and
even more so by the standards of present-day patriarchy: ‘Small
THE ACT OF TELLING 19
women exist in plenty—so do those with gray eyes—but this woman

was among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise’ (9). She is
independent, sensuous and as willing to enter violent physical con-
frontations as she is to enjoy sexual pleasures. According to the myth
of her own society, she is as complete as the first woman (human)
before the creation of man: ‘The lady with whom we concern our-
selves in this story had all her six fingers, and what is more, they all
worked’ (9).
‘Bluestocking’ ingeniously blends two standard literary motifs, one
clearly patriarchal and the other potentially anti-patriarchal. The pri-
mary story line borrows from a standard patriarchal pulp template
which Delany in his introduction to Alyx refers to as ‘Beat up villain: get
girl’ (xvi)4 Specifically, this template is the adventurous rescue of a
young, virginal woman from an undesirable marriage. The relation-
ship between rescuer and rescued develops and matures in the course
of a series of adventures which they face together. In the end, the two
fall in love and live happily ever after in a marriage marked desirable
by convention. The problem with this plot for the story of Alyx, who
takes the position of the rescuer, is obvious: the hero in the original is
clearly gendered masculine (the conventional gender of agency) and
must be male to be able to supply the mandatory deflowering of the
virgin in the end. ‘Bluestocking’ finds a way out of this impasse by
overlaying this patriarchal plot with a version of what Elaine Marks
has called ‘the Sappho model’.5 In this model, an emotional and erotic
relationship develops between an older woman, who may act as or be
a teacher, and an uninitiated young woman. In variations of the story,
one of the two is the seductress. The relationship between the two is
generally analogous to that of a mother and a daughter (Marks, 274).
I will discuss this paradigm, which is one of the central themes in
Russ’s fiction, in more detail in Parts Two and Three. At this point, it
is sufficient to say that although explicit lesbian sexuality remains
subdued in ‘Bluestocking’, an erotic and emotional relationship
between Alyx and Edarra, the young escapee, does develop.
What is more, the rescued maiden in this story is from the outset
clearly not the passive victim of action, but takes the initiative herself,
resisting the position of the demure quasi-daughter and student.
Alyx, who makes her living as a pick-lock, is employed by 17-year-old
Edarra to help her escape her home, the City of Ourdh, where she is
to be married to a rich, considerably older man. Throughout the story,
Edarra does not shy away from violent confrontations with her res-
cuer. When the two have to traverse a sea teeming with monsters,
pirates and other deadly dangers to get from Ourdh to the other,
unspecified shore that represents safety, Edarra resists Alyx’s claim to
a position of leadership and complains about the discomforts of trav-
elling on a run-down dirty little boat. The tensions between them,
marked with strong erotic overtones, develop into a physical fight:
With a scream of rage, the Lady Edarra threw herself on her
preserver and they bumped heads for a few minutes, but the
battle—although violent—was conducted entirely in the dark
and they were tangled up almost completely in the beds, which
were nothing but blankets laid on the bare boards and not the
only reason that the lady’s [Edarra’s] brown eyes were turning
a permanent, baleful black. (16)
At the climax of this quarrel, their relationship receives a symbolic
equivalent in a sea monster which threatens their lives and turns out
to be a mother itself: ‘It held its baby to its breast, a nauseating par-
ody of human-kind’ (17). Alyx faces the female monster, who is also
a skewed mirror-image of herself, and kills it, Edarra remaining in the
background, paralysed with fear. This encounter with the monster as
alter-ego of the protagonist indicates that this and the following
adventures represent dream-like externalizations of the psychological
tensions within and between the two women. To realize her inde-
pendence as an individual, Alyx escaped domesticity, leaving her own
daughter with her husband. When she faces and kills the mother-
monster, she also transforms her relationship to Edarra. The rescue
operation is revealed as more than simply removing a paying client
from physical danger and becomes more explicitly maternal; Alyx
now takes responsibility for Edarra’s education. She cuts Edarra’s
long red hair, which is beautiful but a hindrance in a physically active
life, and teaches her to fight with two short swords.
The second transformative adventure confronts the two women
with three hostile males. Alyx effortlessly kills two, while Edarra fol-
lows her teacher’s lead by putting a sword in the third. Again, their
relationship changes. Edarra now fully accepts Alyx as her elder and
teacher, and becomes almost demonstrative:
Now it was Alyx who did not speak and Edarra who did; she
said, ‘Good morning,’ she said ‘Why do fish have scales?’ she
said, ‘I like shrimp; they look funny,’ and she said (once), ‘I like
you,’ matter-of-factly, as if she had been thinking about the
question and had just then settled it. (20, italics in original)
The third and final test of their relationship and their agency comes
in the shape of a fire on the boat, in which Alyx is severely wounded.
Edarra takes charge of putting the fire out, mends the hole in the boat
(which was made to extinguish the flames) and nurses Alyx back to
health. Their relationship remains equivalent to that of a mother and
a daughter, but is also already beyond this analogy:
‘Creature,’ said Alyx, ‘I had a daughter.’
‘Where is she?’ said Edarra.
Silence.
‘Praying.’ said Alyx at last. ‘Damning me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Edarra.
‘But you,’ said Alyx, ‘are—’ and she stopped blankly [sic] She
said ‘You—’
‘Me what?’ said Edarra.
‘Are here,’ … . (23–25)
Edarra, however, does not want to play the part of Alyx’s lost daugh-
ter. Resisting the role of Alyx’s ‘little baby girl’, she emphatically and
violently demands recognition as a sexually mature adult by using the
skills and knowledge acquired in her training with Alyx. When Alyx
refuses to amend the omissions in Edarra’s sexual education, the
young woman exclaims furiously: ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me’
(25).
Having transformed the relationship between the two women, at
this point the story also changes their interactions with male charac-
ters. Alyx discovers an approaching ship with an unspecified number
of men, who are now potential sexual partners, and dresses up for the
occasion: ‘severe, decent, formal black clothes, fit for a business call’
(24). Alyx’s preparations for the encounter with the males—who are
marked as unmarried by a sign on the boat, like American women
were marked unmarried by the title ‘Miss’ in 1967 when the story
came out—are so remarkable because she does not turn herself into a
sex-object and remains the agent of the (potential) sexual act. The
men are neither greeted as protectors nor potential husbands, but
solely as sources of sexual gratification.
The sexual encounter itself is not object of the text, but placed
beyond the ending. The two men appear precisely when the emo-
tional involvement and the erotic tension between the two women
has increased to a point where a sexual act between them would fol-
low if the sapphic model was allowed to run its full course:
Alyx reached out and began to stroke the girl’s disordered hair,
braiding it with her fingers, twisting it round her wrist and
slipping her hand through it and out again. (25)
An explicitly positive and successful lesbian encounter is still unrep-
resentable in 1967 science fiction (although there was an increasing
presence of lesbianism and lesbian writing in other genres), so the dea
ex machina supplies two males of appropriate age out of nowhere to
stand in for the act.6 The two men are merely mute players in the per-
formance; the primary relationship remains the one between the
women.
In merging two basic plots, rescue story and sapphic model, ‘Blue-
stocking’ makes it possible for a female character to successfully
appropriate the traditional rescue story template which was coded
male. It is crucial for this act of appropriation that Alyx’s ‘masculin-
ization’ does not carry a negative valence. The masculine woman is
not a new creation as such, but she traditionally always pays the price
of complete de-sexualization. For the heterosexual paradigm requires
that those women, who assume characteristics associated with mas-
culinity, have no sensuality and no access to (permissible) pleasur-
able sexual acts. To the contrary, Alyx’s masculinity, as I have
demonstrated, rather than depriving her of erotic pleasures, enhances
them. The text represents Alyx as knowing who she is and what she
wants: ‘Alyx had ambitions of becoming a Destiny’ (10). However,
unlike in Russ’s later female protagonists, Alyx’s ability to exert the
agency that was reserved for males is encoded in her body from birth.
Still in possession of the sixth finger, which other women lack
because (according to her culture’s myth of creation) the first male
was created from it, she encompasses and transcends both. Russ’s
later texts will call into question both the validity of such stories of
exceptionality as political strategy and the possibility of becoming a
self-knowing subject.
Russ herself attributes a watershed position to the stories around
her character Alyx. In an interview, which appeared under the title
‘Reflections on Science Fiction’ in the feminist quarterly Quest in 1975,
shortly after the publication of The Female Man, Russ declared:
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way (my first
reaction upon hearing Kate Millet speak in 1968 was that of
course every woman knew that but if you ever dared to formu-
late it to yourself, let alone say it out loud, God would kill you
with a lightning bolt), I had turned from writing love stories
about women in which women were losers, and adventure sto-

ries in which the men were winners, to writing adventure sto-
ries about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of
the hardest things I ever did in my life. These are stories about
a sword-and-sorcery heroine called Alyx, and before writing
the first I spent about two weeks in front of my typewriter
shaking and thinking of how I’d be stoned in the streets,
accused of penis envy, and so on (after that it is obligatory to
commit suicide, of course).
It was shifting my center of gravity from Him to Me and I
think it’s the most difficult thing an artist can do—a woman
artist, that is. It’s OK to write about artist-female with feet in
center of own stage as long as she suffers a lot and is defeated
and is wrong (the last is optional). But to win, and to express
the anger that’s in all of us, is a taboo almost as powerful as the
taboo against being indifferent to The Man. (42, italics in
original)
In this passage, Russ graphically describes her development as a
writer from male-centred narratives to female- (or self-)centred ones
as chronologically moving through three distinct phases: (1) stories
in which women are losers by definition (pre-Alyx); (2) stories in
which women win (Alyx); and (3) stories that are explicitly feminist
(e.g. ‘When it Changed’, The Female Man).
While such a chronological categorization based on the develop-
ment of feminism is useful in a reading of Russ’s complex oeuvre, my
readings place more emphasis on the ways in which Russ participated
in the formulation of second-wave feminism rather than how her
texts were influenced by it. In particular her early stories show
implicit links to the so-called first wave—the eighteenth and nine-
teenth century women’s movements—while they simultaneously
help to shape radical late twentieth-century feminist thinking. A
reading from this perspective shows that many of Russ’s earlier texts
were not as ‘male-centred’ as the quote above suggests. What makes
Alyx a breakthrough character in genre fiction, then, is not so much
her victory, but how she wins. The following two sections examine
two such earlier short stories, ‘My Dear Emily’ (1962) and ‘Life in a
Furniture Store’ (1965), demonstrating that to read them in terms of
‘failure’ and ‘success’ alone does not do them full justice.
Oh Dear, One Bite Too Many: Vampire meets Emerson
Autonomy brings with it fear, guilt and a sense of loss. The cre-
ation of a desirous female subject—outside of utopias—neces-
sitates contradictions. (Lefanu, 84)
‘My Dear Emily’ first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction in 1962. Reprinted in the collection of short stories The Zanz-
ibar Cat (1984), it is among Russ’s most interesting early texts. ‘My
Dear Emily’ is a vampire story squarely in the tradition of nineteenth-
century gothic fiction, yet it also moves beyond this tradition in sig-
nificant ways. Even though Russ’s texts did not become explicitly
feminist before the late 1960s, the story’s implicit engagement with
nineteenth-century women’s fiction forms a connection to feminist
literary historiography. The following section will explore an intersec-
tion with one of the most important early feminist studies on nine-
teenth-century women’s writing, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. One of the central concerns of their
study is the significance of authorship as expression of agency. Posi-
tioned in relation with Gilbert and Gubar’s expansion on the classic
interpretation of Frankenstein as a romantic rewriting of Milton’s Par-
adise Lost, ‘My Dear Emily’ emerges as a displaced and unsettling
response to Mary Shelley’s novel, speculative fiction’s mythical
ancestor.
This reading suggests that speculative fiction may be regarded as a
particularly productive discursive space for an exploration of links
and continuities between early and contemporary feminism. For both
American feminism and speculative fiction acknowledge crucial
impulses from Anglo-American romanticism. ‘My Dear Emily’ harks
back to this period in American cultural and literary history in form
and in the narrative world it projects, transforming both the conven-
tions of speculative fiction and the roles female characters can play in
it.
The story centres around the young (presumably virginal) woman
Emily and her ‘bosom friend’ Charlotte and their resistance to patri-
archal family structures. This resistance is crystallized by the appear-
ance of a fascinating male vampire. Emily and Charlotte share the
boarding school in the East, the train compartment on their way
home to the West Coast, and the bed in the house of Emily’s father.
Although the two women are not directly related, Emily acts as Char-
lotte’s elder sister. The choice of names connects the two to the
Brontës and underscores the sororal character of their relationship.7
Emily is to be married to Will, a nondescript bourgeois. However, she
is far from being a pale and passive future bride. Her superficial acqui-
escence in the engagement and in Will’s tepid advances is punctuated
by aggressive rejections:
Will, seeing they were alone, attempted to take Emily’s hand
again.
‘Leave me alone!’ Emily said angrily. He stared.
‘I said leave me alone!’
And she gave him such a look of angry pride that, in fact, he
did. (121)
The train ride at the beginning of the story, which takes them home
across the continent, reveals underlying tensions and hostilities
between the two ‘sisters’ which centre around Emily’s engagement.
The need to attach oneself to a husband-proprietor undermines and
disrupts the two women’s friendship. Charlotte expresses her desire
for erotic encounters with ‘savages’ (presumably triggered by her
reading of the then popular captivity narratives): ‘“I should like to be
carried off,” she proposes, ‘but then I don’t have an engagement to
look forward to. A delicate affair.”’ (118) At the mention of her
impending marriage, Emily turns away from her reading of ‘Mr Emer-
son’s poems.’ Disconcerted, she accidentally pinches herself with
Charlotte’s binoculars, which in imitation of her friend she had
intended to use for spotting some of the romantically eroticized ‘sav-
ages’:
‘They hurt me,’ she says without expression, and as Charlotte
takes the glasses up quickly, Emily looks with curious sad pas-
sivity at the blood from her little wound, which has bled an
incongruous, passionate drop on Mr. Emerson’s cloth-bound
poems. To her friend’s surprise (and her own, too) she begins
to cry, heavily, silently, and totally without reason. (118)
In this passage, which foreshadows Emily’s later encounter with the
vampire, two aspects of Romanticism which are apparently irrecon-
cilable for women clash: the idea of total self-realization as an indi-
vidual and the need to seek fulfilment as the complementary yet
inferior half of a heterosexual pair. Thus, this early short story identi-
fies a contradiction, which Russ’s later characters, beginning with
Alyx, will struggle to overcome.
Emily’s blood is drawn by her subconscious or half-conscious

rejection and fear of marriage and domesticity. It is the philosopher
Emerson rather than one of the European writers of literary Romanti-
cism, such as Blake, Wordsworth or Goethe, who is disfigured by the
‘incongruous, passionate drop’. This choice is significant. The Amer-
ican Transcendentalist is, after all, the one who in his lectures and
poems calls for ‘self-reliance’, and the development of an unalienated
American sense of self. This romantic, full humanity may have
appeared within reach for Emily in the all-female space of her school,
but the train that brings the two young women across the continent
also moves them away from the fantasies and unfocused desires cre-
ated by their readings. Just as Charlotte’s fantasized ‘savages’ never
materialize to provide the two desirous women with passionate erotic
encounters in the unmarred wilderness, Emerson’s image of an
unfragmented self remains a false promise. Her fiancé and her father
at home smugly expect Emily to return unchanged by her education
and to be self-effacing rather than self-reliant.
To the two women, the westward movement across the vast dis-
tances of the American continent is not an act of liberation and
democratization, but confirms the loss of self-determination and the
subjection to domesticity. Androcentric narrative conventions leave
only two options open to the female protagonist: death or marriage
(Lanser, Fictions of Authority, 27). To Emily, marriage means virtual
death because it requires her to relinquish the dream of a self-reliant
individuality, which her culture poses as prerequisite for an unalien-
ated, fully human life.
Such polarities are repeated on many levels of the text. The tension
between the supposedly generic, Transcendentalist ideal of self-pos-
sessed humanity and the alienating reality of the narrated world is
only one example of the multiple dualities which are the prime motor
of the narrative. Much of the force of the story, accordingly, stems
from the ironic disjunctions between the various contradictory poles.
The text makes some of these disjunctions apparent by having the
narrative voice implicitly reveal what the character’s speech attempts
to disguise:
Charlotte (who slept in the same room as her friend) embraced
her at bedtime … and then Emily said to her dear, dear friend
(without thinking):
‘Sweet William.’
Charlotte laughed.
‘It’s not a joke!’

‘It’s so funny.’
‘I love Will dearly.’ She wondered if God would strike her
dead for a hypocrite. Charlotte was looking at her oddly, and
smiling. (120)
In disclosing Emily’s unspoken thoughts, the narrator here gives
away Emily’s double-think, and Charlotte’s laughter acknowledges
her complicity in this disjunction. Yet the ambiguity contained in
adding ‘sweet’ to the name of her fiancé, though ironic, is indeed no
joke for Emily. While explicitly commending William’s agreeable char-
acter, she relates him to a common garden flower, metaphorically
depriving him of the masculinity that will give him power over her in
marriage.
However, many such ironic pairs of opposites in the story receive
their very force from remaining disguised. Although the text makes a
pretence of hiding the tensions between the two ‘sisters’, which con-
tain both rivalry and eroticism, the stylized show of affection (‘dear,
dear friend’) makes them even more obvious. Yet each of the women
knows her (gender-) role and plays it expertly: ‘Then in the hall that
led to the pantry Sweet Will had taken her hand and she had dropped
her eyes because you were supposed to and that was her style.’ (120)
While Charlotte and Emily cannot control the explicit content of their
speech and actions, they are able to manipulate the subtext, using it
as a secret code between themselves. While this strategy points to a
lack of agency in the logic of materialist feminism, it shows that the
text does not cast its women characters as passive victims under male
control.
The narrator, in avoiding explicit comment and evaluation, also
remains concealed. Approximating a dramatic performance, the nar-
rative moves in eighteen carefully constructed scenes, set off from
each other typographically through spaces. The flow of the narrative
action easily groups them in three ‘acts’ of exactly six scenes each.
This reveals another doubleness or ambiguity on the level of repre-
sentation: suspending the choice between a dramatic performance
and a narrative text, the short story implicitly destabilizes the concept
of ‘true essence’ or unalienated self as referent and desired counter-
part to the impersonation. The short story is a narrative of a well-
structured performance. Emily and Charlotte accept their gender-role
much like actresses would take on a role in a theatre play, with the
exception that their performance is continuous and dropping the role
not an easy option. The original ‘self’ in this setup cannot be local-
ized.
It is Emily’s desire for this shifting, unrepresentable and highly
eroticized sense of self which conjures up the vampire, rather than the
other way around, although this aspect of the story also remains
ambiguous. The reference to Emerson in conjunction with her blood
supports such a reading. Although she cannot name her desires,
which are as much intellectual as they are sexual, she knows full well
what she doesn’t want: marriage as the proper continuation of her role
in the narrative. In the logic of binary thinking, which patriarchal sto-
ries forcefully suggest for their female characters, the rejection of the
‘proper’ role leaves only one option for Emily: the ‘improper’ role, the
role of the ‘fallen lady,’ which, as I will show below, also relates her to
the original woman, Eve.
The obligatory male partner for her role as the bad woman is Mar-
tin Guevara, the vampire. She meets him at one of her father’s garden-
parties:
‘I can’t move,’ she says miserably.
‘Try.’ She takes a step towards him. ‘See; you can.’
‘But I wanted to go away!’ (122, italics in original)
Since she only has two options—becoming a domesticated middle-
class wife or being regarded as an evil slut—escaping the one inextri-
cably confines her to the other. Guevara visits her at night and sinks
his teeth into her unblemished virginal neck, an event which remains
untold and is represented merely through its effects (blood stains),
leaving the visualization of the deed to the reader’s imagination.
Although the act itself is obscured, the story makes no effort to hide
the sexual character of the bloodsucking:
‘You’ve killed me.’
‘I’ve loved.’
‘Love!’
‘Say “taken” then, if you insist.’
‘I do! I do!’ she cried bitterly. (128)
Being a traditional vampire, Guevara can by definition only rape her
as a completely passive victim, but he reminds Emily that it was she
who first called him up: ‘we like souls that come to us; these visits to
the bedrooms of unconscious citizens are rather like frequenting a
public brothel’ (127). In this analogy to prostitution, Guevara also
makes the parallel to heterosexual intercourse apparent.
However, no discourse is ever purely and entirely ‘patriarchal’,

much less the aggregate of texts that makes up the complex system
of signification called culture. It is in the spaces where texts and dis-
courses become inconsistent that oppositional writers have been able
to place their subversive creations. The vampire in ‘My Dear Emily’
mocks and parodies the self-contradictory narrative of male sexuality,
which demands of him full physical control over the woman’s body
and requires her to derive pleasure from submission to these acts of
violence. The normative pleasure derived from either control or relin-
quishing control in the discourse of twentieth-century popular sci-
ence is solely based on the biology of the participants.
Emily’s eyes are fixed and her throat contracts; he forces her
head between her knees… . ‘We’re a passion!’ Smiling tri-
umphantly, he puts his hands on each side of her head, flat-
tening the pretty curls, digging his fingers into the hair, in a
grip Emily can no more break than she could a vice … ‘we’re
desire made pure, desire walking the Earth’… He throws his
arms around her, pressing her head to his chest and nearly suf-
focating her, ruining her elaborate coiffure and crushing the
lace at her throat. (126f)
In the vice of Guevara’s insurmountable physical superiority, the
woman’s body represents her absolute inability to act. The moment
when Guevara pushes her head between her knees figuratively con-
denses the degrading reality of Emily’s remoteness from ‘self-
reliance’, or agency. It is important to note, however, that such acts of
forced submission are not degrading in themselves. They are degrad-
ing because they supposedly represent the reality of the woman’s
existence. Emily’s submission, however, displaces this connection to
her social position as a woman just as Guevara’s maleness loses sig-
nificance since he does not use his penis to perform the penetration.
Indeed, as I showed above, the vampire’s existence in the text is con-
trolled by Emily’s own desires.
Thus, while it seems that her refusal to submit to domesticity has
brought her even further away from her unnameable yet desired self-
control, the text inserts another duality at this point of tension. While
Emily at first appears to be as completely subjected to the will and
whim of Guevara as she would have been to her prospective hus-
band’s, Guevara is not a human male. With no biological claim to the
role he enacts, he is a dissembler, a con-artist, who, existing as he
does outside the capitalist economy, can freely violate codes of bour-
geois social interactions. The roles in this imaginary underside of cap-

italism, this world beyond life and death, are not as fixed as the anal-
ogy to heterosexual rape may suggest. Sarah Lefanu observes in a
different context:
The image of the vampire represents transgression, the break-
ing of social codes, a denial of death. It is interesting that
so many women writers are attracted by this image for the
vampire is traditionally a male figure, active over his female
victims’ passivity; a barely concealed symbol of phallic pene-
tration. (Lefanu, 83)
Russ’s text transforms the vampire figure by foregrounding the anal-
ogy to penetration. Emily is indeed raped, but this violent loss of vir-
ginity also ironically bestows power on her. Once penetrated by the
phallic teeth, they become available to her as well. She turns into a
vampire herself and overcomes her enforced passivity. Sarah Lefanu
explains the fascination of women writers with vampirism and its
implicit liberating potential: ‘It is perhaps that identification with the
vampire figure allows a claim to be made for a libertarian sexuality for
women, a transgression—no longer the prerogative of men—from the
constraints of social order’ (83).
The identification with the vampire here is more profound than
Lefanu’s statement suggests: the woman, in becoming the vampire,
gains far more than her sexual freedom; the loss of humanness also
relieves her of her eternal lack and disrupts the Judaeo-Christian
myth of creation. Here also lies one of the crucial differences to penile
penetration: the displaced phallus ceases to be the prerogative of the
male. As vampires, men and women become equals, and, more
importantly, sexuality is thoroughly detached from reproduction.
Unlike in the human male, then, the surface of the vampire’s body
does not mark a defining difference.
As Emily metamorphoses into a vampire, she is also relieved of her
role as a delicately decorous young lady. Her diction changes accord-
ingly: ‘I have to stay in the damned bed the whole damned day …’
(129). What is more, she stops putting on a show of self-effacement
and begins to act more like Russ’s later characters, such as Jael, the
fierce assassin from The Female Man (I will further explore the con-
nections between these two characters in my discussion of Jael as a
killer of men in Chapter Two). Crowds of people in the red-light dis-
trict, rather than frightening her, rouse the newly hatched vampire’s
appetite:
What a field of ripe wheat! One of the barkers hoists her by the
waist onto his platform.
‘Do you see this little lady? Do you see this—’
‘Let me go, God damn you!’ she cries indignantly.
‘This angry little lady—’ pushing her chin with one sun-
burned hand to make her face the crowd. ‘This—’ But here
Emily hurts him, slashing his palm with her teeth, quite
pleased with herself … (141f, italics in original)
She has come quite a way from her former self who, sitting in the
train-compartment, ‘look[ed] up from Mr. Emerson to stare Charlotte
out of countenance, properly, morally, and matter-of-course young
lady’ (118).
Guevara himself represents another duality, positioned as he is in a
highly contradictory and supremely ambiguous space. He is first
introduced in his vulnerability, his sickness, his suffering—that is, in
the light of day. At night, in the darkness, he is powerfully seductive
as well as ruthlessly violent. In his relation to Emily, he enacts the role
of perfect masculinity, yet his instrument of penetration is not unique
to his sex: Emily most definitely does not lack teeth. He impersonates
the role of a man and is therefore gendered masculine, but his bio-
logical sex is virtually irrelevant for his performance. As Emily
becomes more like him, his shaky gender-identity becomes even more
unstable.
Vis-à-vis Charlotte, old and new vampire are equals, almost rivals.
Even if Guevara claims the prerogative of the ‘elder’ in Charlotte’s de-
humanizing ‘deflowering’, Emily is not excluded from the practice.
Magnanimously, he offers her the second bite:
‘She’ll be somebody’s short work and I think I know whose.’
Emily turns white again.
‘I’ll send her around to you afterwards.’ (126)
A few scenes further on in the text, the young vampire initiate does
not pale at the thought of biting her friend and metaphorical sister
any more than he does:
[Reclining on the parlour sofa, Emily kneeling beside her:] ‘Oh,
sweetheart!’ says Charlotte, reaching down and putting her
arms around her friend.
‘You’re well!’ shouts Emily, sobbing over Charlotte’s hand
and thinking perhaps to bite her. But the Reverend’s arms lift
her up. (132)
Emily, in her changed state as a vampire, has transformed her ‘femi-

nine’ role—at least partially. This transformation also shifts the role
of masculinity in the text. Guevara not only impersonates a human
male, he impersonates the romantic ideal of a male hero—violently
sensual and irresistibly seductive. He plays the role of Milton’s Satan
in his romantic interpretation. However, even this impersonation is
highly ambiguous: it is the woman, yearning for intellectual and sex-
ual self-determination, who causes his appearance. Emily, like Mil-
ton’s Eve, desires the forbidden fruit of knowledge and full humanity,
but she does not end up as Adam’s wife. She rejects Will as Adam and
turns to Charlotte instead.
Intersecting ‘My Dear Emily’ with the classic feminist interpreta-
tion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in The Madwoman in the Attic, which
was published almost twenty years after Russ’s short story, highlights
the political significance of such intertextualities for feminism.
Gilbert and Gubar relate both Victor Frankenstein and his monster
not only to Satan, but also to Adam and even to Eve: ‘though Victor
Frankenstein enacts the roles of Adam and Satan like a child trying on
costumes, his single most self-defining act [the creation of the mon-
ster] transforms him definitely into Eve’ (232). Gilbert and Gubar use
metaphors of role-playing and play-acting to represent the relation of
the characters in Frankenstein to the ones in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Russ’s short story, as I have shown, takes similar recourse to the the-
atrical on a structural level. Both The Madwoman in the Attic and ‘My
Dear Emily’ use the concept of performance to detach the acts of their
characters from their sexed bodies. Because ‘he’ is not fully human,
the vampire in ‘My Dear Emily’, like Shelley’s monster, can transgress
traditional notions of gender. Both the monster in Gilbert and Gubar’s
interpretations and Guevara have the acting inscribed in their very
being, since neither of the two has a legitimate claim to a biological
essence as its imagined foundation.
The allusion to Frankenstein’s monster in ‘My Dear Emily’ is more
direct than the one to the romantic Satan-hero. The text introduces
Guevara as he is waking up in the twilight, painfully, slowly, just as
Frankenstein’s monster wakes from ‘his’ pre-life state. Guevara’s
physical ugliness in the light of day is a further indication of his sim-
ilarity to the monster. Yet Guevara is also closer to the attractive
aspects of Satan than the monster can be. The vampire’s brutal
seductiveness, the emphasis on his evil yet attractive desires, and his
ambiguous relation to Emily-Eve clearly link him to the glamorous
Prince of Darkness. Thus, in the subtext, Guevara and Emily re-enact
the myth of creation as interpreted in Paradise Lost filtered through the

romantic imagination. Their existence is a life in death or beyond life
and death. Neither paradise nor hell applies to them; Emily-Eve is not
subjected to child-birth and does not have to defer to Adam, who
remains in his self-defined capitalist utopia—the paradise of modern
patriarchy.
The displaced myth in ‘My Dear Emily’ contains the possibility of
change, even if it does not provide the protagonist with what she
desires. Disrupting the patriarchal threesome Adam–Eve–Satan and
its relation to the all-powerful Creator and Author of all things, the
story supplies an alternative way out of ‘the Garden of Eden’. Emily
does not hope for the lost paradise before the fall. The fundamental
structure of duality in the short story is her double-bind: she is left
with a choice between two at first equally degrading alternatives. She
can either marry Will or be raped by Guevara (who is on one level just
Will’s exact opposite). However, the multiple dualities and ambigui-
ties in the narrative give her the option to stay un-dead, if not alive,
with Charlotte. Neither woman attains agency within their society,
but they both escape the dilemma of their lives in Victorian patriarchy.
One is reminded of the classic quote from ‘The Women Men Don’t
See’ by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon): ‘We survive in ones and twos
in the chinks of your world-machine’ (334, italics in original). Charlotte
and Emily occupy such a chink in the world-machine: a common
coffin becomes their place of refuge.
Just as Mary Shelley’s male protagonists can be read as ‘imperson-
ators’, Russ in this early story uses a vampire to make gender-assign-
ments unstable and to place a woman in the centre of the stage. In
‘My Dear Emily’, the rescue-figure is an ambiguous male imperson-
ator and a rapist, an evil yet fascinating Byronic hero. He is at the
same time all-powerful and extremely vulnerable. From this perspec-
tive, Alyx in ‘Bluestocking’ also emerges as an impersonator, since
she enacts the masculine role narrative convention had reserved for a
male. Yet Alyx, though exceptional, is not an alien in her world. She
exists within the socio-economic and symbolic system of her world
and represents a fundamentally different kind of gender discontinu-
ity. Guevara, in his suggested androgyny, displaces the male, while
Alyx, whom the narrative constructs as human and female with a
vengeance, kicks him out. This open confrontation marks the advent
of another phase in feminism, in which women characters in fiction
as well as in feminist theory and cultural criticism demand and claim
agency instead of merely pointing to the lack of it.
What is significant in terms of agency about these various intertex-

tualities between Milton, Blake and Shelley as manifested in Russ
and Gilbert/Gubar is their underlying concern with the authority of
women’s narrative voice. Women writers, particularly before femi-
nism became a significant cultural force, frequently tried to legitimize
their authorship by using male or ungendered (by default also male)
narrators and protagonists and/or by choosing male pseudonyms. On
the basis of my analysis above I would argue that ‘My Dear Emily’ can
be interpreted, in a similar way to Frankenstein, as a renegotiation of
men’s original claim to sole authorship via their direct likeness to the
supreme Author. Russ’s short story participates in the discourse that
is represented here through The Madwoman in the Attic, but ‘My Dear
Emily’ also anticipates a critique of basic political categories in this
discourse: ‘woman’ as a category is not simply a given and most def-
initely not constrained to victimhood.
The reference to Milton and Frankenstein points to another impor-
tant concern in Russ’s writing: authorship as agency. In the 1970s and
1980s, Russ’s criticism contributed to the debate on women and
authorship. As Gilbert and Gubar show in their classic study, many of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers exorcized or tried
to exorcize their ‘anxieties of authorship’ by creating revisionary cri-
tiques of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
The story that Milton … most notably tells to women is of
course the story of woman’s secondness, her otherness, and
how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her
sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods
which is also, for her, the garden of poetry. Milton is for women
what Harold Bloom (who might be paraphrasing Woolf) calls
‘the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong
imaginations in their cradles.’ (191)
These intertextual aspects of ‘My Dear Emily’ connect the story to
Russ’s poignant criticism as voiced, for example, in How to Suppress
Women’s Writing and such essays as ‘Why Women Can’t Write’. In
these critical texts, Russ examines the stumbling-blocks still in the
way of women who write in critical terms.
What Russ’s criticism and fiction most conspicuously evoke as the
real inhibitor of female authorship is not Milton, however, but the
great Creator himself, God as reinforced and repeated by texts such as
Paradise Lost. Russ herself uses the image of God to represent the
many overdetermined forces that suppress women’s liberatory imag-
ination. In the interview in Quest from which I quoted above, Russ

humorously draws from an anthropomorphized image of God who
would strike down dead any woman with the gall to express the
‘truth’ about women’s oppression (42). God in this passage serves as
the instrument of women’s internalized silencing.
In this interview and elsewhere, Russ evokes the image of God to
account for the complex processes which create the feelings of anxi-
ety experienced by her as a female author. Gilbert and Gubar give
voice to these anxieties, relating women’s precarious position within
‘patriarchal poetry’ to the ways in which this literature insists on the
God-like authority of the writer:
… literary women, readers and writers alike, have long been
‘confused’ and intimidated by the patriarchal etiology that
defines a solitary Father God as the only creator of all things,
fearing that such a cosmic Author might be the sole legitimate
model for all earthly authors. (188, cf. also 7)
One of Russ’s key themes in her fictional and critical work is women’s
struggle to rewrite this narrative of authorship. The prototypical
writer of patriarchal ideology, according to this feminist critique, is
the perfect image of God. His pen is a metaphorical penis whose ink
continually inseminates the always virginal page. However, the
women’s movement since the 1970s, to which both Russ and Gilbert
and Gubar have contributed, together with postmodernism’s disre-
spect for the authority of the writer, has disrupted or troubled the
image of the penile pen. Women authors have reshaped the accepted
literary canon, just as female characters in fiction have displaced male
authority and authorship and unhinged the essence of their own
identity as women.
These metaphors of authorship, with which writers of both sexes
in the European and Anglo-American tradition have continually re-
created men’s sole claim to the legitimate production of texts, hark
back to the Judaeo-Christian myth of creation. This connection again
emphasizes how central the myth of creation is to feminist analyses
of authorship and agency in Western thinking. Adam (in his roman-
tic interpretation) was created in the image of God, but he depends
on Eve for procreation. The metaphor of authorship makes the male a
perfect image of a God who fathers the universe without dependence
on a womb. However, the analogy, powerful as it may be, is also strik-
ingly vulnerable to radical feminist critique.
Concern with these issues is one of the themes which Russ contin-
ues to develop in her writing. Her short story ‘Life in a Furniture

Store’ (1965) for the first time introduces a fictional author as a char-
acter in the narrative to explore the psychological ramifications of
women’s limited access to agency, authorship and narrative authority.
Whereas ‘Bluestocking’ and ‘My Dear Emily’ focus on the agency of
the female protagonist, ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ is primarily con-
cerned with the agency of the female author. Since Russ has continu-
ally tackled the question of women’s authorship from a critical
perspective, I will also examine the ways in which the short story
intersects with Russ’s own critical work.
In, in, in, to where the worm lies in the middle … :

down the rabbit’s hole with the author
When I became aware [in college] of my ‘wrong’ experience, I

chose fantasy. Convinced that I had no real experience of life,
since my own obviously wasn’t part of Great Literature, I
decided consciously that I’d write of things nobody knew any-
thing about, dammit. So I wrote realism disguised as fantasy,
that is, science fiction. (How to Suppress Women’s Writing, 127)
‘Life in a Furniture Store’ first came out in Epoch in 1965; the story was
later included in Russ’s most recent collection of short stories and
other short fiction, The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). Like The Zanz-
ibar Cat, The Hidden Side of the Moon contains a variety of quite different
texts, ranging from Russ’s first published short story ‘Nor Custom
Stale’ (1959) to the hilarious satirical piece ‘The Clichés from Outer
Space’ (1984). However, while the earlier collection brings together
stories that are closely affiliated with genre writing (science fiction
and/or fantasy), The Hidden Side of the Moon also includes texts that are
more experimental in terms of transgressing genre boundaries, such
as ‘The View from this Window’ (1970) or ‘The Little Dirty Girl’
(1982). Although ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ clearly employs science
fictional elements and can also be read as a ‘ghost story’ (as I will
argue below), the text discards most conventional narrative para-
phernalia of genre writing. There is hardly any recognizable plot
and the space that is being explored is entirely within one woman’s
mind.
‘Life in a Furniture Store’, in marked contrast to ‘My Dear Emily’
and the Alyx stories, appears to give up most causal and chronologi-
cal relationships, relying on a few marginal narrative elements. The

events that the narrator does relate are grouped with images, frag-
mented, dream-like recollections from childhood, revolving around
the vague notion of a centre, which is not named. In the first para-
graph, the narrator gives a ‘summary’ of the plot, eliding, however, the
most significant events that precede her retreat to a furniture store:
I didn’t always use to live alone; I once worked for a scientific
institute that made bevels or bezels (I forget which) and pub-
lished a magazine, but shortly after that there was a small inci-
dent that led to my being fired, and then I got married, and
then I got divorced, and eventually I went to live in a furniture
store. (162)
The small modifier ‘eventually’ contains and conceals the main part
of the plot, her visit at her friend Laura’s place and her moving into
the furniture store.
Furthermore, the text repeatedly disrupts the plot that it conjured
up in the first paragraph. Oscillating between maintaining a causally
linked narrative sequence and destroying the very idea of coherent
sequence, the narrator establishes a fundamental indeterminacy
which also involves herself as a character. In this text, the narrator,
whom conventional genre fiction presents as possessing perfect
memory, nonchalantly lapses into guessing where she lacks certainty:
‘I once worked for a scientific institute that made bevels or bezels (I
forget which)’ (162); ‘I believe she is dead now’ (166); ‘We went into
the kitchen and sat under the European colanders, or casseroles, I for-
get which’ (168). This added uncertainty heightens the sense that
this teller refuses to hold on to complete control of the tale. Loss of
control therefore becomes an essential ingredient of the text.
This feeling of uncertainty is the only factor that gives some sem-
blance of coherence to the narrator’s representation of her inner
space: ‘Every step is a step away from order’ (172). Shut out from
ordinary life, she finds herself in ‘Limbo’ (164), neither fully dead, nor
truly alive: ‘Life buried, making patterns’ (164). The distinction
between life and death itself slips away from her. When she loses her
job, she cynically opts out of society: ‘I was out of a job. And every-
body knows what that means; that means my life is over’ (163).
Unable to cope with everyday interactions with others, the narrator
seeks refuge in this inner coherence that marks her as psychotic. She
completely withdraws to her own apartment and erratic memories of
pre-adult life, memories which are saturated with her childhood read-
ing experiences, particularly Alice in Wonderland and Through the Look-

ing Glass:
Beyond the curtains, out in the dark, theatrical night, pre-
vented from entering by the glass that gleamed or the thin
gauze of the screen that made all the street lights into crosses,
out there where I forever read my first book, I saw myself shut-
ting the door after my sweet sixteen birthday party. (171)
The protagonist-narrator retreats into her childhood memories, to her
life before initiation to sexuality. After her ‘sweet sixteen’ birthday
party, parting from ten happy couples, she is alone with a silent but-
ler, which comes to represent her exclusion from ‘happy’ heterosex-
ual coupledom.
The text uses the acts of writing and reading on several levels to
restore the narrator’s integrity. She copes with her exclusion from
society by ‘forever read[ing her] first book’ (171), in which the pro-
tagonist, Alice, escapes into a dream-world, removed from reality and
causal logic. ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ makes this reference to Alice
explicit when the protagonist enters the house of her friend Laura: ‘I
knocked the knocker on the little red door (like Alice’s)’ (166). Like
Alice, the narrator speaks to herself, and as she does so, relates her
constant movement inward: ‘In, in, in, to where the worm lies in the
middle’ (163). Like Alice, who falls down the rabbit’s hole towards
the centre of the earth (towards her own dream-world), the narrator
draws away from ‘reality’, seeking her inner self. But, again like Alice,
she never reaches this imagined ‘centre’. The only action that remains
and connects the narrator with the world outside herself is the pro-
duction of the text, which is only completed in the act of reading.
Moreover, ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ offers a number of indications
that the (nameless) narrator-protagonist is also a writer and may be
the fictional author of the short story. Seemingly out of touch with the
primary story line, she scrupulously lists the contents of her purse at
the moment of speaking (writing?), putting particular emphasis on
paper and pencil (166). She sees paper as the condensed image of her
existence:
I wore paper flowers. I paraded. Like the soiled slippers that
ballet dancers wear bound around their hearts, a sort of Yellow
Star, so I wore my distinction—but I danced! I paraded! I stood
with my arms so, and stamped, and looked terrors. I had only
to think a thing and it was done. (163–64, italics in original)
This passage may appear like the deluded ravings of a person on the
brink of madness. Yet in the context of textual clues which point to
the narrator’s authorship, it captures the creative act of imagining
events, like in dreaming or writing. The narrator makes a point of
telling that she wears paper like a ballet dancer wears her shoes, as
signs of her ability and her pain (from bleeding feet). She wears paper
like Jews had to wear the yellow star in Nazi Germany, as a sign
which condensed their existence and marked them for death. A few
lines further down the narrator makes another reference to the pain
of imagining, addressing the reader directly: ‘Yet you enjoy my agony’
(164, italics in original). The text here emphasizes the painful aspects
of writing rather than its liberatory potential. The pain of writing is
represented as prerequisite for the enjoyment of reading, like the
bleeding feet of ballet dancers are inextricably connected with the
rigor of her art and the enjoyment the audience feels from watching a
well-rehearsed performance. The ballet dancer interprets music and
choreography with her body, bearing the inevitable pain.
This intense engagement with authoring and active reading distin-
guishes Russ’s work from most conventional science fiction. Russ
does not write for quick consumption. Subtle hints will disclose
whole new layers of (albeit shifting) meaning. Critics have empha-
sized the significance of the act of reading in Russ’s work. Sarah
Lefanu in her chapter on Russ underscores the primacy of the
(female) reader in Russ’s texts: ‘Russ is passionately concerned about
her readers; in all her work they feature variously as voyeur, eaves-
dropper, willing or unwilling confidante’ (177). While I do not argue
with this assessment, I would suggest that the act of authoring is as
important as a concern of Russ’s work as a writer. In her fiction, the
two acts, reading and writing, correlate in significant ways. Thus, the
agency of the author in Russ’s text always also depends on the reader
for validation. I will come back to this issue in Part Three in my dis-
cussion of Russ’s novel We Who Are About To … (1978), in which
authoring becomes the sole connection of the dying narrator to life
and human history in even more pronounced ways than in ‘Life in a
Furniture Store’.
This (unstable) conflation of fictional author and narrator in ‘Life
in a Furniture Store’ breaks apart towards the end of the story, when
the narrator-author metamorphoses into a ghost and leaves the realm
of realism:
The spirit that rides the blast caught me as I walked past a
shop-face brilliant as a cave; with a whirl of last year’s leaves

and refuse it blew me around the corner and into a brick wall,
hurrying the clouds between the narrow brick defile: black
night-clouds, purple clouds suffused with rain, slate-colored
clouds blowing dully at the edge, all streaming down the sky.
(172–73)
As a ghost, the narrator comes to haunt the furniture store, continu-
ing her perpetual inward movement. In the empty furniture store at
night, as completely isolated from human society as the narrator of We
Who Are About To, her only remaining action is remembering.
The same types of women writers who populate Russ’s fictional
texts also concern her critical work. Using the image of the female
author, she exposes the strategies with which dominant discourses
have silenced women’s writing and denied or spoiled their agency as
writers. Russ demands of women who write to fight the limitations
imposed upon their texts and on the female characters they create
and to find a language to express that which cannot be expressed in
the terms of patriarchal stories:
… middle-class women, although taught to value established
forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither
can use established forms to express what the forms were
never intended to express (and may very well operate to con-
ceal). (How to Suppress Women’s Writing, 125)
Thus, according to Russ, the material conditions of the writer’s life
require her to consciously use the established forms to represent
what within their dominant logic must be unrepresentable. It is pre-
cisely these interrelations and tensions between the material life of
the fictional author and her text that motivate the stories of author-
ship in Russ’s oeuvre.
‘Life in a Furniture Store’, although it may appear like a story of fail-
ure for the female protagonist, affirms her narrative authority, thus
anticipating Russ’s later work regarding women’s authorship.
Whereas in ‘Bluestocking’ and even more strikingly in ‘My Dear
Emily’ the narrator functions merely as a hidden mediator of the nar-
rative, ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ moves the narrator to the front as
sole protagonist. The telling itself emerges as the subject of the tale.
The short story manipulates the ‘established forms’ in a way that
seems closed to a critical text, but Russ’s criticism defies these
boundaries. How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), for example,
deliberately uses the persona of the author, the speaking subject who
produces the text, to comment on the act of writing and to subvert the
god-like presence of the author in traditional, ‘objective’ criticism:
Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the mar-
gins does growth occur. [Which is] why I, who am a science-
fiction writer and not a scholar, must wrestle in my
not-very-abundant spare time with this ungainly monster.
Because you, you critics, have not already done so (preferably
a century ago). If you don’t like my book, write your own.
Please! (129–30)
‘I’ve been trying to finish this monster for thirteen ms. pages
and it won’t. Clearly it’s not finished. You finish it. (132)
Meta-textual comments by a fictional author such as these are char-
acteristic of Russ’s later work. For example, Joanna, one of the pro-
tagonists in Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975) is such a fictional
author. She flippantly addresses the reader and sends her text off to
the world in the closing section: ‘Live merrily, little daughter-book,
even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who listen; stay hope-
ful and wise’ (213).
Such destabilizations of the author’s authority in Russ’s writing
also affect the act of narration. Starting with ‘Life in a Furniture Store’
and the fairy-tale/horror story ‘Come Closer’, both first published in
1965, Russ’s texts display an increasing uneasiness with narrative
omniscience. Her writing moves from traditional ‘third-person’ nar-
rative—the ‘public’ form of genre fiction—to more ‘private’ forms
which borrow from autobiography, diary and letter. This move from
‘public’ to ‘private’ discourses is also accompanied by a ‘sexing’ of the
narrative voice, a development which I will discuss in more detail in
Part Two. Even in such texts as ‘Bluestocking’, in which the narrator
is not a protagonist of her tale, she makes her (human rather than
divine) metafictional presence felt:
… the girl [Edarra] swept up to the deck with her plate and
glass. It isn’t easy climbing a rope ladder with a glass (bal-
anced on a plate) in one hand, but she did it without thinking,
which shows how accustomed she had become to the ship and how far
this tale has advanced. (21, my emphasis)
Russ’s later, explicitly feminist texts further explore the ways in
which the presence of a fictional author may be deployed for purposes
of disruption as well as for establishing agency. The Female Man
(1975), Russ’s most widely read novel, is a prime example for these
experiments. Joanna as fictional author, like the narrator in ‘Life in a
Furniture Store’, is also present in the fictional world as a ghost. She
points out, ‘don’t think I know any of this by hearsay; I’m the spirit
of the author and I know all things’ (166), ironically disrupting liter-
ary conventions of narrative omniscience, particularly those of sci-
ence fiction or genre fiction. Similarly, the narrator in the novel The
Two of Them (1978) suddenly appears as fictional author: ‘She didn’t
take him. She didn’t do it. I made that part up’ (175). The insistence
on agency by these fictional authors is always ironical and disrupting,
but simultaneously also deadly serious.
‘Life in a Furniture Store’ is significant for a feminist reading of
Russ’s work in yet another respect. In addition to its introduction of
the female fictional author, this early short story also employs textual
strategies which Russ later formulated as crucial ingredients of femi-
nist writing. While the two fantasy pieces ‘Bluestocking’ and ‘My
Dear Emily’ emphasize creating new plot patterns for female charac-
ters, this short story experiments with disintegrating plot and the act
of narration. Russ’s critical work, which she began publishing in the
early 1970s, has a similar double agenda. Like her fiction, her criti-
cism sets out by exploring women’s agency on the level of plot
(‘images of women’) and authorship. Her examination of the literary
tradition, however, also leads her to a prescriptive political aesthetics,
in which she calls for the creation of new, feminist modes of writing,
integrating questions of plot development, representation and style.
Two of Russ’s early essays appeared in Susan Koppelman’s pio-
neering anthology of feminist criticism Images of Women in Fiction:
Feminist Perspectives (1972), as ‘What Can a Heroine Do? or Why
Women Can’t Write’ and ‘Images of Women in Science Fiction’. Both
of these texts interrogate the existing literary tradition as to which
images of women it makes available and what these women can do
other than fall in love or go mad. These traditional plot-patterns, as
Russ asserts in ‘What Can a Heroine Do?’,8 ‘are dramatic embodi-
ments of what a culture believes to be true—or what it would like to
be true—or what it is mortally afraid may be true’ (81). Furthermore,
Russ vividly demonstrates that simple role reversal will not do the
trick: ‘Reversing sexual roles in fiction may make good burlesque or
good fantasy, but it is ludicrous in terms of serious literature. Culture
is male. Our literary myths are for heroes, not heroines’ (83).
Another contradiction, however, which Russ does not make
explicit, emerges from her proposed solution to the dilemma of the
self-consciously feminist writer. The conflict is between the desire to

drop literary conventions altogether (which are, as she maintains
with John Barth, exhausted anyway), and the utter impossibility of
fully escaping the ‘male myths’ shaped by these conventions. What
women experience as their lives is already co-opted and contained by
the web of patriarchal stories available to them. Russ points out that
‘we interpret our own experience in terms of [these myths]. Worse
still, we actually perceive what happens to us in the mythic terms our
culture provides’ (90). On the other hand, she rightly maintains that
while for a writer like, say, Hemingway (to take one of Russ’s own
favourite examples) working with existing traditions is a relatively
simple and advantageous route, to a woman writer this route is not
easily accessible—nor is it desirable, for that matter.
Identifying two ways out of the cul-de-sac of patriarchal narratives,
Russ appears to end up in another. She says: ‘There seem to me to be
two alternatives open to the woman author who no longer cares
about How She Fell in Love or How She went Mad. These are (1) lyri-
cism, and (2) life’ (‘Why Women Can’t Write’, 87). This recipe leaves
crucial questions unanswered. How can women shape new myths
from their own experience, if what they perceive as ‘their own’ life is
already determined by patriarchal myths? And, more importantly,
how is ‘lyricism’ which ‘exists without chronology or causation’ (87)
distinguishable from the patriarchal definitions of the ‘woman’s
sphere’ and of ‘women’s shapeless literature’?
Here the enabling, oppositional practices seem to prove as limiting
as the established plot-patterns. If the web of patriarchal narratives
were indeed perfect and all-encompassing, there would be no escape
from this double-bind. As some of her own fictional texts such as ‘Life
in a Furniture Store’ or ‘Bluestocking’ prove, however, these limiting
narratives contain interstices and inconsistencies which writers from
the ‘margins’ may use to displace the stories that exclude them.
Russ’s essay, even if it does not explicitly explore the possibility,
works from the assumption that these interstices exist and that the
impasse is therefore not definitive.
Russ’s fictional practice shows that her writing strategies success-
fully disrupt narrative conventions by deploying several, even contra-
dictory, strategies at the same time. Read along with ‘What Can a
Heroine Do?’, the short story ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ would seem to
emerge clearly as an example of writing in Russ’s lyric mode. Yet I
would argue that it is precisely the narrative aspects of the story
which make its ‘lyricism’ function as a destabilizing factor. The first
paragraph determines a seemingly clear, linear chronology for the

events that the text relates. Narrative convention works with the logic
that a given event is causally related to the event that precedes it. So,
for example, when the narrator says ‘I was fired the next day’, one is
led to assume that the events preceding this statement are the cause
of her being fired. This assumption is encouraged by the first ‘sum-
mary’ paragraph: ‘shortly after there was a small incident that led to
my being fired’ (162). However, her narrative does not provide events
that would justify firing an otherwise reliable employee. She has a fit
of hysterical laughter when her (spineless) boss breaks his back after
slipping on some paint on the office floor. She also comments on the
fact that he will not be able to bear the shameful knowledge that she
saw him fall. She asks him whether he is all right, although it is obvi-
ous that he is almost dying. All of these are perfectly predictable reac-
tions in a state of confusion when one is confronted with the sudden
presence of near death. Any or none of these responses could have led
to her being fired. The text thus invokes narrative logic, just to make
it slip. One central question emerging from the narrator’s story, for
example, remains unanswered: where did the paint come from which
led to the accident in the first place?
By identifying these inconsistencies, the paradoxical work of trying
to utilize the interstices of patriarchy receives clearer outlines. If ‘Life
in a Furniture Store’ indeed introduces, as I think it does, the feminist
textual strategies Russ makes explicit in ‘What Can a Heroine Do?’,
then her categories ‘life’ and ‘lyricism’ do not work as alternatives but
as simultaneous, interdependent practices. In the terms of my read-
ing here, they may be referred to as plot creation and its simultaneous
disruption.
Other aspects of Russ’s textual practice function according to sim-
ilar oppositional patterns. The fictional authors Russ’s short stories
and novels create do not simply replace the image of the masculine
all-powerful author-creator with the great goddess in a dubious
manoeuver of reversal. These authors, existing as they do in spaces of
supreme instability and disjunction, do not and cannot emerge as
producers of grand counter-narratives. Rather they are mischievous
destabilizers, who disrupt the narrative thrust at the same time as
they construct it. These disruptions, however, are not just metafic-
tional games and intellectual mind-teasers, but emphatically political
strategies in the development of a feminist literary tradition.
Although ‘My Dear Emily’ comes years before Russ’s transition to
explicit feminism, the short story rewrites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
in ways that are politically relevant for feminism. I selected this short
story for discussion in this chapter because it partially conflates the
agency of the protagonist with that of the fictional author. As in many
of Russ’s later stories, the text inscribes in the act of narration the
‘anxieties of authorship’ inextricably connected with marginalized
authors. For women, this troublesome relationship to writing is
strongly invested with romantic notions of authorship, which recon-
figured the woman as the muse of the male narrator (Lanser, Fictions
of Authority, 34). Even when the narrator is female, she is routinely
associated as constructed by a male author.9 The narrating voice in
‘My Dear Emily’, remaining as it does outside the text and therefore
ungendered, risks becoming, by default, the voice of a man who con-
structs his female subject. ‘Life in a Furniture Store’, on the other
hand, in transforming the character into a writer, disrupts this perva-
sive image of authorship. In making the women writers’ anxieties an
object of the story, such texts are able to (at least partially) transform
the limiting discourses which produce the anxieties into enabling
ones. Thus, rather than reading the various women writers who fre-
quently appear in Russ’s fiction as autobiographical representations
of herself, I read them as crucial elements in a narrative strategy with
which the texts (among other things) tackle the privilege of the phal-
lic pen.
Giving the fictional author a strong woman’s voice is one of the
most pervasive strategies employed by Russ’s texts in order to claim
the power of creating oppositional images and stories. The next chap-
ter discusses another such strategy, which works on the level of the
characters in the narrated world. In the character typologies of sci-
ence fiction, non-submissive women await a fate of death and/or
defeat; the female monster, killed by Alyx, may be seen as remnant
and ironical reference to this mechanism. Perhaps in response to
these narratives, the killing of a male becomes central to most of the
stories of agency that Russ creates.
CHAPTER TWO
Acts of Violence:
Representations of Androcide
Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation—The Female

Man (191)
Materialist feminism operates with the assumption that sex consti-
tutes the most basic social class distinction. The utopian goal, then,
is to eradicate sex as a socially relevant category by way of a feminist
revolution. Beginning with the stories around Alyx, Russ’s fiction
develops androcide as the focused representation of a revolutionary
war. Taking the life of a member of the sex that has denied women the
capacity to act opens new ground for female characters in the exist-
ing archive of comprehensible and permissible story lines.
I will, therefore, examine androcide in terms of its narrative func-
tion within the texts, shunning too ready conflation between the ‘real’
lives of women and the stories of characters in fiction. Thus, while I
acknowledge the analogy between the stories people live and fictional
narratives, I also want to point to this analogy’s limitations. Presup-
posing structural similarities between the stories of female fictional
characters and the stories cultures tell about women’s lives does not
suggest their complete identity. In my reading of Russ’s fiction,
androcide is therefore not the celebration of violence, not advocacy of
mass murder, but a narrative device, which (partially) endows female
characters with the ability to act independently. In Russ’s texts,
androcide as a narrative device represents women’s claim to agency,
destroying as it does established gender-specific narratives in the
handed-down set of basic story lines available to (genre) fiction writ-
ers. Women, who are conventionally supposed to give life, especially
to male offspring, transcend this demand of patriarchy by taking the
life of a grown man. Women, who are conventionally expected to help
the male hero, become the heroes of their own stories, destroying pre-
cisely those characters in the story which would bar their access to
heroism.
In the course of her career as a writer, particularly in the phase that
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 47
I labelled ‘explicitly feminist’, Russ has continuously transformed and

developed androcide as a means to give female characters power and
credibility. I will discuss a number of such killings from various points
in Russ’s development. The sword-and-sorcery character Alyx, in the
stories collected in The Adventures of Alyx, is a single, outstanding
woman whose ability to control her actions marks her exceptionality.
In Picnic on Paradise (1968), Russ’s first novel which is also included in
the collection, for example, Alyx kills an individual man as an imme-
diate reaction to an offence committed by him. She has no explicit con-
sciousness of the necessity to fight for women as a group. In contrast,
Jael from The Female Man (1975) kills the man not primarily as an indi-
vidual, but as a member of the sex class she hates. Finally, Irene, pro-
tagonist from The Two of Them (1978), acts on the basis of a more
complex concept of oppression. She kills the man she loves.
The Adventures of Alyx: Take the Sword and Win
As the discussion of ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) above suggested, Alyx is

an individual woman, whose exceptional strength and independence
within a patriarchal culture rest on her special relation to an altered
myth of creation. A collection of the short stories around Alyx
(excluding only one) was first published under the title Alyx in 1976.
In 1983, the collection was republished under the title The Adventures
of Alyx. The one story excluded in both of these editions, ‘A Game of
Vlet’ (1974), later found a space in The Zanzibar Cat (1983). Russ
remarks in her introductory note to the story: ‘[“A Game of Vlet” is]
the last story I ever wrote about my character Alyx, the last, the last,
the last, I’m sorry, readers who want more of her, but there just ain’t
no more’ (256). Russ’s comment on ‘A Game of Vlet’ demonstrates
that the character Alyx clearly belongs to an earlier stage in feminism.
What was revolutionary and breathtakingly new in 1967 seems out of
place in the environment of the feminism of the mid-1970s, which
had already fully articulated the need to appropriate agency through
revolutionary acts.
The short story ‘I Gave her Sack and Sherry’ (1967)1 shows a ver-
sion of Alyx at seventeen when she was still living with her first hus-
band, who treats her as a slave. Once she decides to leave him, the
first thing she does is cut her long black hair, in a gesture of liberation
reminiscent of the cutting of Edarra’s hair in ‘Bluestocking.’ When he
attempts to keep her from leaving, she kills him:
Her hands dropped with a tumbled rush of hair, she moved

slowly to one side, and when he took out from behind the door
the length of braided hide he used to herd cattle, when he
swung it high in the air and down in a snapping arc to where
she—not where she was; where she had been—this extraordi-
nary young woman had leapt half the distance between them
and wrested the stock of the whip from him a foot from his
hand. He was off balance and fell; with a vicious grimace she
brought the stock down short and hard on the top of his head.
She had all her wits about her as she stood over him. (33)
As in the killing of the men in ‘Bluestocking’, the death of her hus-
band is represented as a reaction to a direct assault on her rather than
as a symbolic act that would fundamentally change her life. The act
of killing for Alyx simply confirms the independence she already has,
making this independence an explicit part of her character. Having
made her escape, Alyx joins a group of smugglers, presumably the
same men who had visited her husband just before she left him. Pre-
vailing over a physically stronger man reinforces her self-confidence,
which allows her to confront all males, even the wild crew on the
ship: ‘they reminded her uncannily of her husband, of whom she was
no longer afraid’ (35). She is always ready to fight. If she can kill one,
she can face them all.
Young Alyx uses Blackbeard, the ship’s captain, as a sparring part-
ner and learns to fight with swords. He, surprisingly gentle and emo-
tional for the type of character he represents, gives her a nightgown,
which she at first refuses: ‘Tcha! It’s a bargain, isn’t it!’ (37) Since she
‘lost’ her first man, the plot needs to find another for the heterosexual
romance required of a story in which a woman is the protagonist. The
story quite deliberately frustrates these expectations, at least partially.
She gets her man, but on her own terms instead of on his:
‘Woman, what man have you ever been with before?’
‘Oh!’ said she startled, ‘my husband,’ and backed off a little.
‘And where is he?’
‘Dead.’ She could not help a grin.
‘How?’ She held up a fist. Blackbeard sighed heavily.
(37–38)
Slowly, she begins to notice—and enjoy—Blackbeard’s body. How-
ever, as soon as he tries to constrain her freedom to move, she is ready
to take off again, leaving no doubt that she would not hesitate to kill
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 49
him as well if he tried to stop her. As soon as he is sure enough of

being in possession of ‘his girl’ to say, ‘Look, I am going into town
tonight, but you can’t come’ (39), he has already lost her. She moves
on to Ourdh, where she will become the famous pick-lock and ‘kill-
quick for hire’ of ‘Bluestocking’ and ‘The Barbarian’ (1968). These
stories represent a female character who already has agency, as some-
thing she magically possesses as part of her being. This ‘extraordi-
nary’ woman kills only to maintain her independence, not to create it.
Although the killing marks a major transition in the plot, it is not the
cause of this transition.
Alyx’s singularity makes her story a speculative model rather than
a fundamental reformulation of how ‘real’ women can narrate their
lives. The text’s detached narrative voice parallels this isolation of
women as individuals, which Russ’s later texts make a pronounced
effort to overcome. Keeping the narrator outside the text as an anony-
mous speaking subject, the story risks erasing both the female author
and (potentially) female readers as well. A ‘male’ voice insinuates
itself, even if ironically, into the voice of the, ostensibly un-sexed, nar-
rator who hides outside the tale. Representing the point of view of the
husband who is being left by his wife, the narrator says: ‘They insist,
these women, on crying, on making demands, and on disagreeing
about everything. They fight from one side of the room to the other’
(32–33). Because this mode of narration conceals its origin, the
speaking subject receives a male body by default, even if the author
as a living, historical being is known (or believed) to be a woman.
Thus, the following representation of Alyx’s body is filtered through
the insidious male gaze: ‘He looked at the nightgown, at the train she
held, at her arched neck (she had to look up to meet his gaze), at her
free arm curve to her throat in a gesture of totally unconscious femi-
ninity’ (37). The narrative discourse here undermines the power that
Alyx exerts in the plot. I would argue that it is the impossibility of
resisting the authority of the male voice in this type of narrative which
motivates the use of a more personal voice, clearly connected to a
woman, in most of Russ’s later—explicitly feminist—texts. As the
previous chapter demonstrated, Russ began to develop this theme as
early as 1965 in her short story ‘Life in a Furniture Store’. I will return
to this question in more detail in Part Two, which explores women’s
relationship to each other on the basis of their (presumably) shared
physical existence. From such a perspective, the bodies of women
serve as the basis of their identity as an oppressed class.
In the third short story collected in The Adventures of Alyx, ‘The Bar-
barian’ (1968), Alyx faces not an ordinary man, but an all-powerful

sorcerer who shares many of the characteristics of Martin Guevara,
the vampire of ‘My Dear Emily’. This ‘fat man’, who does not age,
hires Alyx without informing her about the task he wants her to per-
form; she accepts because she enjoys the thrill. The quick-witted
pick-lock puts her skills to his service and the two break into the gov-
ernor’s villa, where she learns that she is to kill the infant daughter of
the governor, as well as her nurse. The baby, he tells her, will, when
she grows up, become an evil queen: ‘She will be the death of more
than one child and more than one slave. In plain fact, she will be a
horror to the world. This I know’ (56). Alyx refuses to kill the child,
but cuts the nurse’s throat to keep her from screaming. The sorcerer
disappears, but not before striking Alyx’s husband (a new one) with
a mysterious disease for her disobedience.
At this point Alyx turns her skills against the sorcerer. Locking her
raving husband in the house, she goes out to hunt her mysterious
employer, eventually locating him in a tower outside the city. As a true
sorcerer’s hideout, the tower is furnished with a magical protective
device to keep off trespassers. The device is an invisible yet impene-
trable wall that bars her way up the stairs and has similar symbolic
significance to the infamous ‘glass ceiling’ in women’s careers. After
a number of frustrated attempts to get through, Alyx discovers the
secret of the wall: it keeps out only living beings, so she brings her-
self as near death as possible and comes through, barely alive. She
struggles with the man, who pompously claims to be the creator of
the entire world, and prevails:
‘Yes, but—no—wait!’ for Alyx sprang to her feet and fetched
from his stool the pillow on which he had been sitting, the pur-
pose of which he did not at first seem to comprehend, but then
his eyes went wide with horror, for she had got the pillow in
order to smother him, and that is just what she did. (66)
Before she kills him, she tricks him into showing her how to turn off
his machine, with which he claims to have created and controlled the
world. Again, Alyx encounters an alternative, ironic myth of creation,
one in which all being originates in the machine of an uncanny wiz-
ard. Undaunted, she debunks the myth:
Make the world? You hadn’t the imagination. You didn’t even make
these machines; that shiny finish is for customers, not craftsmen, and
controls that work by little pictures are for children. You are a child
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 51
yourself, a child and a horror, and I would ten times rather be subject
to your machinery than master of it. (67, italics in original)
The death of the evil pretender saves the life of her husband. As in
the other Alyx stories, the protagonist moves as a dissembler and
impersonator in a plot template that narrative convention tailor-made
for male characters. From a linear progression of adventures, she
emerges victorious against seemingly insurmountable odds. In these
stories, men and women are not yet seen as antagonistic classes.
When she comes home from her successful quest, her man awaits
Alyx as his hero:
She got home at dawn and, as her man lay asleep in bed, it
seemed to her that he was made out of the light of the dawn
that streamed through his fingers and his hair, irradiating him
with gold. She kissed him and he opened his eyes.
‘You’ve come home,’ he said. (67)
Having performed the role of the hero who solves all problems that
confront him (sic) with wit and skill rather than with physical force,
she now acts as the prince, kissing sleeping beauty awake.
A comparison between Alyx’s interactions with males and the rela-
tionship between Emily and the vampire in ‘My Dear Emily’ demon-
strates the crucial importance of androcide for the agency of the
female protagonist. The central factor here is the ability, that is the
knowledge and skill, to kill a male opponent, not the killing itself.
After her dental ‘deflowering’ by Guevara, Emily seeks him out in his
hotel room, with the intention of destroying the vampire:
‘Nobody knows I came,’ she says rapidly. ‘But I’m going to fin-
ish you off. I know how.’ She hunts feverishly in her bag.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he remarks quietly.
‘Ah!’ Hauling out her baby cross (silver), she confronts him
with it like Joan of Arc. He is still mildly amused, still mildly
surprised. (125)
Emily’s ineffectual attempt to ‘kill’ Guevara also seals her ties to him
and further emphasizes her inability to act as an independent agent.
In contrast to Alyx, she lacks the knowledge of how to destroy the
representative man who bars or threatens her agency. Ironically, he
informs her of how he could be harmed: ‘My dear, the significance is
in the feeling, the faith, not the symbol. You use that the way you
would use a hypodermic needle’ (125). Ultimately, it is Emily’s father
and her ex-fiancé who destroy the vampire, at a time when he has
ceased to be a threat to the woman.
In Russ’s first novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), androcide takes a
slightly different turn. This novel or long short story (such genre cat-
egories slip easily in science fiction) first came out as an independent
publication but was later included in Alyx and The Adventures of Alyx.
While in the stories discussed above, Alyx kills to save her life or that
of her husband, in Picnic on Paradise her killings are motivated by grief
and revenge. This story propels Alyx from the sword-and-sorcery
environment into the different context of science fiction. In this story,
she is a murderer and pickpocket from ancient Greece, who escapes
execution by a coincidental propulsion through time to an alien world
in the distant future. Alyx is thus not only slightly alien within the
context of science fiction, but also literally becomes a ‘visitor’ from a
different time and place.
The Trans-Temporal Authority, which had accidentally set her off
on this involuntary journey through time, quickly promotes her from
her status as guinea pig and object of study to a position as a military
agent. She becomes an important asset in the commercial war that is
taking place on the planet Paradise, a winter tourist resort which is
claimed by two adversaries who remain obscure. Her mission is to
rescue a small party of rich tourists and take them to a safe military
base. This task has to be carried out without the help of any of the
available high-tech equipment, without vehicles, and without
firearms since these devices would be detectable by the ‘enemy’. Her
unique profile—she is skilled in all kinds of ancient survival strate-
gies, but completely ignorant of modern technology—makes her the
perfect candidate for this rescue mission.
Isolated from the rest of humanity on this sterile planet devoid of
warmth, the two cultures, as well as the two narrative conventions,
science fiction and sword-and-sorcery, clash violently. The rich
tourists epitomize complete alienation, the society in which they live
seeming perfectly smooth, clean and spotless. The ice that covers the
planet is an externalization of the chill emanating from this culture,
which is capitalism carried to an extreme. The individual tourists are
isolated from each other and from the image of a core self, even
though they constantly talk about their psychological problems and
group dynamics in scenes reminiscent of psychotherapeutic group
sessions. Plastic surgery can fit them with the artificial bodies they
want, but this merging with machinery lacks the liberatory edge that
it will take on in Russ’s later texts in characters such as Jael. Their
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 53
culture completely represses the reality of death. When one of the

fugitives does die, it is at first impossible for the survivors to compre-
hend her death as the irreversible end of life. The authorities regulate
every aspect of people’s lives, including reproduction, but nobody is
concerned with what or who these authorities represent. They expe-
rience the ice of Paradise as beautiful because it corresponds to the
sterility of their own society. Alyx’s body, which shows the marks and
deteriorations of a physically active life, symbolizes the contrast
between the two societies. Her scars and other signs of ageing repre-
sent her mortality. As a petty criminal, she operated in the interstices
of her culture, partially outside of and independent from the laws her
society represents.
As in the other Alyx stories, Alyx here has agency before she kills.
The narrative relates a number of instances prior to the killing in
which Alyx demonstrates her ability to act against male characters. A
young military officer on Paradise, three heads taller than Alyx, is the
first to experience her unwillingness to comply with conventional
rules of decorum for women:
I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot believe you’re the proper Trans-
Temporal Agent; I think—’ and he finished his thought on the
floor, his head under one of his ankles and this slight young
woman … somehow holding him down in a position he could
not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation. She let
him go. (5, my emphasis)
Alyx does not hesitate to react with violent physical force. She never
stops to think if what she is doing is socially acceptable behaviour.
Gunnar, the man whom she will kill later in the story, is next in line
to have to submit to her physical skill. When he tries to take control
over the group, she again asserts herself with immediate physical
action:
Gunnar came up to her sympathetically and took hold of her
hands. She twisted in his grasp, instinctively beginning a
movement that would have ended in the pit of his stomach,
but he grasped each of her wrists, saying ‘No, no, you’re not
big enough,’ and holding her indulgently away from him with
his big, straight, steady arms. He had begun to laugh, saying ‘I
know this kind of thing too, you see!’ when she turned in his
grip, taking hold of his wrists in the double hold used by cer-
tain circus performers, and bearing down sharply on his arms
… she lifted herself up as if on a gate, swung under his guard

and kicked him right under the arch of the ribs. (26)
In both of these instances, the text sets up a narrative situation in
which the female character would conventionally be forced to submit
to a male who is barring her access to agency by the force of his phys-
ical superiority. It is in situations like this that Alyx’s story quite
deliberately slips from the ‘masculine’ plot template to insert a story
line omitted in conventional genre fiction. Here, Alyx demonstrates
her exceptionality. Alyx’s—exceptional—reaction creates an alterna-
tive turn in the story; instead of yielding, she asserts herself and pre-
vails.
Significantly, Alyx’s agency, that is her ability to control the plot,
also rests on her emotional distance from male characters generally,
even from her lover. Alyx, who has never loved a man before, falls in
love with the 36-year-old adolescent boy who calls himself Machine
because this is how he experiences his existence. When their rela-
tionship becomes known in the group (they make love within earshot
of the others), an intense rivalry between Machine and Gunnar
breaks out, and Machine fiercely wants to protect what he ultimately
perceives as his property:
‘I shall take you tonight,’ said Machine between his teeth; ‘I
shall take you right before the eyes of that man!’
She brought the point of her elbow up into his ribs hard
enough to double him over … (114)
Again Alyx reacts immediately, without hesitation. She does not let
male presumption diminish her ego even if she is emotionally
attached to the perpetrator. In all of these passages, Alyx matter-of-
factly does the opposite of what is expected of her and in so doing cre-
ates a conceptual space in which women prevail in (physical or
discursive) confrontations with male characters. Since Alyx’s agency
is solidly grounded in her scarred and efficient body (with all six fin-
gers functioning), her presence in the text also destabilizes the privi-
leged symbolic relation of the male body to power.
These smaller victories set the stage for Alyx’s ultimate destruction
of the male body: androcide. When Machine falls into a glacier chim-
ney, Gunnar is the only one around who could save his life with minor
risk to his, Gunnar’s, own safety. But Gunnar chooses not to rescue his
rival. After Machine’s death, Alyx is devastated and even though Gun-
nar plunges himself into convulsions of guilt, Alyx coolly kills him:
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 55
‘Defend yourself,’ said Alyx, and when he did not—for it did

not seem to occur to him that this was possible—she slashed
the fabric of his suit with her lefthand knife and with the right
she drove Trans-Temp’s synthetic steel up to the hilt between
Gunnar’s ribs. It did not kill him; he staggered back a few
steps, holding his chest. She tripped him onto his back and
then cut his suit open while the madman did not even move,
all this in an instant, and when he tried to rise she slashed him
through the belly and then—lest the others intrude—pulled
back his head by the pale hair and cut his throat from ear to ear.
She did not spring back from the blood but stood in it, her face
strained in the same involuntary grimace as before, the cords
standing out on her neck. (133)
She does not kill him to defend her life; she kills him out of anger and
grief over the death of the only man she ever loved. The murder is
individual retaliation; Alyx has no sense of a common cause for
women. The doctrines of patriarchy pre-date even the society of the
sword-and-sorcery version of ancient Greece, where Picnic on Paradise
places Alyx’s home.
Her ability to defy the death-mills of indoctrination is inexplicable
in materialist terms. Alyx has the same independence of mind and
un-selfconscious ability to act as Janet from the all-female utopian
society on Whileaway (‘When It Changed’, The Female Man), but with-
out a social system that would provide the material conditions for her
existence. The Mediterranean murderer and pickpocket is an isolated
incident of an exceptional woman, while the Whileawayan is the
product of her genderless community of strong, independent individ-
uals. However, as Russ points out in ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science
Fiction’ (1975), characters in science fiction are never purely individ-
ual (113). Alyx is also a type, and her story is a potential model for
female characters in genre fiction and beyond. Female protagonists
who become killers of men in Russ’s later work, such as Jael from The
Female Man or Irene from The Two of Them, reverse the relationship
between their own agency and the act of killing. While Alyx’s agency
is a precondition for her androcidal actions, these actions become the
foundation of (partial) agency for Jael and Irene.
The Female Man: The hateful hero with the broken heart
In 1969, when ‘feminism … hit the university’,2 Russ wrote her first
self-consciously and explicitly feminist short story, ‘When It
Changed’, which she placed in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous
Visions (1972). The story, which won the prestigious Nebula Award in
1972, introduced the radical feminist vision of a class- and gender-
less society, Whileaway. As an all-female utopian society, Whileaway
harks back to earlier feminist books such as Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Herland (serialized in 1915). ‘When It Changed’ also shows
intertextual connections to contemporary genre writing. The story
was, according to Russ, in part a reaction to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left
Hand of Darkness, published in 1969:
… how can one call a hermaphrodite ‘he,’ as Miss LeGuin does?
I tried (in my head) changing all the masculine pronouns to
feminine ones, and marveled at the difference … Weeks later
the Daemon suddenly whispered ‘Katy drives like a maniac,’
and I found myself on Whileaway on a country road at night.3
Russ’s version of a ‘gender-less’ society acknowledges the obsta-
cles language and narrative conventions place in the way of such
utopian visions. There are no men on Whileaway. Originally a Terran
colony, Whileaway in ‘When It Changed’ lost contact with Earth at
some point in the past. About 600 years before the narrated events, a
plague swept away half the population—all the males. The remaining
colonists, all women, created a thriving, rational and, above all, egal-
itarian society:
‘Whileaway was lucky,’ I said. ‘We had a big initial gene pool,
we had been chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high
technology and a large remaining population in which every
adult was two-or-three-experts in one. The soil is good. The
climate is blessedly easy. There are thirty millions of us now.
Things are beginning to snowball in industry—do you under-
stand?—give us seventy years and we’ll have more than one
real city, more than a few industrial centres, full-time machin-
ists, give us seventy years and not everyone will have to spend
three quarters of a lifetime on the farm.’ (14)4
However, as functional and just as this utopian society may be, its
existence is also highly precarious. The narrator in the passage
quoted above is speaking to a representative from Earth, a male, who
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 57
has just landed on Whileaway with an (all-male) delegation that

wants to reclaim the colony. Another man from the Terran recolo-
nization crew admits that the utopia is an accomplished and suc-
cessful experiment, but then postulates: ‘Whileaway is still missing
something’ (18). To the dismay of the Whileawayans, who miss noth-
ing ‘except that life isn’t endless’ (18), he goes on: ‘There is only half
a species here. Men must come back to Whileaway’ (18). The story
centres around the demise of the all-female utopia, which is defence-
less against Terrans who command the more effective intergalactic
weaponry. Again, the lack of agency, this time of the all-women soci-
ety as a whole rather than of individual women, is emphasized
through an ineffectual attempt to kill the male opponent:
Katy [the narrator’s wife] said in a brittle voice, ‘You damned
fool, don’t you know when we’ve been insulted?’ and swung
up the rifle to shoot him through the screen, but I got to her
before she could fire and knocked the rifle out of aim; it burned
a hole through the porch floor. (19)
The man survives and the women-only utopia is doomed. Men
(which in Terran logic ostensibly includes women as well) will
return and, if necessary, they will use force. In a resigned note at the
end, the narrator remembers the original name of the colony, which
captures its only temporary existence: ‘For-A-While’ (21, italics in
original).
As the examples from ‘My Dear Emily’ and ‘When It Changed’
demonstrate, ineffectual attempts to kill a man in Russ’s fiction mark
and confirm women’s failure to attain agency as individuals or as a
group. A deliberate and effectual killing, then, makes all the differ-
ence in the narrative. Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975) retains the
original idea of Whileaway as an all-female utopia, but the novel takes
a more radical and more assertive stance which rests in part on a nar-
rative of androcide. The Female Man is Russ’s most important book—
if only because it has received the most critical attention by far. It is
doubtlessly Russ’s most explicitly feminist novel and employs more
complex narrative strategies than both of her two earlier novels, Pic-
nic on Paradise (1968) and And Chaos Died (1970).
Russ began working on the project in spring of 1970 and finished it
towards the end of 1971, but it took her almost four years to place it
with a publisher. Russ herself attributes this delay partly to a mis-
judgement on the part of her agent, who tried to sell the book in hard-
cover (letter to the author, 21 Sept. 1995). However, the difficulties in
finding a publisher may also relate to the book’s explicit feminist

politics and concomitant sophisticated narrative strategies.
In the early 1970s, women as authors, narrators and characters
were only beginning to claim significant space within science fiction.
This is particularly true of feminist women. Alice Sheldon still wrote
under her pen-name James Tiptree, Jr., and people still believed she
was a man. Ursula Le Guin’s visions could be considered feminist,
but the (mainly) male protagonists and (more or less) conventional
narrative style of her early work (e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969)
fit more easily into the generally masculinist science fiction environ-
ment. By 1975, the whole field of science fiction had changed. More
feminists had made inroads into science fiction, and women writers
had received important science fiction awards. That year also saw the
publication of the Khatru 3 & 4 Symposium: Women in Science Fiction, in
which writers like Joanna Russ, James Tiptree (still not ‘revealed’ as
a woman), Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda McIntyre
and Samuel Delany discussed women’s precarious situation within
science fiction.
One could identify a number of other reasons why The Female Man,
which is now regarded as probably the most outstanding feminist
science fiction novel of the decade, was not published until four years
after it was finished. However, there is no doubt that the book caused
a great deal of confusion and irritation in science fiction circles, both
when it first came out in 1975 and when it was republished by The
Women’s Press ten years later. Interestingly, most negative reviews
cloak their undercurrent of homophobia and anti-feminism—the
novel is the first of Russ’s texts with explicit lesbian love scenes—in
vague and self-righteous assaults on the book’s transgressive narra-
tive techniques. A reviewer in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fic-
tion, for example, remarked in 1975:
The Female Man is advertised as a science fiction novel, but it is
not one. It is not a story. It is not an action. There is no narra-
tive thread. Instead, one might more fairly call The Female Man
a meditation or an exercise in self-revelation that uses some of the
devices of science fiction… . Nothing is visualized, nothing
happens. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from the book, it
is that the author feels that men are not altogether human, but that
women without men are or might be. (Rev. of The Female Man, 51,
my emphasis)
In the context of this review, which uncritically conflates one of the
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 59
protagonists with the author herself, the phrase ‘exercise in self-rev-

elation’ most likely refers to the lesbian sexuality which this protago-
nist embraces (among other things) at the end of the novel. Such
evaluations that equate narrative complexity with bad writing in an
obscured critique of the novel’s radical feminist politics resurfaced
after The Women’s Press edition came out in 1985. For example,
Laura Marcus maintains in the Times Literary Supplement:
Joanna Russ has learned all that a radical feminist science fic-
tion writer should know about the genre; but this does not pre-
vent The Female Man from being very nearly unreadable. Her
prose is a singular affair, marked by a simplicity of diction and
a remarkable obfuscation of temporality, context, place,
addresser, addressee, and, ultimately, the point. (1070)
Similarly, the Library Journal, assuming the voice of liberal feminist
reason, insists, in 1988, that The Female Man ‘marked Russ’s transi-
tion from a writer of sensitive, skillful, feminist sf such as Picnic on
Paradise, 1968, and And Chaos Died, 1970, to the polemicist for feminist
perspectives’ (Rev. of The Female Man, 30). From these reviews one
might conclude that The Female Man is not ‘skilful’ and ‘sensitive’
because it is too radically feminist. It is not a novel because it has no
‘action’ and no ‘narrative thread.’ It is ‘unreadable’ because it does
not show its ‘point’. Contradicting all of these claims on a number of
levels, my readings of The Female Man in this and the following chap-
ters analyse the ways in which the novel skilfully explodes the very
narrative conventions in which these reviewers ground their criti-
cism.
The Female Man significantly transforms Whileaway. Transferred to
the novel from the short story, the exclusively female society is no
longer an isolated colony like it is in ‘When It Changed’, but interacts
with women from other societies represented in the text. In the novel,
Whileaway is only one of four narrative worlds and thus has a differ-
ent function altogether as the home of one of the four protagonists
whose story interlaces with the stories of the other, non-utopian
women. This section focuses on one of these non-utopian protago-
nists, Jael, whose name relates her to a biblical man-killer in Judges
4 and 5.5
There is indeed plenty of action in the The Female Man, only not of
the kind one might expect in a science fiction text. Russ’s Jael repre-
sents violent feminist rage at women’s oppression within patriarchy.
While Alyx does not think beyond retaliation, Jael uses her hatred
and vindictiveness as an instrument in a violent resolution of the sex-

antagonism and the reappropriation of her sense of self. In Jael’s
world, which is in the future but exists on an alternative time contin-
uum, women and men are engaged in a cold war against each other;
the contradiction between the sex classes has been externalized. The
two sexes live separated from each other on two different continents
with an ocean between them. Women have created a nation of their
own, ‘Womanland’, on a continent which could (if it were in our time
continuum) be identified as North America, while men have moved to
the area that in 1969 was still the Soviet Union. Their nation is—
appropriately—renamed ‘Manland’. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘Her-
land’ echoes through these names, but there is no indication that a
harmonious reintegration of both sexes in one culture is a possibility.
In contrast to Alyx, who merely acts without reflecting upon it, Jael
is conscious of the process of gaining agency—and therefore self-
respect—through androcide:
Murder is my one way out.
For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with
every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a
little of my soul. (The Female Man, 195)
On a diplomatic mission in Manland, Jael negotiates with a male
representative, Boss, who tries to convince her that what women
really want is to reunite with men. Brandishing his penis, he performs
a satire of heterosexual ‘seduction’ clichés. He only nominally
addresses her in his ritual soliloquy:
You’re a woman, aren’t you? This is the crown of your life. This
is what God made you for. I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to
screw you until you can’t stand up. You want it. You want to be
mastered… All you women, you’re all women, you’re sirens,
you’re beautiful, you’re waiting for me, waiting for a man,
waiting for me to stick it in, waiting for me, me, me. (181)
This scene also underscores one crucial difference from Russ’s earlier
work. While, for example, Guevara’s mocking performance of hetero-
sexual intercourse refers to the same sexual politics within patriarchy
as Boss’s soliloquy, Boss makes these politics explicit. The character
of Guevara requires an active, feminist reading to identify its subver-
sive implications; Boss’s ravings constitute a scathing caricature of
normative masculine behaviour from a clearly feminist perspective,
which (as the reviewer’s reactions demonstrate) must be painfully
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 61
obvious even from the perspective of an anti-feminist reader. While

‘My Dear Emily’ works with strategies of disguise and dissemblance,
The Female Man leaves no doubt about its politics.
The killing of Boss is not represented as the spontaneous, erratic
action of a helpless victim. To the contrary, it is a carefully planned,
deliberate act which is contextualized as part of a revolutionary war.
Jael, who has turned her body into a killing-machine through plastic
surgery and metal implants, does not execute Boss immediately; she
lets him ramble on along his never-changing line of argumentation
about how women need men to ‘do’ them since they ‘don’t have noth-
ing to do it with’ (168). Her apparent patience at this point is merely
a prelude to the great killing frenzy about to break out. Jael knows
how she will react to a situation like this; her anger is not an immedi-
ate reaction to the pathetic pseudo-come-on of a man who poses no
direct threat to her. Her anger is much larger and more thorough than
a direct reaction to the ramblings of a single would-be rapist.
Boss’s killing becomes highly symbolic, his death denaturalizing
the defeats and (virtual) deaths of women at the hands of male hero-
conquerors in science fiction. In her essay ‘Amor Vincit Foeminam:
The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction’ (1980), Russ analyses anti-
feminist science fiction novels and short stories that depict strong
women and all-female societies. In these stories, the women are
brought down by such male heroes, whose sole claim to domination
is their biology:
So ‘natural’ is male victory that most of the stories cannot offer
a plausible explanation of how the women could have rebelled
in the first place… The conflict is resolved—either for all
women or for an exemplary woman—by some form of phallic
display, and the men’s victory (which is identical with the
women’s defeat) is not a military or political event but a quasi-
religious conversion of the women. (43)6
In Russ’s story of Jael, the phallic display does not turn the woman
into victim of biology, driven to worship the penis. On the contrary,
Jael thoroughly debunks this logic. ‘Rosy assassin’ that she is, she
relishes the act of slaughtering the man instead of submitting to the
supposed pleasures of penile penetration:
I could have drilled him between the eyes, but if I do that, I all
but leave my signature on him; it’s freakier and funnier to
make it look as if a wolf did it. Better to think his Puli went
mad and attacked him. I raked him gaily on the neck and chin
and when he embraced me in rage, sank my claws into his
back. You have to build up the fingers surgically so they’ll take
the strain. A certain squeamishness prevents me from using
my teeth in front of witnesses—the best way to silence an
enemy is to bite out his larynx. Forgive me! I dug the hardened
cuticle into his neck but he sprang away; he tried to kick but I
wasn’t there (I told you they rely too much on their strength);
he got hold of my arm but I broke the hold and spun him off,
adding with my nifty, weighted shoon another bruise on his
limping kidneys. Ha ha! He fell on me (you don’t feel injuries,
in my state) and I reached around and scored him under the
ear, letting him spray urgently into the rug … (182)
When she has completed the killing, the text depicts the relief of ten-
sion as cathartic: ‘Jael. Clean and satisfied from head to foot. Boss is
pumping his life out into the carpet’ (182).
Jael here reverses and distorts the act of heterosexual intercourse,
orgasm being analogous with death. She relates her rage to the man’s
sexual arousal: ‘Boss was muttering something angry about his erec-
tion, so, angry enough for two, I produced my own—by this I mean
that the grafted muscles on my fingers and hands pulled back the
loose skin …’ (181, my emphasis). Under this loose skin, Jael has
artificial claws, with which she proceeds to penetrate Boss’s body to
kill him. The killing here is more than just the taking of life, it is a cel-
ebration of Jael’s physical power, an atrocious violation of the male
body. The passage mimics and thus exposes the violation of women’s
bodies in patriarchal narratives. As men have stabbed women with
their penises, Jael stabs the representative man with her claws, let-
ting him spray blood instead of seminal fluid. Boss pumps out his
own life instead of pumping new life into the female reproductive
organs, which in this process had become the site of her oppression.
The male character’s death enables the power of the female character
in the narrative.7
This analogy to sexual acts works because it is normative patriar-
chal sexuality which most effectively helps to bar women from
agency. In ‘Amor Vincit Foeminam,’ Joanna Russ quotes a passage from
Edmund Cooper’s Gender Genocide, which came out in 1972—after The
Female Man was finished, but before its publication. The parallels
between Cooper’s rendition of heterosexual intercourse and Jael’s
killing scene are nevertheless striking (italics mine):
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 63
No woman—particularly an exterminator—who is conscious

and uninjured can be raped… The revulsion and feeling of
sickness just sort of died. And the weight on top of me seemed
to be—well, interesting. And when he pinioned my arms and bit
my throat and dug his fingers into my breast, it all hurt like hell but it
aroused me… So I let him enter… I tell you, I never knew what
a climax was until that red-haired animal squirted his semen
into my womb. (50)
Since it is highly unlikely that either writer knew the work of the
other when they worked on their respective scenes, both must have
drawn from a well-established convention in (genre) literature,
which points to a deeply ingrained plot pattern of patriarchal dis-
courses in general. What is particularly insidious about Cooper’s text
is that it is ostensibly narrated by the defeated woman herself, who
thus sanctions her own subjugation as natural.
In such defences of patriarchy, male biology justifies the dominance
of men as a class. Science fiction texts that use androcentric plot tem-
plates uncritically have accordingly produced stories that culminate
in women’s failure when they dare to assume a position of power. In
The Female Man, Russ relies on existing genre conventions, but trans-
forms them into stories in which women are able to de-throne the
male genital: when Boss displays his penis, Jael does not submit but
gloriously prevails.
Man-slaughter for Jael as a character is her way of forcing men to
recognize her own responsibility for her actions:
I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred
twisting your arm, I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into
your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am
doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not
you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is
I, who you will not admit exists. (The Female Man, 195, italics
in original)
Jael constructs herself as force and fury personified, as the female
redeemer, who, turning herself into a killing-machine, sacrifices her-
self for the sake of all women. Mercilessly destroying the male body,
she transfers women’s physical and psychological pain to him. Only
when he recognizes her as an agent, expressing this recognition with
a ‘truthful reflection in [his] eyes’ (The Female Man ,195), can she rec-
ognize herself. In the very act of becoming independent, she looks for
recognition from a man, reaffirming her dependence. This depen-

dence, however, has been transformed: it is she, now, who is the mas-
ter, not he. The former slave, through revolution, has negated her
relation to power. Marilyn Hacker notes that ‘Jael lives for The Man
in just as consuming a way as Jeannine does’ (74), but this does not
fully capture Jael’s predicament: while Jael is deeply entrenched in
the gender antagonism, she does not live for ‘the man’, she lives
against, and in spite of ‘him’. Androcide has two sides for Jael: her
assertion of agency is invariably tied to the reaffirmation of the cate-
gorical dependency. Her impasse points to the need to develop strate-
gies which move beyond straightforward opposition.
Russ’s later characters share a number of attributes with the
indomitable early creation Alyx, but there are significant differences
which parallel transitions in Russ’s feminism. Jael is a character who
merges science fictional devices with fantasy. She is a high-tech fem-
inist vampire who kills to suck the blood out of patriarchy. Although
she fights for women collectively, her technologized body, very much
like Alyx’s, also marks her as an exception. As in the stories around
Alyx, her body disrupts the connection between female anatomy and
lack of agency. However, while Alyx is born with the physical advan-
tage that makes her exceptional, Jael creates this advantage, which
gives her access to agency, herself. Furthermore, Jael kills the man out
of principle rather than as reaction to one of his acts. The androcide
narrated in the text is not unique, but one of many similar killings
which together constitute Jael’s violent oppositional strategy. Simi-
larly, the protagonist Irene Waskiewicz in Russ’s novel The Two of
Them, which first came out in 1978, is also reminiscent of Alyx,8 par-
ticularly of the Alyx of Picnic on Paradise. Yet Irene’s narrative trans-
forms her from an extraordinary woman, who fights for her own
independence, to an ordinary woman, who takes on patriarchy as one
woman among others rather than for women as singular and sole
heroine of the narrative.
The Two of Them: To hell with the universe!
The Two of Them combines strands from Russ’s earlier work, integrat-
ing their contradictions to a new vision of feminist oppositional poli-
tics within science fiction. Although this novel uses simpler narrative
techniques than The Female Man and at first seems to remain well
within the boundaries of science fiction, with some fantasy elements
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 65
for flavour, the reverberations of earlier themes in the text highlight

the development of Russ as a writer. I have already mentioned Irene’s
affinities to the early feminist character Alyx. The Two of Them also
takes up the idea of parallel universes from The Female Man: in The Two
of Them, the two interstellar spies, Irene and Ernst Neumann are sent
on a mission to the planet Ka’abah, a colony which has adopted a
social structure that uses stereotypical elements from Islamic cultures
and exaggerates patriarchy to an extreme. On this mission, Irene is in
charge for the first time and not Ernst, her partner, lover, teacher and
mentor. Irene and Ernst come from alternate worlds, the headquar-
ters of their employers are located on yet another alternate world, and
Ka’abah also exists in another possible universe.
Irene’s home world is, like Joanna’s, similar to the Earth of the fic-
tional author. Ernst was instrumental in Irene’s escape from Ameri-
can suburbia, which had been in the process of stifling her ambition.
In a number of flash-backs, the narrator relates Irene’s rescue, pre-
senting her as an apparently independent young woman, who knows
exactly what she wants and does not want. Irene is 16 in 1953 (The
Two of Them, 29) when Ernst Neumann walks into her home as a mys-
terious stranger. He visits Irene’s mother, for reasons which remain
obscure. Irene senses that Ernst is different from the males she
knows, specifically from her boyfriend David, who comes to embody
all the elements in her environment which coalesce to force her into a
subdued existence in the footsteps of her mother. The stranger seems
to recognize her as an equal. Boldly seizing the opportunity, she uses
him to escape from her home, which she knew would restrict her
severely as soon as she entered what her society considers to be sex-
ual maturity. However, her enthusiasm is already mixed with an ele-
ment of doubt: ‘What if David and Goliath turned out to be the same?’
(The Two of Them, 55)
Ernst is an agent of the Trans-Temporal Authority, an ‘interstellar
espionage organization’ (Russ, ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’, 80), and
helps Irene get the kind of training she needs to become an agent her-
self. The relative freedom and independence she manages to achieve
are nevertheless deceptive. Even though she is nominally in charge of
their mission on Ka’abah, she still has to defer to her former teacher
when it comes to more far-reaching decisions. The encounter with
patriarchy in a ‘pure’ form on Ka’abah serves as a catalyst, revealing
the superficial nature of her supposed equality. Irene can act and she
carries the title ‘agent’, but she does not have agency because it is
Ernst who validates her actions. She has no connection to the author-
ity that orchestrates their missions, and she does not know the larger
project which her job serves. She works as a wage-labourer without
knowledge of the products of her activity.
Events and interactions with the people of the alien culture on
Ka’abah gradually disclose to Irene the alienated nature of her work
and her essential dependence on Ernst. Since Ernst acts as a quasi-
father and teacher, this process of emancipation is the liberation from
both the father and the male lover, the breaking free from what the
text represents as the patriarchal fetters that constrict Irene’s mind.
Ernst is the epitome of the understanding male partner, who respects
his female lover and appreciates her knowledge and skill. In the
beginning of the book, the two are distinguished by age, not by gen-
der. However, when Irene becomes active on her own account, out-
side the regulations of the male-dominated authority, Ernst’s
behaviour takes a surprising turn.
The 12-year-old daughter of their host on Ka’abah, Zubeydeh,
wants to become a poet, a profession closed to women in this society.
Since the planet’s surface is uninhabitable, the life of the colony takes
place underground, where women are locked in secluded women’s
quarters. Being confronted with a girl who goes through some of the
same ordeals that tortured her own early adolescence, Irene becomes
aware of her own subtle oppression. She discloses her doubts to Ernst
about the Trans-Temporal Authority as well as her determination to
rescue Zubeydeh, but he is unsympathetic. Irene, however, already
plans to go even further than rescuing one poetic little girl: her project
becomes dissolving patriarchy itself, not only on Ka’abah but also in
her own world, to make agency possible not only for herself, but for
all women. She asks Ernst: ‘What about the unpoetic ones? What
about their cousins and their sisters and their aunts?’ (135) Margaret
Fuller, who has herself come down in history as an isolated, excep-
tional woman, is supposed to have said: ‘I accept the universe!’—
Irene goes beyond that and is ready to reject it:
‘Well, my dearest dear,’ [Ernst] continues in the same deliber-
ately lightened tone, ‘we can’t save them all, can we? Think!
All the rebels, all the refugees? No planet would hold them all.
The universe itself wouldn’t hold them.’
She says promptly, ‘Then to hell with the universe!’ (135)
When Irene insists on taking Zubeydeh with her and proposes to
reveal their employer’s hidden agenda by breaking into the computer
files, Ernst secretly has her privileges as an agent of the Trans-
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 67
Temporal Authority cancelled. Instantly, Irene, who has always been

part of ‘the gang’, one of the boys, is suddenly completely isolated. In
spite of this isolation, she manages to fool the computer system and
orders a shuttle for herself and Zubeydeh. When Ernst tries to stop
her, she fights. Again, as in Jael’s case, the struggle is intensely phys-
ical and curiously analogous to copulation:
To you—
To an observer—
—they would look like dancers, half the time on their heads,
arms and legs flying. Both of them seem to have forgotten why
they’re fighting or what they’re trying to do. (161)
The struggle has lost its original focus. The object is not primarily the
rescue of Zubeydeh, but something quite different. Ultimately, the
object of the fight is control over Irene’s actions. Will she act for her-
self or will Ernst continue to mediate her actions? Since neither of the
two has a decisive advantage over the other, the physical confronta-
tion seems endless—until Irene stops the one-on-one confrontation
and brings in a deadly weapon:
In such a contest of strength and skill it’s always significant
who wins and who loses. It’s crucial that the man is stronger
than the woman or the woman stronger than the man. Ernst’s
age weakens him; there’s not much to choose between a
woman of thirty and a man of fifty. Her endurance is greater
than his, but nonetheless he’s stronger and his muscle hurts
her. She’s coming out of a thirty years’ trance, a lifetime’s hyp-
nosis. She used to think it mattered who won and who lost,
who was shamed and who was not. She forgot what she had
up her sleeve.
Sick of the contest of strength and skill, she shoots him.
(162)
This passage lifts the ‘contest of strength and skill’ between Irene
and Ernst onto a generic plane. The two individuals represent
‘woman’ and ‘man’ in general, the gender antagonism which accord-
ing to a materialist feminist analysis can only be resolved by violent
action—revolution—on the part of the oppressed. Making the death-
struggle analogous to sexual intercourse, the text lets the act of liber-
ation directly refer to the act that instituted the oppression and that
seems to confirm it every time a man (in a patriarchal culture) sticks
his erect penis, charged with cultural meaning and significance, into
a woman. Unlike Jael, Irene does not wait for the dying man’s recog-
nition. It is not anger that drives her to kill the man, but plain neces-
sity, not hatred of the man, but love of self.
The conventions of formula genre fiction in this case would have
dictated conciliatory behaviour on Irene’s part. Yet the text creates a
story that violates society’s idea of female/feminine behaviour and
creates a counter-story which displaces male dominance and patriar-
chal plot conventions:
This is not a comedy; Zubeydeh will never come across it in the
library. A comedy is where Ernst would marry Irene in the end
… Ernst (thinks Irene) was kind and gentle, he was a truly
good man; nonetheless he was going to return her to Center
(for her own good), stick her in a desk job (if they had one), or
maybe just send her home. (164-65)
As in The Adventures of Alyx and The Female Man, androcide is directly
linked to agency. However, while both Alyx and Jael are represented
as in possession of agency before they kill the man, Irene’s transfor-
mation takes place in the act of killing itself. Irene has the body of an
ordinary woman. Since agency in her story is not tied to her body, but
to the acts she performs, the concept loses its stability. In order to
maintain her agency, Irene has to continue performing subversive acts
and she is in perpetual danger of lapsing back to a state of enforced
passivity. The revolutionary act of killing her lover is only the first of
many more every-day confrontations which she faces at the end of the
novel.
Furthermore, the concept of oppression challenged by androcide in
The Two of Them is far more complex than in the other two novels.
Alyx’s and Jael’s motives for killing fit within the frameworks of con-
ventional narrative logic, even if they subtly reverse and/or subvert
gender-roles. The men killed by Alyx and Jael clearly represent and
epitomize the idea of the oppressing class in the patriarchal power
structure. Both Gunnar and Boss are patronizing and misogynist to
an extreme, both commit an offence against the protagonist which
seems to justify retribution on the part of the victim: Gunnar refuses
to save Machine’s life, and Boss attempts to rape Jael both verbally
and literally. Although both texts additionally stress these perpetra-
tors’ status as victims of the gender system—their actions are repre-
sented as typical, not individual—they seem to ‘deserve’ punishment
within the logic of poetic justice. Not so Ernst. Ernst is represented as
gentle, understanding and open for discussion—exceptionally so for
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 69
a male character: ‘Ernst is one of the few men [Irene]’s ever met who
likes women. Most men don’t’ (The Two of Them ,144). Not only is he
the quintessentially ‘good, liberal man’, he also supports Irene’s pro-
fessional career.
Therein, however, also lies one of the problems. As her teacher and
male partner, he has direct access to the authorities and thus power
over her on a professional level beyond their emotional relationship,
which becomes apparent to her only when she chooses to transgress
the rules of that authority:
She thinks, But I have no such power. She has never had the
numbers of Ernst’s I.D.’s, not even when she was his Con-
science. Yet he must have a record of hers and must have got-
ten it from Trans Temp at Center, months ago at the very least.
Keeping them all the time. Holding her identities in the palm
of his hand. Trans Temp guards against the different one, the
unstable one, the female one … (146, italics in original)
‘Holding her identities in the palm of his hand’, Ernst controls Irene’s
existence, since the privileges attached to the numbers of her identity
cards give her access to the computer and are therefore prerequisite
for her ability to act in a meaningful, that is unmediated and inde-
pendent way (in the logic of materialist feminism). The control she
had thought she had over her actions is revealed to be a mirage cre-
ated by Ernst’s behaviour and rhetoric. As long as she played by the
rules of the male game, Ernst’s superior position remained below the
surface and Irene could maintain her imaginary status as an equal
partner, without conscious awareness of the fundamental class dif-
ference between them. However, as soon as Irene decides to break
into Trans Temp’s files and to begin to sabotage Ka’abah (i.e. patri-
archy), Ernst removes his support, ostensibly to keep her out of fur-
ther trouble. He acts as he feels he must. Killing Ernst, Irene severs
her affiliation with dependency and transforms the story of her life.
Instead of a quasi-agent for an abstract Trans-Temporal Authority she
becomes an agent for herself—with other women.
Because Ernst displays the best egalitarian behaviour one can hope
for in a male character in genre fiction, his murder is the most shock-
ing and effective of the three, although it is executed with the least
gore and violence. Marilyn Holt admits that ‘[i]nitially [she] felt a
wrongness’ (‘No Docile Daughters’, 98) when Irene killed the man,
but comes to the conclusion: ‘I realized that this was a reversal of the
literary tradition which allows a helpmate woman who shirks her
duties towards her man to be killed by that man’ (98). However,

Ernst’s swift death not only destroys the reader’s expectations about
plot development, it also shatters the illusion that this is finally a fem-
inist novel about an egalitarian society which is able to accommodate
both biological males and females in the double binary system of sex
and gender. Like materialist feminist theory, the text exposes the fun-
damental structures of subordination and oppression within patri-
archy that make reconciliation impossible even with exceptionally
sympathetic males. For the oppression functions not on an individual
but on a structural level—woman cannot get away without murder,
even of the man she is emotionally attached to.
The stories of Alyx, Jael and Irene illustrate the ways in which the
narrative function of androcide develops in Russ’s writing. The
Agency of both Alyx and Jael is relatively stable, anchored as it is in
the women’s own bodies. However, while Alyx’s ability to kill is nat-
uralized by her culture’s myth of creation, the story of Jael celebrates
the artificial origin of her man-killing body. The Two of Them, then,
detaches the female protagonist from such stories of exceptionality
and makes the agency she claims through androcide perpetually pre-
carious. Irene’s story, which is a story of separation from men in
favour of a primary link to women, also points to the possibility of
simply ignoring men instead of killing them. In Part Two, I will focus
on the ways in which Irene’s relationship to Zubeydeh maintains and
recreates a different kind of agency. In the 1980s, Russ’s critically fem-
inist phase, in which lesbian sexuality and gender discontinuities
become more pronounced themes in her work, androcide all but dis-
appears as a narrative device.
These transformations in Russ’s work also influence the ways in
which the texts use figurative language to expand the discourses and
permissible narratives about women. The most significant recurrent
trope in relation to androcide in Russ’s texts is the ambiguous and
troublesome image of the cat, which is emblematic of the power
women acquire in the act of killing a member of the antagonistic class.
The Cat As a Metaphor: Positively Not a Pussycat!
… not everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the

contrary! (The Female Man, 188)
Cats in Russ’s fiction appear in various guises, utilizing and subvert-
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 71
ing the traditional connection between stereotypical characteristics of

women and cats. Edarra in ‘Bluestocking’, for instance, compares the
independence of her rescuer to that of a cat:
You remind me of a cat we once had, a very fierce, black, female
cat who was a very good mother,’ (she choked and continued
hurriedly) ‘she was a ripping fighter, too, and we just couldn’t
keep her in the house whenever she—uh—’
‘Yes?’ said Alyx.
‘Wanted to get out,’ said Edarra feebly. She giggled. ‘And she
always came back pr—I mean—’
‘Yes?’
‘She was a popular cat.’ (27–28)
Edarra here combines contradictory characteristics that Western cul-
tures attribute to the image of domestic cats. The cat, like Alyx, is sex-
ually active, a warrior and a mother who does not rely on a male
whose semen impregnates her. However, cultural memories also have
other versions of cats in store, which emphasize passivity and recep-
tive sexuality.
Like the vampire, the cat is thus marked with a fundamental ambi-
guity which makes it a momentous image in feminist texts. In her
influential collection Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), which crucially
helped shape the leftist women’s movement in the 1970s, Robin Mor-
gan included a quote from Eldridge Cleaver which brings this ambi-
guity to the point and reveals the predicament of women active in the
New Left and the Civil Rights movements. According to Morgan,
Cleaver said in 1968: ‘Women? I guess they ought to exercise Pussy
Power’ (36). ‘Pussy’ is a term used either to refer to a domestic cat or
to the female genital organs, both of which meanings are alluded to
in Cleaver’s statement. Loaded with scornful irony, it creates an image
of the woman as a purring pet cat whose only access to power lies in
her role as the object of men’s sexual desires. ‘Pussy Power’ in this
context therefore means no power at all.
Many of Russ’s texts deploy precisely this double (or multiple)
innuendo of the cat image to destabilize fixed patriarchal stories
about women. The texts take up the conventional trope of the woman
as a cat, shifting its tenor so as to thoroughly transform it from an
image of powerlessness into one of power. In this process, the con-
cept of power itself is transformed. This power, or agency, is continu-
ously provisional, never fixed to one person or group.
The contradictory images of the cat in patriarchal discourses are
exemplified by the conflict between the professional killer Jael and

the idealist ‘Arcadians’ in Womanland:
They thought I [Jael] was Ultimate Evil. They let me know it.
They are the kind who want to win the men over by Love.
There’s a game called Pussycat that’s great fun for the player;
it goes like this: Meeow, I’m dead (lying on your back, all four
paws engagingly held in the air, playing helpless) … (186)
To Jael, the idealist Womanlanders are innocuous and helpless,
exposed to attack like a cat who expects to be petted. Jael herself, on
the other hand, transforms herself into a cat who shows (and uses)
her claws instead of meeowing trustfully for the owner:
It took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to
stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Pussy-cat-ified, but
at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded
assassin you see before you today. (187)
Jael as a narrator also use the cat image in representing her moment
of greatest power, in the act of killing the man. She celebrates the exe-
cution and lets the man die slowly, playing the same deadly game
with him as a cat would with a mouse. She has even externalized this
metaphor via plastic surgery and has fitted her body with a cat’s
killing instruments: ‘I do not have Cancer on my fingers but Claws,
talons like a cat’s but bigger, a little more dull than wood brads but
good for tearing. And my teeth are a sham over metal’ (The Female
Man, 181).
This image transformation is made possible by and points to the
self-contradictory character of the cat metaphor as used by patriarchal
discourse, of which Cleaver’s statement is just one example. As
innocuous as the domestic cat may seem to the owner, to a small
rodent it is a dangerous predator. A materialist feminist analysis may
therefore detect a third, undesired element in the ‘pussy’ of Cleaver’s
metaphor: the male class’s fear of its oppressed antagonist. Russ’s
texts surface this element, exposing it to multiple subversive read-
ings—a move which makes a power potential for women within patri-
archal narratives about them accessible.
Moreover, the cat analogy emphasizes the point that the women
murder by necessity, not whim. To a cat, killing its prey is a matter of
survival, its existence depending on its ability to carry out the deed
ruthlessly. Jael is very much aware of her identification with the cat
and the potentially liberating other images available to women:
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 73
At heart I must be gentle, for I never even thought of the pray-

ing mantis or the female wasp; but I guess I am just loyal to my
own phylum. One might as well dream of being an oak tree.
Chestnut tree, great rooted hermaphrodite. (136)
The Female Man uses the cat metaphor in its relation to power most
explicitly, but the cat makes its ambiguous appearance throughout
Russ’s fiction. The ways in which the texts deploy cat images corre-
spond to the different function androcide has in these texts as a lib-
eratory act. Alyx, in Picnic on Paradise, right after she has wiped out
Gunnar, wipes his blood off her white suit ‘carefully and automati-
cally like a cat’ (134). Gunnar, who is physically a giant compared
with the slight Mediterranean murderer, is by implication dwarfed to
the size of a cat’s prey. The text here plays with the way in which
physical size is generally used as a metaphor for potency. However,
the instruments of death are not part of Alyx’s own body as in Jael’s
case. Alyx kills the man matter-of-factly with two knives and there is
no reference to sexuality in the killing scene. This difference demon-
strates a development in Russ’s writing which I have already indi-
cated. In contrast to Russ’s later work, Picnic on Paradise emphasizes
the liberation of the individual woman. Russ’s first novel does not
conceptualize sex as a social class but as a biological given. Picnic on
Paradise does not yet incorporate the crucial role of reproduction and
sexuality as sites of women’s oppression, which explains the absence
of sexuality in the act of liberation.
In The Two of Them, on the other hand, the cat is completely absent
from the scene of killing itself, but it surfaces in one character’s
dream: Zubeydeh’s mother Zumurrud, who is perpetually medicated
to fit into the restrictive patterns of behaviour deemed appropriate for
women on Ka’abah, in a dream imagines herself as a cat:
… a cat in a cat garden with cat servants, a free cat rummaging
in garbage with cat allies, a heartless cat who had walked
along a fence made of real wood in the Outside in some kind of
loving mist and had sung in earsplitting shrieks. (99)
Zumurrud’s desire for emotional and mental independence as well as
her need to articulate her pain, transferring it to others via their audi-
tory organs, is synthesized in this dream-image. However, when
Zumurrud wakes up from this presumably drug-induced dream and
Irene enthusiastically offers her the opportunity to leave Ka’abah, she
declines, again retreating into her dream world:
Zumurrud slips back into her cat dream, in which cat friends
tell her admiringly that she’s a stubborn cat, all right, in which
the walls of the sleeping room melt into the illimitable vistas of
Outside, and—for she is a dangerous cat—she goes off to have
cat adventures, to bear famous kittens and seduce handsome
toms, but all somehow in a key that doesn’t matter, in a way
that doesn’t really count, for she’s also alone, and what really
matters are the trees and the plains, the endless forests, the
rivers she follows for miles, all this mixed up with a lot of
explanation and self-justification, mixed up, in fact, with end-
less talking, and with the sensation of walking, walking for-
ever, never stopping, pulling a little harness with bells on it like
Yasemeen’s, like a cat she saw once in a picture in her child-
hood, a cat in a shop who pulled a little rotisserie, or like
Dunya.
Zumurrud turns in her sleep and sighs, sunk forever in her
beautiful, troublesome, unsatisfying dreams. (103)
Zumurrud feels that leaving Ka’abah for her is impossible because
Ka’abah is etched into her own mind, which makes her unable and
unwilling to openly revolt against the naturalization of her inferiority
and subordination as woman. Only in her dreams can she slip into
the role of a cat who has a satisfying sex life and freely roams the
wilderness—alone. Zumurrud’s cat is also a highly ambiguous crea-
ture. It is both a free, wild creature of the forest and a domestic, har-
nessed pet that enjoys the safety of a loving human home. This cat is
both completely free and totally confined, which relates her to the
theme of madness in The Two of Them, which I will discuss in Part
Two. Because Zumurrud cannot make this tension productive for a
liberatory narrative of her own, she remains caught in her dreams.
Russ’s stories thrive on tensions and paradoxes such as the ones
posed by the cat metaphor. Each of her texts further develops and
hones such strategies of feminist cultural change. As my discussion
of androcide showed, her work shifts its political emphasis from vio-
lent revolution to the love of women as foundation for its stories of
liberation. As Russ’s first larger explicitly feminist project, The Female
Man in many ways enacts these transitions. The novel’s four protag-
onists individually and collectively struggle for the power to define
their own stories. Three of these characters act out a (disrupted)
dialectic which moves the narrative from a materialist sex-class
antagonism to a postmodernist disintegration of such stable identi-
ACTS OF VIOLENCE 75
ties, without, however, invalidating any of the stages in the ‘dialectic’.

In spite of what reviewers have said, my reading of Jael’s murderous
deeds made evident that The Female Man not only has at least one
powerful point, but also plenty of action. Chapter Three will identify a
strong narrative thread in the novel which intersects with materialist
feminist analyses of social structures and change.
CHAPTER THREE
The Revolutionary Act:
A Dialectic of Sex/Gender
in The Female Man
The Female Man partially shares the radical materialist feminist

premise that positions women as a sex-class in a dual system of
oppression formed by patriarchy and capitalism. To demonstrate pre-
cisely how the novel uses and departs from this premise, I will put it
in dialogue with the materialist feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex
(1970) by Shulamith Firestone. Firestone was one of the first ‘second-
wave’ feminists to utilize Marxist concepts for the interpretation of
patriarchal power structures, taking sexual difference as the most
fundamental category of social division. This view of sex-class as a
natural category has been subject to severe attacks by feminists, since
it is based on the assumption that the unequal power distribution in
the biological family is inherent, but Firestone envisioned a social
system that goes beyond the limitations she thought biology imposed
upon women. In The Dialectic of Sex, the sexed human body determines
the most basic power structures in human society, structures which
predate all human socio-economic systems. According to Firestone,
women’s childbearing functions necessitate the original division of
labour and establish the biological family as basic unit of reproduc-
tion. Since women as a class are oppressed because of their repro-
ductive function in society, she greets the advent of new technologies
capable of interfering with a destiny predetermined by biology:
So just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires
the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a tempo-
rary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to
assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of
the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduc-
tion: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of
their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control
of human fertility—the new population biology as well as all
THE REVOLUTIONARY ACT 77
the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. (19,

italics in original)
Within this logic, technology, particularly artificial reproduction as a
tool in the hands of a feminist revolution, severs the (supposedly)
transhistorical tie that fixes women in a state of oppression and lib-
erates both the child and the mother from domination by the father.
Such a sex-class antagonism which is grounded in women’s repro-
ductive function also shapes the dynamics of interactions between
males and females in many of Russ’s texts. Female characters in her
work frequently secure their agency by appropriating control over
reproduction. For example, women of the non-patriarchal human
colony in And Chaos Died (1970) use their mental powers to effect
parthenogenesis, and the genderless society on Whileaway in ‘When
it Changed’ and The Female Man has found a way to merge ova. Within
the narrative worlds these texts create, this strategic move renders the
dominant sex-class’s prime claim to power in modern Western patri-
archies superfluous in economic terms. Thus, the first step in the
dialectical process of liberation in both Firestone and Russ is to access
history by claiming agency in the reproductive process. Furthermore,
in her explicitly feminist texts, Russ puts special emphasis on elimi-
nating gender distinctions by letting her female protagonists claim as
their own qualities stereotypically assigned to (white) men in west-
ern patriarchal societies.
The Female Man both uses and subverts the dialectical antagonism
between men and women which is constitutive of patriarchal soci-
eties. One level of this complex novel delineates the historical pro-
gression from the alienated woman via the feminist revolution to the
woman conscious of herself and able to act. However, the novel
makes this historical progression ambiguous: each successive stage is
in the future, but not the future of the former stage. The Female Man
thus acknowledges the symbolic power of dialectical thinking but
challenges its fixed linearity. The three steps in this progression
mimic the classic concepts of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis but
place disjunctions between them. Time for each of the represented
possible universes in The Female Man is linear, but the novel does not
establish necessary causalities between events. The worlds are linked
by a disrupted and disruptive chronology.
Staging these disjunctive dialectical transformations, the text cre-
ates four worlds which exist on parallel time lines in chronological
order, but not in direct succession. Using a common trope in science
fiction, the novel explains the existence of an infinite number of pos-

sible universes—which may differ only slightly from one another—
with minute historical and material variations that each create a new
possible universe:
Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you
either tie your shoe or you don’t; you either straighten up
instantly or maybe you don’t. Every choice begets at least two
worlds of possibility, that is, one in which you do and one in
which you don’t; or very likely many more, one in which you
do quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you don’t
but hesitate, one in which you hesitate and frown, one in
which you hesitate and sneeze, and so on … Every displace-
ment of every molecule, every change in orbit of every electron,
every quantum of light that strikes here and not there—each of
these must have its alternative. (6)
Even though the four parallel universes represented in The Female
Man do not exist on one time continuum, they are close enough to
share a similar history. All of the worlds have in their present or in
their past a patriarchal society that shapes the existence of each of the
protagonists. Jeannine’s world is a stark patriarchy, Jael’s world is in
the process of violently overcoming the oppressive system, and
Janet’s world, Whileaway, has eliminated males. On one level of the
narrative, these three women stand for the three phases in the dialec-
tic path. This dialectic starts out with a patriarchal society, the narra-
tive world associated with Jeannine. A revolutionary war against the
oppressive sex-class on Jael’s world negates this patriarchy, and the
dictatorship of women’s sex-class supersedes it with the ‘gender-less’
utopia Whileaway.
However, the novel also contains factors which challenge such a
linear reading. For the purpose of my analysis, I have separated dif-
ferent narrative strands and spaces of intersection with materialist
feminism. Yet the dialectic in Russ’s text is far from faithfully repeat-
ing the unambiguous, linear progression suggested by Karl Marx’s
and Shulamith Firestone’s theories. Although The Female Man uses
the concept of a linear, progressive history, it also subverts this con-
cept: versions of Jael and Janet may be in Jeannine’s and Jael’s
futures, but the text establishes no direct historical connection
between the three worlds. The fourth world, then, the world of the
fourth protagonist Joanna, acquires a special status outside this
dialectic as ‘basic’ narrative world. It is a world very similar to the
United States in 1969, the place and time in which the author Joanna
Russ produced the text for a contemporary audience. Joanna as fic-
tional author is not only outside the dialectical path, the dialectic also
takes place within her, creating an assemblage of stories that make up
the narrative of her self. I will discuss the complex mutual interac-
tions and connections between Joanna’s world and the other three in
Part Three.
Beauty Asleep: Jeannine, the Self-less
The starting point for the dialectic of sex in The Female Man is Jean-
nine’s universe. It is a place in which World War II never happened
and America in 1969 still has not recovered from the Great Depres-
sion. Jeannine in this narrative world epitomizes the emerging
awareness of oppression, which, however, she cannot yet frame in a
narrative of liberation. Jeannine is represented as having no existence
of her own because she has neither agency nor conscious awareness
of her oppression. Therefore, in order to take part in human existence
within her culture, she needs to make herself available to become the
property of someone who can act. In the process, she must suffer
complete negation of self: ‘There is some barrier between Jeannine
and real life which can be removed only by a man or by marriage’
(120). Yet Jeannine’s oppressive universe is not a thing of the past.
The time is 1969 and her world is painfully close to the basic narra-
tive world of Joanna, the starting point and end point of the novel’s
analysis of the fictional author’s self.
From this perspective, Jeannine’s inability to tell her own story
becomes her defining characteristic in the novel. Jeannine’s disregard
for her prospective husband Cal, a character who criticism has all but
ignored in the past,1 highlights this inability. Cal’s alienated existence
is directly equivalent to Jeannine’s separation from what would be
her self. Unable to kiss her awake to a satisfying sexual and social
existence, Cal fails to perform his role as the prince whom Jeannine
desires. Conversely, Jeannine does not act the role of the demure
princess for him. He calls her the ‘vanishing woman’ (4), which also
links Jeannine to Janet because he is quoting the words from a news-
paper headline that refers to Janet, the Whileawayan protagonist.
Jeannine, wondering whether she should break up with Cal because
there is ‘something wrong with him’, says in a conversation with
Joanna:
He doesn’t take me any place. I know he doesn’t make much

money, but you would think he would try, wouldn’t you? All he
wants is to sit around and look at me and then when we get in
bed, he doesn’t do anything for the longest time; that just can’t
be right. All he does is pet and he says he likes it like that. He
says it’s like floating. Then when he does it, you know, some-
times he cries. I never heard of a man doing that. (84)
Jeannine, who does not see how her own life is circumscribed by
patriarchal discourses, transfers the disgust she feels for her own fail-
ure to perform the proper feminine role to Cal. He is as weak as she
is; he suffers from the constricting effects of the same binarism, but
from the perspective of the ‘master’ class. He is endowed with the
penis, but cannot adequately perform the act that would confirm his
power. The limp genital therefore just confirms his failure. Like Jean-
nine, he desires to escape to the theatre, where, as an actor, he can
perform the roles that life denies him. The role the actor plays on the
stage does not intrude into his or her story of self. Jeannine observes:
Sometimes—sometimes—he likes to get dressed up. He gets into
the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around
his neck, and stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He
wants to be an actor, you know. (85, italics in original)
On his imaginary theatre-stage, Cal can transcend the masculine role
that his position in the cultural narratives casts him for. With the help
of domestic implements and ‘feminine’ devices of beautification, he
endows himself with the paraphernalia of both femininity and power.
His pathetic attempt to act out a role of power independent of his
anatomy appears like a faint echo of the vampire Martin Guevara in
‘My Dear Emily’.’ However, Cal’s performance falls flat, emphasizing
his failure rather than offering a valid alternative.
Jeannine’s derision does not give her a voice in her narrative world.
Mouthing the words her culture prompts, she remains ultimately
speechless. Jeannine is the only one of the four protagonists who
never acts as a narrator in her own right: her speech acts remain on
the level of dialogue and free indirect speech, both controlled by
another speaking subject. This inability to retell her own story on a
level beyond the confines of a narrative told by another connects
Jeannine to Emily in ‘My Dear Emily’—both cannot articulate a story
of liberation since they do not perceive the crucial gaps and inconsis-
tencies in patriarchal discourse. Thus, her own speech acts repeat the
stories that frame her in a narrative of inferiority, and Cal, who might
be her ally against this narrative, emerges as a failure in her tale.
What distinguishes Jeannine from other, apparently more ‘success-
ful’ women in her world is a vague awareness of a desire for some-
thing that she cannot name: ‘That’s my trouble, too. My knowledge
was taken away from me’ (124). As a result, she turns her destructive
energies against herself. The older she gets, the more intense
becomes the pressure put on her by society to fulfil her ‘feminine’ role,
marry and immediately activate her maternal instincts. At 29, consid-
ered an old maid, she yields to the pressures of her culture and
decides to marry Cal, whom she neither loves nor respects. But she
pays dearly for recognition by the community: she loses the chance to
overcome the self-alienation. What she cannot name remains beyond
her grasp: ‘Fleeing from the unspeakableness of her own wishes—for
what happens when you find out you want something that doesn’t
exist?—Jeannine lands in the lap of the possible’ (125). The narrative
of romance and marriage in Jeannine’s and Cal’s culture positions
both in a double bind which forces them to repeat the narratives that
produce their predicament: ‘Somewhere is the One. The solution. Ful-
fillment. Fulfilled women. Filled full. My Prince. Come. Come away,
Death. She stumbles into her Mommy’s shoes, little girl playing
house’ (125). The patriarchal family as an institution serves as the
disciplinary centre which conditions Jeannine to objectify herself and
to enter a marriage that confirms her status as a commodity.
In ‘My Dear Emily’, the unnameable desires of the protagonist con-
jured up the male vampire Guevara, who routinely rapes his victim,
transforming her from material life to an unreal imaginary space of
un-death. Cal, on the other hand, as a human male whose sex endows
him with a power over Jeannine that he cannot wield, must fall short
as fulfilment of her displaced desires. Instead, her contradictory and
unfocused wishes call up an entirely different ‘vampire’, Jael, the
woman of one of the possible futures, the unyielding antagonist of the
male sex-class.
Jael, ‘The Woman Who Has No Brand Name’
Jael, in contrast to Jeannine, is fully absorbed in her selfishness and

obsessed with striving to acquire knowledge of self. While Jeannine
stands for the inability to name her oppression, Jael gives it a name
and therefore a possible solution. Thus, Jeannine can only raise com-
plaints against an individual man in her immediate life, but Jael

raises a revolution against what she identifies as the whole system of
oppression. Jael thus exemplifies the significance of naming and
names in Russ’s texts: her biblical namesake in Judges 4 and 5
becomes active in a war by killing the leader of the opposing army. In
Jael’s world, which represents the second stage in the dialectic, the
archetypal antagonism between men and women has escalated to a
physical, though still ‘cold’ war. Jael says about this confrontation
that it is the ‘only war that makes any sense if you except the relations
between children and adults, which you must do because children
grow up’ (164).
Naming the problem, Jael can frame it in a narrative that is (at
least partially) under her own control. Jael presses for a real military
confrontation between Manland and Womanland to destroy the
antagonist, yet her motives for waging this war are also deeply per-
sonal. When she was younger her life very much resembled that of
Jeannine:
I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said so;
cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by
being hooked on to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only
partly redeems them and every biological possessor of one
knows in her bones that radical inferiority which is only
another name for Original Sin. (187)
This passage, narrated by Jael herself, names specific aspects of the
culture in which she grew up. In this act of naming, she identifies the
sources of her suffering as a child and young adult. This reference to
her youth connects her to Jeannine: structurally, Jael’s story is also
the story of Jeannine’s life. Generalizing her own story as universal
for all women, Jael legitimizes her acting as a representative of her
sex-class.
In her brief analysis of patriarchal oppression, which I quoted
above, Jael superimposes her own, ironizing voice over the social
knowledge imparted to her by her mother. Her angry irony puts a dis-
tance between the naturalized ‘body knowledge’ of her mother, which
enforced the girl’s feelings of inferiority, and her own, verbalized
knowledge of the oppressive structures. The woman’s external mark
of sexual difference, her visible lack, turns into the ‘possession’ of
‘cunt’. Thus, she exposes the external sign of an inferiority that the
culture’s myth of creation has naturalized and inscribed on the body’s
internal, structural frame, her ‘bones’. In framing this process of nat-
uralization in a narrative that exposes its oppressive effects, Jael can

direct her destructive energies against what she perceives as the
source of her oppression. Unlike Jeannine, she has a name for her
desire. She commits herself to a story of liberation, in which she
found a place as revolutionary force. Jael’s materialist feminist story
is effective because it allows her to negate denigrating patriarchal dis-
courses about herself and because it gives her a clear position in the
historical process. This story allows Jael to say about herself: ‘I come
and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself
through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of
you here today. In short, I am a grown woman’ (187). Jael has become
active. She has become active not only for her own redemption as an
individual, but also for the redemption of all women as universal sex-
class and their collective selves: ‘Mommy never shouted, “I hate your
bloody guts!” She controlled herself to avoid a scene. That was her
job. I’ve been doing it for her ever since’ (194).
Jael devotes all her energy to the war against the ‘Manlanders’,
who to her embody the abstract structures of oppression named by
her analysis. Devoting the better part of their energies to the re-cre-
ation of patriarchy, the men confirm Jael’s evaluation. However, their
nostalgic attempts to restore their former power are doomed to fail.
Womanland has superior technology and superior knowledge, but
most importantly, women are in control of reproduction: ‘Manlanders
have no children. Manlanders buy infants from the Womanlanders
and bring them up in batches, save for the rich few who can order
children made from their very own semen …’ (167).
As in Firestone’s utopian vision, the Womanlanders in The Female
Man have become the ones who propel history by appropriating the
means of reproduction. However, there is also a crucial difference
between the feminist revolution proposed in The Dialectic of Sex and its
equivalent in The Female Man, that is Jael’s struggle. While Firestone
wants to eliminate sex as socially relevant category, Jael wants to
eliminate men. In Jael’s revolution, the physical destruction of the
Manlanders equals the resolution of the antagonism. Entrenched in
the anger which makes her such an effective warrior for women, Jael
lacks the speculative vision to imagine a society without fixed sex dis-
tinctions. Her function in the text is similar to that of androcide. As a
point of convergence, she also represents and embodies the pain and
anger of the primary narrator, Joanna. Russ herself explains how she
conceptualized Jael:
I thought of Jael as almost a medieval personification of

Anger—something you might find in stone on a cathedral, like
the gargoyles. She originally had bat’s wings but I realized I
couldn’t justify that in sf terms and took them out. The echo of
‘angel’ in the ‘devil’ is quite intentional, if it is still there. (Let-
ter to the author, 9 March 1995)
The biblical reference here to the double role of Jael as personification
of good as well as evil is significant as well as fitting. Jael as allegory
of Anger is produced by what is wrong with the Judaeo-Christian
patriarchy. In her function as allegory she gives a concrete, physical
shape to the diffused, self-destructive feelings of inferiority that stifle
Jeannine. At the same time, she is also a rounded character in the
novel, who has the life history of a human woman.
Jael’s devotion in her actions to dialectical thinking make her a sin-
gular individual even in her own home country. Her focused anger
and radically materialist politics isolate her from her fellow-Woman-
landers who are unwavering idealists. Jael remarks: ‘There is a pre-
tense on my own side that we are too refined to care, too
compassionate for revenge—this is bullshit, I tell the idealists’ (184).
These women, who live underground in ‘sentimental Arcadian com-
munes’ (186), deny the material threat of Manland and live in an
imaginary space free of conflict. It is a utopia which resists and denies
the dialectic and contrasts sharply with the other, materialist utopian
creation in The Female Man, Whileaway, which Jael casts in her own
future. Jael scornfully says about these idealists: ‘They are the kind
who want to win the men over by Love’ (186).
Since her fellow-Womanlanders turn out to be unreliable allies in
her war, Jael explores other time-continuums or possible universes to
seek out other versions of herself. She plans to meet Jeannine, Joanna
and Janet: ‘It came to me several months ago that I might find my
other selves out there in the great, gray might-have-been, so I under-
took—for reasons partly personal and partly political … to get hold of
the three of you’ (160). Planning to install military bases on the
worlds of her other incarnations, Jael intends to lead the revolution-
ary war to its logical conclusion, the annihilation of Manland. This is
also where Jael’s and Jeannine’s stories reconnect. Jael wins the sup-
port of Jeannine, who tells her without hesitation: ‘You can bring in
all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over; I wish
you would’ (211). Jeannine, the self-less, becomes Jael’s accomplice
in her life-struggle for self-acceptance.
However, Jael also pays a price for the success of her narrative. In
order to do her job, she has to become thoroughly brutalized, cynical,
devoid of sympathetic emotions. She cannot relate to others on a
basis other than hatred and scorn. Jael can externalize her anger
because she can frame it in a positive story of liberation (the materi-
alist dialectic), but she cannot name herself as a type: ‘Who am I? I
know who I am, but what’s my brand name?’ (19) Within patriarchal
language, there is no name for her. In Womanland, she is isolated
from other women of her kind. It is interesting to note that she seeks
to create a category for herself in the language of capitalist econom-
ics: ‘brand name’ ironically emphasizes her commodification. She is
the product of the very system of oppression that she fights, capital-
ist patriarchy, and she casts her liberation in the terms that deprecate
her as a woman.
Ultimately, Jael’s concept of society beyond the gender-war does
not include herself, so she cannot progress beyond the revolution.
This impossibility to live the utopia that she fights for has its equiva-
lent in the novel. Just as Jeannine’s inability to speak for herself
excluded her from taking her place in the novel as a narrator, Jael is
the only one of the non-utopian protagonists who never visits While-
away. Jeannine and Joanna travel there without her. Jael, whose exis-
tence is necessary for Whileaway, cannot move beyond her hatred and
rage. She is barred from enjoying the results of her struggle since the
accomplishment of her goal would also destroy the basis of her iden-
tity. Shulamith Firestone defines the objectives of materialist femi-
nism as follows:
just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the
elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic
class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution
must be … not just the elimination of male privilege but of the
sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings
would no longer matter culturally… For unless revolution
uproots the basic social organization, the biological family—
the vinculum through which the psychology of power can
always be smuggled—the tapeworm of exploitation will never
be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger
than—inclusive of—a socialist one to truly eradicate all class
systems. (8, italics in original)
Jael exemplifies the fundamental dilemma of all revolutions: only
focused hatred and fierce anger will instigate the necessary radical
outburst of violence directed against the oppressors. Thus, a feminist

revolutionary needs a deeply etched sense of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, that is
a clear sense of identity and otherness. However, it is exactly this
extreme polarization that ultimately makes eliminating the social and
symbolic distinction between the ‘oppressors’ and the ‘oppressed’
impossible.
Reading The Female Man in relation with materialist feminist dialec-
tical thinking thus underscores Jael’s crucial function in the novel.
Yet critics have frequently diminished Jael’s role in the text. Richard
Law in ‘Joanna Russ and the “Literature of Exhaustion”’ for instance
declares that Jael ‘embodies the age-old yearning for nemesis’ (153).
But in the context of materialist feminism, vengeance is not what her
struggles are primarily about: Jael goes through intense agonies to
fight for her right to exist as an agent in society, not merely for petty
feelings of personal revenge. Similarly, Law misreads Russ’s fierce
humour as mere playfulness, and her manipulations of patriarchal
genre conventions as formal experiments: ‘The Female Man is a mad-
cap tour de force with droll devices that transform the fictional mode’
(154). Law, although superficially sympathetic, thus trivializes the
text as well as Jael’s struggle, and fails to recognize that both are
deadly serious. Jael kills men not for revenge, but to assert her exis-
tence: ‘Murder is my one way out’ (195).
Similarly, some critics have suggested that Jael’s world represents
a dystopian, ‘false’ future, similar to the one in Marge Piercy’s Woman
on the Edge of Time (e.g. Bartkowski 61). Nancy A. Walker in Feminist
Alternatives (1993) also relates Jael’s world to Piercy’s dystopia:
The Female Man also presents utopian and dystopian alterna-
tives, and Russ, like Piercy, proposes that present actions cre-
ate future probabilities, but she does so in a far more complex
manner by insisting on parallelism and relativity instead of
direct historical progression. (179)
I agree that The Female Man, in employing the science-fictional topos
of parallel universes, contains the possibility of a dystopian future, but
I would argue that this possibility is never articulated in the novel.
The universe of Jael differs radically from Piercy’s dystopia and does
not represent a ‘false’, dystopian future. The historical progression,
while it is not direct, is nevertheless suggested—as possibility—by the
time-frame in which the protagonists are placed, even if the chronol-
ogy is disrupted. Even though the four universes are not identical,
they are close enough to share crucial characteristics, which makes it
very likely that one version of Jeannine precedes Jael, and some kind
of altered Janet follows her on her own time-continuum. The parallel
universes allow the text to inscribe in the stories the liberatory narra-
tives of radical materialist feminism, while at the same time disrupt-
ing them with alternative, even contradictory stories. From the point
of view of the dialectic, Jael’s world is not a dystopia (dystopia for
whom?) but rather a necessary step on the way to utopia. Janet’s
world, Whileaway, then, represents the final stage in this dialectic
(which is only one of many stories told by the text) and the end point
of the (partial) resolution of the sex antagonism in The Female Man.
Janet, the ‘Saviour’ from the Paradise Built on Corpses
If Jeannine—in the logic of the materialist feminist dialectic—stands

for the total negation of self and Jael for total obsession with self, then
Janet represents the utopian image of the self in balance with society.
On Whileaway, the deadly antagonism is resolved. Whileaway is a
just, ‘genderless’ society and consequently decentralized and anar-
chistic. However, Russ does not construct Whileaway as a harmo-
nious solution to all the problems in the other worlds. In spite of its
status as utopia, Whileaway is also a world in its own right which is
neither completely egalitarian nor free of conflict. Russ escapes the
essentialist femininist2 pitfall and does not create a sugar-coated
romanticized vision that merely extrapolates from current stereotypes
about femininity. Conflict and aggression are not absent from While-
away, nor is violence. Whileawayans work, sweat, fight duels and
scorn romantic love because it is possessive. They copulate passion-
ately and love their families (which are quite different from patriar-
chal families). Furthermore, Whileaway is (possibly) the result of a
war that is in stark contradiction to its present peaceful social system.
Attacking Janet’s blissful oblivion, Jael reveals her version of the
death of all men in Whileaway’s past, and confronts her with the bru-
tal, ruthless massacres of the revolutionary war that, according to
Jael, made the Whileawayan paradise possible:
Whileaway’s plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It
is I who gave you your ‘plague,’ my dear, about which you can
now pietize and moralize to your heart’s content; I, I, I, I am
the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your
world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand
years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish

themselves on the bones of the men we have slain. (The Female
Man, 211)
Since she is the one whose life is spent in anger, Jael is more than
aware that a radical transformation of society is not effected by
chance or natural causation, but by human effort (Moylan, 72), while
Janet can be oblivious to social struggle. The Whileawayan is naively
unaware of the significance of agency because she does not lack it.
However, the text does not authorize one version of Whileaway’s
history over the other. Jael’s voice speaks of war, while Janet insists
on the plague. The text remains open to a multiplicity of other, even
contradictory, readings. For example, Manlanders (or the While-
awayan equivalent) could conceivably have killed themselves in a
foolish attempt to eradicate a version of Jael, wearing a suit infested
with deadly viruses. (This reading would also explain why the
‘plague’ killed only males, sparing the women.) Thus, the contradic-
tion inherent in revolutions exemplified by Jael remains unresolved—
it does not need to be resolved. The ambiguity subverts the logic of
dialectic historical progression. It is this indeterminacy which lets the
text move on beyond Jael’s crucial yet limiting anger.
Similarly, Whileaway, although it represents the endpoint of the
materialist dialectic in the text, is not entirely free of social structures.
It is organized by age, which is an inherently dynamic category. As
Jael points out, the opposition of child versus adult does not have to
be resolved, because it resolves itself when the children grow up
(164). Everyone on Whileaway moves through different stages in life
that have different functions: childhood, youth, adulthood, mother-
hood and old age. Everyone—at a certain point in her lifetime—has
equal access to reproduction, which is why reproduction on While-
away has lost its economic significance. Power on Whileaway is thus
based on age, which resists binary coding. As the Whileawayan indi-
vidual grows older, she develops informal networks of associations,
becomes part of a family, and learns to form links to computers with
increasing sophistication. The more thoroughly she can merge, the
more power she has. The women on Whileaway move from powerless
(‘low class’) occupations to increasingly powerful and creative (‘high
class’) occupations. Thus, Whileaway conflates the complexly inter-
related power structures of racist, patriarchal capitalism in a single
basis for stratification, age, which, since it resists the deadly binary,
also resists the dialectic. Whileaway must therefore find its own
utopia, one which is not fully articulated in the novel. The text only
represents the search for utopian visions, of which Janet’s journey
may be a part. A Whileawayan utopia is unrepresentable in the terms
of the primary narrator, whose consciousness defines the limits of the
novel’s speculative scope.
From the perspective of the non-utopian visitors to Whileaway,
Janet Evason ‘knows who she is’, that is she has access to a life story
in which she is an active protagonist. She has consciousness of self,
and fulfils her responsibilities towards the community. Very much in
contrast to both Jeannine and Jael, her story gives her a strong ego
that enables her to form mature relationships with others. Even
though she knows she has a lower IQ than most women on While-
away, and that ‘they can spare [her]’ (22) for trips to the other worlds,
this does not hurt her self-confidence. Within the logic of her narra-
tive, her value resides in her own being. To shape her story of self,
Janet does not need the support or the reassurance of others because
she defines her existence through her own actions. While Jael only re-
acts, Janet acts, which means she has achieved the objective of this
feminist dialectic: agency. Paradoxically, this concept must be mean-
ingless to Janet herself because she must be unaware of an existence
without agency.
Janet’s oblivion therefore also demonstrates that for this kind of
feminist revolution it is not enough to eliminate the dominant class;
a culture without a sexual difference that puts one sex at a symbolic
and social advantage needs to undo the very categories that made its
existence possible. The Female Man operates with the premise that a
utopian society, to avoid stasis, must rewrite its history, that is the
narratives of which it is a creation. Thus, while the materialist dialec-
tic is the prerequisite for Whileaway, the dialectic ceases to be func-
tional there. The utopian society is both based upon patriarchy and
imagined as beyond it, expressing the need for such a utopian space
and the ultimate impossibility of reaching this space. Janet repre-
sents a (provisional) image of an elsewhere, of a space beyond
patriarchy whose dynamic does not rest on the resolution of contra-
dictions but on negotiating tensions between them.
The materialist feminist analysis of patriarchal capitalism, as exem-
plified by Shulamith Firestone’s text, rests on a relatively monolithic
concept of culture. In breaking the linear causality of the dialectic, The
Female Man partially gives up all-encompassing theories about
‘women’ and their ‘oppression’ in ‘patriarchy’. This move away from
grand explanations and liberatory narratives, however, is already
implicit in early, supposedly ‘reductive’, materialist feminism. Even if

Firestone herself does not make this deconstructive edge of her the-
ory explicit, she already makes the integrity of the ‘natural’, ‘original’
body vulnerable by embracing advanced technologies to free women
of their ties to biology. If the body can be shaped according to cultural
definitions and ideological needs, the distinctions between bodily
reality and discourse about it begin to become leaky. Cybernetic tech-
nologies, biotechnologies and a humanistic concept of ‘nature’ are
unstable and explosive together, the combination invariably culmi-
nating in the destruction of ‘nature’s’ claim to original wholeness and
innocence. Thus, the narrative elements in The Female Man which
destabilize the dialectic just articulate what is already an integral part
of the materialist feminist cultural critique.
More recent feminist theory, reflecting upon its situatedness in the
historical context of postmodern culture in transnational corporate
capitalism, has foregrounded this instability. Such theories have also
called into question the concept of individual agency and with it the
category of ‘the subject’ who acts. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, for
example, interrogates the very basis on which earlier feminists had
demanded agency, the category ‘woman’, delineating the limits of lib-
eratory identity politics: ‘Gender ought not to be construed as a sta-
ble identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather,
gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an
exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts’ (140, italics in origi-
nal). While earlier feminists had relied on the idea that agency con-
stitutes identity and subjectivity, and thus existence, Butler defines
human acts as performative, resulting in multiple, fluid, non-fixed
identities. Although Russ does not explicitly acknowledge her femi-
nist agenda before ‘When It Changed’ and The Female Man, even her
early texts clearly participate in these developments in late twentieth
century feminism. Emily of ‘My Dear Emily’, the nameless narrator of
‘Life in a Furniture Store’, and Alyx anticipate and are prerequisite for
Russ’s later characters whose stories are more explicitly critical of
these three texts’ implicit humanist premises. Part Three, ‘Indetermi-
nacy’, will pick up this thread, to further analyse the ways in which
Russ’s texts undermine the notion of agency within a singular libera-
tory narrative.
Very early in her development as a writer, Russ’s texts also show a
concern with what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have called ‘anx-
iety of authorship’.3 Russ’s critique of the literary tradition is centrally
concerned with women’s agency as authors and as characters. In her
critical work, Russ has extensively analysed the ‘anxieties of author-

ship’ as well as the non-existence of women protagonists in estab-
lished literary plot-patterns. The attention many of her texts pay to
the acts of authoring and reading corresponds to their concern with
the materiality of women’s lives. Creating an imprint of the author
and the reader in the text, Russ connects their bodies in their eco-
nomic and material existence as (mostly white, middle-class Ameri-
can) women. Although her later texts, particularly in the late 1970s
and the 1980s shift the focus of attention to a critique of this simple
political stance, Russ remains a materialist. In spite of these shifts of
emphasis, her texts always operate in the space of tension between
the unattainable materiality of (middle-class American) women’s
lives and its textual formation.
Thus, Russ began the process of moving away from affirming patri-
archal plot templates well before Alyx entered the stage. Alyx con-
fronts patriarchy as a hero in her own right, while earlier female
protagonists, unable to attain full agency, use strategies of deception
and displacement, withdrawing to an imaginary or inner space. At the
end of the 1960s, when feminism became an explicit component of
Russ’s fiction, there is a distinct shift in the function and foundation
of agency in her texts. In her work before explicit feminism, the
emphasis is on the individual woman. In the Alyx stories, for exam-
ple, agency is an integral part of an individual’s being and not directly
related to other women. Alyx’s acts are a result of her agency rather
than its foundation. Her relationship to the lives of women as a group
is that of a model. In Russ’s explicitly feminist texts, on the other
hand, the agency of the individual is inextricably tied to women as a
social class. Agency becomes based on acts rather than on inherent
characteristics of an individual. Consequently, the focus shifts from
the exceptional woman who serves as an ultimately unattainable
model to the ‘ordinary’ women whose acts establish partial agency.
The beginning of this period in Russ’s career as a writer is marked by
the short story ‘When It Changed’ (1969), which for the first time con-
nects the struggle for agency with lesbian sexuality and emotional
relationships among women. The significance of such woman-cen-
tred relationships in Russ’s writing represents the second thread in
my exploration of her work. Transcending the anger and hatred
directed against their antagonistic class, women characters in Russ’s
fiction also create emotional and erotic ties to women and by ignor-
ing men gain access to a narrative which promises them ownership
over their own bodies and control over their sexuality.
PART TWO
Sexuality
Eros, weaver of tales—Sappho

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more
essential change to human society than the seizing of the
means of production by workers. The female body has been
both territory and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited
and assembly-line turning out life. We need to imagine a world
in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body
– Adrienne Rich (Of Woman Born, 285)
Introduction to Part Two
Kristeva’s delineation of Western feminism uses the trope of a circle

for the concept of time which inspires her second feminist moment.
This circularity corresponds to a focus on the female body as a site
where feminist politics ground their liberatory narratives. The pur-
pose of Part Two is to analyse the ways in which Russ’s fiction par-
ticipates in such liberatory narratives. As Part One has shown, Russ’s
fictional texts intersect on many levels with her own critical work as
well as with other contemporaneous materialist feminist discourses
on agency. My analysis of these intersections foregrounded how Russ
narrativizes the issue of agency in her fiction and how her texts desta-
bilize agency at the same time as they appropriate it for women. Sim-
ilar intersections exist between Russ’s work and feminist discourses
on sexual difference. At these crossroads, the female body, sexuality
and the act of storytelling coalesce and become the basis for an analy-
sis of power whose ultimate aim is not to establish equality, but to
confirm difference and to celebrate women’s bonds to other women.1
Thus approaching Russ’s oeuvre from the thematic angle of ‘sexual-
ity’ further underscores how agency remains an unstable concept in
her writing. Russ’s texts do not attempt to resolve the fundamental
contradiction between the explicitly anti-essentialist claim for equal
agency on one hand, and the ultimately essentialist demand for an
autonomous, genuinely female sexuality.
Since radical materialist feminism explained and demanded agency
in Marxist terms, I explored the function of agency in Russ’s novels
by intersecting these texts with Marxist dialectics, showing similari-
ties and significant departures. Part Two shifts the focus onto psy-
choanalysis as an exploration of how oppressive power structures
work in Western patriarchal cultures. These two systems of analysis
have become useful for feminism not in spite of their origin in patri-
archal discourse but because of it. The pre-feminist version of Marx-
ism was gender-blind, and psychoanalysis regarded female sexuality
as the mirror image/negation of the male norm. However, if one reads
Marx and Freud and their followers as descriptions not of ‘reality’ but
of patriarchal constructions of reality, and if one turns the tools of both
systems against patriarchy, they become powerful resources for criti-
cism. Toril Moi, in her critical analysis of Freud’s Dora, his case his-
tory of a young, ‘hysterical’ woman, succinctly reiterates this feminist
paradox:
The attack upon phallocentrism must come from within, since
there can be no ‘outside,’ no space where true femininity,
untainted by patriarchy, can be kept intact for us to discover.
We can only destroy the mythical and mystifying constructions
of patriarchy by using its own weapons. We have no others.
(Moi, ‘Representation of Patriarchy’ 398)
Therefore, I will work with central concepts of psychoanalysis as they
were appropriated by feminist theory. I will not, however, attempt a
psychoanalytical reading of Russ’s work. This would be quite a dif-
ferent project. The following readings mark and analyse spaces of
intersection between Russ’s fiction and feminist discourses on sexu-
ality, which always either use or argue against psychoanalysis.
While the women’s movement and feminism have always been
concerned with sexuality, in the 1970s and early 1980s ‘self-posses-
sion’ of the female body moved to the centre of feminist politics. In
1969, when feminism was just gathering force throughout the cam-
puses of the United States, a small group of women got together at a
Boston women’s conference to discuss ‘women and their bodies’
(Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 11). The project that
emerged from this gathering met with immense success. By 1973, the
first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women was pub-
lished commercially, inaugurating the fight against limiting medical
discourses about women: ‘We are our bodies. Our book celebrates
this simple fact. Sexual feelings and responses are a central expres-
sion of our emotional, spiritual, physical selves. Sexual feelings
involve our whole bodies’ (39). Much more radical and thorough in
her analysis than these very pragmatic attempts to change women’s
relationship to their bodies, Mary Daly elaborated a feminist critique
of the American medical establishment in her landmark study of
misogyny, gynocide and violence against women Gyn/Ecology (1978).
Gynaecology, she argues, was created to counteract the first wave of
feminism in the nineteenthth century: ‘For of course the purpose and
intent of gynecology was/is not healing in a deep sense but violent
enforcement of the sexual caste system’ (227, italics in original). Daly
exposes the medical discourses on women as well as the practices of
genital surgery (clitoridectomy, for example, was introduced as a
‘cure’ for female masturbation) and psychotherapy as cynical means
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO 97
to maintain women’s subordination and to separate them from their

‘original’ femaleness: ‘This man-made femininity, the normal state of
femininitude, grows and swallows up the remnants of naturally wild
femaleness by its supernatural/unnatural “life” (undeadness)’ (231).
In 1981, Andrea Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing
Women. The previous year had seen the publication of ‘Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ by Adrienne Rich. These
texts, as well as a host of others, although radically different in their
approaches (Adrienne Rich, for instance, joined the pro-free-speech
feminists who opposed Dworkin’s stance on pornography), are pri-
marily concerned with the issue of female sexuality and how it has
been grossly misrepresented by patriarchal discourses. Thus, femi-
nists of the second moment rally around the call for claiming their
bodies and their sexualities as their own. These feminists further-
more express—and live—the need to separate sex from reproduction.
The focus in radical feminisms in the United States shifted from the
need to fight men as the oppressive gender class, to the possibility of
ignoring them altogether.
As feminism was going through these transformations in the
1970s, separatist utopian visions proliferated in feminist speculative
fiction. Suzy McKee Charnas imagined a parthenogenetic all-female
society in Motherlines, which came out in 1978 as a sequel to the
dystopian Walk to the End of the World (1974). Another classic feminist
utopia was envisioned by Sally Miller Gearhart in The Wanderground
(1979). Joanna Russ, with ‘When It Changed’ (1969) and The Female
Man (1975), was among the first to revive (and transform) the sepa-
ratist utopia, which had been a major factor in earlier feminist writ-
ing such as Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizorah: A Prophecy (1880–81) or
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915)2. One aspect crucially dis-
tinguishes the ‘second-wave’ utopias from earlier texts, that is the
way in which sexual relations among women become central for
these utopian visions’ political momentum.
Even this cursory sketch of discourses on female sexuality and the
body as sites of oppression as well as liberation—although it is far
from being in any way comprehensive—reveals fundamental opposi-
tions to the feminist concepts explored in Part One. Russ’s texts to
different degrees intersect with separatist and essentialist discourses
even when they put their dominant force into destroying biological
determinism. These tensions and contradictions are, as I have shown,
in part already implicit in the materialist analysis of reproduction as
foundation of patriarchal sex-class. However, many of Russ’s texts
move contradiction to the front, exploring the powerful connections

between women’s bodies at the same time as they attempt to eradi-
cate sex-class distinctions. Janet, from the utopian society of While-
away in The Female Man, exemplifies this strategy: she is
not-a-woman, that is without gender in a genderless society, but at
the same time also emphatically female in a women-only utopian ver-
sion of the future.
Yet Russ’s fiction is not a homogeneous body of texts. Interacting
with the developments that transformed the concept of agency in her
work, the role and conceptualization of sexuality and the female body
change as well. In Part One I delineated a progression from the indi-
vidual, exceptional woman in the stories around Alyx to the woman
who acts as part of her sex-class in the later texts. In terms of sexual-
ity, the shifts in paradigm are even more fundamental. I agree with
Samuel Delany, who notes in his essay ‘Orders of Chaos’ that ‘The
Female Man mounts a radical critique, on every level, of the social, aes-
thetic, and sexual assumptions of And Chaos Died, just as The Two of
Them mounts an equally radical critique of The Female Man’ (116). In
spite of all the other developments, sexuality is the one category that
distinguishes Russ’s earlier short stories and novels (for example, Pic-
nic on Paradise, And Chaos Died) from her later work. Her most recent
fiction, particularly Extra(Ordinary) People (1984), shows another such
transition, deconstructing as it does both agency and sex as stable
foundational categories of feminist politics.
As in Part One, my readings of Russ’s texts vis-à-vis the radical
separatist feminist moment set in at the beginning, the word. In this
feminist moment, one of the central themes in the critique of patriar-
chal sexual politics is the inability of women to speak in a language
which does not erase them as female subjects of their speech. Another
radical feminist goal is to show how patriarchy blocks relationships
among women and how such relationships can be productive in fem-
inist stories of liberation. Russ has used and transformed such liber-
atory stories which link female characters to other women and lets
them reconstitute and claim motherhood, daughterhood and female
sexuality.
CHAPTER FOUR
Author-izing the Female:
Women Loving Women
Loving Women
I stopped loving men (‘It’s just too difficult’) and in a burst of

inspiration, dreamed up the absolutely novel idea of loving
women—Russ (‘Not For Years But For Decades’, 28)
Women as a group have been denied a public voice and access to dis-
cursive authority. The ways in which women have submitted to and
written against their confinement to ‘private’ discourses (for example,
the epistolary mode) has been explored by feminist literary scholar-
ship. The feminist narratologist Susan Sniader Lanser in Fictions of
Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice goes back to the mid-18th
century, when both the novel and modern gender identity emerged
simultaneously:
Certainly taboos against women’s public writing, along with
the practice by which novels were presented as the ‘true’ his-
tories of their narrating protagonists, discouraged the presence
of the author’s name on a novel’s title page. In this way, just
when, according to Foucault, individual authorship is becom-
ing the ground of textual validity, the dominant female identity
in eighteenth-century fiction becomes not the author’s but the
character’s. (33)
Thus, even though women were serious competitors in the econom-
ics of narrative production from the eighteenth century onwards, lit-
erary histories consistently erased their contributions. Women writers
as a class were separated from the androcentric literary canon and
separated from each other by making every woman writer an excep-
tion to the rule that ‘women can’t write’. ‘Essentialist’ feminist dis-
courses confront patriarchy’s definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’
non-writer by constructing a female literary tradition on the basis of a
shared biology (which had also been the basis of the exclusion). Russ
participates in this discourse in her essay collection How to Suppress

Women’s Writing, but also throughout her fictional work. Reconstruct-
ing women as authors and characters of fiction is a significant factor
in the sexual politics particularly of Russ’s explicitly feminist texts.
Rewriting images of the woman as author and as character, Russ
tackles the ‘anxieties of authorship’, which Part One discussed from
the angle of agency, also from the perspective of sex.
Mother-lines: Linking ‘Female’ Literature
The power of the word and the pleasures of the female body are
intimately related. (Marks, 287)
From the point of view of the need to shape a female literary tradition,
the implicit references to Charlotte and Emily Brontë and to Franken-
stein in Russ’s short story ‘My Dear Emily’, which I discussed in Part
One, take on additional significance. For these references create a
subtext of female authorship. Such implicit or explicit links to literary
women are pervasive throughout Russ’s work. The dedication of The
Two of Them (1978) to Suzette Haden Elgin, whose short story ‘For the
Sake of Grace’ served as a basis for Russ’s novel, is a case in point.
One of Russ’s short stories that explores the female experience of
writing on a number of levels is ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’,
which first appeared in 1983 in the anthology Heroic Visions edited by
Jessica Amanda Salmonson.1 The short story conjures up the ghost
of George Sand through Amy Lowell’s poem ‘Sword Blades and
Poppy Seed’ and through Ellen Moers’s pioneering delineation of a
female literary tradition, Literary Women (1976). Thus, the text creates
a web of interrelations among female writers, including the ghostly
narrator, George Sand herself: ‘Where do we writers get our crazy
ideas?’ (23). The narrator makes clear that the phrase ‘we writers’
refers to women only, namely Lowell and Sand, but also Mary God-
win Shelley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte, Emily and (possibly)
Anne Brontë, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Gertrude
Stein, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston and Colette.
All of these writers have received attention and respect even in andro-
centric literary canons, but they appear isolated as ‘exceptional’
women (usually towards the end of chapters on the great men of the
particular period). Basing her assessment primarily on Elaine
Marks’s and Shari Benstock’s work on female modernists, Susan
AUTHOR-IZING THE FEMALE 101
Lanser notes in Fictions of Authority: ‘despite extraordinary, innovative

achievements, writers such as Gertrude Stein, Colette, Djuna Barnes,
Zora Neale Hurston, and Richardson were dismissed for decades as
precious, irrelevant, and eccentric’ (107). Lanser speculates that Vir-
ginia Woolf, who is missing from this list, escaped the sweeping dero-
gation of modernist women writers because of her ‘carefully
distanced narrative devices’ (107) which distinguish her from other
female modernist writers. Yet it is precisely this (partial) appreciation
which singles her out as an exceptional, isolated incident, corrobo-
rating instead of debunking the patriarchal maxim that ‘women can’t
write’.
All-female utopian societies imagine an existence for women ‘out-
side’ such male-dominated spaces. The lineage of literary women in
‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’ creates a separatist utopian vision
that explodes the all-male spaces of literary histories. Unlike the con-
nections of solidarity among women as an economic class, a political
concept which relies on men as the antagonistic force, women writ-
ers here link on the basis of their female body, seen as a stable trans-
historical entity. They do not turn against men with ripping hatred
like Jael, but towards each other, with love. Writing along similar
lines, Sarah Lefanu concludes her reading of ‘Sword Blades and
Poppy Seed’ with a statement that also embraces the historical author
of the short story in the lineage of women writers: ‘Joanna Russ situ-
ates herself within a tradition of women writing and struggling to
write, or living and struggling to live’ (198). In pointing to these
‘essentialist’ reverberations in such adamantly anti-essentialist writ-
ers as I take both Russ and Lefanu to be, I do not mean to suggest fail-
ure. Quite to the contrary, such partial affiliations with discourses
which celebrate the liberatory potential of the female body-commu-
nity to my mind are a necessary component of any feminist politics in
the second half of the twentieth century. For there is no indication
that the body has ceased to be the site of women’s oppression and
suffering, and patriarchal discourses all over the world still define
women through their bodies as the other.
However, while ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’ does set up the
female body as basis for bonding among women, the story, as with
most of Russ’s texts, plays with sex and gender uncertainties as well.
The narrator George Sand relates a fictional incident that goes back
to when she was still alive, 27 years old and struggling with her novel
Indiana. Returning from a theatre performance in men’s clothing, she
meets an old man who leads her to his store, where he sells, as he
informs her, ‘Sword blades and poppy seed … Dreams and visions
there, over here, edged weapons. Both for your trade …’ (25). He gives
writers their ‘crazy ideas’ and they, in turn, pay with a lifetime of
work. The man relates to her ‘as one man to another’ (24), which to
her is ‘no surprise’, presumably because she can successfully pass as
a male. Sex and gender of the old man, the ‘Marchand des Mots’, how-
ever, are unfixed as well: ‘So there in the firelight the old man—or was
it an old woman?—handed to me the measure of poppy seed that was
mine …’ (27). He (or she) gives to Madame Aurore Dudevant a name
that is neither French nor ‘feminine’: her disguising ‘masculine’ pseu-
donym George Sand.
This reading of the short story also puts intertextual relations in
some of the earlier texts by Russ in a different light. The implicit com-
ment on Frankenstein, which I located in ‘My Dear Emily’, is made
explicit in ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’. The old man (or woman)
refers to Mary Shelley, who received radium in the mythical store as
follows: ‘the young English girl who lost her baby and brought
women’s life-giving back into my trade with the myth of a monster
that has made the world tremble’ (27). The fictional incident takes
place in the early eighteenth century, yet both characters, old man
(woman) and narrator, speak with a late 1970s consciousness. The
narrator’s text thus participates in the feminist discourse which
enabled books like Moers’s Literary Women or Gilbert and Gubar’s
Madwoman in the Attic.
As in ‘Life in the Furniture Store’, the narrator is cast as an author
and as a ghost. George Sand, however, is not alone, but linked to
other women writers. Unlike the narrator of ‘Life in the Furniture
Store’, she has a name as well as a voice which speaks with authority
and self-confidence. She presents herself as in control of the dis-
course of the novel-writer as well as that of the literary critic:
And the other wall! The prospect here was as flat, hard, and
glittering as the first was capacious and rough, an expanse of
steel that testified (or so I thought, for to tell the truth I was as
fascinated and amused as Madame Lowell’s poetic persona was
frightened—or was to pretend to be—some ninety years later)
to humanity’s dual passion for cutting things to pieces and
then putting them into containers afterwards. (‘Sword Blades
and Poppy Seed’, 25)
Speaking as a ghost from a space beyond her own life-span, the nar-
rator George Sand is able to endow the voice of the narrator-protago-
nist with the kind of authority only a narrator not involved in the tale
could otherwise command. In reference to the female body that she
once was, she can speak as a woman, which a so-called ‘omniscient’
narrator, who has no body in the text, never could. As Lanser demon-
strates in her analysis of narrative voice from the eighteenth century
to the present, Fictions of Authority, the voice of the ‘omniscient’ narra-
tor is by default masculine in gender, the privileged origin of this voice
being a male author.
In speaking as a woman, the narrator in ‘Sword Blades and Poppy
Seed’ is able to gather authority from other women writers. She refers
to Amy Lowell to legitimize her (ironic) tale of female creativity: ‘In
the main, however, events went much as the poet has described (you
would do well to read Madame Lowell’s account, which she called
‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’ in her volume of the same title)’ (24).
‘Life in a Furniture Store’, on the other hand, represents such female
solidarity as a painful absence. The narrator of ‘Life in a Furniture
Store’ makes an effort to relate to her lesbian friend Laura, but fails to
make the connection and is even unable to find words to express her
resistance. Her only connection to life is the precarious one to the
actual reader, while George Sand, although dead, lives on in the imag-
ination of many women, including the fictional author of the short
story who places the epitaph from Ellen Moers’s Literary Women
before the text: ‘For this was something new, something distinctive of
modernity itself, that the written word in its most memorable form …
became increasingly and steadily the work of women’ (23).
In her first book of non-fiction, How to Suppress Women’s Writing
(1983), Joanna Russ delineates a number of strategies that women
can use to author-ize their work. The most empowering of these
strategies, according to Russ, is consciously feminist linkages to other
women:
Nowadays the statement [‘women can’t write’] sometimes
meets with … a drastic shift in perspective which can only
occur in the context of explicit feminism, after considerable
open anger, and with the backing of feminist solidarity. This is
a response I can call woman-centeredness. (107–08)
Like the narrator in ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’, authors who can
rely on ‘feminist solidarity’, that is women relating to women, can
move beyond ‘anxieties of authorship’ and create tales of women’s
lives without preoccupation with the struggle against men. The most
effective response to ‘women can’t write’, then, is to ignore the state-
ment as well as the one who makes it. As Russ phrases this response
(characteristic of radical separatist discourses of the 1970s and early
’80s): ‘… What? from a group of turned-away, preoccupied female
backs’ (109).
Thus, while ‘My Dear Emily’ and ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ embrace
structures of inequality and identify strategies of authorization, they
stop short of positively asserting alternatives. ‘Sword Blades and
Poppy Seeds’, published twenty years later, creates such alternative
visions of female authorship. Entering a literary women-only space,
George Sand as narrator appropriates an authority not based on dom-
inance but on cooperation. However, the gender discontinuities insti-
tuted by the text also disavow the female body-community at the
same time as it is being established. The affiliation with radical sep-
aratist feminism remains provisional.
Most Women Do Not Creep by Daylight:

Intertextual Fabrics in The Two of Them
This is another of those uncomfortable books which Russ reg-

ularly produces, her analysis of the sex-gender system increas-
ingly complex, subtle, and disturbing (Kathleen Spencer on
The Two of Them in ‘Rescuing the Female Child’, 178)
Authors do not make their plots up out of thin air (Russ, To
Write Like a Woman, 80)
Referring to women in literature or history most often means referring
to narratives about women, which are by necessity embedded in the
dominant discourses of a culture. The specific function of woman-
based intertextuality in feminist writing is therefore to manipulate
these narratives, liberating women’s voices muted in the texts which
tell their stories. Russ’s work makes extensive and ingenious use of
this technique. This is not to say, of course, that there are no other
intertextualities in her work that involve texts by or about men. Russ
draws from a rich knowledge of world literature as well as of genre
fiction and children’s literature. Her texts juxtapose Shakespeare and
William Blake with H.P. Lovecraft, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Car-
roll, Fritz Leiber, Hemingway and the Bible (to name just some of the
most prominent examples). However, the linkages to female charac-
ters and writers occupy a privileged position in Russ’s intertextuali-
ties. The connections to women, particularly in her work after 1969
(when ‘When It Changed’ came out), are both systematic and sys-
tematically marked as such. Acknowledging Suzette Haden Elgin’s
short story as the basis for her own work also links the historical
author Joanna Russ to the newly developing recognized tradition of
female science fiction writers. The previous section discussed such
references to women authors, whom the text also identified by name
and whose stories were transferred from stories of isolation to those
of community. The political implications of naming women charac-
ters and authors reach beyond the text itself to embrace the mater-
ial(ized) bodies of female readers and writers. In this section, I will
discuss the ways in which such references function in Russ’s fictional
work, taking as an example one of her later novels, The Two of Them
(1978), which I introduced in Part One. Creating webs of interrela-
tions among women, the novel recovers the inherent power in char-
acters such as Shahrazad of The Arabian Nights, or Irene Adler, the only
woman Sherlock Holmes grudgingly comes to respect. These inter-
relations ground women’s power to create meaning through story-
telling in their bodies rather than in their struggle as a socio-
economic class.
Feminist discourse in the 1970s and early ’80s consciously
attempted to disconnect from male-defined narratives revealing the
way in which access to power and normative heterosexuality dovetail.
Recovering and establishing connections with women both in history
and in women’s lives served as a primary strategy of resistance. In the
essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980),
Adrienne Rich critiqued a number of feminist texts on the basis of
their unacknowledged heterosexual bias. This bias, according to
Rich, prevents feminism from recognizing compulsory heterosexual-
ity as one of the most powerful forces in the overdetermined oppres-
sion of women:
[H]eterosexuality, like motherhood [i.e. women’s role in repro-
duction], needs to be recognized and studied as a political
institution—even, or especially, by those individuals who feel
they are, in their personal experience, the precursors of a new
social relation between the sexes. (657)
Far from proselytizing for ‘compulsory Lesbianism’, Rich demands
from feminism an awareness of the powerful impetus the women’s
movement can derive from asserting membership in their sex-cate-
gory by consciously associating with women. Rich differentiates two
basic aspects of relating to women:
Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical pres-

ence of Lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of
that existence. I mean the term Lesbian continuum to include a
range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of
woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a
woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experi-
ence with another woman. (648)
I find Rich’s terms useful for a discussion of Russ’s novels because
they include the lesbian experience without at the same time neces-
sarily excluding women who sleep with men. The ‘lesbian contin-
uum’ allows women who identify and act as ‘heterosexuals’ to share
the subversive potential of lesbianism and posits a vision of a society
which transcends categories of ‘sexual orientation’.
The Two of Them activates such a critique of patriarchal heterosex-
ual relations, grounding it in an emphatically feminist intertextuality.
The novel assembles a variety of literary women in/as text to make a
radical feminist politics in a fictional narrative. As I said above, the
book is dedicated to Suzette Haden Elgin, the author of the short
story ‘For the Sake of Grace’ (1969), which Russ used, as she says in
her dedication, ‘as a springboard to a very different story of [her]
own’. Such references and borrowings are common practice in sci-
ence fiction, but Joanna Russ in her work specifically and systemati-
cally refers to female characters and authors who were originally
defined by androcentric literature or literary historiography. In these
explicit allusions to images of women in patriarchal discourses, par-
ticularly discourses within or about literary production, the name of
the woman is of crucial significance, as my reading of ‘Sword Blades
and Poppy Seed’ demonstrated. The name identifies the woman both
as unique individual and as member of the female body-community.
Thelma Shinn in her comparative essay ‘Worlds of Words and
Swords: Suzette Haden Elgin and Joanna Russ at Work’ (1985)
appeals to the need for what she calls ‘sisterhood’ among women,
arguing that in this respect Elgin ‘has a convert in Joanna Russ’
(209). Shinn suggests that Russ’s women protagonists before The Two
of Them, particularly the individualist hero Alyx, are isolated from
other women as strong, exceptional individuals: ‘Only in The Two of
Them does she [Russ] expand this framework to demand the sister-
hood of women, although her awareness of this sisterhood begins to
emerge as early as Picnic on Paradise’ (207). In the light of the devel-
opments delineated in Part One on agency, I would challenge these
claims as well as the usefulness of the term ‘sisterhood’ in discussing

Russ’s participation in essentialist discourses. Instead, I would con-
tend that the community and lineage of women created by The Two of
Them, while they are based on the female body, resist such universal-
izing visions at the same time as they evoke them. The reference to
community and lineage is as disrupted and disruptive as the use of
the materialist dialectic in The Female Man. Using the family metaphor
‘sisterhood’ to refer to all humans with a female body—as empower-
ing as it still seemed in 1985 when Shinn’s essay came out—conflates
differences among women and imposes precisely the kind of defini-
tional closure that Russ’s texts abandon.
If one compares ‘For the Sake of Grace’ with Russ’s novel, the lat-
ter emerges as conscious of the need to connect to women as a basis
for political action, but Russ’s connections are always provisional,
never fixed. While Elgin’s text, read in conjunction with The Two of
Them, projects a static image of patriarchy and emphasizes individual
struggle, Russ’s novel faces the awesome complexity and overdeter-
minedness of the patriarchal symbolic order. In comparing the two
texts, I do not want to pass a value-judgement and find one of them
lacking. What I do want to do is explore the ways in which Russ
rewrites and transforms the original story by Elgin, which, if Thelma
Shinn is right in claiming that it embraces ‘sisterhood’ as central con-
cept, positions itself within American liberal-essentialist feminist dis-
courses.
Jacinth in Elgin’s ‘For the Sake of Grace’ is an extremely excep-
tional individual, who is able to accomplish the impossible and ded-
icates her accomplishment to one other woman, her less fortunate
aunt Grace. She escapes the ‘normal’ fate of women (either absolute
confinement to domesticity or to madness in isolation) through an
achievement that is clearly unattainable to less gifted individuals. Her
position in the story is analogous to Virginia Woolf’s in the narrative
of modernism as told by traditional literary historiography that I
referred to above: her existence is ultimately not a signal for hope, but
further underpins the inadequacy that her culture identifies with
women as a group. The two female protagonists in The Two of Them,
to the contrary, come to discard their status as extraordinary individ-
uals and cooperate in a rescue operation which ultimately aims at the
‘rescue’ of all women from patriarchy.
The unidentified narrator in ‘For the Sake of Grace’ tells the story of
12-year-old Jacinth primarily from the perspective of her father, the
Khadilh ban-harihn. The setting is an extremely misogynist patri-
archy on a planet which is at least a nine-months’ interstellar journey

from Earth. Women are excluded from all the professions and con-
fined to women’s quarters, where they exist only to be beautiful and
to produce offspring. The highest and most prestigious of the profes-
sions is that of the poet. Since poetry is a religious office, regulations
for practitioners differ from those for the other professions:
The law provides that any woman may challenge and claim her
right to compete in the Poetry Examinations [the passing of
which secures the right to enter the university programme for
Poetry], provided she is twelve years of age and a citizen of this
planet. If she is not accepted, however, the penalty for having
challenged and failed is solitary confinement for life, in the
household of her family. (218)
The Kadilh’s sister Grace, who entered the examinations at age
thirty, suffered the fate dictated by law and exists in the madness of
complete isolation. Against seemingly insurmountable odds (there
have been only three women poets in nearly ten thousand years of the
culture’s existence), Jacinth not only passes the examination, she is
awarded the rank of the seventh—the highest—level. Before the
authorities isolate her from all contact with her family and other
women because she is a female poet, they grant Jacinth one more
visit. She uses this last opportunity of communicating with her fam-
ily to dedicate her accomplishment (which subjects her to an isola-
tion virtually as complete as her aunt’s) to the woman who failed:
‘You will send someone at once to inform my Aunt Grace that I have
been appointed to the Seventh Level of the Profession of Poetry …’
(230).
Although The Two of Them takes over both setting and central char-
acters from ‘For the Sake of Grace’, the novel creates a fundamentally
different story. The 12-year-old would-be poet Zubeydeh, unlike
Jacinth, does not enter the secured status of a professional poet
within her culture, but leaves her home planet to open up the possibil-
ity of becoming a writer in an alien culture. Leaving the culture of her
origin allows Zubeydeh to participate in a project which aims to col-
lect ‘women and little girls from the far corners of the Universe’ (168).
Zubeydeh in Russ’s novel thus becomes part of a (coalitional) com-
munity of women from which Jacinth in ‘For the Sake of Grace’ must
remain excluded. The community of women in Elgin’s short story is
one of anonymous victims, a community based on shared oppression.
Conversely, Irene and Zubeydeh in The Two of Them move beyond the
oppression to become agents of change. The web of acknowledged or

unacknowledged allusions to images of women in patriarchal dis-
courses extends the community beyond the text to the bodies of
male-defined female characters.
One of the problematic issues which the text only touches upon
marginally is the cultural imperialism implicit in Irene’s rescue of
Zubeydeh. The tacit assumption of the text is that Zubeydeh is old
enough to decide whether she wants to leave or change her own cul-
ture from within. Zubeydeh’s mother Zumurrud chooses to stay
behind. It is important to point out that Ka’abah, for all its superficial
similarities, is not an Arab culture.2 Its existence spans only three
generations (compared to more than ten thousand years in Elgin’s
story). Its exaggerated fakeness and rigidity point to totalitarian fan-
tasies of complete control over women which are closer to the ones
expressed in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) than to
any real society. Furthermore, Ka’abah has been excommunicated by
the intergalactic version of Islam represented in the text (The Two of
Them, 3).
Another intertext within genre fiction which Russ wove into the
narrative of The Two of Them recalls one of the major icons of popular
genre writing in the nineteenth century: Sherlock Holmes.3 The pro-
tagonist of The Two of Them, Irene, identifies with Sherlock Holmes’s
opponent in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘A Scandal in
Bohemia’ (1891). The basis for this identification is the woman’s
exceptionality, which Irene initially also claims for herself. In her
teens, as a response to the denigrating position of ‘ordinary’ women
in her own culture, Irene decides to become ‘one of the boys’. Partially
disinheriting her body, she becomes not-a-woman and from this bor-
derline position is later able to enter the space of men, represented by
the all-powerful Trans-Temporal Authority. Young Irene gives this
aspect of her fragmented personality the name of the exceptional
woman in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about the famous misog-
ynist Holmes: ‘Waskiewicz was given her at birth, but … she saved
herself in adolescence by thinking of herself as Irenee [sic] Adler, the
woman’ (5). The variant spelling points to the different pronuncia-
tion of the name in American and British English (The Two of Them, 3).
Irene Adler from ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ is the only woman who Sher-
lock Holmes respects as having reasoning powers (almost) as formi-
dable as his own. To Sherlock Holmes and to the narrator Dr Watson,
Irene Adler is the ideal woman, endowed as she is with both a beau-
tiful body and a keen intellect (which ‘saves’ her from her body).
The woman Irene Adler represents an idea which Western patriar-

chal societies have perpetuated since the Enlightenment, namely that
true (that is ‘masculine’) intellect will succeed even in a female body.
This image of the ‘masculine’ mind in the female body re-enforces the
naturalized inferiority of women and re-inscribes both patriarchal
gender relations and compulsory heterosexuality. Irene Adler in
Conan Doyle’s story erases all other women, excluding them from the
possibility of attaining agency in this text: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is
always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any
other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of
her sex’ (206). Sherlock Holmes’s client, Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigis-
mond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Falstein, and hereditary
King of Bohemia, identifies her as a dissembler, as a man who occu-
pies the body of a woman, thus setting her, but only her, free to think
and act independently of the limitations her body would ordinarily
impose on her: ‘You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She
has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most
resolute of men’ (217).
The woman is thus both the perfect woman and not a woman at all.
Miss Irene Adler’s mind does not conform to her body—yet she can
become a positive protagonist precisely because of her body. Her
beautiful body opens the possibility of romance, without which nar-
rative convention would force her into the role of a monstrous female
foe. She is able to beat Holmes at his own game because he underes-
timates her powers of reasoning.
However, Holmes is right in assuming that she will cease to be a
threat as soon as she becomes the possession of a legal spouse in the
plot of romance which she cannot escape. Following Irene’s pre-
sumed suitor across town, Holmes accidentally—and ironically—
becomes best man in their hurried marriage ceremony. He observes
correctly (in the logic of the narrative): ‘This marriage rather simpli-
fies matters’ (226). Matrimony neutralizes Irene Adler’s extraordinary
powers of reasoning, and she ‘reverts’ to her ‘original’ state, deter-
mined and circumscribed by her body. Holmes’s plan to trick her into
exposing the location of a hidden photograph (which Holmes is hired
to secure from her) is now certain to succeed, even though it is based
on a sequence of generalizations which sound rather simple-minded
for a great ‘scientific’ reasoner: ‘Women are naturally secretive, and
they like to do their own secreting’ (226–27). Holmes continues in the
same vein:
When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is

at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a per-
fectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken
advantage of it … A married woman grabs at her baby; an
unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. (230)
In a situation of crisis, the woman’s body (‘instinct’, ‘overpowering
impulse’) will make sure she behaves in calculable patterns. As he
expected, Irene Adler at the fake cry of ‘fire’ reaches for the desired
photograph, exposing its secret hiding place. Yet her ‘masculine’
mind also recognizes Holmes’s deception, and she is able to flee the
country with her husband and the photograph. Her victory, however,
is ultimately ineffectual—because she is married.
In her essay ‘What Can a Heroine Do?’ Russ analysed this dilemma
of female protagonists: ‘For the heroine the conflict between success
and sexuality is itself the issue, and the duality is absolute’ (84). The
King of Bohemia can rest assured that Irene will not expose the
incriminating photograph to raise a public scandal that would ruin
his monarchal-matrimonial career plans—because she is already
safely attached to a male. Sherlock Holmes ironically receives his fee
in the form of a photograph which shows the woman, Miss Irene Adler,
on whose image he can now continue to fix his gaze—without fear.
Appropriating the female character Irene from an androcentric narra-
tive for herself, Irene Waskiewizc moves the angle of vision from the
original narrator in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ to the woman, rescuing
her from her place as other. Reading the patriarchal text against the
grain, Irene thus becomes the voice of the woman who is silenced in
Conan Doyle’s text.
Initially, Ernst Neumann seems to indeed recognize her as Irenee
Adler, whose exceptionality allows her to transgress the limiting
boundaries of her female body. When he, the ‘earnest new man’ (The
Two of Them, 5), addresses her as ‘I-REE-nee’, using the British—
Holmes’s—pronunciation of her name, she infers that he does repre-
sent the New Man, who will not impose on her the confining stories of
the past. Therefore, Irene at 16 decides to leave her middle-class Amer-
ican home for a life of adventures with him. However, as Part One
demonstrated, the New Man proves to differ only superficially from
the ‘old men’ from Irene’s patriarchal past. Like Irene Adler, whose
name in German refers her to a powerful bird of prey, she does act, but
without consequence because her primary attachment to a male lim-
its her range of action to precisely the scope of this relationship.
However, The Two of Them connects Irene with a number of other

female characters and these connections ultimately break up the sin-
gle identity that fixes her to Ernst in a heterosexual constellation in
which she can only lose, no matter how exceptional she may be. Ire-
nee Adler is the name of one only of Irene’s multiple personalities in
the text, which, similar to The Female Man, subvert the notion of the
stable, singular identity suggested by revolutionary acts of power
against men as well as by identity politics solely based on the female
body.4 Irene as (unmarried) Irenee Adler is a possible self uninhibited
by patriarchal concepts of femininity. As Irenee Adler she can become
an interstellar spy. Yet Irene is also Maria Sklodowska Curie, Mikolaj
Kopernik and Lady Lovelace, each name representing a different self
within the woman who received the single name ‘Irene’ at birth. Irene
plays a deliberately confusing game with ‘female’ as well as ‘male’
identities, displacing them from their ‘original’ culture as well. As an
impersonator, Irene is able to appropriate for herself the ability to
fight physically, to reason scientifically and to enjoy sex actively with-
out the burden of romance: ‘Let’s fuck’ (8).
The power of these identifications, however, remains precarious as
long as Irene is emotionally and sexually tied to Ernst. The text rep-
resents the moment when Irene trusts Ernst enough to let him know
about her powerful other self, Irenee Adler, as the moment when this
self loses its ‘virginity’ as well. Once caught up in an emotional rela-
tionship with a man, Irenee’s skills and abilities become ineffectual:
In the dark [16-year-old Irene] decided to tell [Ernst] about
Irenee Adler The Woman, and so she did, in a dry, self-mock-
ing, grown-up voice that scared her and made her bones ache;
here is the little girl (said the voice), here is the trap, here is the
little girl in the trap. (The Two of Them, 52)
Her reveling in pleasurable erotic activities with Ernst’s body leads
her to enter the trap unawares, a trap which the narrator’s (feminist)
voice in this passage recognizes. The knowledge of Irene Adler’s story
allows Ernst to harness the power of his lover’s alter ego. Naming
them, he also gains control over Irene’s other personas, Sklodowska,
Kopernik and Lady Lovelace. When he appropriates their names, the
different selves of Irene begin to serve him instead of her. Like
Holmes, who comes to own a photograph of the singular Irene Adler,
he is able to subject her to his own definitions. Therefore, when Irene
kills Ernst, she not only rescues Zubeydeh, but also Irene(e) Adler,
Marie Sklodowska Curie, Mikolaj Kopernik and Lady Lovelace.
Irene’s involvement in anti-essentialist discourses demonstrates

once more that the text does not rely on confronting one master nar-
rative with another monolithic counter-story.
The killing of Ernst is meaningful on yet another level, since it
refers to and reverses the story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad from
The Arabian Nights. The beginning section of The Two of Them includes
a long quote from a Ka’aban book, a phoney imitation of stories from
The Arabian Nights, which Irene, infuriated by its blatant racism and
sexism, reads to Ernst. Irene explicitly compares the Ka’aban version
with the original: ‘She says, “The Arabian Nights is genuine. It wasn’t
published last week”’ (3). The society of Ka’abah is an exaggerated
and simplified version of the one represented in The Arabian Nights, a
use of the text which corresponds to traditional Western readings.
Husain Haddawy in the introduction to his new translation (1990)
observes: ‘From Galland to Burton, translators, scholars, and readers
shared the belief that the Nights depicted a true picture of Arab life
and culture at the time of the tales and, for some strange reason, at
their own time’ (xxi). The artificial culture created by the inhabitants
of Ka’abah mimics such interpretations. The narrator in The Two of
Them calls Ka’aban society ‘mock-Arabian’ (11), but it also effectively
mocks all patriarchal societies’ claims to genuineness and authentic-
ity, exposing the interest and constructedness of their respective
myths of origin.
Irene’s and Shahrazad’s stories share characteristics which are cru-
cially relevant in terms of how Russ’s texts link women’s writing with
the way in which they position themselves in relation to compulsory
heterosexuality. Shahrazad is forced to continually tell stories to save
her life from a tyrannical husband, an ardent woman-hater, who is
intending to kill her the morning after he had ‘satisfied himself with
her’ (16). In putting her own life at stake by choosing to become King
Shahrayar’s wife, she also saves the lives of other women whom he
would have slept with and killed the next day. As the King controls
the life of the storyteller, Ernst controls Irene’s life—in spite of their
supposedly equal relationship. Irene, in killing Ernst, activates the
disjunctive analogy to Shahrazad and creates an effective story, but
for her own life and other women instead of for a tyrant’s languid
pleasure.
A further trait which Shahrazad shares with Irene Adler, the young
Irene in The Two of Them, is that she possesses extraordinary gifts that
distinguish her from other women:
The older daughter, Shahrazad, had read the books of litera-

ture, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had
studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the say-
ings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intel-
ligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined. (The Arabian Nights,
11)
At this point of intersection, ‘For the Sake of Grace’, The Two of Them,
and The Arabian Nights meet. Shahrazad tells stories for her life and
Jacinth takes the mortal risk of competing in the poetry examination.
Zubeydeh, although she is more like an ordinary 12-year-old, risks
going with Irene to be able to tell her own stories. To all of them, writ-
ing, or storytelling, is a matter of survival. In this respect, the narra-
tor of The Two of Them has a special position. Although this narrator is
never identified as female, s/he most definitely speaks with a feminist
voice.
Furthermore, Zubeydeh in The Two of Them, in contrast to Jacinth in
‘For the Sake of Grace’, has a voice of her own, even if this voice is
controlled by the narrator. She wants to become a famous writer, but
on Ka’abah the position of a poet enjoys an elevated social status and
is only open to males, as is any kind of productive activity. The young
girl, however, has been able to create a story of her own life in which
the rule that women cannot write magically does not apply to her.
This story preserves a space within herself that allows her to believe
in her own ability to become a published poet although she has fully
absorbed the gender stereotypes of Ka’abah:
‘I will be a poet! I won’t give in!’ … ‘Daddy doesn’t want me to
be a poet, but that’s only because he’s afraid I’ll fail. He doesn’t
understand, but I’ll convince him. I know it’s not good for
women to be poets, but I’m different.’ (The Two of Them, 84)
Since women cannot be writers (a dogma which stands in blatant
contradiction to the source of Ka’aban culture, the tales told by
Shahrazad), Zubeydeh can only conceive of herself as something
other than a woman. Like Irene, she has to construct herself as an
exception to enter the world of activity—even if only in her imagina-
tion—without fundamentally questioning the precepts of her culture.
But in joining forces with the older woman, Zubeydeh can also take
part in abandoning that imaginary safe space for the struggle that
aims to transform rather than escape the social and symbolic forces
that silence them. Although this struggle deprives both women of the
security and stability that accompanied their silencing, the novel rep-
resents it as ultimately infinitely more rewarding.
In this respect, there is a distinct difference between The Two of
Them and the stories around Alyx. While Alyx is clearly an exceptional
woman, the image of a role-model that demonstrates women’s poten-
tial, Zubeydeh and Irene exemplify the limitations of such exception-
alism. The narrator in Russ’s short novel On Strike Against God (1980)
brings this shift to a different agenda to the point, changing Woodrow
Wilson’s famous First World War slogan to a battle cry for the libera-
tion of women’s agency from the exile of exceptionality: ‘Make the
world safe for mediocrity’ (81). This example demonstrates the dan-
gers always also involved in using such patriarchal patterns: the fem-
inist text necessarily risks reinscribing the very hegemonic discourses
that it is intending to destroy. It is my point in this chapter that, by
connecting a number of different patriarchal story patterns about
women, The Two of Them and many of Russ’s other texts are able to
create provisional authorizations of female writers and characters.
These authorizations do reinscribe the principle of power, appropriat-
ing it for women as members of the female body-community, but this
power is fragmented, decentralized and temporary. This strategy
again points to a skewed reversal of another significant American cul-
tural narrative: out of the one, many.
The representation of Zubeydeh’s aunt Dunya in the text follows a
slightly different pattern of resistance. Dunya also exists and func-
tions in a web of deliberate intertextualities, but her story combines
feminist intertexts with the patriarchal canon. As with all major char-
acters in the novel, she is primarily modelled on a protagonist in
Elgin’s short story, Grace. As in ‘For the Sake of Grace’, the mad aunt
represents the women who were killed because they could not tell
stories in The Arabian Nights. Again, in Russ’s text, using the name to
identify the woman is significant. The text explicitly refers Dunya to
Shahrazad’s sister (Dinarzad in Haddawy’s translation): ‘It is nothing
living but only the memory of another voice, the voice of Dunyazad,
Shahrazad’s sister, that mad, dead, haunted woman who could not
tell stories, who could not save herself’ (The Two of Them, 181). Woven
into the story of Dunya in The Two of Them is a feminist reinterpreta-
tion of the ‘madwoman’. This empowering reinterpretation intersects
with feminist critical discourses of which The Madwoman in the Attic is
an example. However, there is yet another possible intertextual level
to the sound of Dunya’s name which relates her to the modernist
writer and lesbian icon Djuna Barnes, creating a lineage of women’s
resistance to their silencing. These feminist twists to Dunya’s story of

confinement and insanity give her a dignity and self-control that
Grace as unambiguous victim must lack.
One of the ways in which the novel exercises this reinterpretation
of women’s madness is in representing Dunya, the rebel who has
gone insane in her confinement, through the eyes of Irene and Zubey-
deh at the moment when the girl begins to become rebellious herself.
As long as Zubeydeh was considered biologically not a woman but a
child, she was allowed some freedom to ‘scribble’. However, when
she enters puberty, the apparatus of oppression closes in on her. Her
mother, who has to be medicated to remain an obedient wife, is the
one to confront her with the ghastly fate of a woman who insists on
wanting to write on Ka’abah: Zubeydeh’s aunt Dunya, who has been
locked up in an unfurnished cave with only rudimentary sanitary
facilities. Mortified to see that her aunt has been reduced to a dehu-
manized ‘heap of clothes’, Zubeydeh takes Irene, who has become her
confidante, to Dunya’s prison cell:
The little girl is crying, ‘Daddy did it! Daddy did it!’
At first Irene can see nothing. The walls beyond are bare
rock; there is an undecorated, naked bulb in the ceiling and
someone has left a few crumpled pieces of paper on the floor
and what look like smears of food. There is an odd smudge
along the wall, some sixteen inches off the floor, as if furniture
had been moved there repeatedly over the years and had
scraped or in some fashion partially smoothed the rock…
Then the heap of clothes begins to stir. It fits itself into the
smudge on the wall—so that’s how, Irene thinks—and moves
slowly along the floor. From time to time the woman whom
one can’t even see inside the rags becomes still, not stopping
in any human attitude but ceasing the way a snail might do
upon encountering an obstacle. Then the heap shivers a bit
and for a few moments rocks back and forth, a movement in
which Irene sees a faint echo of Zubeydeh’s extravagant grief.
And again the slow creeping along the wall. (The Two of Them,
81–2)
Zubeydeh and Irene observe the incarcerated woman from the out-
side, perceiving her as non-human. However, the episode is a direct
and controlled allusion to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow
Wall-Paper’ (1892). The subtext thus created simultaneously shows
the perspective of the ‘it’, the ‘heap of clothes’, the woman.
‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ performs a similar reversal in perspective

by giving the ‘madwoman’ control over the text as narrator. Her hus-
band, who is a physician, confines her to her room ostensibly to cure
her of a ‘nervous condition’. Part of this ‘rest cure’ requires that the
patient is not allowed to do anything, a restriction which especially
refers to writing. The narrator manages to keep a diary of her con-
finement in spite of her husband’s and her sister-in-law’s attempts to
prevent it. Condemned to inaction, she watches the wallpaper, whose
pattern, colour and smell begin to occupy her mind completely. At
once terrified and fascinated, she sees a woman—herself—caught in
the pattern, shaking it in the attempt to break free: ‘And she is all the
time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that
pattern—it strangles so …’ (810). Gradually, she escapes to the only
place available to her, her own mind, severing all connections to the
outside world. Having pulled off most of the wallpaper, she is deter-
mined to stay in the room: ‘here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and
my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot
lose my way’ (812). Aunt Dunya has, like the narrator in ‘The Yellow
Wall-Paper’, also found refuge in what from the outside perspective
looks like ‘madness’: complete isolation from a society that deprives
her of an existence. The allusion to Gilman’s story makes Dunya, the
woman who has no voice, a potential narrator. The woman in ‘The
Yellow Wall-Paper’ is confined to her room, but she is the one whose
voice is heard.
At her visit to the cave of the mad aunt, Zubeydeh is for the first
time forced to see what adulthood has in store for her, and it is her
mother—a victim herself—who comes to enforce the ‘law of the
father’. Zumurrud says, speaking to her daughter and Irene:
‘I took my daughter to see her because I want her to know
what happens to women who go mad in our family.’ …
‘Your Aunt Dunya wanted to be a poet.’
She adds, ‘We kept taking her papers away from her. They
weren’t good for her. And then we knew we had done the right
thing because she went mad.’ (The Two of Them, 83–4)
Zubeydeh, however, still clings on to the idea that she is a poetic
genius and will be able to become a writer in spite of her father. Con-
fidently, she submits her poems to his judgement, but to her dismay
he rejects them: ‘Alas, my daughter, you have no talent. Your poems
are worthless. They are no good at all’ (93). What makes this rejection
especially painful is that it comes from Zubeydeh’s own father.
This personal policing of gender boundaries by someone the girl

loves marks another crucial difference to ‘For the Sake of Grace’. In
Elgin’s story, the ‘law of the father’ is static, fixed by an impersonal
authority, out of reach for Jacinth’s real father. The characters in the
short story live according to rigidly enforced laws, which do not
change, while The Two of Them shows the constant re-creation of the
law by the agents who live in it. Zubeydeh’s father, as well as the girl
herself, is part of the process of reinscription.
Yet Zubeydeh finds a way to disrupt this process of cultural repro-
duction. The traumatic experience that destroys her hope creates
another, more powerful vision. Only when Zubeydeh sees her father
tear her writings into pieces does she realize that no matter how good
she might become as a poet, he will never accept her writing because
she is of the wrong sex:
She starts to cry. Everyone is against her. No one, neither
mother nor father, is willing to admit the truth. She starts to cry
more hysterically then for it seems to her that she will wake
tomorrow in the cell with Dunya, fouled by the madwoman’s
excrement, daubed with her food, with a mad, whispering
voice in her ears saying horrible poetry until Zubeydeh’s own
brain begins to turn, until she gets dizzy, until she too goes
mad, and then there will be no poetry, no marriage, no friends,
no happiness, no sanity, but only madness forever and ever.
(93–94)
This eye-opening experience leads her to decide to come with Irene to
a world which, though it is also patriarchal, provides gaps for women
to exist in. However, Zubeydeh carries her culture’s stories about sex-
ual difference with her. So the escape can never be completed. On the
spaceship away from Ka’abah, she meets a six-year-old orphaned boy
she wants to take with her, and Irene observes: ‘Zubeydeh knows he’s
a good boy. Zubeydeh is willing to give poetry readings for him, to
scrub floors for him, to work for him and sacrifice for him’ (168).
Zubeydeh’s rescue from Ka’abah demonstrates that each liberating
action also has its limitations, but each step expands the gaps in the
strangling patterns of patriarchal discourse.
Thus, The Two of Them complexly interweaves multiple layers of
relationships among women across texts and within its own narra-
tive. Zubeydeh’s moment of insight is paralleled by Irene’s breaking
free from her lover. The moment when Irene realizes that Ernst is not
what she took him to be, she connects the supposedly egalitarian
Trans-Temporal Authority with the constrictive patriarchy of

Ka’abah:
Trans Temp guards against the different one, the unstable one,
the female one, the Wife-stealer! She remembers ’Alee peering
in horror through his beard: Where are your children? Center
must have been asking the same question, asking it for years,
expecting that any moment she would revert and turn back
into Rose. (146–47)
Rose is the name of Irene’s mother, who stands for the women who
are not extraordinary, the women who remain within the discursive
limits of their bodies without taking possession of them. In the hor-
ror of ’Alee’s face Irene recognizes the potential power of ‘reverting’ to
the female body. Just as there is no way for Ernst to escape the limits
of his own body to become the earnest new man he aspires to be, a
man who ‘loves and respects women’, the individual solution is ulti-
mately closed to Irene as well. They share the opposing ends of one
fate dictated by the patriarchal narratives that define their bodies as
binary opposites. In killing him, she takes her fate in her own hands
and embraces her own being as female, turning towards other women
for validation instead of turning against men. The end of the novel
has brought her ‘Back to Square One’ (176). She is now a thoroughly
ordinary woman, ‘a thirty-year-old divorcée with a child to support’
(176), on her way to Albuquerque. Irene has shed her adolescent
dream of escaping her body and now wholeheartedly embraces the
community of women. Again, she gives a name to this newly devel-
oped aspect of her personality. Her adult name is Irene Rose Wask-
iewicz (177). By rescuing the female child, she also becomes her own
mother’s daughter. Yet this reconciliation with the mother does not
happen on the basis of identification. Irene does not repeat the story
of Rose but constructs her own from the fragments of other women’s
stories. Her mother had validated her femaleness through attachment
to a male and thus made Irene’s existence possible. Irene connects to
her mother directly, as a woman, using her body—defined by patri-
archy as limiting—as the basis for her liberatory politics.
Towards the end of the narrative, Irene thus finds herself thor-
oughly ‘outside’ the ‘system’, a seemingly powerless nobody. But the
text has also placed her inside multiple (inter)textual webs which
connect her to other women. In the end, Irene dreams a hopeful mes-
sage of possible change which reiterates and brings together these
connections to a female lineage and a reassuring albeit fragmented
sense of body-community. This dream, a somewhat Blakeian apoca-

lyptic vision, creates an extraordinary image of a vast vulva that con-
tains the dead bones of the slain women but also a faint inkling of
hope:
In her dream Zubeydeh is a grown woman and in her Ka’abite
dress sits on a rocky promontory, a little above Irene, brooding
behind her veil like the Spirit of the Abyss; Zubeydeh is wait-
ing for something to happen. Far below the two of them Irene
can see a desert valley and an old, dry watercourse where a
river ran ages ago; the rock walls of the valley rise not into the
sky but into a half-lit, interior greyness like the roof of a vast
cavern; Irene knows that they are in the centermost vacancy of
someone’s mind, that they have found their way at last into the
most secret place of Ka’abah. Farther out towards the surface
there may be tumultuous winds, fiery conflagrations, and rains
of blood, but here all is still, and in the gray, colorless half-light
Irene can see that the floor of the valley below is thickly cov-
ered with bones. (179–80)
The valley, the abyss, the roof of a vast cavern in this passage may be
read as the enormously amplified echo of Zubeydeh’s grown body, yet
the text does not flatly tie the woman back down to earth. The image
contains an ambiguity which keeps it open to a multitude of readings.
The dead valley, a vast mirror image of Zubeydeh’s living vulva, also
links her to her aunt Dunya: ‘It is so dry, so still, so movelessly gray
that Irene knows at once whose soul it is—it is Aunt Dunya’s soul …’
(180). The eroticism that is suppressed between Irene and
Zubeydeh—represented in the dream through the physical distance
between them—is implicit in the imagery.
The same image, however, whose visual forms can be read as a
vulva is simultaneously also shaped like the mad woman’s head from
the inside. The desert valley from this perspective corresponds to the
groove in the brain inside the dome of Dunya’s skull. Irene’s dream
thus in a physiological image conflates what patriarchal narratives
have separated for women like Irene Adler, her brains and her sex. On
the other hand, the image of the cavern—oscillating between two
vital parts of the female anatomy—also separates what patriarchal dis-
courses have linked in a continuous manoeuvre of naturalization,
namely the reproductive function of the woman’s body and the sup-
posed inferiority of her mental abilities. According to this patriarchal
logic, women cannot write because they have a vagina rather than a
protruding organ. Correspondingly, this narrative tells woman that

because her economic function is grounded in her womb, she cannot
become a nuclear physicist.
Ultimately Irene reaches a point where she sees that the power to
act she thought she had was only vicarious power mediated through
her lover. In this final section, she reaches for the unnameable. The
imagery of the passage suggests that the text locates this unnameable
liberating something in the mad woman’s mind as well as in her body,
precisely where Ka’aban patriarchy locates its most secret and most
terrible fear:
For the first time, something will be created out of nothing.
There is not a drop of water, not a blade of grass, not a single
word.
But they [the bones of the dead women] move.
And they rise. (181)
Irene’s dream uses one of the stock tropes of horror fiction, the rise of
the living dead, for an image of hope for the female body-community.
The title of the book, The Two of Them, which in the beginning seems
to refer to Ernst and Irene, by the end has shifted to the intimate rela-
tionship between the two women. Thus, it is not the physical removal
that rescues Zubeydeh and simultaneously also Irene, but her actively
accepting the lesbian continuum. The two women break with their
loyalty to patriarchal structures, which are predicated upon isolating
women from other women.
The Two of Them thus interweaves the stories of two female protag-
onists, Irene and Zubeydeh, who both start out insisting on their indi-
viduality and uniqueness but through their interactions come to
appreciate the political potential of recognizing commonalties. It is, in
other words, precisely the interactions between fundamental (cul-
tural) differences which instigate the creation of the body-community
across cultural and age boundaries. The Two of Them, in similar ways
to The Female Man, thus enters highly contested and contradictory dis-
cursive grounds. The contradiction is between the desire to identify
individual women as exceptional, that is distinct from other women,
and the political need to build a community of ordinary women which
levels out distinctions among them. Both novels negotiate these irre-
solvable contradictions through conjuring up the ghosts of women
from patriarchal literature. Russ thus derives oppositional force from
acknowledging a lineage of exceptional women, but her texts simul-
taneously also question discourses of exceptionality.
Beauty Awake: Re-reading the Male-defined Female

(The Female Man and On Strike Against God)
The insistence that authors make up their own plots is a recent

development in literature; Milton certainly did not do it … It’s
a commonplace that bad writers imitate and great writers steal
… nothing flowers without a history (Russ, To Write Like a
Woman, 86)
Trained in the conventions of genre writing, Russ works without
romantic illusions about originality and individual creation. The Two
of Them weaves an effective fabric from fragments of borrowed stories
about women, participating in discourses which emphasize the polit-
ical impact of a female body-community. In my discussion of this bro-
ken fabric, I focused on the most obvious and acknowledged
intertextualities in the novel, untangling some of the intertwined sto-
ries. This process of untangling also made apparent the ways in
which the intertexts partially interfere with the essentialist-feminist
agenda. Yet these interferences or undesired implications of the patri-
archal stories ultimately also work for the text as a whole because
they ensure that the coalition with monolithic essentialism remains a
partial affiliation. In positioning women’s bodies and women’s sto-
ries as primary to the narrative, The Two of Them thinks essentialist
strategies to their logical conclusion, but does not create closure at
this point. The text moves on.
Although The Two of Them creates the most elaborate fabric of
woman-based intertextualities, Russ began to develop this strategy
early in her career as a writer. In my analysis of the early short story
‘My Dear Emily’ I have already discussed her use of such intertextu-
alities. My reading related this story to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and the names of the protagonists, Emily and Charlotte, to the Brontë
sisters. There is no stability in this lineage since the names also evoke
the writers Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Later
texts of Russ’s explicitly feminist period specifically weave in patriar-
chal stories of women in their narratives. This section will discuss
how The Female Man and On Strike Against God implement and trans-
form the stories of women characters whose creation goes back to
ancient oral traditions, similar to those that were the basis for The
Arabian Nights, and some of which have become stock characters in
literature. In this discussion, I will re-examine the biblical stories of
Jael and Ruth, and will explore how Russ’s texts make use of the fem-
inist potential of such characters as Brynhild and Sleeping Beauty.

Brynhild or Brunhild is a character from the Nibelungenlied, a heroic
epic written in the early thirteenth century, but drawing on a much
older oral tradition. Her supernatural physical strength is tied to her
virginity. I would argue that all women characters in the Western lit-
erary tradition who are represented as powerful as long as they stay
away from romance with men are direct relations of Brynhild. Irene
Adler exemplifies this tradition. Yet Brynhild does not give up her vir-
ginity as readily as Irene does. Only through deception and with the
help of Siegfried, who makes himself invisible with a magic hood and
wrestles her down, can her husband win her agreement to copulate
with him. The act of penile penetration deprives her of her magic
powers. Jael in The Female Man, whose powers also lie in her physical
strength, identifies with the virginal Brynhild: ‘I tied my first sparring
partner in enraged knots, as Brynhild tied up her husband in her gir-
dle and hung him on the wall …’ (192). Jael is able to retain her vir-
ginity, if ‘virginity’ denotes the state of someone whose hymen was
never destroyed by the entering penis of a male, as it does in compul-
sory heterosexuality. However, she does not have sex with women
either, since, as she points out, she is ‘an old-fashioned girl’ (196).
Her sexual partner is an android, a machine in the shape of a beauti-
ful, blue-eyed, blond youth: ‘He’s a lovely limb of the house. The orig-
inal germ-plasm was chimpanzee, I think, but none of the behavior is
organically controlled any more’ (199).
With her reference to the legend of Brynhild, Jael as a narrator unrav-
els one of the foundational narratives of patriarchy: the woman relin-
quishes all of her power in the act of heterosexual intercourse. The
content of this myth, however, is generally obscured in dominant dis-
course by promises of romantic love or motherhood (as it is in Irene’s
case in The Two of Them). The legend of Brynhild therefore represents an
interstice in the fabric of patriarchal discourse, one of those loopholes
in the system which make the development of a subversive feminist
counter-discourse possible. The story of Jael, as a stage in the develop-
ment towards a feminist utopia, uses this gap and maps out an escape
route for women from the disempowering, deflowering penetration.
Joanna, one of whose alter-egos Jael represents, takes a different
course, since she, in contrast to Jael, disrupts the power of compul-
sory heterosexuality: ‘Brynhild hung her husband on a nail in the
wall, tied up in her girdle as in a shopping bag, but she, too, lost her
strength when the magic shlong got inside her’ (The Female Man,
207). Accepting the whole story of Brynhild, Joanna both connects to
and distances herself from Jael. While Jael speaks with anger and
pain, Joanna is free to be quite irreverent, and can therefore also
rewrite the story of Brynhild: she names her erotic fantasies about her
girlfriend-to-be Laura Rose ‘Brynhildic’ (208). A Brynhild who sleeps
with women keeps her strength, a story which quite upsets the heroic
fabric of the Nibelungenlied. Thus, the novel evokes the heterosexual
configuration just to break the stifling power it exerts over all protag-
onists with the exception of the utopian woman Janet.
What renders this process of reshaping patriarchal stories so pow-
erful is that it does not rely on the utopian vision of a fixed space
beyond patriarchy, but remains within the logic of patriarchal dis-
course. Merely denying the validity of such stories, as many radical
feminist utopian visions do, precludes the creation of alternative sto-
ries. The available languages are, after all, patriarchal symbolic sys-
tems and need to be subverted because there is nothing to replace
them with. Consequently, Russ’s subversions work with the assump-
tion that a utopian space beyond the existing social and symbolic sys-
tems is unreachable. Once more, it is the combination of different,
even contradictory, intertextualities that ultimately allows her fiction
to stay clear of each of these links’ inherent determinism.
Russ thus uses Brynhild in the Nibelungenlied as a resource for a
woman-based rereading of patriarchy. Another such resource in her
work is the Bible, also a text which preserves an older oral tradition,
presumably from a time when patriarchy as we know it took its
shape. As in the legend of Brynhild, The Female Man seeks interstices
in the biblical discourse which enable Russ to re-interpret the images
of women produced by the Bible. Joanna as speaking subject refers to
a female prophet and judge in the Old Testament, whose story is also
significant for Jael: ‘I won’t tell you what poets and prophets my
mind is crammed full of (Deborah, who said ‘Me, too, pretty please?’
and who got struck with leprosy)’ (136). Deborah in Judges 4 and 5
leads the Israelites in a successful revolt against Canaanite domina-
tion and refers to another Israelite woman, Jael, in her song of victory.
Jael kills the leader of the Canaanites, Sisera, thus ending the strug-
gle against the oppressors:
Judges 4:
Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an
hammer in her hand, and went softly unto [Sisera], and smote
the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for
he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.
Judges 5: 24–27 [from Deborah’s song of victory]

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite
be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent. [Sisera]
asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter
in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, and her right
hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she
smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced
and stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed,
there he fell down dead. (King James Version)
When Jael, who is also the speaking subject at that point, kills Boss,
she uses a direct quote from Deborah’s song of victory, thus confirm-
ing the immediate connection to her biblical namesake:
He fell on me (you don’t feel injuries, in my state) and I
reached around and scored him under the ear, letting him
spray urgently into the rug; he will stagger to his feet and fall,
he will plunge fountainy to the ground; at her feet he bowed,
he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down
dead. (182)
In the Bible, the prophetess Deborah and the killer Jael do act, but
they act in concert with the patriarchs of their own clan against an
outside enemy. Deborah is a wise woman, respected for her abilities
as a judge, yet she defers to ‘the law of the father’ and to Barak, the
patriarch. Relating Jael to women rather than to another male author-
ity, The Female Man effectively reconstitutes Jael as a warrior in her
own right.
The Bible itself invites such a subversive rereading, narrating as it
does two versions of Sisera’s death which contradict each other in
several instances. Deborah’s song of victory, attributed to Deborah
herself, gives a much more detailed account of the killing, which—
most importantly—does not mention that Sisera was asleep when
Jael killed him. On the contrary, since he ‘fell down’ dying, he cannot
have been in a horizontal position previously. Deborah’s version
allows room for a Jael who actually fights against Sisera, instead of
coming to him ‘softly’ and killing him in his sleep. This biblical refer-
ence therefore author-izes women on yet another level: Deborah is
one of the few women in the Bible who is an acknowledged author of
part of the holy text. Again, Russ subtly creates a subtext of female
authorship.
The Female Man takes this hidden story of the warrior woman, nar-
rating a new Jael who acts of her own accord. The new Jael’s com-
panions in struggle are members not of a patriarchal clan, but of a
nation of women who defy patriarchy. This partial restaging of the
biblical story assigns men collectively the role of the Canaanites,
whose irrevocable fate it is to lose, while the Israelites, the women,
must win by historical necessity. This analogy shows the particular
force of this kind of reference to the Bible in an American context. One
of the core narratives of justification in the development of American
democracy is based on a typological reading of the Bible. This read-
ing identifies the new Americans with the Jews in the Old Testament,
who escaped oppression in Egypt by fleeing to the Promised Land.
However, while in their journey to Canaan, a patriarch, Moses, leads
the Israelites to freedom, in Judges 4 and 5, two women finalize their
liberation, one of them brutally killing the leader of the opposing
army. Thus reconstituting a core American cultural narrative, Russ’s
text once more confronts patriarchy where such a confrontation is
most effective: on its own ground.
In On Strike Against God (1980),5 linking female characters to other
women on every level of experience has become the leading principle.
This novel makes the re-creation of the Bible even more explicit than
The Female Man: ‘Queen Esther, my namesake, got down on her knees
to save her people, which is no great shakes, but Ruth—whose name
means Compassion—said Whither thou goest, I will go too. To her
mother-in-law’ (On Strike Against God, 24, italics in original). Ruth in the
biblical book of the same name indeed loves the mother of her late
husband so much that she decides to stay with her, but she submits
herself to the law which makes her the property of her dead hus-
band’s nearest male relative and becomes Boaz’s wife. Similarly, in
the Book of Esther, it is Vashti, King Ahasuerus’s first wife, who
defies patriarchal power and is divorced to set an example for all the
would-be-wanton wives in the kingdom. Russ’s text refers to Esther
who in the Bible replaces the transgressor and becomes Ahasuerus’s
wife—and proceeds to fulfil this role to his complete satisfaction.
Thus, On Strike Against God uses a new, quite different pattern of
relating to women and images of women to the earlier novel: while
the intertextual references in The Female Man still look for strong
women as role-models, the references in On Strike Against God seek
out the ‘weak’ and the ‘collaborators’ to listen to their voices and
stories.
In its reference to the biblical Esther, On Strike Against God makes
use of the contradictions within patriarchy by pitting science against

biblical and literary discourse:
Big news for all the Esthers and Stellas in the audience—your
name means ‘star.’ Forget Hollywood. Stars, like women, are
mythologized out of reality. For example, the temperature at
the core of Y Cygni … is thirty-two million degrees Centigrade
… If you’re really ambitious, you might try to be a nova …
Moreover, a supernova is visible from Earth every three cen-
turies and we’re about due for one. Just think: You might be it.
Did you hear that, Marilyn? Did you hear that, Natalie, Dar-
lene, Shirley, Cheryl, Barbara, Dorine, Lori, Hollis, Debbi? Did
you hear that, starlets? You needn’t kneel to Ahasuerus. You
needn’t be a burnt offering like poor Joan. Practice the Phoenix
Reaction and rise perpetually from your own ashes!—even as
does our own quiet little Sun, cozy hearthlet that it is, mellow
and mild as a cheese, with its external temperature of 6000
degrees Centigrade (just enough to warm your hands at) and
its perhaps rather dismaying interior, whose temperature may
range anywhere—in degrees Centigrade—from fifteen to
twenty-one million. The sun’s in its teens, fifteen to twenty-
one. The really attractive years. The pretty period.
And that, says my bible, is what they mean by my name.
That’s an Esther. That’s me. (24–25, italics in original)
Using scientific discourse, the text turns images of weakness into
images of immense power. The conventional star metaphor’s vehicle
is the star as an innocuous, cold and passive entity, something to
behold and admire from a distance, a thing without a life of its own.
In this passage, the speaking subject uses scientific knowledge, also
produced by patriarchy, to claim the star as an image of power and
action, in command of a vast amount of energy. Even the sun, con-
ventionally a symbol of absolute (masculine) power and the energy
source for all life on this planet, is just a ‘cozy little hearthlet’ by com-
parison. In this passage, the narrator also sends out an appeal to an
imaginary ‘audience’, which is not addressed as gender-class, but as
a group of individual women, referred to by name. The listed names
echo the names of Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Natalie
Wood and Shirley Maclaine, those emblems of the ‘feminine’ role
which is continuously recreated in infinite variations by the media.
On Strike Against God thus supplements the materialist feminist
rhetoric of class warfare by a language of personal relations which
refers to a community based on shared womanhood. Russ’s text

extends this textual community of women to the projected reader in
the text, who is also constructed as female (see also Lefanu, 178).
Russ’s writing therefore becomes more and more woman-centred
through what I call her ‘explicitly feminist’ phase which approxi-
mately spans the 1970s. Her work increasingly represents or projects
protagonists, narrators and fictional authors as female. The readers
are addressed as (white American middle-class) women. Men appear
relegated to a passive position in which not only are they denied their
own voice in the text, they are also barred from the text as readers.
Such strategies of empowerment and exclusion show how Russ’s
writing is contiguous with the feminist moment that Julia Kristeva
identifies with a cyclical notion of time. Diverse feminist texts such as
Mary Daly’s classics Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Pure Lust (1984) as well
as Adrienne Rich’s influential essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence’ (1980) all participated in this moment. Cyclical
time corresponds to a notion of history which allows contemporary
feminist writers to connect to women’s experience across time,
regardless of historical and cultural differences. Since history in such
writing does not progress along a straight line, feminist utopian
visions affiliated with this moment, such as Daly’s and to some extent
Rich’s, privilege space over time to metaphorically mark their dis-
tance to patriarchy. Russ’s utopia Whileaway, which stands at the
beginning of her explicitly feminist phase, exemplifies her position as
participant in both moments: Whileaway exists in the future, but also
in another, parallel universe.
Furthermore, this moment in feminist literary criticism shows a
primary concern with plot, that is with stories about women and
women’s life stories. Russ’s essays in Susan Koppelman’s Images of
Women in Fiction (1972) attest to this concern. Reading the stories of
the Brynhilds in patriarchal literary tradition from the position of this
type of feminism maps out a simple strategy of resistance: the refusal
to relate to men on a sexual-emotional level. An Irene Adler who sim-
ply says ‘no’ to the advances of Godfrey Norton would make a formi-
dable foe for Holmes. Killing the male lover, as Irene does, has a
similar effect. In ‘What Can a Heroine Do’, Russ points out that while
the literary tradition is full of images of women, there are no ‘Women
who have no relations with men (as so many male characters in Amer-
ican literature have no relations with women)’ (81). Within the logic
of this feminist moment, one can extrapolate from Brynhild’s story
why this may be so. Women without men are just too dangerous.
In order to authorize or empower women as writers, narrators,

readers or characters in her fiction, Russ activates intertextual links to
both feminist and patriarchal stories. A plot of liberation which oper-
ates within her text is the ‘rescue of the female child’, an important
topos in feminist utopian writing, particularly writing affiliated with
Kristeva’s second moment, feminism which focuses on sexual differ-
ence rather than equality.
CHAPTER FIVE
Patterns of Innocence:
The Rescue of the Female Child
If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and

physical nurture for both female and male children, it would
seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the
following questions: whether the search for love and tender-
ness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why
in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival,
the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships
should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other;
and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to
enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and sub-
servience to men—Adrienne Rich (‘Compulsory Heterosexu-
ality’, 637, italics in original)
Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’ incorporates multiple forms of woman–
woman relationships that give first priority to emotional links to
women. This community of women differs significantly from the
materialist notion of a sex-class, revealing as it does the intimate con-
nection between women’s role in reproduction and compulsory het-
erosexuality. Patriarchal discourse, according to Rich, has produced a
social system of coercion, which demands that women form primary
relationships with men and sever their original ties to the mother. The
different ways of associating with women covered by the lesbian con-
tinuum reach from rediscovering images of women in literature and
history/historiography (as delineated above) to revealing the possi-
bility of erotic relationships among women. Joanna Russ’s texts
experiment on this continuum, exploring the liberatory potential of
consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others—
precisely because this body is produced and reproduced by the patri-
archal discourses that feminist thinking seeks to disrupt.
In her essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’ (1981) Russ identifies a
theme in contemporary feminist utopian writing which she calls ‘the
rescue of the female child’ (79). In these utopias, the following narra-
PATTERNS OF INNOCENCE 131
tive pattern emerges: an older woman, who has struggled to an

awareness of her position within a patriarchal culture, rescues a
younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life fully
determined by patriarchy. Russ explains this pattern:
Puberty is an awakening into sexual adulthood for both sexes.
According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, it is also the
time when the prison bars of ‘femininity,’ enforced by law and
custom, shut the girl in for good. Even today entry into
woman’s estate is often not a broadening-out (as it is for boys)
but a diminution of life. Feminist utopias offer an alternative
model of female puberty, one which allow [sic] the girl to move
into a full and free adulthood. All the novels described [in
‘Recent Feminist Utopias’] not only rescue the girl from abuses
which are patriarchal in character; they provide something for
her to go to, usually an exciting and worthwhile activity in the
public world. (80)
This rescue pattern is one of the most pervasive themes throughout
Russ’s own writing. From ‘Bluestocking’ (1967), which I have already
discussed, to ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982) and ‘The Mystery of the
Young Gentleman’ (1982), her texts continually rework this narrative
pattern, which spans a whole range of possibilities along the lesbian
continuum.
Russ’s critique of patriarchy in this vein intersects with psycho-
analysis in significant ways, even though she severely attacks the
policing effect of traditional psychoanalytic therapy. It was psychoan-
alytic discourse which articulated the different psychosexual devel-
opment of boys and girls. According to classical psychoanalysis, a
woman’s life is structured around the demands of heterosexuality
and reproduction: via ‘penis envy’ and her role in the Oedipus com-
plex, the little girl supposedly shapes her feminine identity, simulta-
neously dissociating herself from and identifying with the mother.
Her adolescence is determined by her first menstruation (which
makes her a potential mother) and she reaches ‘sexual maturity’
when she is ready for her first heterosexual genital contact and thus
able to bear a child. The structuring events for the mature woman are
marriage (or a similar relationship with a male), child-birth and
menopause. The key event for the male adolescent, on the contrary,
is his first (self-induced) ejaculation (Person, 623). The resolution/
repression of the Oedipus complex, which for the girl is characterized
by lack and loss, confers the power of the father to the son, a power
which is confirmed through marriage (or a similar form of ownership-

relation to a woman). Thus, the moments of decreasing power for the
female as constructed by patriarchy are the moments which empower
the male. Brynhild’s penis envy results in her desiring the male to
deflower her; safely hooked to a penis, she ceases to inspire fear.
Within the logic of psychoanalysis, these mechanisms make het-
erosexuality crucial for the functioning of patriarchal societies. From
this perspective, lesbianism, since it disrupts normative heterosexu-
ality, emerges as a powerful threat to male hegemony. The site of the
threat, however, is not sexual intercourse between women, but the
conscious decision to put men second and to primarily associate with
women. In her novel On Strike Against God, Russ characterizes this par-
ticular weak spot in patriarchy as follows: ‘Sleeping with women is all
right if it’s just play, but you must never let it interfere with your real
work, which is sleeping with men’ (85).
Kathleen Spencer in her thoroughly researched essay ‘Rescuing the
Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ’ (1990) expands on Russ’s
own definition of this feminist rescue motif in her analysis of selected
novels and short stories. Spencer’s article, which originated in a paper
presented at the Popular Culture Association Convention in 1988
(184, n. 1), marks a significant shift in Joanna Russ scholarship
towards the end of the 1980s. Together with Sarah Lefanu’s seminal
chapter on Russ in In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988), it moves
the focus of attention away from the search for wholeness and unity
towards acknowledging the remarkable complexity of Russ’s oeuvre.
However, while Lefanu celebrates the deconstructive elements in
Russ, Spencer expresses her puzzlement: ‘This is another of those
uncomfortable books which Russ regularly produces, her analysis of
the sex-gender system increasingly complex’ (178). The categories
Spencer establishes in her article serve to contain and control these
disturbing complexities:
In Russ’s fiction, the rescuer is always a woman in early mid-
dle age (35-45 years old); the child is either about 12 (that is,
on the edge of puberty), or more commonly, about 17 (on the
edge of sexual awakening). (167)
Leaving aside her problematic placement of the age of ‘sexual awak-
ening’ for the moment, I agree with Spencer about the significance of
this narrative pattern for a reading of Russ’s fiction. This pervasive
rescue motif consistently rests on an intimate intergenerational rela-
tionship between a mature woman and a young girl which also has
erotic overtones. According to Spencer, five stages of increasing com-

plexity can be identified:
(1) physical removal from a patriarchal culture (‘Bluestocking’, The
Two of Them);
(2) rescue from the psychological crippling in patriarchy (Picnic on
Paradise, The Two of Them);
(3) rescue from ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (The Female Man);
(4) rescue of the younger self (‘The Little Dirty Girl’);
(5) rescue of the mother (‘The Autobiography of My Mother’).
As useful as such a delineation undoubtedly is, it also conceals sig-
nificant overlaps—and complexities that are relevant for my readings
in this study. Most of the identified elements are simultaneously pre-
sent in Russ’s stories of mutual rescue, and I would even argue they
are present in most if not all intimate relationships between women
in Russ’s texts. Alyx in ‘Bluestocking’, for example, does facilitate
Edarra’s physical escape from marriage and virtual or even literal
death, yet the text does not create an imaginary ‘elsewhere’ outside
patriarchy where the two could go after a rescue from the ‘patriarchal
culture’. As they turn towards each other, Edarra becomes both Alyx’s
younger self and her daughter, who in turn can ‘rescue’ the elder from
her isolation as exceptional woman. Similarly, when Irene rescues
Zubeydeh from Ka’abah in The Two of Them, she has to do more than
just physically remove the girl from the restrictive culture, since the
value system and patterns of behaviour of this culture are etched into
the young Ka’aban’s mind. Again, the destination of their escape is
not a clearly female space free of patriarchal impurities (although
Irene’s final dream projects the desire for such a space), but another
patriarchal culture with which both have to contend.
In her readings of the individual texts, however, Spencer does
account for some of the ambiguities that remain unaccounted for by
her categorization. She points out the reciprocity of the relationship
between Irene and Zubeydeh (as well as of all other such rescue oper-
ations): ‘If Irene clearly rescues Zubeydeh, Zubeydeh also in a sense
rescues Irene’ (178). Yet although Spencer mentions the reciprocity of
the process, her categories retain the (ultimately patriarchal) idea of
the unilateral rescue operation, which the text already transcends.
Moreover, Spencer tacitly accepts the conventional structuring of a
woman’s life by placing the edge of sexual awakening at the age of
seventeen, which coincides with the age at which a young woman
becomes a potential bride in a capitalist patriarchy. Seventeen is not
the age when the girl’s own sexual feelings ‘awaken’, but the time
when her body is mature enough to conceive and bear a child. It is
about the time when the Prince can finally kiss Sleeping Beauty
awake into motherhood. ‘Sexual awakening’ in this definition thus
equals the first genital contact with a person of the opposite sex and
positions the woman as a womb ready to receive the inseminating
penis. Spencer inadvertently reinscribes the very categories of patri-
archy that the liberatory politics of her essay aim to displace. Zubey-
deh at the age of twelve is far from being asexual:
Irene feels small fingers on her face. Zooby-dooby has sat up
and is saying in a shocked tone, ‘Why, Irene, you’re crying.’
Zubeydeh flings herself into Irene’s lap, a little too actively
compassionate for comfort. The kisses are nice, but the knees
and elbows dig in. (The Two of Them, 155, italics in original)
Although Zubeydeh rejects an overtly sexual relationship to Irene, she
is certainly aware of the possibility: ‘I don’t think you and I should get
into an arrangement like that because we’re friends and I would hate
to do anything that would put our friendship in jeopardy’ (156). Irene
suppresses a snicker about the cliché but is quick to agree: ‘Zubey-
deh, dear, I prefer you as my daughter. Truly I do. I’m not one of those
ladies [she uses Zubeydeh’s term for lesbians], at least I think I’m
not, but if you meet one later and want to go away with her, it’ll be
fine with me. When you’re older, I mean’ (156). In accepting the les-
bian continuum, that is in putting relationships to women first, both
Irene and Zubeydeh escape compulsory heterosexuality.
These texts operate with the implicit assumption that emotional
and erotic relationships to men would become thinkable to the degree
in which a culture rejects heterosexuality as the norm. In the story
‘Bodies’, which is part of Russ’s larger project Extra(Ordinary) People
(1984), Russ envisions the possibility of such a post-patriarchal cul-
ture, in which the body has ceased to be the site of power struggle and
the basis of social organization. In ‘Bodies’, paradoxically, the sexual
and racial category which the individual’s body may fit in patriarchal
societies is irrelevant in economic terms as well as in erotic relation-
ships. Yet the characters mimic and parody types from patriarchal
times (e.g. the handle-bar moustached cowboy Harriet), again exem-
plifying the impossibility of imagining a space completely beyond.
‘Bodies’, as Part Three will demonstrate, explores the political poten-
tial of camp and other gender incongruities that contradict the iden-
tity politics of the female body traced in Part Two. Ultimately, what is
representable is not the unspeakable space beyond the entangling

web of oppressive mechanisms in patriarchy, but the desire for such
an extra-patriarchal space.
In Russ’s feminist utopian writing, the rescue of the female child is
a topos which addresses such a desire for a space free from oppres-
sion, without activating a monolithic narrative of liberation. The
recurrent rescue story upturns the relationship between mother and
daughter in the patriarchal context, in which the daughter is expected
to separate from the mother and simultaneously become like her. By
reconstituting women’s intergenerational relationships, the rescue
story reinforces a girl’s emotional tie to a maternal friend, yet resists
the daughter’s identity with the mother. As the example of Irene and
her foster daughter Zubeydeh has shown, accepting the self as
‘mother’ and recognizing the ‘daughter’ as independent individual
are both inextricably linked to a reconciliation with one’s own
mother. Irene does not become Rose, Zubeydeh remains distinct from
Irene. Yet they connect, effectively shutting men out.
Morlocks, Mothers, Mirrors: ‘The Second Inquisition’
In much of Russ’s fictional work, the female narrator-protagonist

occupies a central position in the text’s resistance to patriarchal story
patterns. ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970) exemplifies this strategy.
The short story concludes The Adventures of Alyx, yet one looks in vain
for a trace of the quick-witted sword-and-sorcery pick-lock—Alyx
does not appear as a protagonist or even a minor character in the
story. This absence raises the question of why Russ included ‘The
Second Inquisition’ in the collection. Apparently one needs to look for
more indirect connecting elements in the text. Russ herself gives the
following answer:
The Second Inquisition is an Alyx story—the character in it is
Alyx’s great-granddaughter. I wanted the stories to form a sort
of closed piece, a Klein-bottle thing, with its tail in its mouth,
to imply that the protagonist of the Inquisition went on to
write the other stories. That’s impossible, of course, but I did
like the tail-in-mouth effect. (Letter to the author, 21 Septem-
ber 1995, emphasis in original)
Russ here conjures up an image of a paradoxical space which both
closes and opens the story sequence as a whole. In ‘The Second
Inquisition’ itself, only the last sentence conflates the protagonist

with the narrators of the other Alyx stories, all of which are told by a
covert narrator not involved in the tale. The statement ‘No more
stories’ (192) concludes the text, implying that all the stories were
told by a single narrator. Thus, the frame provided by the other
texts in the collection opens up a reading of the short story which
locates the (partial) ‘rescue’ of the young woman in the act of narra-
tion itself.
However, while the act of narration emerges as pivotal, the bond
between two women which the story narrates is what makes this act
possible. The two protagonists, an older woman from 450 years in the
future and a 16-year-old girl growing up in a nondescript American
town in the 1920s, develop a relationship that is both maternal and
erotic, although there is no explicit sexuality between the two. Each
woman becomes in a way ‘mother’ to the other. The visitor from the
future boards in the house of the narrator’s parents in the guise of a
circus performer. She is extraordinarily tall and of thoroughly mixed
descent (a common device in the science fiction of the late 1960s and
early ’70s to imply a society in which race has ceased to be a distin-
guishing factor). Whereas The Two of Them narrates the events pri-
marily from the perspective of the older woman, in ‘The Second
Inquisition’ it is the younger woman, as the narrator, who takes cen-
tre stage.
The erotic tension between the women is generated by the narra-
tor’s desirous gaze at the visitor’s body, as the following passage, the
very first paragraph in the short story, illustrates:
I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting
under the floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with
her long, long legs stretched out in front of her and the pool of
light on her book revealing so little of her face: brownish, cop-
pery features so marked that she seemed to be a kind of freak
and hair that was reddish black but so rough that it looked like
the things my mother used for scouring pots and pans. (165)
The visitor’s body as an object of observation thus becomes one of the
central themes in the text. The narrator-protagonist repeatedly runs
her eyes over the surface of the visitor’s body, keeping her under con-
stant surveillance. For example, she reminisces: ‘She would lower
herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around
it, become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again—I
remember so well those long, hard, unladylike legs—and begin again
to read’ (165–66). When the visitor gets involved with a man, the nar-
rator closely observes their conversation as well as their physical
interactions: ‘There was a great deal more of the same business and I
watched it all, from the first twistings to the stabbings, the noises, the
life-and-death battle in the dark’ (185).
The text keeps this lavishly detailed description of the visitor’s
body in tension with an unsettling uncertainty about her physical
existence. Disrupting her story, the narrator unexpectedly negates her
primary protagonist’s presence: ‘It was almost a pity she was not
really there’ (172). This incision in the narrative flow comes precisely
at the moment when the text introduces a parallel science fiction
story line. The narrator desires to interact with the stranger, who rep-
resents a possible escape from her future in male-controlled domes-
ticity. She watches the boarder closely and sneaks by the older
woman’s room, hoping for a meaningful conversation:
Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells’s The Time
Machine and then I would talk to the black glass of the window,
I would say to the transparent reflections and the black
branches of trees that moved beyond it.
‘I’m only sixteen.’
‘You look eighteen,’ she would say.
‘I know,’ I would say. ‘I’d like to be eighteen. I’d like to go
away to college. To Radcliffe, I think.’
She would say nothing, out of surprise. (171)
This passage makes it uncertain for the first time whether the
narrator-protagonist is talking to her own transparent reflection in
the windowpanes or to someone who is physically present. The
grammatical construction used here suggests repetition (‘would talk’,
‘would say’), but the fact that the dialogue occurs only once contra-
dicts this interpretation. Plausibly, one can only be surprised once by
the same incident. From the repetitiveness of everyday life the narra-
tive thus surreptitiously slides towards the subjunctivity of a science
fiction story. The ambiguous subjunctive is sustained throughout the
section which ends with the statement quoted above: ‘It was almost
a pity she was not really there’ (172). The narrative avoids a clear dis-
tinction between ‘realistic’ discourse and fantasy or science fiction in
the text, making the presence and even the existence of the visitor a
matter of supreme uncertainty. The text links the material experience
of the narrator in her ordinary adolescent life with the excitement of
a science fiction plot in which the same young girl participates in a
life-and-death struggle of historical significance for a society 450

years in the future. On one hand she is utterly alienated from her own
mother, on the other she is able to form emotional and erotic ties to a
maternal stranger, who turns out to be a possible far-future progeny
of herself.
As in many of Russ’s later texts, the narrator, who makes herself
part of the story, is endowed with greater control over plot and narra-
tion than a conventional ‘first-person’ narrator. In making the process
of creation part of the story, that is in placing a significant part of the
story in the narrator’s imagination, the text gives her an authority and
autonomy that is not available to a narrator who merely recalls events
from her own experience and must by implication be controlled by a
superior authorial consciousness. This enhanced status of the narra-
tor counteracts the pervasive ‘heterosexual’ writing plot that subjects
a female narrator to a male authorial consciousness (Lanser, Fictions
of Authority, 34–35), even if the author of the text is a woman.
As in the other Alyx stories, the killing of a man is crucial for the
development of the story, but also for the relationship between the
two women. The living body of the visitor serves as a major site of the
interwoven science fiction plot. As much as the narrator makes the
visitor’s physical presence unstable, it is nonetheless central to the
story. When her opponents in the far future track her down to her hid-
ing place, the agent, who comes alone, invades the innocuous space
of a small town dance which the visitor and the narrator are attend-
ing together. This agent, for the benefit of the people at the dance, acts
as the visitor’s cousin. When he shakes her hand in a mock gesture of
friendship, he penetrates her palm with a minuscule explosive, which
turns her body into a live bomb and is meant to immobilize her. The
alien object in her body, which is clearly analogous to the penetrating
penis, forces her to act—at least on the surface—as he commands.
Only her ingenuity and deviousness allow her to circumvent the
power of the penetrator, and only her ability to kill him ruthlessly
saves her life:
When he fell, she kicked him in the side of the head. Then she
stepped carefully away from him and held out her hand to me;
I gave her the poker, which she took with the folded edge of the
tablecloth and reversing it so that she held the cold end, she
brought it down with immense force—not on his head, as I
had expected, but on his windpipe. (181)
I refer back to the discourses of agency discussed in Part One here to
demonstrate the ways in which contradictory concepts of feminist

textual politics interlace in Russ’s texts. At the same time as the text
‘unearths’ a female physicality and sexuality independent from oppo-
sition to the male, Russ refers to the concept of class struggle, which
rests on this opposition. Similarly, the ‘unearthed’ body does not
appear as a rigid and stable whole, but is wrought with uncertainty
and remains unstable.
It is at this juncture precisely that I would go beyond Kathleen
Spencer’s reading of the ‘rescue’ theme. In none of the cases she
analyses is there a clear-cut rescue from a state of oppression to one
of freedom. While she does address the complexities and uncertain-
ties of the texts, she expresses her desire for an unambiguously safe
haven for the young girl in ‘The Second Inquisition’ to go to: ‘It is an
appallingly bleak ending to a remarkable story, one which shifts
unpredictably from the discourse of realism to the discourse of SF and
back again’ (172). Based on this assessment, Spencer describes the
rescue of the narrator in this story as abortive: ‘In 1970, the attempt
to rescue the self can be imagined, but not carried through success-
fully’ (173). While I would concede that one can identify different
types of rescue, possibly even a development towards a ‘higher
degree’ of liberation in the later stories, to my mind none of the texts
presents an unequivocally successful rescue operation. It is exactly
this indeterminacy that shapes the utopian space—the destination of
each escape—as a process rather than a stable state of being.
‘The Second Inquisition’, much like ‘Life in a Furniture Store’
(1965), utilizes the act of narration as liberatory practice. However,
while the narrator in ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ resorts to ultimate
solipsism, the young woman who tells the story of ‘The Second
Inquisition’ creates an enduring link to another woman and envi-
sions a life beyond the limitations of her own. At the end of the story,
she faces her parents alone, but she is able to give new shape to the
visitor’s body through her tale and to envision an undomesticated
future for herself: ‘Someday I would join a circus, travel to the moon,
write a book: after all, I had helped kill a man. I had been somebody’
(192). She did not kill the man alone. As in ‘Bluestocking’ (1967), the
two women rely on each other’s strength and cooperation.
Physical violence, escape from patriarchal domesticity and story-
telling interrelate in complex ways in this short story. A reading in the
context of Russ’s other texts makes these multilevelled interrelations
tangible. In the passage from ‘The Second Inquisition’ quoted above
the maternal friend of the narrator, who also remains a stranger, kills
a man from her own culture. The passage repeats a theme in Russ’s
writing which links androcide, agency and the ability to speak. Once
more it is the body, in this case the male body, that serves as the site
where these connections are performed. A return to the central killing
scene in The Female Man highlights the multiple significance of the
murderous act and the way in which the woman performs it. Jael,
when she kills, routinely bites out her victim’s instruments of speech.
Matter of factly, she declares: ‘the best way to silence an enemy is to
bite out his larynx’ (The Female Man, 182). ‘The Second Inquisition’
makes the connection between physically destroying the man’s abil-
ity to speak and his death even more emphatic. The narrator makes a
point of expressing her surprise at the fact that, instead of hitting his
head, the visitor smashes her opponent’s windpipe, effectively silenc-
ing him in more than one way. In the chapter on androcide, I pointed
out that killing men in this context is by no means an empty image of
raving violence, but has a crucial function as a narrative device that
confirms or establishes the agency of a female character. The way in
which Russ fills the act itself with metaphorical depth adds further
weight to this interpretation. Both narratives make the very organ
which women had been barred from using central in the death of the
man. Significantly, these stories are told by female narrators.
While the story resonates with the voice of a young woman telling
her own story, communication between the protagonists is far from
being smooth or unbroken. The most significant bond between the
two remains unspeakable:
‘Did you ever think to go back and take care of yourself when
you are little? Give yourself advice?’
I couldn’t say anything.
‘I am not you,’ she said, ‘but I have had the same thought
and now I have come back four hundred and fifty years. Only
there is nothing to say. There is never anything to say. It is a
pity, but natural, no doubt.’ (190)
This passage reveals the narcissistic desire contained in the pedagog-
ical eros which runs through such intergenerational relationships
between women. The science fiction element in the story lets the pro-
tagonist play out this desire, just to confirm the impossibility of its
fulfilment. Moreover, her ineffectual attempt to speak to her own self
in the child, who is her ‘great-grandmother’, also demonstrates the
circularity of such time-travel. Although she cannot communicate her
knowledge to the girl in which she seeks her self, however, she does
enable the girl to speak her own story.

These paradoxical dynamics within Russ’s metaphorical
mother–daughter bonds further demonstrate how her texts reach into
the moment of feminism that radically emphasizes sexual difference.
As Mary Daly has pointed out, the metaphor of choice for the feminist
movement in history is the spiral, not the circle, which only brings
one back to the same. Daly’s definition of radical feminism which she
gives in the ‘First Passage’ of Gyn/Ecology clarifies how Russ activates
this feminist moment in her rescue of the female child theme:
Radical feminism is not reconciliation with the father. Rather it
is affirming our original birth, our original source, movement,
surge of living. This finding of our original integrity is re-mem-
bering our Selves. Athena remembers her mother and conse-
quently re-members her Self. Radical feminism releases the
inherent dynamic in the mother–daughter relationship toward
friendship, which is strangled in the male-mastered system.
(39)
The woman from the science fictional future in the girl’s story
attempts such a remembering return to her origin. The impossible
point of the operation is to rescue the self in rescuing the other. The
text also brings out one of the paradoxes which destabilize the mater-
nal relationship between the two women. While the young girl looks
up to the tall and skillful stranger as a maternal role-model, she is
herself the foremother of the time-traveller. This reversal flips the two
women’s roles, the ‘mother’ becoming the ‘daughter’ and vice versa.
Like Russ’s other stories of rescue, some of which I will discuss in
the following sections, ‘The Second Inquisition’ explores the para-
doxical relation of feminism to motherhood, or rather the contradic-
tions between what Adrienne Rich has called ‘the institution of
motherhood’ vs. the ‘experience’ of motherhood. The two short sto-
ries discussed in the following section revisit this site of contest
between selfhood and maternal or filial relationships, illustrating
how these texts’ ‘personal’ narrative voices correlate with the stories
they tell.
My Mother in the Mirror: ‘The Autobiography of

My Mother’ and ‘The Little Dirty Girl’
Spanning the crucial decade of the 1970s, Russ published a circle of

texts which combine science fictional elements with a personal nar-

rative voice that borrows from autobiographical writing. This circle
echoes themes from the earlier short story ‘Life in a Furniture Store’
(1965) and includes the stories ‘Old Pictures’ (1973), ‘The Autobiog-
raphy of My Mother’ (1975), ‘Daddy’s Girl’ (1975),1 ‘The Little Dirty
Girl’ (1982), the coming-out story ‘Not for Years but for Decades’
(1980) and the novel On Strike Against God (1980). I have already men-
tioned Russ’s strategy of making a fictional author part of the text as
narrator. This fictional author often shares characteristics with Russ
herself, sometimes even her name. In Part One, I discussed this nar-
rative device in terms of women’s agency as authors. Such an autobi-
ographical or quasi-autobiographical narrative voice in Russ’s writing
nevertheless also dovetails with creating stories of rescue within
what Rich has called the lesbian continuum. For what combines all of
these ‘autobiographical’ texts is that their narratives revisit, or ‘re-
member’ in Daly’s terms, the self and/or the mother as a child. Among
the stories mentioned above, ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ and
‘The Little Dirty Girl’ most explicitly deploy and reformulate the res-
cue of the female child as a theme. Like ‘The Second Inquisition’
these two short stories connect the rescue of the self to a reconcilia-
tion with the mother and motherhood.
Kathleen Spencer reads ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ as
another story of failed rescue (176), but I would argue that such a
reading passes over the multiple liberatory power of the text. Since
absolute ‘liberation’ is utterly impossible, partial ‘failure’—if that
term applies at all—is always part of the paradoxical project of femi-
nism. Indeed Russ’s reformulations of the rescue motif question the
usefulness of imagining such a completely non-patriarchal space.
Furthermore, in my interpretation it is not so much the mother, as
Spencer suggests, but the narrator herself who ultimately becomes
the escapee. She ‘re-members’ her (narrated) self through her own
narrative.
The narrator in ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ represents a
series of scenes in which she encounters her own mother in various
stages of the mother’s life. Through telling the story of these encoun-
ters, the narrator, as fictional author, rewrites the story of her own self.
Of course such an encounter is impossible in autobiography, but sci-
ence fiction is a more pliant genre. Although the narrator’s ability to
travel freely through time is not explained, the narrative follows basic
science fictional premises about time-travel. It is these conventions
(and plain logic) which highlight the narrator’s dreadful dilemma.
She desires to protect her mother from a denigrating life in marriage,

a life which forces her to abandon ambitions of becoming a poet, but
if the narrator were to succeed in this ‘rescue’, she would instanta-
neously destroy herself. Paradoxically, the precondition of her own
existence is her mother’s succumbing to the very situation from
which the narrator desires to rescue her, namely motherhood as insti-
tution. Thus, the interactions with her mother are fraught with con-
tradictions and ambivalent emotions, which the narrator frames in an
ironic reference to the cliché values of white suburban domesticity
with which her mother had brought her up:
‘Consider what you gain by not marrying,’ I said. We walked
out onto Columbus Avenue. ‘All this can be yours.’ (Be the first
one on your block; astonish your friends.) I told her that the
most sacred female function was motherhood, that by her
expression I knew that she knew it too, that nobody would
dream of interfering with an already-accomplished pregnancy
(and that she knew that) and that life was the greatest gift
anybody could give, although only a woman could understand
that or believe it. I said:
‘And I want you to take it back.’ (209–10)
The distinction between the narrator and the other woman breaks
down in similar ways to those in ‘The Second Inquisition’. The
mother is chronologically the narrator’s senior, but through the text’s
speculative time loop into an imagined past, she is also the child.
Temporarily merging the two female protagonists enables the narra-
tive to reconstitute the relationship between them. Unlike in Gertrude
Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which authorial conscious-
ness and narrator are clearly distinct if interwoven, the narrator of
‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ modulates between becoming the
mother and being herself. She does not speak for her mother, she
becomes her mother.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, upon entering the ‘symbolic order’,
the language and social structure of patriarchy, the child is forced to
repress the imaginary bond to the mother. Since in theory the hetero-
sexual model is absolute, this means that the female loses the possi-
bility of establishing physically and emotionally intimate bonds to
women. While the little girl now becomes the mother to desire the
father, the boy enters the Oedipal triangle and, repressing it, matures
to desire women. Reaching back into her mother’s childhood, the nar-
rator in ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ seeks an alternative to
this identity (sameness) with the mother. Reconstituting this link to

the mother through her narrative then allows the daughter to initiate
a process of individuation that enables rather than precludes love. In
order to be able to find the mother as a person, the narrator strips her
of institutionalized motherhood, turning her into a little child:
I was visiting friends in Woodstock; you may find it surprising
that I met my mother there for the first time. I certainly do. She
was two years old. My mother and I live on different ends of a
balance; thus it’s not surprising to find that when I’m thirty-
five she’s just a little tot. (206)
The narrator seeks to recover her mother’s original self in the child,
yet the necessary reconciliation is not only with the mother as a per-
son, but with the concept of motherhood itself.
Once more, Adrienne Rich’s categories become productive points of
intersection in exploring Russ’s feminist narrative strategies. In Of
Woman Born (1976), Rich draws a clear distinction between the ‘expe-
rience’ or potential of motherhood and the patriarchal institution of
motherhood, which is useful in this context. As Rich points out, ‘All
human life on the planet is born of woman’ (11). Yet, in ‘the most fun-
damental and bewildering of contradictions, [motherhood as institu-
tion] has alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in
them’ (13). What links Russ to Rich here is that her short story fic-
tionalizes precisely the paradoxical split of motherhood into institu-
tion and lived experience which Rich’s analysis makes explicit as vital
in the struggle for/with the female body. The institution of mother-
hood forces the mother to give up her own ambitions to give birth to
her daughter.
In Part One, I demonstrated how Russ dismantles motherhood as
patriarchal institution through artificial reproduction, which serves
as a foundation in her feminist utopian vision very much like in Fire-
stone’s study The Dialectic of Sex. However, artificial reproduction,
while it frees the woman of motherhood as a mechanism of control
over her body, ultimately does not face the feelings of pain and guilt
in which this institution entangles women. Explaining sex-class, gen-
der and reproduction in economic terms, as Firestone did, can tell
only one of many stories that make up the kaleidoscope of cultural
meaning. For the institution of motherhood generates feelings of
resentment and loss between mothers and daughters which the same
institution requires them to deny.
‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ shows both mother and daugh-
ter caught in such strangling webs of guilt and self-denigration. In a

series of unconnected scenes the narrator and her mother enact a
variety of possible relations between women. The narrator encoun-
ters the mother as an infant, as a younger sister at play, as a niece, a
cousin, a stranger, a lover. She meets her in a restaurant when she is
19: ‘At that time I wasn’t born yet. I’m not even a ghost in her thought
because she’s not going to get married or even have children; she’s
going to be a famous poet’ (208). The narrator’s mother does not
become a poet. Instead, she gives birth to the narrator. Whether or not
the two events are causally linked is irrelevant, since the institution
of motherhood predetermines that connection. Put simply, the
mother exists to give her life to her offspring. She feels guilty because
her self-effacement cannot be complete, and she is resentful because
of the opportunities she lost and the creative potential she wasted.
Telling the speculative tale of her mother’s original child self, how-
ever, transforms the narrator’s relationship to her mother, releasing
both positive and negative emotions between the two from their insti-
tutionalized prohibitions. She faces and demystifies the animosities
between herself and the image she has of her mother, at least on the
level of narrative:
An unspoken rule between us has been that I can hate her but
she can’t hate me; this breaks …
‘I think,’ says my mother thoughtfully … ‘that I’m going to
get married.’ She looks at me, shrewdly and with considerable
hatred.
‘That way,’ she says in a low, controlled voice, ‘I will be able to
get away from you!’ (214, italics in original)
The narrator also moves beyond facing the hatred between herself
and her mother and braves another hideous taboo, incestuous love.
When the narrator meets her mother as a 19-year-old in a Chinese
restaurant, she courts the perplexed young woman with what must
be the most ridiculed come-on line of all times: ‘Do you come here
often?’ (209) The tension between the two is erotic enough for the
narrator to lapse into ironic denial: ‘It may occur to you that the con-
text between us is sexual. I think it is parental’ (209). The irony stems
from the fact that the two are clearly not mutually exclusive. At 19, her
mother is not a mother yet, she is just a young girl with dreams. Stag-
ing an encounter with her mother as not-a-mother expresses her
desire to see the woman without the barrier of guilt:
Here’s something else I like: when I was twenty-nine and my

mother—flustered and ingenuous—told me that she’d had an
embarrassing dream about me. Did she expect to be hit? It was
embarrassing (she said) because it was incestuous. She
dreamed we had eloped and were making love.
Don’t laugh. I told it for years against her. I said all kinds of
awful things. (215)
In this rewriting of the Oedipus story, the narrator recalls her mother’s
dream not as an imaginary scene between a juvenated mother and
herself, but as an event from her lived experience. By telling the many
stories of female–female relationships, the narrator reinterprets the
dream, adding her own incestuous desire to the plot.
The mother’s dream thus serves as a point of transition in the short
story. The narrated scenes unfold successive stages of liberation away
from culturally predetermined and sanctioned paths for the
mother–daughter relationship towards recognizing the necessity to
love. The text explores the possibility of hating the mother, the luxury
of being able to hate the daughter, and the even greater luxury of
mutual love. The last sentence in the short story recalls the chorus of
a popular song by The Beatles which places the link to the mother in
the context of heterosexual romance: ‘All you need is love’ (217).
Consequently, the liberating potential lies not so much in the plot of
rescue, but once more in the act of telling. The daughter cannot liter-
ally rescue the child that will become her mother, not even in science
fiction. As in ‘Life in the Furniture Store’, the telling is by no means
therapeutic. Psychic health is not an objective. The pivot is power: the
power of the narrator to tell her own stories of existence and to exper-
iment with anti-psychoanalytical stories of daughterhood which
enable the lesbian continuum, rejecting compulsory heterosexuality.
In this rewriting of the psychoanalytical story of individuation, ‘The
Autobiography of My Mother’ partially reunites the image of the
mother with the original goddess. The text thus participates in the
feminist search for an unmarred female body through the symbolic
power of such a mother-goddess. The end of the short story comes
around to a reference to the ancient Babylonian myth of creation, in
which Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, is defeated by the male god Mar-
duk. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk creates order from chaos and thus
becomes the supreme god of the universe. He creates earth and sky by
splitting Tiamat’s body in two halves. Rosemary Radford Ruether in
Gaia & God describes Marduk’s victory over Tiamat as symbolic for the
defeat of the matriarchal idea in this society (16-19). Russ’s narrator

instead establishes a bodily connection to the mother, going back to
a changed myth of creation, in which the male god is displaced by the
original mother-goddess:
This is what comes of re-meeting one’s mother when she was
only two—how willful she was! how charming, and how
strong. I wish she had not grown up to be a doormat, but all
the same what a blessing it is not to have been made by some-
body’s hands like a piece of clay, and then he breathed a spirit
in you, etc., so you are clay and not-clay, your ingredients fight-
ing each other like the irritable vitamin pill in the ad—what a
joy and a pleasure to have been born, just ordinary born, you
know, out of dirt and flesh, all of one piece and of the same
stuff She is. To be my mother’s child. (Your pleasures and
pains are your bellybutton-cord to the Great Mother; they
prove you were once part of her.)
I asked, Why couldn’t my mother have been more like You!
(216)
Having travelled back to the moment when the future mother is just
recognizing herself as an individual, the narrator of the short story
here expresses the wish that she could interfere with her mother’s
entrance to the patriarchal symbolic order. But the solipsistic time-
traveller cannot change history. What she can do, however, is to
manipulate the story she tells. Russ’s text provisionally reinstalls the
original goddess in the body of the mother and ridicules the Judaeo-
Christian male god as supreme symbolic creator. The rule of the
mother, assumed to be creative, non-linear and non-repressive,
supersedes the law of the father.
The goddess as a symbol corresponds to Rich’s concept of the
‘experience of motherhood.’ The text does not represent maternity as
an accessible entity outside patriarchy, but, in a manoeuvre similar to
the one which I analysed for such characters as Brynhild, consciously
grounds it in existing narratives. Via a narrative reconciliation with
the mother and with a reconstituted concept of motherhood, the nar-
rator comes to terms with herself as a daughter. Like ‘The Second
Inquisition’, the story thus transforms and complicates the rescue
pattern in various moves of reversal. Ultimately, the rescued ‘child’ is
the adult daughter whose narrative invents a youthful image of her
mother and circles back to rescuing herself.
‘The Dirty Little Girl’ is more solipsistic and direct in disclosing the
self as protagonist in its rescue of the female child theme, but the
story uses similar time loops back into childhood. This time, however,
it is the childhood of the narrator that serves as a point of reference
and it is the child who travels to the time and space of her adult self.
This adult is also the autobiographical narrator and fictional author
of the story. Her autobiographical narrative voice is enhanced by the
fact that she shares a number of central characteristics with the
author. Like Joanna Russ, she is a writer, teaches creative writing in
Seattle, and has severe, incapacitating chronic back pain. Yet it is cru-
cial to point out that the text is by no means an autobiography. As
‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ relies on science fictional ele-
ments in the development of the narrative, ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ uses
genre elements from fantasy, specifically from ghost stories, which are
out of place in clear-cut autobiography. Neither does the story tell an
anecdote from the author’s, Joanna Russ’s, life. But the autobio-
graphical elements in the text lend credibility to the intimately per-
sonal narrative voice. Thus identifying the narrator with the author in
the text both makes the narrator clearly female and invests her with
the authority of an author who writes with confidence of her own life.
What is more, the story is framed as a personal letter, which also
draws in the reader as female addressee in a circle of intimate com-
munication between women. Thus, the story exemplifies Russ’s
move towards an ever more personal narrative voice. In this move,
major concerns in Russ’s oeuvre—particularly after ‘When It
Changed’—coalesce: writing, reading and reformulating the stories of
women’s lives, resistances and revolutions.
The severe health problems of the narrator, which link her to the
author, also provide the basis for connection and reconciliation with
the girl self as the main theme in the story. The first encounter with
this girl self combines both the ordinary and the unusual. On a shop-
ping trip, the narrator meets a strange eight-year-old girl, who offers
to help her carry her groceries and comes to take up more and more
room in her life. Throughout the story, the back pain is always pre-
sent. The narrative moves from the body of the narrator, via the body
of the child, to the body of the mother, to come full circle to a trans-
formed image of the body of the narrator herself.
Going through similar oscillations to the visitor in ‘The Second
Inquisition’, the body of the girl is the site of another transformation.
On one hand she is materially and physically present, an unsanitary,
smelly child’s body. The narrator finds the girl physically repulsive:
‘Here was a Little Dirty Girl offering to help me, and smelling in close
quarters as if she hadn’t changed her underwear for days: demand-

ingness, neediness, more annoyance’ (5). On the other hand, how-
ever, the body of the child is also unstable. On each successive visit,
she becomes physically smaller, and the incongruities between the
child’s body and her intellectual capabilities become greater. Gradu-
ally, the narrator realizes that the girl is a ghost, more specifically the
ghost of her own self which she has rejected, ‘messy, left alone,
ignored, kicked out, bedraggled, like a cat caught in a thunderstorm’
(3). The girl’s body disappears little by little. Her sometimes unpleas-
ant physical presence is thus accompanied by an almost complete
disembodiment:
And as surely as A.R. had been a biggish eight when we had
met weeks ago, just as surely she was now a smallish, very
unmistakably unnaturally knowledgeable five. But she was
such a nice little ghost. And so solid! … If the Little Dirty Girl
was a ghost, she was obviously a bodily-dirt-and-needs ghost
traumatized in life by never having been given a proper bath or
allowed to eat marshmallows until she got sick. (13–14, italics
in original)
The conflict between the narrator and her child-self is resolved
when she embraces the small, dying, dirty body for its own sake,
without the detached sense of utility that had governed their interac-
tions previously. It is not disgust but fear of the alien self that has pre-
vented her from sensually, lovingly accepting her infantile alter-ego: ‘I
imagined the Little Dirty Girl sinking her teeth into my chest if I so
much as touched her. Not touched for bathing or combing or putting
on shoelaces, you understand, but for touching only’ (16). The
moment they get into bed together to sleep, the externalized self of
the narrator becomes part of her and disappears: ‘She said sleepily,
“Can I stay?” and I (also sleepily) “Forever.” But in the morning she
was gone’ (17). The photograph of the Dirty Little Girl referred to at
the end of the story is the pictorial representation of the narrator’s
own aged body.
‘But that’s not the end of the story’ (18), as the narrator points out.
The reconciliation with the self does not conclude the plot. As the
narrator faces her own child-self, she also faces the maternal in her-
self, and conversely, once she is able to mother her own self, she can
brave the confrontation with her mother:
Well, this is the woman who came to visit a few weeks later. I
wanted to dodge her. I had been dodging academic committees

and students and proper bedtimes; why couldn’t I dodge my
mother? So I decided that this time I would be openly angry (I’d
been doing that in school, too). (18, italics in original)
The mother recognizes the change in her daughter and this recogni-
tion triggers her to revisit the narrator’s childhood: ‘When you were
five, I had cancer … I kept it from you. I didn’t want to burden you’
(20). Again, it is the mother’s physical illness that determines their
relationship.
However, these bodily illnesses do not serve as metaphors for the
women’s psychological condition. Such a reading would reinforce the
very dichotomy between the body and the mind which is displaced by
the text. Through physical pain and physical pleasure the body man-
ifests itself as material reality. Representations of sickness and sen-
suality thus reinforce the body’s presence in the text. In ‘The Second
Inquisition’ the curious and desirous gaze of the young narrator on
the older woman’s body, as I have shown, makes a similar connection
to the body’s materiality that serves as the basis of the story’s libera-
tory impulse. The narrator in ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’
embraces her own body as part of her self, which in turn enables her
to connect with her mother’s physical being. Yet Russ once more
makes neither rescue nor reconciliation unambiguously complete: ‘I
wish I could go on to describe a scene of intense and affectionate rec-
onciliation between my mother and myself, but that did not happen—
quite’ (21).
The narrator’s tale thus transforms her own body from an external
substance alien or even hostile to her self to an entity which is an inte-
gral part of her self. The narrative parallels this transformation in a
sustained metaphorical link between her body and the image of a
horse. Referring to the time before the Little Dirty Girl came into her
life, the narrator explains her physical pain by the way in which she
had treated her body as other. She uses the image of a plough horse:
Besides, that was no worse than my flogging myself through
five women’s work and endless depressions, beating the old
plough horse day after day for weeks and months and years—
no, for decades—until her back broke and she foundered and
went down and all I could do was curse her helplessly and beat
her the more. (19)
With the wisdom of hindsight, the story makes a causal link between
the way in which the narrator treated her body like a utility and her
illness. The narrator thus reconnects her physical and her psycholog-
ical pain, which she represents as caused by the separation of her
body from the work of her mind. At the end of the text, however, the
plough horse has become the horse of a king and referred to in the
first person. Speaking to the addressee of the epistolary text, the nar-
rator concludes the story with a transformed quotation from Shake-
speare: ‘the one thing you desired most in the world was a
photograph, a photograph, your kingdom for a photograph—of me’
(22). The quotation here contains a concealed reference to a horse
desperately needed by the anonymous recipient of the letter that
frames the narrative. The split between the narrator and her body has
shifted. The photograph represents not just the body but is repre-
sented as a mirror image of the narrator herself.
Both ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ and ‘The Little Dirty Girl’
thus explore the transformative power of storytelling. As the narrators
in these texts confront the stories of their own selves, they retell the
story of motherhood. In ‘The Little Dirty Girl’, the rescue of the female
child as a plot pattern has moved to the explicit rescue of the narra-
tor’s self through her own narrative. The pattern is similar if less
explicit in both ‘The Second Inquisition’ and ‘The Autobiography of
My Mother’. The impossible desire which all these stories express is
ultimately to travel back in time and to rescue the child-self. While the
stories confirm the impossibility and paradoxical character of this
desire, the potential for ‘rescue’ pops up in a place different from
where the trajectory of desire had seemed to lead the narrators. The
act of narration itself turns out to be the site where a more process-
oriented kind of rescue can take place. Whereas in these three ‘auto-
biographical’ stories, the ‘rescued child’ is either the narrator or a
protagonist, the novel Kittatinny brings in the reader as part of this
rescue pattern.
Warrior Woman and Girl Love: Kittatinny
Kittatinny was published in 1978 by Daughters Press with illustra-

tions by Loretta Li, as a book for young girls. The protagonist is the
eleven-year-old girl Kittatinny who goes on a magical journey
through a landscape of rewritten myths and fairy tales. On her jour-
ney, Kit meets Taliesin, the beautiful female dragon who gives her the
power of the sword, she fights the deadly ‘slonches’, finds a book
which contains an alternative story of the mermaid Russalka,

watches the Warrior Woman fight, and finds the real Sleeping Beauty,
who is an ageless girl vampire. In an enchanted forest, she picks up
the newly born B.B., a satyr who accompanies her on the rest of the
trip. B.B. is physically marked as male: ‘So Kit was not surprised to
see, peeping between the baby’s hairy little legs (which he was wav-
ing vigorously in the air as if he were on a bicycle) a rod of flesh with
a bag of skin under it’ (15). The two from then on live a symbiosis:
when the girl carries B.B. who lives off her heartbeat, she has no need
to eat.
As Kit lives through a succession of adventures, the little satyr
becomes more human and grows to be her own size. Eventually, B.B.
‘goes out like a candle’ (80) and momentarily disappears from Kit’s
life. Like the visitor in ‘The Second Inquisition’ and A.R. in ‘The Lit-
tle Dirty Girl’, he is slowly revealed as the protagonist’s alter-ego,
whose physicality and gender are both subject to uncertainty.
Returned from her fantastic journey, Kit is startled to find her lost
travel companion at her home. He has become fully human, but ‘it
couldn’t be him because this person had bumps on her chest that
looked like breasts (and were) and where B.B.’s little flesh-roll had
hung between his legs this person had a tidy mound of hair exactly
like Kit’s’ (87). B.B. thus confronts Kit with her own conventional
concepts of sex and gender-roles, which have limited her imagina-
tion. Only through B.B.’s intervention is Kit able to overcome the cul-
tural restraints her society put on her and to experience the rewritten
children’s stories:
B.B. shouted furiously, ‘Boy? I was never a boy! What do you
mean, boy? You’re as bad as the master printer with your boy!
That’s all you can think about is boy!’
‘Now look here—’ Kit said.
‘Look here yourself!’ yelled B.B. ‘I told you about legendary
creatures, didn’t I? I told you I would turn into whatever you
were. Is it my fault you’ve got stupid ideas and a limited imag-
ination? Is it my fault you think only boys can lose their tem-
pers and have adventures?’ (87, italics in original)
B.B. is represented as the part or aspect of Kit’s self which rebels
against the limitations of patriarchal valley life. At the very moment
when the girl chooses the love of the woman Rose Bottom over that
of the man Ondry Miller, the text destabilizes the sexed body and the
link between masculinity and maleness. As in ‘The Second Inquisi-
tion’, the two selves merge in the mirror image of the protagonist’s
body: ‘Kit put her fingers out to touch B.B.’s and B.B. put her fingers
out to touch Kit’s. Kit’s fingers did not meet the faun’s. Instead they
met a flat surface, hard and cold, like glass’ (89, italics in original).
As B.B.’s presence enabled Kit’s masculinity, s/he also facilitates
the link to the other woman: ‘And in spite of Kit’s being the adven-
turous one and Rose the stay-at-home in the lovely dress, they were
the same’ (86). Although sexual desire is not represented as exclu-
sively directed towards women, the text authenticates/privileges les-
bian love over the love of men:
Kit felt as if B.B. were at her again, though she didn’t know
why, and she wanted to put her arms around her friend
[Rose]—so she did—and then suddenly she felt just as she had
with Ondry Miller, which was extremely confusing as you
weren’t supposed to feel that way with another woman. Only
it was coming over her in waves, and this time it wasn’t just
fun but something that made her heart hurt. And then they
were kissing each other, which was worse. Kit kept on kissing
the soft skin on Rose’s face and neck and feeling Rose’s breasts
press against her own until the confusion got to be too much,
and then she stopped. (86–87)
As the narrative ‘rescues’ Kit from compulsory heterosexuality, the
text opens a door for the reader. The maternal voice of the narrator
replaces the plot of heterosexual romantic love and normative female
passivity with stories which celebrate women who actively pursue
their sexuality and the desire for the female body.
However, as in the other stories of rescue in Russ’s oeuvre, Kit-
tatinny resists definitive closure and static utopian spaces. The narra-
tor, unapologetically didactic, makes this principle of the shifting,
process-oriented utopia explicit in an image that parallels Kit’s sub-
versive journey through children’s literature: ‘once you’ve changed,
you have to go out again on adventures that never end because all of
it’s an adventure and all of it constantly changes. So there’s no home,
really, and no end to traveling …’ (92).
In these four representative texts, the short stories ‘The Second
Inquisition’, ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ and ‘The Little Dirty
Girl’ and the novel Kittatinny, the rescue of the female child is inextri-
cably linked to the narrative act as well as to the act of reading. The
reconciliation and connection with other women in these creative
acts are not parts of a confessional therapy, but rather assertions of
power, specifically the power to endow women’s strength and the

love of women with symbolic meaning. In these texts, the power to
tell one’s own story thus correlates with woman’s erotic desire for the
female body and a reconciliation with motherhood and with the
woman who gave birth to the protagonist.
This connection of intergenerational (erotic) tensions and
(utopian) desires points to fundamental contradictions within con-
temporary feminist discourses on sexuality. Intergenerational rela-
tionships in Russ’s fiction utilize the contradictory nature and
instability of the mother–daughter relationship, as the discussion of
the ‘rescue of the female child’ model illustrated. From the perspec-
tive of the younger woman, the elder is a mother, a teacher and a role-
model, who represents a potential future, as well as the guardian of
the past. In patriarchal societies, it is the mother who is positioned to
enforce the young woman’s initiation to motherhood, and the daugh-
ter is always also a potential mother. The image of the mother thus
represents both a link with women’s history and with feminist
utopian desire. Similarly, from the point of view of the older woman,
the female child or young woman represents her desires for a changed
past, for liberating the child-self from debilitating discourses of the
self. The younger woman/girl looks with admiration at the power and
independence of the older woman, and the older woman desires to
teach and advise the younger woman as her younger self. The follow-
ing discussion will analyze how the inherent erotic tensions in this
intergenerational rescue pattern function in explicitly sexual relation-
ships between women in Russ’s work.
CHAPTER SIX
Lesbian Existence:
Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
Let’s be reasonable. Let’s demand the impossible—Russ, (On

Strike Against God, 107)
There is no one person in or out of fiction who represents a
stronger challenge to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to patri-
archy and phallocentrism, than the lesbian-feminist—Elaine
Marks (282)
Radical feminist thinkers affiliated with Kristeva’s second moment in
feminism, such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly or Andrea Dworkin,
base their cultural criticism on the idea that heterosexual intercourse
serves as one of the central sites of women’s oppression in patriarchy.
Therefore, from this perspective, it is only from within patriarchal
conceptualizations of sexuality that feminist interventions can dis-
place this oppression. As Chapter Five demonstrated, attaining
agency does not complete the processes of feminist utopian specula-
tion in Russ’s fiction. Russ simultaneously explores how women’s
economic position in patriarchy is linked to their bodies and their sex-
uality through a complex system of mutual interaction.
Russ’s central ‘heterosexual’ protagonists, Alyx in the short story
collection The Adventures of Alyx, Jael in The Female Man and Irene in
The Two of Them, assert their agency by killing a man, but this act by
itself does not make these women subjects of their sexual desire.
Alyx, the woman who kills a man she hates without so much as
winking, she who never hesitates to act, becomes an instrument of
her lover’s pleasure in copulation:
‘Forgiven,’ Alyx managed to say as he plunged in, as she dif-
fused over the landscape—sixty leagues in each direction—
and then turned into a drum, a Greek one, hourglass-shaped
with the thumped in-and-out of both skins so extreme that
they finally met in the middle, so that she then turned inside-
out, upside-down and switched right-and-left sides, every cell,
both hands, each lobe of her brain, all at once, while someone
(anonymous) picked her up by the navel and shook her vio-
lently in all directions, remarking ‘If you don’t make them cry,
they won’t live.’ She came to herself with the idea that
Machine was digging up rocks. He was banging her on the
head with his chin. (Picnic on Paradise, 121–22)
The narrative of Alyx’s own sexual pleasure buries this pleasure in
images of passivity which remove her from her self. Only after what
may be her orgasm does the text have her ‘come to herself’. Such pas-
sivity, which normative heterosexuality makes necessary for women,
is impossible for Jael. She uses an android for her sexual gratification
not simply because passivity does not turn her on sexually, but also
because compulsory heterosexuality endows each sex act with polit-
ical significance. Similarly, Irene, once she realizes ‘I don’t know any
women’ (The Two of Them, 120), ceases to relate to Ernst sexually. She
‘kick[s him] out of bed’ (153). Therefore, while killing Ernst affirms
her agency, identifying with the lesbian continuum opens a process
which enables her to decide that heterosexual intercourse impedes
her liberatory political acts: she chooses ‘not to’. Since patriarchal
narratives of sexual relations operate in structures of ownership and
submission, female characters’ ownership of their own bodies is a
central image in radical feminist rewritings of women’s sexuality.
Claiming their bodies as their own by refusing to give men access to
them, celibate and lesbian women in these rewritten stories break up
the complexly interrelated system of patriarchal economics and com-
pulsory heterosexuality, and create a utopian space for a revolution-
ized concept of sexuality (partially) beyond the gender dichotomy.
Masturbation: My Own Body
I will tell you my own, recently-developed theory of sexuality,

proven by years of experimental masturbating: i.e. you feel
your climax most whenever you are being most stimulated.
This opens surprising fields of research to those of us with
suckling infants or three hands or other situations like that.
Honest (On Strike Against God, 55)
This passage from On Strike Against God sums up the attitude towards
sexuality implicit in Russ’s writing since the 1970s, her ‘explicitly
feminist’ phase. Participating in the discourse of body ownership,
LESBIAN EXISTENCE 157
these texts counter the theories of lack projected by psychoanalysis.

Russ’s work after ‘When It Changed’ shifts from an appetitional
model of sexuality based on psychoanalysis to a model which untan-
gles sexuality from the system of libidinal economy. In his essay
‘Orders of Chaos: The Science Fiction of Joanna Russ’, Samuel
Delany analyses this central paradigm shift in Russ’s writing:
The model that Russ constructs is a process model: sex is a
process that two or more persons of different sexes can assist
one another through, that two or more persons of the same sex
can assist one another through, or that one can indulge in by
oneself. (95)
Delany’s analysis, however, does not account for the very different
functions which the various types of sexuality, homosexuality, het-
erosexuality and autosexuality, fulfil in Russ’s novels. Moreover, by
sweepingly dismissing psychoanalysis as ‘clearly unscientific’ (122),
he overlooks Russ’s heavy reliance on the categories of psychoanaly-
sis in the creation of her alternative models.
Autoeroticism in Russ’s work is a case in point. Post-Freudian psy-
choanalytic research has related masturbation in adolescent girls to
their sense of autonomy and self-esteem. Clinical evidence shows
that girls who masturbate during adolescence are more likely to
actively pursue career goals later in their lives, which indicates a close
connection between assertiveness and the exploration of sexuality
(Person, 624).1 Again, this is not to say that there is any form of essen-
tial or ‘natural’ tie between agency and autoeroticism but rather that
a psychoanalytic view on late capitalist patriarchal culture makes this
connection. The interviewees in any research project obviously also
operate within the system of dominant cultural narratives. In psy-
choanalytic discourse, masturbation is also a direct indication of the
level of active involvement in sexual intercourse:
So-called low drive [in women] is manifest in the low rates of
female adolescent masturbation, the tendency to tie sexuality
to intimacy, and the ability to tolerate anorgasmia. Here the
tacit assumption is that male sexuality constitutes the norm
and that women perform at a deficit. (Person, 623)
Russ’s post-1970 novels clearly respond to this model, constructing
images of women who know exactly what they want from sexual
encounters because they have claimed their bodies and their sexual-
ity as their own through masturbation.
Dorothy Allison articulates the connection between masturbation

and power, sex and agency in her essay ‘Puritans, Perverts, and Fem-
inists’ published in her essay collection Skin (1994), recalling her ado-
lescent reading of science fiction:
The honest-to-god truth is that I spent most of my adoles-
cence—and I’ll admit it, even my twenties—jacking off to sci-
ence fiction books, marvelous, impossible stories full of
struggle and angst.
As a girl I read Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, C.J. Moore’s
Jirel of Joiry, the Telzey books by James Smith, More Than
Human by Theodore Sturgeon, and all of the Alyx Stories by
Joanna Russ … I would orgasm to the adventures I conjured
up for myself in those worlds, but more important was the con-
stant excited satisfaction of imagining myself so far away and
different. (93–94)
What makes masturbation liberatory in these texts is not the act itself,
but telling a story about it. Framing the act in a self-affirming narra-
tive, feminist clinical psychoanalysis, Dorothy Allison and Joanna
Russ participate in the same feminist oppositional practice.
Russ’s novel And Chaos Died (1970), on the contrary, still primarily
operates with a concept of sexuality which relates masturbation to an
immature and unfulfilled love life. The novel creates a voyeuristicly
erotic scene between the two protagonists, Jai Vedh and Evne, and
another character, in which Jai and Evne observe the other woman’s
sex play with herself. Because the two protagonists can read the
woman’s mind, the observation encompasses her accompanying sex-
ual fantasies.
However, one may at the same time read the novel as a site of tran-
sition in respect to sexuality. And Chaos Died does experiment with
gender discontinuities and sexual deviations, disrupting the norma-
tive heterosexual plot of romance. Jai Vedh, the main character, simi-
lar to Cal in The Female Man, does not correspond to conventional
concepts of masculinity, particularly in science fiction. Since most of
the plot takes place in his mind, his body also remains unstable. Sim-
ilarly, space and time appear distorted through the narrative. Jai Vedh,
as a result of an interstellar accident, encounters a utopian planet
whose population has acquired the skill of extra-sensory perception.
The social structure on this planet is vaguely matriarchal. Since the
inhabitants can manipulate matter with their minds, they can do
without technology, which makes the culture seem primitive to an
outsider (Delany, ‘Orders of Chaos’, 113).

Like his body and gender, Jai Vedh’s sexuality is unfixed. Although
he claims he is homosexual, Evne, who is a genetic surgeon, seduces
him effortlessly. In the mid-1970s, Russ playfully disowned the way
in which And Chaos Died represents homosexuality, but in her most
recent stories, such as ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution,
Grandma?’ (1983) or ‘Bodies’ (1984), she comes back to similar sex-
ual discontinuities. In her review of The Dispossessed in The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction of March 1975, Russ criticizes Le Guin’s het-
erosexual bias: ‘We are told that one (male) character is homosexual:
yet he acts asexual’ (42). She adds in a footnote: ‘A mistake made in
And Chaos Died by Ross—um—Roos? Rouse? Somehow I forget’ (42).
Jai Vedh, however, is far from leading an asexual life. In fact, sexu-
ality constitutes the main theme, the leitmotif, in the novel. But more
often than not, the eroticism remains disguised or subdued and the
sexual acts discontinued. Evne teaches Jai to develop his own extra-
sensory powers. Combining their mental capacities, the population of
the idyllic planet transport Jai Vedh and Evne to a spaceship bound
for Earth. The two end up in a room that belongs to one Mrs Robins,
a character reminiscent of Mrs Robinson of The Graduate. Jai and Evne
are about to make love, when they sense her coming back. In their
extra-sensory minds, the image of Mrs. Robins’s body appears as an
assembly of artificial parts: ‘She had milk-blue eyes, cropped straw
hair, a butcher’s smock, and spiked sandals. She had enormous
breasts, two wells of silicone jelly, enormous buttocks, a faked,
crowded waist, dyed eyes, dyed hair and no uterus’ (93).
Samuel Delany reads Mrs Robins’s ‘hysterical absence’ as a symbol
of emptiness, a ‘social vacuum’ which is ‘permanent, unchangeable,
appeasable only in fantasy’ (‘Orders of Chaos’, 114). Such an inter-
pretation leaves little room for Mrs Robins’s own voice. The culture in
which she lives is a dystopian extrapolation from contemporary cap-
italism in which the alienation of the individual is carried to an
extreme. Mrs Robins’s name, in addition to its reverberations of sex-
ual frustration and insatiable hunger from the movie, recalls a hero
from the very beginnings of capitalism: Robinson Crusoe. Deprived of
human relationships, she is alone even if she does leave her insular
room. She is completely isolated, and cultural standards of beauty
mould her body. Evne senses Mrs Robins’s alienation, and her own,
Evne’s—unalienated—body responds with a violent reaction: she has
to vomit. Without invalidating Delany’s reading, I would interpret
Mrs Robins’s body as an emblem not just of emptiness but also of an
overload—weighed as it is with the artefacts of a culture that has

made the woman’s body a commodity.
On entering the room, Mrs Robins immediately assumes that the
two nude people have been placed there to perform for her amuse-
ment, and she expresses her disappointment when they refuse to do
so. Ironically, she ends up performing for them. She takes out an elab-
orate sex toy, an ‘exercycle’ designed to assist her in masturbation and
proceeds to operate it with determination, while Evne and Jai witness
the image of a man forming in the woman’s mind:
The exercise seat plunged and rose, plunged and rose. The
woman herself stiffened, knees together.
It was a real, true idea. It was a real thought. It was inside
her head. She couldn’t think of herself but only of a man, not
of her own body, her lovely twin sister, but only of a man who
had skin, bones, teeth, fingers, a penis, a brain, and whose
lungs were breathing air into her own. (96)
Here, masturbation appears to confirm the woman’s alienation from
her body. In her imagination, Mrs Robins reproduces sexual inter-
course with a man, positioning herself as the passive recipient of
pleasure. However, such a reading of Mrs Robins as sexually deprived
only confirms the limiting interpretation of the two protagonists
through whose voyeuristic eyes the narrator represents Mrs Robins’s
pleasure. Neither Jai and Evne nor the narrator avert their eyes from
the scene which they purportedly disapprove, but rather vicariously
savour every detail of the woman’s autoerotic pleasures, freely shar-
ing them with the reader. These pleasures are, after all, Mrs Robins’s
own.
While the narrative of And Chaos Died disavows the titillating effect
of such scenes of spectatorship and autoerotic pleasure, Russ’s later
novels, specifically The Female Man and On Strike Against God, explicitly
explore the liberatory potential of masturbation scenes. Sex toys
emblematically represent the emancipation of masturbation in Russ’s
work. On Whileaway, the feminist utopian society in The Female Man,
girls receive vibrators as gifts in their initiation ceremony:
these charming dinguses are heirlooms. They are menarchal
gifts, presented after all sorts of glass-blowing, clay-modeling,
picture-painting, ring-dancing, and Heaven knows what sort
of silliness done by the celebrants to honor the little girl whose
celebration it is. There is a tremendous amount of kissing and
hand-shaking. This is only the formal presentation, of course;

cheap, style-less models that you wouldn’t want to give as pre-
sents are available to everybody long before this. (148)
Whileawayans use these devices by themselves and when more than
one person is involved. The distinction between masturbation and
‘real’ sex has been dissolved. Similarly, in On Strike Against God, when
the speaking subject is sexually aroused by the first erotic interplay
with the woman she loves, and it does not result in copulation, she
simply masturbates:
I kissed Jean on the cheek and said a trembly good-by.
And staggered to the bedroom, kicked off my shoes mechan-
ically, sat down on the bed. Pulled the curtains to, pulled down
my pants, reached in the bottom drawer of the bureau for the
vibrator.
A little voice cried, You’ll wear yourself out!
But ah, that was impossible. (52, italics in original)
The shape and function of these sex toys, which are expressly non-
penetrative, once more confirm the stories’ dependence on the psy-
choanalytic narrative of sexuality. In this narrative, the clitoral
stimulation corresponds with active sexuality, whereas vaginal pene-
tration expresses passivity. Since sexuality in this logic serves as the
basis for social structure, passive sexuality is directly related to a sub-
missive social role. Here, Russ’s explicitly feminist texts show a con-
cept of sexuality contiguous with And Chaos Died. Mrs Robins’s
exercycle is penetrative and denigrating rather than liberating,
whereas Whileawayan vibrators are non-penetrative and correspond
directly with the character’s active sexuality. Thus making vaginal
penetration a forbidden act, both texts perpetuate the idea that such
penetration is necessarily an act of domination. The stories Russ pub-
lished in her ‘critically feminist phase’, particularly ‘What Did You Do
During the Revolution Grandma?’, partially shift this symbolic mean-
ing, giving dominance and submission a slightly different twist. Part
Three will analyse this shift in greater detail.
It is this patriarchal erotic symbolism, then, which ensures that the
act of masturbation for Mrs Robins confirms her position in the patri-
archal order. For the autoerotically inclined women in The Female Man
and On Strike Against God, on the other hand, masturbation correlates
with their freedom from patriarchal sexuality. Through masturbation
these women get in tune with their own sexual fantasies and plea-
sures, thumbing their noses at compulsory heterosexuality. In Russ’s

later novels, masturbation is therefore directly linked to what must be
the most radical sexual acts of resistance in the logic of psychoanaly-
sis: lesbian lovemaking.
Copulation: Our Bodies, Our Selves
… while it is easy enough to show women doing men’s work,

or active in society, it is in the family scenes and the love scenes
that one must look for the author’s real freedom from our most
destructive prejudices (Russ, ‘Images of Women in Science Fic-
tion’, 89)
I have already discussed two major strategies of liberation in Russ’s
texts: androcide and entering the lesbian continuum. Another such
strategy is deploying scenes of sexual/erotic interactions between/
among women which deliberately exclude men. Lesbian existence as
represented in Russ’s novels is such a formidable force in the strug-
gle against the oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy because it com-
bines claiming women’s own sexuality with the assertion of agency
in a way which deprives patriarchy of one of its most crucial founda-
tions. This foundation is the heterosexual family arranged around the
phallus and within this arrangement woman’s role as object of trade
among men and receptacle of semen. Although We Who Are About To …
and The Two of Them contain lesbian sexuality as a potential, the two
books which most explicitly explore sex scenes among women as a
narrative strategy are The Female Man and On Strike Against God.
In placing this immense revolutionary significance on lesbian sex-
uality, I do not want to indicate that Russ’s texts represent it as merely
a political act. But it is an old feminist truism that since patriarchal
power rests on the most intimately personal, this is where a feminist
revolution can be most effective. This truism is especially relevant for
radical feminisms of Kristeva’s second moment. As I pointed out ear-
lier, it is not lesbian lovemaking as such that opens up a space for rev-
olution, but ignoring men as sexual partners. Women who turn to
women for sexual pleasure disrupt the story which traditional psy-
choanalysis presents as the norm.
I have been using the term ‘lesbian’ as if it were an uncontested
term. However, it is perhaps the prevailing uncertainty of what pre-
cisely constitutes a lesbian that contributes to the threat which the
concept poses to the heterosexual contract. Furthermore, the concept

is as fragmented and heterogeneous as it is contested. In the short
time of its existence since the late nineteenth century, there has been
‘natural’, ‘converted’, ‘political’, ‘genetic’ and even ‘ludic’ lesbianism
and many more variations on these themes. However, for my reading
of Russ here, the contours of lesbian existence remain comparatively
clear, if only for the moment of analysis. A lesbian, then, is a twenti-
eth century woman in a Western patriarchal culture who desires other
women. This definition is not meant to exclude women from non-
Western cultures or lesbians who do not identify as ‘woman’, but is
strictly limited to the specific textual interpretation ventured in this
study. According to this provisional definition, Joanna in The Female
Man and Esther in On Strike Against God are lesbian characters, but Jael
and Irene, even though they come to primarily associate with women
politically and emotionally, are not.
Nevertheless, not all critics agree with this assessment. Marilyn
Hacker has argued, for example, that there are no feminists and no
lesbians in The Female Man. Janet, according to Hacker, is not a les-
bian since ‘her sexuality is, in her world, the norm, and indeed the
only possible orientation’ (75). I agree with Hacker in that Janet is not
a lesbian. In Part Three I will even go further and claim that she may
not even be a woman (another contested term) because in her society,
with the absence of men, this category has ceased to carry meaning.
However, in Part Nine of the novel, ‘The Book of Joanna’, it is Joanna,
not Janet, who dis-covers her sexual attraction to Laura Rose—and is
very much aware that she is venturing into territory outside the norm:
‘bringing my fantasies into the real world frightened me very much.
It’s not that they were bad in themselves, but they were Unreal and
therefore culpable …’ (208).
Joanna’s apprehensions and doubts about the cultural validity of
her desire point to the political implications of lesbian sexuality for
feminism. Joanna, the tenderfoot refugee from compulsory hetero-
sexuality, experiences the erotic relationship between herself and
another woman not primarily as orgasmic pleasure, but as a radical
break with patriarchal constructions of reality:
I can’t describe to you how reality itself tore wide open at that
moment. [Laura Rose] kept on reading and I trod at a snail’s
pace over her ear and cheek down to the corner of her mouth,
Laur getting hotter and redder all the time as if she had steam
inside her. It’s like falling off a cliff, standing astonished in
mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible,

anything is possible. Later we got stoned and made awkward,
self-conscious love, but nothing that happened afterward was
as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful
wrench of mind. (208, my emphasis)
Patriarchal articulations of reality do not allow for satisfying sexual
experiences for women outside the heterosexual framework. Making
‘Real what was Unreal’ (208), Joanna and Laura are committing a
crime against what structuralist psychoanalysis calls ‘the Law of the
Father’, which is ‘the crime of creating one’s own Reality, of “prefer-
ring oneself”’ (The Female Man, 208). The text is also careful to dis-
tinguish between the actual act of lovemaking and the possibility of
lovemaking between women—of the two the latter causes the radical
break. Nevertheless, to open up this possibility and to recognize it as
real, Joanna and Laura do have to actually sleep with each other.
Merely fantasizing about it is not enough: ‘having Brynhildic fan-
tasies about her was nothing—I have all sorts of extraordinary fan-
tasies which I don’t take seriously …’ (208).
On Strike Against God has a straightforward plot and does not—in
contrast to The Female Man—employ multiple narrative layers, but the
two books are nevertheless closely related. In respect to lesbian sex-
uality, On Strike Against God is a continuation of the earlier book. The
Female Man delineates the liberation process of one of the speaking
subjects. The end point of this process, lesbian lovemaking, marks
the beginning of a new, more subtle revolutionary process. This is
where On Strike Against God starts off:
Clumsily I put my arms around her, twice-clumsily I kissed her
on the neck, saying hoarsely, ‘I love you.’ (Which was some-
thing of an over-simplification, but how are you going to
explain it all?)
She went on reading.
She blushed delicately under me, like a landscape, I mean
her neck, she just turned red, it was amazing.
Reality tore itself in two, from top to bottom. (49, italics in
original)
Here, the radical break with patriarchal constructions of reality occurs
early in the novel, propelling the speaking subject into another
process of liberation, which leads her away from the patriarchal con-
cept of love as possession of the other and to an acceptance of her self:
‘The world belongs to me. I have a right to be here’ (58).
Having broken with the ‘Law of the Father’, Esther and her lover
Jean begin to explore and compare their bodies ‘like little girls’. The
two women stage an imaginary journey back into their early puberty,
a time when ‘the prison bars of femininity’ had not yet completely
closed in on them. Referring to childhood gives them a conceptual
space in which to find new meaning and a new language for their
bodies:
Then she took off her sunglasses and smiled at me, so that
tears rose to my eyes. She unhooked her dress (home-made so
no zipper) and let it drop to the floor, then with crossed arms
shucked her slip and did a little victorious dance around the
room, waving the slip in the air. We took off all our clothes, very
soberly, and then had a cup of tea, sitting politely on the couch,
naked; I went into the kitchen to fetch it in my bathrobe. We
looked each other over and I showed Jean the mole on my hip;
so she lifted her hair and showed me the freckles on the back
of her neck. We compared our ‘figures’ like little girls. We sat
on the two ends of the couch, our knees up, feet to feet, and
talked about the ecstasies and horrors of growing breasts at
twelve, of bouncing when you ran, of having hairy legs, of
being too tall, too short, too fat, too thin. There is this business
where you think people end at the neck; then gradually as you
talk, as we talked, as we reconstituted ourselves in our own eyes—
how well we became our bodies! how we moved out into them. I under-
stood that she felt her own ribs rise and fall with her breathing,
that her abdomen went all the way into her head, that when
she sat, she felt it, I mean she felt it in herself, just as I did.
Until she looked—as she had felt to me before—all of one
piece. (59, my emphasis)
Returning to their childhood selves allows them to make their bodies,
which had formerly been the property of their husbands or male
lovers, their own. Talking about their initiation to womanhood, for
both a painful experience, they try to undo the damage caused in their
puberty. Like the protagonists in ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’
and ‘The Little Dirty Girl’, Esther and Jean find remnants of an
uncommodified body and physical pleasure in their childhood selves.
The way in which reference to the female body operates in Russ’s
writing once again demonstrates that her development as a radical
feminist writer does not directly parallel the development of radical
feminist discourses, even as she employs some of the same strategies
and images. While her short stories and novels do intersect with
Rich’s lesbian continuum and lesbian existence and are concerned
with the correlations between motherhood, daughterhood and the
female sense of self in ways similar to Mary Daly, her fiction also
emphatically undermines these categories. Russ draws the female
body into her texts through a number of narrative strategies which all
closely link the body, sexuality and the act of narration. Part One
analysed how androcide establishes or confirms women’s agency, but
the killing scene also brought the woman’s body in focus. In ‘The Sec-
ond Inquisition’, The Female Man and On Strike Against God, on the
other hand, sexual acts and/or erotic glances exchanged among
women celebrate the female body in the text without the presence of
a counterpart that is not female. Other texts, such as ‘The Little Dirty
Girl’, bring in the female body through its illness and pain. Thus fic-
tionalizing androcide, erotic acts or physical suffering allows Russ’s
texts to perform the act of narration through and on the surface of the
body. But it is a body whose contours remain as uncertain and
unfixed as agency in her materialist thread. Her texts consistently
resit attempts by critics to pin them down to any one affiliation. They
revel in the many.
PART THREE
Indeterminacy
One of the best things (for me) about science fiction is that—
at least theoretically—it is a place where the ancient dualities
disappear. Day and night, up and down, ‘masculine’ and ‘fem-
inine’ are purely specific, limited phenomena which have been
mythologized by people. They are man-made (not woman-
made). Excepting up and down, night and day (maybe). Out in
space there is no up or down no day or night, and in the point
of view space can give us, I think there is no ‘opposite’ sex—
what a word! The Eternal Feminine and The Eternal Masculine
become the poetic fancies of a weakly dimorphic species trying
to imitate every other species in a vain search for what is ‘nat-
ural’—Russ (in ‘Commentary’, Khatru, 43)
Introduction to Part Three
Radical materialist feminists and feminists concerned with sexual

difference have demanded that images of women in literature speak
to the actual experience of women in ‘real life’. Parts one and Two
explored ways in which Russ’s fiction intersects with these concerns.
The readings showed that while Russ’s work does develop from pre-
feminist to explicitly feminist and critically feminist interpretations of
social power and sexuality, both concerns are present in most texts
and in tension with each other. However, those readings also indi-
cated that there is a third strand in her writing, which undermines
and contradicts the foundations of these first two moments in femi-
nism. Feminist theory affiliated with this third moment, which corre-
sponds to Kristeva’s third generation, has in various ways criticized
the first two moment’s investment in universalizing enlightenment
categories. Such thinkers for example examine the way in which the
category ‘woman’ itself is produced in (patriarchal) discourses. Since
to these theories there is no such thing as the essentially female/fem-
inine outside the symbolic order, woman’s ‘authentic’ experience
does not exist except as a utopian dream—a line of argumentation
which at first sight might look like a clever anti-feminist plot. If
‘woman’ is just a product of discourse, anything connected to a uni-
versal ‘women’s cause’ becomes an essentialist regression and a cor-
roboration of the binary gender system: every time a woman acts to
fight for the rights of her sex-class, she actually perpetuates and jus-
tifies the system of categorization that created the oppression; every
time a woman decides to form primary relationships with women and
to put men second, thinking she can ‘escape’ patriarchy, she confirms
the expulsion of women from the symbolic order. On the other hand,
merely deconstructing patriarchal discourse in a language and
medium inaccessible to people outside academia does not change the
economic position of women, nor does it release their sexuality from
their economic role in reproduction. Russ ingeniously manoeuvres
her texts out of this apparent impasse: consciously working with
these contradictions, she creates an open subject position for her
female characters. This open subject position enables identities that
destabilize the closed systems of sex class and sexual difference,
without relinquishing the political force of these categories. Thus, for

the purpose of gaining agency and claiming their own sexuality,
women in Russ’s texts in part act as if the categories produced by
patriarchy were, in fact, stable categories. In the following, I will fur-
ther explore how Russ activates narrative possibilities offered by sci-
ence fiction as a genre which allow these texts to use and
simultaneously counteract the essentialism inherent in the material-
ist feminist position.
Part Three will revisit certain spaces of intersection between Russ’s
work, feminist theory and genre fiction that have already been dis-
cussed in the previous chapters. I will, however, foreground the dis-
ruptive elements in Russ’s novels and short stories, elements which
destabilize the very sexual and political categories established by the
texts. So far I have focused on intersections with such feminist texts
that were largely contemporaneous with Russ’s own writing and
closely tied to feminist activism. In the 1980s, however, radical US
feminism took part in the large-scale ‘turn towards theory’. Particu-
larly the ‘French’ theories of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia
Kristeva became integral parts of feminist reflections on writing, the
body, and sexual difference. Toril Moi’s book Sexual/Textual Politics
(1985), in which she criticized much of American feminism for its
implicit biologism and essentialism and for its reductive concepts of
patriarchy, played an important role in this transformation. In the
1990s, theorists such as Judith Butler who grew up in this climate of
more theory-oriented feminism are analysing the instability and dis-
cursive formation of gender and sexuality. The following discussion
will examine the ways in which Russ’s fiction meets with these more
recent feminist theories, which most of her fiction predates.
Radical feminist theory in the 1990s, participating as it does in
many different academic disciplines, has assumed a significantly dif-
ferent role in relation to the women’s movement. Many universities
have (however reluctantly) established Women’s Studies pro-
grammes; feminism has become accepted in many academic fields.
The academic branches of feminism have further added to its diver-
sity and made its theories increasingly complex. The following analy-
sis focuses on spaces of intersection between Russ’s fiction and more
recent feminist theories such as Judith Butler’s idea of ‘gender per-
formativity’ and Donna Haraway’s cyborg identities. Again, I empha-
size continuities as well as departures from earlier concepts of
feminist politics.
Therefore, the following readings will demonstrate the ways in
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE 171
which Russ’s work, even as it participates in radical materialist and

essentialist feminist discourses, moves beyond concepts of victimiza-
tion. Russ’s texts painfully disclose oppression and subordination of
women as a group and vividly elucidate the deadly opposition
between oppressor and oppressed. Yet she simultaneously always
also envisions overcoming these dichotomies. She undermines the
idea of the essential, ‘pure’ lesbian at the same time as she celebrates
women’s sexual love for women. Criticizing universalizing narratives
about sexuality such as the psychoanalytic and anti-psychoanalytic
stories of women’s passivity in ‘patriarchy’, Judith Butler says in
‘Against Proper Objects’ (1994):
Feminist positions such as Catherine MacKinnon’s offer an
analysis of sexual relations as structured by relations of
coerced subordination and argue that acts of sexual domina-
tion constitute the social meaning of being a ‘man,’ as the con-
dition of coerced subordination constitutes the social meaning
of being a ‘woman’ … But that deterministic account has come
under continuous criticism from feminists not only for an
untenable account of female sexuality as coerced subordina-
tion, but for the totalizing view of heterosexuality as well—one
in which all power relations are reduced to relations of domi-
nation—and for the failure to distinguish the presence of
coerced domination in sexuality from pleasurable and wanted
dynamics of power. (7)
Butler here emphasizes the distinction between power and domi-
nance. In Parts One and Two, I focused on the intimate connection
between sex, gender, sexuality and agency. In these analyses, the
social power of males over females was conceptualized as dominance
within an all-encompassing system of patriarchal capitalism. In such
reductive systems of analysis, men would be the perpetrators and
women the victims—until they can kill the man and claim their body
as their own. The third moment in feminism explicitly resists such
totalizing views of sexual relations and power, pointing out the his-
toricity and multiplicitous constructedness of all discourses. These
theories no longer conceptualize women as the universal victims of
patriarchal domination. Furthermore, they problematize time as a
concept, showing that both the linear model of time, which was the
basis of the materialist project, and the cyclical model of time, which
provided a symbolic connection to the female body cycles, are histor-
ically produced and reproduced within a web of related discourses.
Thus, participation in ‘patriarchal’ discourses and practices is not

culpable but inevitable, and the task is not to try to overthrow the
‘system,’ but to utilize existing spaces of incongruity. In her earlier
book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler uses a childhood story to
illustrate this feminist strategy, which turns its fundamental conun-
drum and dilemma into a major asset:
Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender
lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the inde-
terminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure
of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative
valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourses
of my childhood, something one should never do precisely
because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its
reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a
phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the
subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with
trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.
Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how
best to make it, what best way to be in it. (vii)
Russ participates in discourses of gender indeterminacy which
enabled theories such as Haraway’s and Butler’s, even as she
espouses the materialist project which rests on a clear and stable
model of gender opposition, superseded by a similarly stable model of
the gender-less society.
In my discussion of The Female Man in Part One, I showed how age
displaced gender as a basis for social structure in the utopian society
of Whileaway. The following chapter will expand on the ways in
which Russ in all phases of her development uses age differences as
a means to represent pleasurable power dynamics in erotic relation-
ships which do not lapse into rigid patterns of domination. These
texts do more than simply reject the link between sex and power.
Merely envisioning a sexuality without absolute dominance of one
over the other (the age-old paradox of all utopias) would just confirm
the power structures it negates. In using age rather than a binary sys-
tem of reference as the force that generates power differences
between women, Russ faces power in sexual interactions rather than
simply negating it. What women find erotic in sexual relations with
women is as much implicated in dominant discourses about sexual-
ity as the most traditional and misogynist images of heterosexual
intercourse. Working with these mechanisms, Russ’s texts partially
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE 173
break up the rigid determinism of essentialist notions of female

sexuality, rescuing the erotics of power for a reconstituted concept of
sexuality.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Patterns of Experience:
Sappho and the Erotics
of the Generation Gap
Sappho and her island Lesbos are omnipresent in literature

about women loving women, whatever the gender or sexual
preference of the writer and whether or not Sappho and her
island are explicitly named. Through her own poetic fragments
she is the unwitting initiator of three apparently distinct mod-
els, which have, in fact, a common origin: the older woman
who seduces beautiful young girls, usually in a school or by
extension in a convent or bordello; the older woman who com-
mits suicide because her love for a younger man is unrequited;
the woman poet as disembodied muse—(Marks, 273)
In Part One of this book, which focused on agency, I discussed the
relationship between rescuer and rescued in ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) in
terms of Elaine Marks’s ‘Sappho model.’ The tensions between Alyx
and Edarra develop from the antagonistic through the maternal to the
sexual, at which point they are diverted through a mysterious appear-
ance of two male sexual partners. From this perspective, I would
argue that Russ’s rescue stories, which affect all of her intimate rela-
tions between women, are closely affiliated with the ‘Sappho
model’—at least in the subtext. In these rescue stories the maternal,
the erotic and the ‘autoerotic’ between two women of different gen-
erations emerge as reassuring yet unstable female spaces. The
‘mother’ easily shifts to becoming the lover (as Alyx becomes Edarra’s
lover—if only in the subtext); the daughter becomes the former self
(as in ‘The Little Dirty Girl’); the mother or the great-grandmother
become daughters (as in ‘Autobiography of My Mother’ and ‘The Sec-
ond Inquisition’ respectively). At the same time, Sappho always also
stands for women’s power to write, which is probably the strongest
red thread which runs through Russ’s fiction as well as her criticism.
Kathleen Spencer has also positioned the ‘rescue of the female
PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE 175
child’ motif in the larger context of feminist writing: ‘Tracing this

motif through Russ’s writing not only reveals the development of the
pattern in one writer’s works, but helps illuminate what can be seen
as the central issue for many feminist writers and theorists, and not
just within SF’ (167). I would argue that putting this rescue motif in
the even larger context of the Sappho myth both reveals the ways in
which concepts of sexuality develop in Russ’s oeuvre and shows how
the myth of the woman-loving female poet may serve as a powerful
paradigm for feminist writing and theory.
The Sappho myth has traditionally served to domesticate women’s
bodies and their relation to language in circumscribing the woman
who loves women in a discourse that reduces her to her sexuality
(Marks, 273, 276). Elaine Marks demonstrates the emergence of a
new, woman-centred mythology through the writing of women who
search for a Sappho before domestication. Russ, however, does not go
on a quest through history for the isle of Sappho as the locale of an
authentic, ‘undomesticated’ female sexuality. With the Sappho plot,
Russ’s texts disclaim original femaleness within a narrative practice
that emphatically asserts the need to link to women/lesbians and to
find a voice for the unspeakable. This unbearable contradiction
allows her Sappho to fully enjoy the sexual/political act of depoliticiz-
ing sex.
The following discussion will analyse the dynamics of sexual rela-
tionships between women, one of whom is significantly older. These
relationships follow patterns similar to those described for the ‘rescue
of the female child’, yet the texts make the erotic tension explicit,
using the representation of the sexual act between the two women
both to show the initiation of the younger to the pleasures of the
female body and to destabilize the concepts of gender and sexuality
as well as their interrelations.
Although Russ wrote only a few actual plays and says about herself,
‘I was NOT a good playwright’ (letter to the author, 21 September
1995), many of her earlier narrative texts contain strong dramatic ele-
ments, as the example of the short story ‘My Dear Emily’ has shown.
Russ’s most distinct reformulations of the Sappho model function
within such contexts of the theatrical. In my discussion of sapphic
intergenerational erotics, I will focus on four texts ranging from the
late 1960s to the early 1980s. This delineation will also supplement
my (provisional) categorizations of Russ’s career as a writer. The first
short story, ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’ (1968), is roughly contempo-
raneous with the Alyx stories and represents an ‘early’ phase, before
the formulation of an explicitly feminist agenda. The Female Man

(1975) asserts the anger and politics of explicit lesbian-feminism,
without however glossing over the contradictions and instabilities of
this stance. Finally, ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982) and
‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ (1983) belong
to most recent developments, in which her texts systematically reach
beyond the politics of woman-identification, foregrounding the
deconstruction of binary conceptions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’. My dis-
cussion of these developments will also demonstrate the continuities
between these phases, highlighting the postulated provisional char-
acter of the categorization. Especially the reading of ‘Scenes from
Domestic Life’ will show that even in her early, supposedly ‘proto-
feminist’ phase, Russ’s texts already destabilize gender and the
female body as bases of identity.
A Queer Kind of Love: Drag of Age
The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cul-

tures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of
the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories.
The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual
frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the
so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as
copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. (Judith But-
ler, Gender Trouble, 31)
‘Scenes from Domestic Life’ came out in 1968 in the small magazine
Consumption and was not—unlike most of Russ’s other short stories—
reprinted in any of her collections. In similar ways to ‘My Dear Emily’
it is formally close to a play, the narrator reduced to a few comments
in between the dominating discourse of the characters. Like this vam-
pire story it is concerned with play-acting and performance in relation
to sexuality.
The scene is Greenwich Village, presumably in the 1920s, a time
when popularized Freudianism had reached the American middle
class, initiating heated talk about ‘aberrant’ sexual practices. Lillian
Faderman says about this time and place in Odd Girls and Twilight
Lovers:
While a lesbian identity was impossible for many women to
assume during the ‘20s, sex with other women was the great
adventure, and literature and biography suggest that many

women did not hesitate to partake of it … The era saw the
emergence of little areas of sophistication or places where a
laissez-faire ‘morality’ was encouraged, such as Harlem and
Greenwich Village, which seemed to provide an arena in which
like-minded cohorts could pretend, at least, that the 1920s was
a decade of true sexual rebellion and freedom. (67)
The two protagonists of the story, Miss Jones and Miss Edward, play
out a drama of romance on such an imaginary arena of sexual free-
dom, simultaneously asserting female sexuality and denaturalizing
the pleasures of the body. The two women meet in the seemingly
innocuous atmosphere of an outdoor café. Within their first few
speech acts, the two women are clearly placed in the typology of the
Sappho model. The text casts the older woman, incidentally a teacher
of literature, as the sexual aggressor who clearly lusts after the femi-
nine and ‘fragile’ Miss Jones:
‘I believe you got that hat at Peck-and-Peck,’ murmured Miss
Jones.
‘I never think about clothes,’ replied Miss Edward, leaning
mesmerically forward—a dry, keen, remarkably lifelike fifty.
‘Don’t you?’ said Miss Jones, looking at her sidewise, ‘I do,
I’m afraid. All the time.’ (22)
The two women play a ritualized game of seduction, mocking and
mimicking heterosexual romance, much like the impersonations of
the vampire Guevara in ‘My Dear Emily’. Miss Edward, after the first
initiating sentences by Miss Jones, plays the part of the older seduc-
tress. In the first five scenes, she is the one who propels the plot
through her insistent verbal advances, cleverly disguised as polite
attempts at pleasant small talk. In these first scenes, Miss Jones only
meekly reacts to Miss Edward’s questions and demands, displaying
artful airs of refusal when she is asked to Miss Edward’s apartment.
‘“I couldn’t think of it. I hardly know you.” … “No, no, no,” said Miss
Jones, shrinking away. “Never. Don’t even talk about it”’ (23). Thus,
the power to move their romance forward is clearly with the older
woman.
Miss Jones’s elaborate refusal points to the underlying content of
Miss Edward’s speech acts. The two converse in code, enacting dou-
ble roles, constantly evading a textually fixed self which could be
identified as ‘core’ beneath the mimicry. Even though possible sexual
activities are never mentioned explicitly, both understand what polite

invitations such as ‘I would ask you to my pied-à-terre on Eighth Street
but …’ signify. The two women’s speech acts are thus charged with
an excess of eroticism which runs counter to their commonplace sur-
face content.
These erotically charged interactions define the younger woman as
sexually inexperienced, and the older woman as the teacher of
unspeakable lesbian pleasures. Miss Edward marks the younger
woman as ‘child’ who is helpless and has to be taught the ways of the
world. Reading Miss Jones’s palm, she predicts that the young
woman will go on a trip soon, accompanied by a friend. ‘“A very dear
friend,” said Miss Edward, sweating a little, “Who will teach you a
very great deal”’ 24, italics in original). Again, the supposedly innocent
‘girl’ understands the message: ‘I don’t think I want to learn any-
thing’ (24). What is significant in their role-play is therefore not their
respective physical age, but the age and experience they project
through their performance.
Miss Jones heats the atmosphere by affecting complete innocence
in sexual matters. When Miss Edward suggests speaking about love,
‘true love’, ostensibly as an abstract concept, Miss Jones exclaims
with exaggerated shock: ‘“Oh, don’t” . . . “It’s so . . . fleshly”’ (25).
Miss Edward wickedly points to the cherry on Miss Jones’s cake.
Again, the sexual implications of the speech act remain undecoded or
half-decoded:
‘You eat it,’ said Miss Jones, frowning slightly.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Miss Edward, laughing a short,
masculine laugh of bitter irony … (26)
Miss Edward here takes the part that Alyx cannot play. The ‘rescue of
the female child’ here is the object of ridicule, in which the rescued
merely impersonates a child and the rescue operation is a theatrical
performance. The older woman—in a way similar to Alyx—acts the
male part in the romance, whose passionate courtship initiates the
virgin in the pleasures of the body.
Thus, this early story clearly retains a reference to a model of sex-
ual interactions which presupposes two complementary genders. The
two women’s role-playing, though resting on their age difference, is
reminiscent of pre-Stonewall butch/femme codes of dress and behav-
iour, in which each woman had to assume one of two roles, ‘mascu-
line’ or ‘feminine’. The butch/femme relationship then functioned
within gender patterns that were modelled on idealized images of
courtship as projected by fiction and Hollywood (Faderman, 170). Lil-

lian Faderman maintains that butches in the 1950s ‘followed that
chivalric behavior, as real men often did not outside of romance mag-
azines and movies’ (170). Thus, Faderman represents the lesbian
copy of the supposed ‘original’ as superior to the heterosexual perfor-
mance.
Miss Edward and Miss Jones both relish the power dynamics and
tensions of their lovemaking, which remain, however, disguised by
the pretence of celibate spinsterhood. The older woman exclaims:
I realized then that I would be the happiest person in the world
if only I could devote my life to serving you. I thought perhaps
you did need me, even with your beauty and your glowing per-
sonality, that you needed a friend, someone to care for you, a
cavalier servante. (27)
Miss Jones is less imaginative in her replies: ‘“No, no,” said Miss
Jones, shrinking away, “No, I couldn’t”’ (27). But Miss Edward,
insistent, continues her courtship unthwarted: ‘I swear a life of ser-
vice like a wandering knight!’ (27)
In spite of Miss Jones’s consistently negative replies, the next
scene shows the two in Miss Edward’s apartment and the younger
woman stripped to her slip. Her verbal refusal becomes more aggres-
sive as if amplified by her nudity: ‘“I hate you!” . . . “I detest you!” …
“What you want is dreadful!” … “I never heard of such a thing in my
life … I’m distracted, I’m frantic”’ (29). At this point, the text intro-
duces the first discontinuity in the flow of the performance. Instead
of using physical force and/or displaying her sexual prowess, as a
male suitor in a romance novel might have (and as Martin Guevara
does), Miss Edward challenges the younger woman to leave, passing
the power over to her: ‘Either you make up your mind to stay and take
the consequences or you take your dress and that idiot hat and get
out. I’ve had enough!’ (30), Miss Jones, wishing to return to the orig-
inal plot of romance with its promise of unspeakable orgasmic plea-
sures, walks into the bedroom ‘with her head hanging and with a
slow step, with the cross, sad, bored, noble expression of a martyr’
(30). The following scenes place Miss Jones’s ‘submission’ clearly in
the realm of pleasurable role-play, in which she chooses to relinquish
the situational power to heighten further erotic pleasures.
In the morning after the act, Miss Jones’s behaviour has changed
completely. Again the plot is disrupted. Instead of having become the
possession of the deflowering agent, she demonstrates her indepen-
dence from Miss Edward. In this scene, Miss Jones has thoroughly
relinquished the role of the child. Coolly putting on her make-up, she
gets ready to leave—with no intention of returning. The plot of
romance to her is completed. Miss Edward, continuing her part unin-
terrupted, enacts the disappointed lover, who wonders why he/she is
being left:
‘You’re overwhelmed with guilt. Aren’t you?’
‘Oh dear, no,’ said Miss Jones …
‘Well, it’s over, isn’t it?’ [Miss Jones] produced a dazzling
smile. ‘It was wonderful,’ she said, ‘Don’t worry. You were mar-
velous. Such a drama, you know, with love and death and pur-
suit and forever and all the rest of it.’ (31–32)
In this scene, the two women perform within puzzlingly shifting and
skewed patterns of mimicry. Miss Jones acts a meta-role in which she
represents Miss Edward’s performance of courtship as an expertly
played imitation, while Miss Edward still plays within the patterns of
courtship that Miss Jones refers to as titillating game.
When the younger woman thus locates the essence of their sexual
relation solely in the play-acting, Miss Edward appeals to the plea-
sures of the female body:
What about the rest? What about love? What about passion?
What about pleasure? You felt that passion and that pleasure,
don’t deny it! Don’t pretend about the deepest experiences of
your soul. Don’t deny your body. (32)
Miss Jones, unmoved and consistent in her new role, responds: ‘I
should think that if you wanted the real thing, you’d get a man’ (32).
Perfectly in accord with the discourses of her time, Miss Jones now
poses as the bisexual experimenter, who has no intentions of identi-
fying as lesbian. The rescue from compulsory heterosexuality here
seems to be abortive. However, the reference to the ‘real thing’ here
ironically positions it as the less desirable pleasure. Although Miss
Jones acknowledges the privileged status of heterosexual intercourse
in dominant discourses of what counts as ‘real’, she clearly prefers the
supposed ‘copy’ as the more pleasurable performance. Because the
sexual act is recognized as play (as well as thoroughly divorced from
reproduction), the power she artfully relinquishes remains solely sit-
uational and does not leave the bedroom.
Miss Edward, who had seemingly opened her heart and poured out
her innermost emotions about the sanctity of the female body, how-
ever, does not plunge herself into suicidal contortions of grief as the
Sappho model would suggest: ‘It took Miss Edward fully two hours
to recover from the experience’ (33). She is ready to pick up her next
date, resuming an almost identical game. The full extent of the intri-
cate and multi-layered performance thus does not become apparent
until this last scene, in which Miss Edward meets the next girl in the
same café, responding to the same cues with precisely the same code:
‘I believe,’ said the girl in a murmur, ‘that you got that lovely
suit at Henri Bendel.”
‘I never think about clothes,’ stated Miss Edward dogmatically.
(33)
This new break with the conventional plot of ‘true love’ not only
mocks all that is sacred to heterosexual romance, it also questions the
valorization of the woman and the female body. Yet Miss Edward’s
missing penis, which would tie the deflowered woman to her/him
and close the plot with marriage and motherhood, does not emerge as
a substantial lack. Quite to the contrary, she is able to continue her
game, continuously mocking the promise of ‘true love’ as the essence
of female sexuality. Her sexual pleasures are entirely her own, operat-
ing as she does in a utopian women-only space, where her ability to
act is not challenged by the presence of a male. When Miss Jones,
evoking the spectre of ‘the real thing’, penetrates this space, Miss
Edward’s sexuality may momentarily seem devalued, but playing on,
she emerges victorious. To her erotic enjoyment, what counts as ‘the
real thing’, is irrelevant. Her performance is not only equal to but
exceeds that of heterosexual males.
Furthermore, the story irreverently reworks myths of female sexu-
ality that are an integral part of the plot of heterosexual romance. The
aged, post-menopausal spinster, who is completely negated as a sex-
ual being in the dominant story of heterosexual erotic interactions, is
the one who commands the most exquisite orgasmic pleasures.
These pleasures are represented as unattainable for the heterosexual
male, whose sexual performance is limited by his static link to the
‘real thing’, his penis. He is thus demoted from possessor of supreme
power to object of supreme ridicule, making him expendable in the
(supposedly unlimited) arena of female sexuality.
This non-science fictional short story allows a freedom with plot
and sexuality that was not available to Russ as a science fiction or fan-
tasy writer at the time. Only one year later, Russ published ‘When It
Changed’, a story which indeed marks a change in her representa-
tions of lesbianism, taking its sexual practices out of the closet. This
year, 1969, was also the year of the ‘Stonewall Rebellion’, the first gay
riots in American history. Stonewall assumed a significance for male
gays and lesbians that reached far beyond its immediate effects on the
media, which began to accept ‘homosexuals’ as a marginalized
minority who legitimately claimed their rights as citizens (Faderman,
196). Without intending to establish any direct relationship between
‘When It Changed’ and Stonewall, I do believe that Russ’s work
proves to be at the forefront of the rapidly changing discourses on
sexuality in the late 1960s and ’70s. Yet even in participating in these
discourses, Russ remains critical of their essentialism, prefiguring
crucial feminist/queer debates of the 1990s. However, ‘Scenes of
Domestic Life’ uses a model of sexuality which relies on two oppos-
ing genders, with the older woman clearly occupying a masculine
position. Later references to the ‘Sappho model’ in Russ’s work aban-
don binary coding altogether. The reference to age makes power even
more fluid and subject to instant change and reversal.
A Female Genghis Khan in the Windowpanes:

Power, Ghosts and Cunnilingus
In my discussion of Whileaway, I argued that its all-female utopian

society displaces gender in favour of age as a basis of social power.
Whileaway privileges sexual relations between individuals of equal
power; intergenerational sexual acts are one of the greatest taboos in
this utopian society. However, the sexual scenes narrated in The
Female Man thrive on unequal yet dynamic power distribution, simi-
lar to the one in ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’. These sexual acts
momentarily abandon the concept of ‘equality’, deriving pleasure
from playing with precisely what is forbidden. Both of these texts
resist the conflation of self and other which proved so central to the
‘rescue of the female child’ stories. Instead, these representations of
sexual intercourse unfold an arousing dynamic of seizing and relin-
quishing provisional power, which allows them to sidestep equilib-
rium and stasis. I use ‘power’ in this context to signify the potential
ability to determine and move events in the story of copulation.
Unlike the stable and ultimately monolithic power associated with
agency as discussed in Part One, this notion of power is not based on
the individual’s material, socio-economic position but on her actions
at a particular moment in the plot. In this section, I will return to The
Female Man, specifically the relationship between two characters,

Janet, the woman from a utopian future, and Laura, the teenager from
Anytown, USA, in 1969. Janet initially has power over Laura, because
she acts as the more experienced, not because she has a higher social
position as the elder. From this perspective, power is created and re-
created with each new action (represented linguistically in the text as
a verb).
In The Female Man, the section directly preceding the passages in
which multiple narrators relate the sexual encounter between Laura
and Janet makes the central theme of this encounter explicit:
Dunyasha Bernadetteson (the most brilliant mind in the
world, b. A.C. 344, d. A.C. 426) heard of this unfortunate young
person and immediately pronounced the following shchasnï, or
cryptic one-word saying:
‘Power!’ (68)
The power dynamic generated by the erotic activities between Laura
and Janet displaces the notions of empowerment through sexual rela-
tions between women as discussed in Part Two. Laura is released
from compulsory heterosexuality as all-encompassing concept of nor-
mality, yet her acts of resistance are not directly equivalent to the ‘res-
cue of the female child’. The ‘rescue of the female child’, rests on a
partial conflation of the rescued with her rescuer as well as on a
simultaneous reciprocal rescue of the older woman. Janet has no
need of being rescued. She can empathize with the pain of the ado-
lescent, but she cannot share the experience of this pain.
Paralleling the shifting power positions of the two lovers, the nar-
rative voice is of uncertain origin, produced as it is by indistinct and
changing agents. The narrators, implicitly and loosely identified as
Jael and Joanna, witness the scene as disembodied presences. As in
‘Life in the Furniture Store’, ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’, and
other fictional texts by Russ, the narrator who speaks as a ghost ren-
ders her own body as well as those of the other characters unstable.
The narrators move in and out of Janet’s body and mind, relating the
physical interactions with the young girl partially as their own expe-
rience. The text disembodies the narrators, but does not make them
completely body-less. However uncertain the presence of their bod-
ies, they are clearly identified as women.
Janet is first to explicitly recognize the erotic tension between her-
self and the young girl, who acts—somewhat like Miss Jones in
‘Scenes from Domestic Life’—younger than she is. One of the narra-
tors remarks: ‘We noticed the floss and dew on the back of her neck—
Laur is in some ways more like a thirteen-year-old than a seventeen-
year-old’ (The Female Man, 62). Her (half-hearted) rejections of Janet
are also reminiscent of Miss Jones: ‘Never—don’t—I can’t—leave
me!’ (71) However, while Miss Jones is fully aware of the part she
plays, Laura is still ‘the victim of ventriloquism’ (62), the act of het-
erosexual, ‘true’ womanhood forced on her by her family.
The narrators, who are present in Janet’s body and mind at the
time, share the Whileawayan’s explicit sexual fantasies, but represent
them in the third person: ‘In the bluntness of her imagination she
unbuttoned Laur’s shirt and slid her pants down to her knees’ (63).
This strategy puts a definite distance between the lesbian sexual acts
and the narrative voices, yet allows the engaged eavesdroppers to
experience these acts directly through the body of the perpetrator.
Janet, initially being in a position of superior power, keeps her own
emotions and sexual desires for the young woman in check. Finally,
however, it is Laura who takes the initiative, claiming the power to
move the action: ‘Then she [Laura] put her hand on Janet’s knee, a
hot, moist hand with its square fingers and stubby nails, a hand of
tremendous youthful presence, and said something else, still inaudi-
ble’ (70). The subtle power struggle between the two continues,
Janet in her actions emphasizing the youth and inexperience of the
other: ‘Janet pulled her up on to her lap—Janet’s lap—as if she had
been a baby’ (70). Laura, counteracting this reduction of self-deter-
mination and control, attempts to manifest herself as an adult and
sexually mature woman:
Janet—I—held her, her odor flooding my skin, cold woman,
grinning at my own desire because we are still trying to be
good. Whileawayans, as has been said, love big asses. ‘I love
you, I love you,’ said Laur, and Janet rocked her and Laur—not
wishing to be taken for a child—bent Miss Evason’s head
fiercely back against the chair and kissed her on the mouth. Oh
my goodness.
Janet’s rid of me. I sprang away and hung by one claw from
the window curtain… (71)
Here, the narrator is temporarily disembodied to change places in the
scene of desire; turned into a feline ghost, she continues to watch—
and to narrate her observations—from outside in third-person narra-
tive. She thus remains part of the scene, adding her voice to the
chorus of narrators.
In addition to the tensions created by the age difference, there are

also cultural differences which govern the erotic desires of the two
women. Laura, for lack of other models, relies on stories of hetero-
sexual romance in moments when she has the power to determine
the ‘plot’ of their lovemaking, assuming, however, the freedom to play
the role of the male. Thus, whereas Miss Edward and Miss Jones
referred to a single set of roles, masculine and feminine, Laura and
Janet move within a field of possibilities. The Whileawayan has no
concept of gender in sexuality and is thus able to create space for
Laura to play out her fantasies.
The passage quoted above also shows the way in which the ghosts
or disembodied narrators merge in Janet’s body, physically leaving
her in crucial moments of the lovemaking. These moments always
also coincide with shifts in power between the two lovers. The narra-
tor who flees Janet’s body here is recognizable by her physique. The
claw loosely identifies her as Jael, the fierce killer of men, whose body
is an assemblage of lethal weapons (such as steel claws and teeth, as
well as artificially re-enforced muscles). When Laura kisses Janet in
a gesture of assumed adulthood, Jael, who hates men but does not
desire women, flees Janet’s body.
The second narrative consciousness, however, remains in Janet’s
body until the Whileawayan proceeds to assume control over the
younger woman’s sexual pleasure through cunnilingus, giving her
‘the first major sexual pleasure she had ever received from another
human being in her entire life’ (74). The narrator says:
So I fled shrieking. There is no excuse for putting my face
between someone else’s columnar thighs—picture me as
washing my cheeks and temples outside to get rid of that cool
smoothness (cool because of the fat, you see, that insulates the
limbs; you can almost feel the long bones, the architectura, the
heavenly technical cunning. They’ll be doing it with the dog
next). I sat on the hall window frame and screamed.
Janet must be imagined throughout as practicing the
extremest self-control. (74)
In her description of the bodily object of oral stimulation, the narra-
tor here betrays her physical enjoyment of the act that she explicitly
resists. Another, more distanced narrative voice, the one who speaks
of Janet’s self-control, intervenes at this point, encouraging such a
reading. The titillating oscillation between embodiment and disem-
bodiment is accompanied by a profound ambiguity about the body
itself as well as who is speaking to whom at a particular moment.

This disjunction between what is said explicitly and the implicit
sexual pleasure shows a continuity between And Chaos Died and The
Female Man. The voyeuristic scene of masturbation in the earlier novel
also works with a narrator and protagonists who experience the sex-
ual arousal of the masturbating woman directly through her mind.
However, there are also significant differences which highlight the
shift in the way in which Russ represents sexuality. While in And Chaos
Died the sexual pleasure of the narrator and the observing protago-
nists remains concealed, the later text deliberately lifts the veil of the
narrator’s explicit rejection of and resistance to these sexual plea-
sures. The Female Man opens the doors to the closet, making this
process an integral part of the narrative and the act of narration.
The love scene between Janet and Laura which is narrated in the
passage from which I quoted above unites all of the characters in The
Female Man who at one point in the book also speak up as narrators.
The only protagonist excluded from the act here is Jeannine, who is
also the only one who never assumes the authority of the narrator.
This controlled exclusion further underpins the significance of how
telling the story interacts with the (female) body in the text and the
erotic activity performed with the body. Such playful self-referential-
ity is of course not unique to feminist science fiction. Yet I would
argue that feminist science fiction makes serious political use of it in
specific ways. Science fiction and fantasy, because of their speculative
potential, can make use of disembodied narrative voices, characters
who speak as ghosts or read other characters’ minds and body plea-
sures. Thus, the act of narration itself becomes science fictional and
radically feminist in Russ’s work.
In the scene of copulation narrated here, Janet and Laura do not
come together as equals. The age difference creates a dynamic of
power and restraint. The very experienced older woman wilfully
keeps her desires for wild abandon in check to teach the younger
woman basic yet unspecified techniques. Whereas Laura continually
acts out scenes that draw on the same narratives as normative het-
erosexual romantic love does, Janet’s concept of sex does not rely on
such fantasies. From Janet, Laura learns to expand her restrictive
imagination: ‘[Laura] had learned from a boy friend how to kiss on
top, but here there was lots of time and lots of other places’ (74). Rep-
resenting sex as pleasurable activity that requires certain acquirable
skills, the text denaturalizes sexuality and divorces it from its norma-
tive connection to romantic love.
The two invisible characters present at the scene of Laura’s first

sexual encounter with another woman are also reminiscent of
Siegfried in the legend of Brynhild, who is present in the bedroom and
invisible through his magic hood. However, the effect is the reverse:
while intercourse deprives Brynhild of her power and initiates her
into the patriarchal order, it places Laura outside this oppressive sys-
tem, conferring to her agency and possession of her own body. Les-
bian sexuality thus reverses the disempowering deflowering of the
virginal woman through the patriarchal myth, empowering her to
commit new revolutionary deeds against the oppression. In ‘The
Book of Joanna’, the final chapter in The Female Man, the fictional
author Joanna enters a sexual relationship with Laura without the
mediation of Janet as an imaginary other. Through this integrative
character, who is recognizable as a white, middle-class woman in an
America of 1969, the text is able to connect the liberating vision of the
science fiction narrative to the world of the implied white middle-
class reader, making it directly relevant to her life.
Janet, in order not to exploit the young girl’s inexperience, gives up
the power that she could exercise in the act, deliberately creating a
space for Laura to explore possible sexual performances. Although
Laura refers to familiar patterns of heterosexual love, the underlying
‘Sappho model’ simultaneously breaks this connection. The roles she
takes up are not determined by her anatomy. In her sexual encounter
with Janet, she learns to claim power as contingent and situational
rather than a fixed and unyielding capacity.
The link between her desire for power and her sexual desires crys-
tallizes in her adolescent daydream, in which she envisions herself as
Genghis Khan (60). If she were, according to this dream, a powerful
woman, she would be excluded from heterosexual romance because
she had ‘never met a man yet who wanted to make it with a female
Genghis Khan. Either they try to dominate you, which is revolting, or
they turn into babies’ (67). For her, not being able to relate sexually to
a male is thus less determined by an unwillingness to give up her
virginal independence, but rather by an incompatibility with her
own sexual power fantasies. Since Janet’s power rests on knowledge
not biology, in the act of teaching this knowledge, power may pass
over and shift freely between the two women. The achievement of
orgasm reshuffles their power differences, but there is no sense of
closure:
So it was easy. Touched with strange inspiration Laur held the
interloper in her arms, awed, impressed, a little domineering.

Months of chastity went up in smoke: an electrical charge, the
wriggling of an internal eel, a knifelike pleasure.
‘No, no, not yet,’ said Janet Evason Belin. ‘Just hold it. Let
me rest.’
‘Now. Again.’ (74–75)
Both ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’ and The Female Man thus repre-
sent lesbian sexual practices as superior to the supposed ‘original’.
Both texts create an implicit comparison between heterosexual inter-
course and sex between women in which the latter emerges as more
pleasurable, varied, open and multiplicitous. This section has focused
on the pleasure of the acts, revealing that their link to the female body
is—though crucial—only provisional. This perspective adds to the
political implications of representing lesbian sexuality in Russ’s fic-
tion the sheer enjoyment of talking about it. While texts such as The
Female Man and On Strike Against God first have to narrate the ground
on which lesbian sex becomes thinkable, the more recent short sto-
ries ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ and ‘What Did You Do
During the Revolution, Grandma?’, which I will discuss in the fol-
lowing section, take sex between women as a given. This starting
point allows them to avoid representing sex between women as ‘bet-
ter’ or more pleasurable than sex between women and men and to
explore finer nuances of intergenerational pleasures. Furthermore,
Russ’s later work also expresses the desire to move beyond the con-
cepts ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’, the latter being, after all, a category
firmly embedded in twentieth-century dominant discourses.
He’s a Not-So-Young Lady:

Invisible Folks and Unnatural Lusts
‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982) was first published as

an independent short story, but later became part of Russ’s collec-
tion/novel Extra(Ordinary) People. The story continues major themes in
Russ’s work, but shifts the focus from the struggle for an independent
self to the instabilities and pleasures of writing, sex and gender. The
previous sections showed how ‘Scenes From Domestic Life’ and The
Female Man already make use of subversive play-acting and gender
performance to destabilize these concepts. ‘The Mystery of the Young
Gentleman’ moves a step further and makes acting the predominant
factor in the relationship between the two protagonists. They have no
other identity than the one they perform, and—more importantly—

they are aware of it.
Specifically, the story reformulates the ‘rescue of the female child’
theme and its relation to the Sappho model, critically echoing scenes
from Russ’s earlier work. The narrator, who travels as ‘Joe Smith of
Colorado’, is on his/her way from Europe to the US. He/she is accom-
panied by the enigmatic young girl Maria-Dolores, ‘a fifteen-year-old
from the slums of Barcelona’ (64). The text has the form of a travel
journal/letter addressed to a fellow member of the ‘telepathic minor-
ity’ who have formed a secluded community up in the mountains of
Colorado—the destination of ‘Joe Smith’ and Maria-Dolores. The
young girl shares the gift of extra-sensory perception, but has not
learned how to use it properly. Both the ‘rescue of the female child’
theme and the ‘Sappho model’ as well as the way in which they inter-
act have been transformed in this story. As in ‘Scenes From Domestic
Life’ and The Female Man, the explicit sexuality between the two pro-
tagonists prevents a conflation of selves.
While their personal interactions become more intensely erotic, the
two protagonists continuously improve the act which they play to the
world: much of the two travelling companions’ time and energy is
spent in the attempt to create the best possible appearance and to
perfect their performance of gender and class roles. Maria-Dolores
travels as Joe Smith’s little twelve-year-old female cousin, but her
body does not necessarily tie her to a specific role: ‘Next time I travel
as your son!’ (70) The narrator, performing the part of the maternal
teacher, shows her how to play the feminine role but without identi-
fying this role as the girl’s essential self. After all, Joe Smith’s access
to motherhood rests only on her/his performance since s/he is not
clearly a woman. This training in subversion corresponds to another
transformation of the maternal role from a model in which the mother
is a combination of victim and perpetrator to one in which she serves
as a collaborator in resistance. With this transformation of the mater-
nal, the short story continues yet another theme from Russ’s earlier
work.
This troublesome ‘mother’, even as she teaches her foster daughter
how to perform upper-class femininity, makes sex and gender uncer-
tain. Although Maria-Dolores is ‘one of them’, a telepath, she has a
great deal to learn about how the telepathic community functions:
She says, being a real pest, ‘I bet there are no women in the
mountains.’
‘That’s right,’ I tell her. (She’s also in real confusion.)

‘But me!’ she says.
‘When you get there, there will still be no women.’
‘But you—is it all men?’
‘There are no men. Maria-Dolores, we’ve been over and over
this.’ (70)
The underlying logic in this dialogue is that since the members of the
isolated community interact through controlled telepathy, they do not
depend on categories such as gender, class or race. Thus, this story
links a materialist utopia with a liberation from certain limiting cate-
gories in the symbolic order. The telepathic community, then, repre-
sents the desire for an ungendered, classless society, which in itself is
unrepresentable in language. This (provisional) loyalty to the necessity
of utopian visions, even if they are impossible, demonstrates that even
in Russ’s latest work the affiliation with deconstructive discourses is as
partial as the one with materialist and essentialist feminism.
Although the gender of the narrator/protagonist Joe Smith remains
ambiguous and unstable throughout, the interactions with the young
girl consistently follow the Sappho model. As in The Female Man, the
older partner possesses the knowledge necessary for satisfying sexual
intercourse and the younger is more than eager to learn. Sexual desire
is thus not represented as desire for an external object but for the
pleasurable process itself. This process follows patterns reminiscent
of the interactions between Alyx and Edarra in ‘Bluestocking,’
between the two protagonists in ‘The Second Inquisition’, or between
Irene and Zubeydeh in The Two of Them. The crucial difference from
these earlier texts, however, is that ‘The Mystery of the Young Gen-
tleman’ makes the sexual tensions between the two characters
explicit. When the narrator says, ‘I get up and go in to where I have a
view of her white-kid calves and her child’s dress’ (65), s/he seems to
steer dangerously close to stories of child abuse and sexual exploita-
tion. But such a reading would deprive the young woman of the very
self-determination that is the utopian goal of the rescue theme and
turn her into a passive victim. What is more, the text itself counter-
acts such a reading. Maria-Dolores is not entirely uninitiated and, like
Laura in The Female Man, wants to prove that she should not be con-
sidered a child: ‘I’ve done it before. With girls, too; girls do it with girls
and boys with boys; everybody knows that’ (71). Like Laura, it is
ultimately Maria-Dolores who initiates explicit erotic interactions
with ‘Joe Smith’.
Moreover, the power that knowledge gives the elder is transferable

and unfixed, and the desirous gaze on the other does not reduce her
to permanent availability. The narrator tells Maria-Dolores that sex
among telepaths requires extreme self-control and distancing
because it opens the channels that normally protect them from the
chaotic mass of thoughts and emotions of other people. S/he explains
that one has to prepare for these sexual encounters:
‘Because,’ I say, ‘this is how it happens when one is young,’
and knowing so much more than she, sit down, knees giving
away, with my face in my hands. The two mirrors so placed
that they reflect each other to infinity, as you see in a barber-
shop, each knowing what the other feels. That remembered
fusion which opens everything, even minds. (72)
The crucial point in these sexual interactions is to resist the fusion of
selves yet to come close enough to recognize oneself in the other. The
narrator fantasizes about sex with the young girl in the solitude of the
Colorado mountains: ‘“Joe Smith” of “Colorado” slides his hands
under the little girl’s shirt—a process I’m sure he could describe very
well—but his face will never be reflected in her eyes’ (90). Again, the
fantasy represents the potential sexual act as a process of teaching
that rests on the self-control of the older and her/his ability to relin-
quish the power that knowledge gives her/him over the young girl:
As I bend slowly down to the nubbiness, the softness, the
mossy slipperiness, the heat, that familiar reflection begins
back and forth between us, a sudden scatter-shot along the
nerves, its focusing on the one place, the echoes in neck and
palms and lips, the soles of her feet, her breasts. Maria-Dolores
is breathless; ‘Don’t stop!’ forgetting that I know. She closes
her eyes, sobs, grabs inside, clutches my head with her hand:
overwhelming! And sees me, all I remember, all I feel, all I
know: overwhelming! And then, out of the things I know—
and can’t help knowing—she sees the one thing as strange and
terrible to her as the dark side of the moon: herself. (90)
As Janet in The Female Man, the narrator here ultimately takes plea-
sure in restraining her/his sexual desires, making space for the young
girl to exercise her power and to explore her own sexuality. This pas-
sage also evokes the image of a core self that Maria-Dolores can per-
ceive in the mirror of the other. Telepathy enables the lovers to
sidestep the mediation of culture and the symbolism of language—a
concept which clearly contradicts the idea that their identity is coex-
tensive with their performance. Thus, while ‘The Mystery of the
Young Gentleman’ makes the identities of the protagonists unstable
and based on the acts they perform, it also grounds them in a self that
is independent of the symbolic context in which it exists. However,
this self is not, as for instance in Mary Daly’s work, an original home
that women need to recover, but rather an unattainable, fearful space.
As unattainable as the hidden side of the moon without a space pro-
gramme. Again, the text keeps a securely grounded stability in ten-
sion with the instability which is its focus.
This instability primarily centres on the narrator/protagonist ‘Joe
Smith’. S/he is never clearly identified as a woman, although the text
towards the end points to the possibility. Referring to one of the many
books that Maria-Dolores reads, the narrator says: ‘It’s called The
Mystery of the Young Gentleman (he’s a not-so-young lady, we find out)’
(92). Even though the text leaves Joe Smith’s sex uncertain, her sex-
uality is comparatively unambiguous. Her sexual fantasy suggests
cunnilingus and clitoral stimulation rather than penetration, her/his
role in the sexual act resembling that of Janet in The Female Man
rather than that of Machine in Picnic on Paradise. Orgasm, rather than
being represented as a loss of self, becomes a moment of supreme
self-knowledge. The narrator’s imagined sexual encounter with the
young girl thus demonstrates that, in spite of the foregrounded gen-
der uncertainties and the destabilization of the category ‘lesbian’ in
‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’, the female body at the same
time remains a privileged site of pleasure and empowerment.
The narrator also engages in—quite different—sexual acts with an
elderly physician on the ship to divert the interest this man had taken
in the strange couple Joe Smith and Maria-Dolores. While sex with
the narrator for the young girl is potentially empowering, it com-
pletely disempowers ‘Dr Bumble’, in part because he is unable to rec-
ognize gender as purely performative. At first he is fascinated with
‘Joe Smith’ of Colorado and the young girl travelling with ‘him’, and
he begins to write up an account about the narrator’s supposed
homosexuality under the title ‘A Hitherto Unconsidered Possibility:
The Moral Invert’ (78). To protect her/his and Maria-Dolores’s travel-
ling act, the narrator now performs for the doctor, always slightly
shifting her/his role to the utter confusion of her/his victim. Acting as
a woman disguised as a man, s/he seduces the old physician and
coolly ‘handles his secret self’ to give him an unceremonious orgasm:
‘For a moment he comes back to himself to see his wife—no, the Col-
orado gambler—no, the actress—in one dim, ambiguous person’

(85). Unable to recognize the various selves of the narrator as perfor-
mances, ‘Dr Bumble’ loses himself in the search for ‘essence’. The
narrator tells him:
But it’s perfect nonsense, my dear fellow, a woman pretending
to be a man who pretends he’s a woman in order to pretend to
be a man? Come, come, it won’t work! A female invert might
want to dress and live as a man, but to confess she’s a woman—
which would defeat her purpose—and then be intimate with
you—which she would find impossibly repulsive—in order to
do what, for heaven’s sake? Where’s the sense to it? No there’s
only one possibility, and that’s the truth: that I have been
deceiving nobody, including you, but that you, my poor dear fel-
low, have been for a very long time deceiving yourself. (88)
Using the doctor’s own rigid and limited gender-categories, the nar-
rator here does nothing more than put labels on her/his various per-
formances—which can only make sense if they are recognized as
such. To the doctor the only possible—and logical—conclusion is the
one implied in this passage, namely that the narrator is, in fact, a male
invert who was able to tap his, the doctor’s, own hidden homosexual
desires. To maintain face, he unwittingly proceeds to return to his
male heterosexual role performance and, negating the discontinu-
ities, burns his account of the ‘invert’.
Thus, ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ retains a trace of the
idea of lesbian sexuality as preferable to normative heterosexuality,
even as lesbianism loses its political function as centrepiece of a lib-
eration story. Joe Smith in spite of her/his unfixed sex and gender
shares fundamental characteristics with the maternal teacher in the
Sappho model. Yet the story also departs from Russ’s earlier work in
significant ways. In this particular adaptation of the model, the pass-
ing on of knowledge moves to the centre and becomes thoroughly
tied in with the erotic interactions between the older and the younger
protagonist. Furthermore, the story emphasizes distance and differ-
ence between the two, rather than establishing sameness. Maria-
Dolores in no way represents a younger version or former self of Joe
Smith. Joe interacts with her as an independent individual. Neither
does she carry the weight of the struggle for a better, less oppressed
future since the utopian vision in the text is spatial rather than tem-
poral: the society of telepaths exists parallel to the rest of the narra-
tive world—in the mountains of Colorado.
The story thus exemplifies a central paradox in Russ’s writing, par-

ticularly of the late 1970s and 1980s, namely the impossibility of and
necessity for a utopian vision. The text both creates and deconstructs
its utopian visions and desires for a society in which neither race,
class, nor sex or gender have symbolic meaning and social function.
The ‘Young Gentleman’ may or may not be female, but since her/his
performance in the sexual act convincingly parallels that of lesbians
in Russ’s oeuvre and elsewhere, this question is ultimately irrelevant.
Furthermore, regardless of whether s/he has a male or a female body,
s/he can convincingly pass as either in the world outside the utopia.
Another story which combines explorations of gender play-acting
with a version the sapphic plot is ‘What Did You Do During the Rev-
olution, Grandma?’ The story was first published in 1983 in The Seat-
tle Review and is also incorporated in Extra(Ordinary) People. Like ‘The
Mystery of the Young Gentleman’, it is an epistolary story in which
the central protagonist and narrator disguises herself as a male. Her
disguise, however, also includes cosmetic surgery, an incomplete sex-
change operation (incomplete because the narrator refuses to let the
surgeons attach a penis). This surgery uses as a model Asmodeus, a
demon character from Jewish legend. In this disguise, the narrator
takes on a masculine name and—among other things—enters an
erotic relationship with a significantly younger protagonist, who is
unmistakably female.
Like Joe Smith in ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’, this male
impersonator is sent on a mission for which she has to travel to
another culture. The 58-year-old protagonist is an agent of the leftist
United Front, an organization reminiscent of the Trans-Temporal
Authority in Picnic on Paradise and The Two of Them. She learns that she
is to go to Ruritania in the role of Issa, a demonic male character from
Ruritanese mythology who resembles Asmodeus, to help instigate a
revolution: ‘We want you to do this little thing for us: go into Storybook Land
and impersonate an ambassador to King Shabriyar …’ (122, italics in orig-
inal). However, an unsettling factor disrupts the narrative logic of the
text, as well as that of the revolution. This factor is what the narrator
calls Ru, a measurement which represents the consistency of causal-
ity: ‘Only at Ru 1.0 is there an ironclad relation of cause and effect’
(120).
For this reason, the precise object of the narrator’s mission in the
story remains obscure and she proceeds to act out her own agenda,
which she narrates in a series of ‘snapshots’. One of these story frag-
ments is particularly significant in this context because it represents
a parodic twist on the Sappho model. Like the other stories of inter-
generational relationships in Russ, it is grounded in a scene of teach-
ing. In her role as Issa, the narrator gives mathematics lessons to the
King’s 13-year-old daughter, who promptly tries to seduce the alien
‘Prince’. To the young seductress’s disappointment, however, Issa
claims, as part of ‘his’ elaborate disguise, that ‘his’ fiancée at home
had cast a spell over ‘his’ genitals so ‘he’ would not be able to use
them for copulation. But ‘he’ is imaginative and ultimately finds a
way to circumvent this handicap:
‘Can you take me?’ she says, and I, ‘Alas, lady’—and she—and
I—and she—and I—and then a very awkward silence.
Then I say, ‘There’s a way—’
Very incautious of Issa, no doubt, but how can you throw a
lady out of bed? . . . I didn’t come here to masturbate a thirteen-
year-old.
On the other hand— (137)
In contrast to the stories discussed above, ‘What Did You Do Dur-
ing the Revolution, Grandma?’ thus reads like an ironic comment on
the liberating potential of the ‘Sappho model’. The self-mocking voice
of the narrator reveals sheer lust for the young girl rather than the
wish to ‘rescue’ her as motivation for the sexual act. Ruritania is on a
parallel universe which functions on an even lower level of consis-
tency than the basic narrative world. Since in this world events are
not necessarily causally related, a story of rescue as well as a utopia
becomes an absurdity. Thus, instead of worrying about her assign-
ment, the narrator pursues her pleasure and impersonates a pirate for
the erotic entertainment of the Princess:
And she sheds the Princess, red all over and face averted, and
having found nakedness even more deliciously shameful than
pirates, lies there while I violate her with my mouth, which
(thank God!) makes talking impossible …
I put my finger inside her; she groans and then, moving her
hips from side to side, ‘Oh no. Oh, don’t. Oh, please don’t.’
So it begins all over again. (137–38)
The presence of digital penetration in this scene is remarkable only
when read in conjunction with the absence of such sexual practices
in representations of lesbian lovemaking in the texts discussed previ-
ously. This sexual fantasy of violation, enjoyable as it may be for the
Princess, echoes the exploitation of the lower Ru worlds by the world
of the narrator. In this variation of the Sappho model, sexuality is

once more the site of a power struggle, but here the older woman
gives in to the pleasure of acting out the girl’s fantasy of submission
instead of ‘rescuing’ her from a patriarchal arch-enemy.
The narrative that frames the narrator’s adventure in Ruritania is in
the form of a letter addressed to a ‘Beloved Woman’. The writer of the
letter is convalescing from serious surgery, presumably an operation
that reconstructed her body to its original form before she was turned
into Issa. In this frame, the narrator counteracts the effect of the story
of her adventure as Issa, which mocks the possibility of utopian
visions, by emphasizing their necessity:
[H]uman pleasures, human pains and human loves are real,
not rhetorical no matter on what Ru position of what more-or-
less Earth they occur; they are the only things that count and
would reconcile me to a great deal more than any small nui-
sance I have to put up with in this newly-emerged, post-revo-
lutionary, stumbling, bumbling, not so very dreadful, indeed
rather nice and quite significant Utopia-to-be— (144)
In this text as in her other work, Russ emerges as a consistent
radical; all three of Kristeva’s feminist moments, which could sim-
plisticly be identified as ‘materialist’, ‘essentialist’ and ‘deconstruc-
tionist’ are present to varying degrees in most of her fictional work.
This presence also prevents her from totalizing the impossibility of
transcending language, as so much poststructuralist feminism is
tempted to do. These consistently partial affiliations allow the texts
to think feminist oppositional thoughts to their radical conclusion
but at the same time to resist universalizing any one of them.
Extra(Ordinary) People thus engages lesbian-feminism but at the same
time puts it in tension with the deconstruction of its utopian
premises. Even more so than Russ’s earlier texts, this novel/collection
acknowledges the power dynamics among women which subvert the
woman-identification suggested by lesbian-feminist politics. The fol-
lowing chapter will further examine the ways in which Russ’s work
simultaneously undermines the categories established by its feminist
utopian visions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Great, Grand Palimpsest
of Me: Fragmented Locations
and Identities
To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person—Russ,

The Female Man (138)
The title of The Female Man echoes Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1970), in which Greer reveals the stereotypical concept of
femininity as one of lack, which constructs the woman as a castrated
man. Placing the concept of a gendered identity within the cultural
context, Greer asks for alternative versions of this identity:
We know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what
we might have been … Nothing much can be made of chromo-
somal difference until it is manifested in development, and
development cannot take place in a vacuum: from the outset
our observation of the female is consciously and unconsciously
biased by assumptions that we cannot help making and can-
not always identify when they have been made. The new
assumption behind the discussion of the body is that every-
thing that we may observe could be otherwise. (16–17, italics in
original)
The speculative possibilities of science fiction make this genre a dis-
cursive space that is excellently suited for narrative experiments with
such alternative identities. Placing another version of a genetically
identical woman in an imaginary cultural context allows Russ to
explore the ways in which culture determines the characters’ sense of
self and identity. In turn, this speculative freedom also allows the text
to experiment with strategies of resistance against this determinism.
Although The Female Man contains the most prominent examples of
characters with alternate identities, Russ’s work is full of such exper-
iments. Jael collects her ‘other selves out there in the great, gray
might-have-been’ (160), proving that all they have in common is the
same genotype: ‘We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike,
but of course we don’t. So plastic is humankind!’ (162) In The Two of
Them, Irene as an adolescent makes up an alternate identity for her-
self and names her Irenee Adler, ‘the woman’ (5, italics in original)
uninhibited by patriarchal concepts of femininity who can defy the
rules of passivity and go out to become an interstellar Trans-Tempo-
ral agent. Zubeydeh has a ‘Bad Self’ (137) which allows her to act out-
side the rigid confines of Ka’aban gender roles. Similarly, Esther,
narrator of On Strike Against God, refers to an alter-ego named Joanna:
‘One of us who is writing this (we’re a committee)’ (23). Esther uses
the metaphor of the palimpsest (17) to refer to the multiple overlap-
ping texts that make up her self, emphasizing the possibility of
change through new stories one writes up for oneself. Such overlap-
ping stories also allow Joanna, the fictional author in The Female Man,
to enter into a dialogue with herself which provides her with a story
of liberation.
Joanna’s Story? Jael’s Story? Empowering Dual Visions in

The Female Man
Within the multi-layered narrative of The Female Man, two interlaced

strands emerge: one in which Jael searches in different parallel uni-
verses for other versions of herself as allies in the war against Man-
land and another in which Joanna negotiates between her own
different selves within herself trying to break through the limiting
patriarchal narratives that inhibit her mind. But all four protagonists,
Jeannine, Jael, Janet and Joanna, are part of both stories. For exam-
ple, Jael may be read as a character in a science fiction story who kills
a Manlander in self-defence, but at the same time she is also a prod-
uct of Joanna’s imagination, an alternative personality within
Joanna. Joanna is an intermediary between these two narrative lev-
els and has a special status as narrator: ‘[addressing the reader:]
don’t think I know any of this by hearsay; I’m the spirit of the author
and know all things’ (166). As ‘spirit of the author’, Joanna is able to
switch between different narrators, using the ‘voice’ of Jael, Janet or
herself to relate the narrative. This oscillation between different nar-
rative voices breaks down discursive hierarchies in the novel, since
different points of view are related directly from the first person per-
spective. The unstable narrative voice creates a double ambiguity in
the text: on the one hand, the reader has to keep track of the two
THE GREAT, GRAND PALIMPSEST OF ME 199
intersecting stories which run through the text, while on the other,
she can rarely be sure who is speaking at a particular moment.
Janet, as a narrator, is an exception: her narrative is clearly distin-
guishable from Jael’s and Joanna’s, and she gives an immediate, first-
hand account of the utopian society on Whileaway. Tom Moylan
observes that this head-on confrontation with the utopian world
transforms the traditional narrative frame in which a guide shows a
non-utopian visitor around (63). The Female Man thus blends three
different genres: Jael’s science fiction, Janet’s utopia and Joanna’s
realistic narrative.
From Joanna’s point of view, Janet is one of her possible other
selves, one which is completely free from inhibiting patriarchal struc-
tures in her mind. Joanna refers to these inhibiting structures as ‘the
knowledge you suffer when you’re an outsider—I mean suffer; I do
not mean undergo or employ or tolerate or use or enjoy or catalogue or file
away or entertain or possess or have’ (137, italics in original). Janet, in
Joanna’s mind, ‘appears Heaven-high … with a mountain under each
arm and the ocean in her pocket’ (213), and transforms Joanna’s life
when she ‘visits’ her: ‘Before Janet arrived on this planet’, Joanna
was ‘moody, ill-at-ease, unhappy, and hard to be with’ (29) and did
nothing but ‘live for The Man’ (29):
Then a new interest entered my life. After I called up Janet, out
of nothing, or she called up me (don’t read between the lines;
there’s nothing there) I began to gain weight, my appetite
improved, friends commented on my renewed zest for life, and
a nagging scoliosis of the ankle that had tortured me for years
simply vanished overnight. (29)
Reading ‘between the lines’ in spite of or rather because of the narra-
tor’s admonitions against it, one detects an intersection between the
two narrative levels in this passage. From Jael’s perspective it is Janet
who visits Joanna as a time traveller between universes. From
Joanna’s point of view, however, Janet is a daydream, a possibility to
interact with a desired aspect of Joanna’s own self.
Thus, a mental state which might be treated as multiple personal-
ity disorder by clinical psychology becomes a space for liberating acts
of power: the dialectic of gender which I delineated in Part One simul-
taneously takes place in Joanna’s mind: ‘I’ll tell you how I turned into
a man. First I had to turn into a woman’ (133). She accepts the nega-
tion of self through patriarchal discourse, associating with the cate-
gory ‘woman’:
You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine,

thus revealing my true nature …
Very swampy in my mind. Very rotten and badly off. I am a
woman. I am a woman with a woman’s brain. I am a woman
with a woman’s sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off,
bald as an adder, God help me and you. (137)
Subsequently, she negates the negation within herself: ‘Then I turned
into a man’ (137). Splitting the image of herself in four distinct per-
sonalities, all of whose names start with ‘J’, allows Joanna to stage
this dialectic in her mind in the framework of a science fiction story
and thereby to propel herself into a state of mind in which she can
confront and reformulate inhibiting patriarchal narratives.
Janet’s visit on Joanna’s earth surfaces some of the ambiguities
inherent in the text: ‘Oh, I made that woman up; you can believe it!’
(30) Joanna’s exclamation can be read in two ways: on the one hand
she refers to her efforts to refine Janet’s manners and appearance: on
the other she also implies the possibility that Janet is merely a prod-
uct of her, Joanna’s, imagination. Joanna tries to teach Janet the cus-
toms and especially the taboos of her planet, as well as the intricacies
of the English language, one of the main objectives being to find a
male mate for the Whileawayan. But Janet is not in the least inter-
ested in men and tells Joanna: ‘about this men thing, you must
remember that to me they are a particularly foreign species; one can
make love with a dog, yes? But not with something so unfortunately
close to oneself’ (33). Janet is, however, apparently quite interested in
Joanna herself, who at that point is still under the effect of compul-
sory heterosexuality and rejects her with exaggerated violence: ‘She
bent down to kiss me, looking kind, looking perplexed, and I kicked
her. That’s when she put her fist through the wall’ (33). This passage
illustrates the unsettling ambiguity that runs through the text: in the
science fiction framework, Joanna and Janet are two separate char-
acters who could conceivably sleep with each other. Taken as a day-
dream, however, the text presents Janet as merely one of Joanna’s
personalities, without a physical body of her own. Both readings exist
as possibilities throughout the novel, but none of them in a privileged
position. This simultaneity exemplifies the way in which Western
feminist oppositional politics must deploy multiple strategies to
resist both the socio-economic system which privileges white middle-
class males and the symbolic order which accompanies it.
Other novels by Russ employ similar strategies to connect the sci-
ence fiction narrative to the life of the fictional author and/or implied
reader. Although The Two of Them is far less complex structurally, it
also splits the narrative into a science fictional and a realistic strand.
Irene is thus both a protagonist in the science fiction adventure and a
woman from a basic narrative world which corresponds to the world
of the implied reader. After having killed Ernst, Irene returns to the
world of her childhood and becomes a ‘thirty-year-old divorcée with
a child to support’, a woman who has left her husband and faces the
vicissitudes of a world hostile to women, rather than being a well-
trained member of an effective espionage organization. The Two of
Them and especially The Female Man make these experiments with
multiple identities within the cultural context explicit through the
science fiction narrative.
Dissolving discursive hierarchies and the singular narrative voice,
The Female Man creates an unstable narrator who is at the same time
one character—Joanna as spirit of the author—and three different
characters who are able to move in and out of each other and between
their worlds. These ambiguities allow Joanna to tap the anguish that
leads Jael to man-slaughter, and, charged with this power, to over-
come the cultural training that had made one aspect of her as selfless
as Jeannine. The following section will focus on the way in which
Joanna negotiates between her multiple selves, without ever attempt-
ing to integrate them into a unified whole, which would, after all,
inevitably get stuck in essentializing and reified definitions of the self
as compact external object—which one could comfortably perceive in
a mirror. The continued references to quite different oppositional dis-
courses in Russ’s work thus activates permanently shifting, multiple
and—above all—contradictory identities.
Welcome Selves, Goodbye!
Somewhere there is a book that says you ought to cry buckets

of tears over yourself and love yourself with a passion and
wrap your arms around yourself; only then will you be happy
and free. That’s a good book. (On Strike Against God, 32)
Jeannine, Janet and Joanna in The Female Man do not only share the
same genotype with Jael, they are also connected via their names, a
fact that the text emphasizes repeatedly: ‘Janet, Jeannine, Joanna.
Something very J-ish is going on here’ (148); ‘Jeannine, Janet,
Joanna. Something’s going to happen’ (149); ‘Joanna, Jeannine,

Janet. What a feast of J’s. Somebody is collecting J’s’ (155). Jael, who
otherwise hates everyone else, expresses the deepest affection for her
three alter-egos: ‘How she loves us! … She turns the warmth of her
smile on Jeannine the way none of us has ever been smiled at before,
a dwelling, loving look that would make Jeannine go through fire and
water to get it again …’ (158). Jael plans to enlist the other versions
of herself to act with her for a single, stable cause: the war that will
annihilate the Manlanders. In so doing, she desires to shape a unified
identity to integrate all four of them: ‘Look around you and welcome
yourselves; look at me and make me welcome; welcome myself, wel-
come me, welcome I’ (158-59). As I showed in Part One, Jael makes
Whileaway possible, but in attempting to forge a monolithic self, she
gets stuck with the phallus. However, of all the other ‘Js’, only Jean-
nine is willing to ‘do business’ (210) with Jael. Janet flatly refuses,
without explanation. War, as a patriarchal concept, would be a set-
back for the open, decentralized society of Whileaway, while to Jean-
nine it is the only chance to escape her fate as some (any) male’s wife.
Joanna, being at the same time one of them and all of them, remains
indeterminate. She leaves her answer open, and neither fully
embraces Jael’s war nor rejects it.
The final chapter in The Female Man brings the four women together
for the last time in a neutral place—a restaurant mostly frequented by
women—for Thanksgiving dinner. After the meal, the narrator
releases her other selves:
We got up and paid our quintuple bill; then we went out into
the street. I said goodbye and went off with Laur, I, Janet; I
also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show
Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
… Remember: we will all be changed. In a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear it on my own
head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be ourselves. Until
then I am silent; I can no more. I am God’s typewriter and the
ribbon is typed out. (213)
The disintegration of the subject is a powerful concept in feminist
redefinitions of subjectivity. Russ’s novels and short stories present
the (post)modern trope of the fractured identity not as a source of
confusion and disorientation for the narrator, but as an empowering
state that allows her to engender stories of liberation within the self.
The concluding section of The Female Man, ‘The Book of Joanna’, in

which Joanna brings together her various selves and bids them good
bye, shows her as a transformed character. Not only does she ‘come
out’ as a lesbian, she also takes her place as the dominant narrator
and fictional author. Thus, the text intertwines the character’s com-
ing to terms with the reality of fragmentation, acknowledging her
own deviance from the sexual norm, and the act of narration or
authoring. As in other texts by Russ, authoring allows the woman
engaged in it to manipulate and subvert the discourses of patriarchy
and to create her own narratives against the stifling narratives that
define her as a member of her sex. Two other novels, The Two of Them
and We Who Are About To …, further explore the way in which women
cope with the patriarchal narratives of femininity which mute their
voices and inhibit their access to the process of signification.
So It All Cancels Out: We Who Are About To…
‘My religion,’ said I … ‘says a lot about power. Bad things! It

says thou owest God a death. It says that the first thing a sane
civilization does with cryogenic corpses is to pull the plug on
those damned popsicles, and if you want to live forever you are
dreadfully dangerous because you’re not living now. It says
that you must die, because otherwise how can you be saved?
It says that without meaningful work you might as well be
dead’. (We Who Are About To…, 31)
This passage, put forth by the narrator of We Who are About To…
(1977),1 brings to the point one of the key premises of Russ’s work:
productive activity as prerequisite for an existence that is meaningful
within the cultural context. Writing constitutes one such productive
activity. Russ writes within the tradition in feminism which claims
that, since dominant discourse has constructed the author as male, a
female writer is faced with a paradoxical situation: the language avail-
able to her defines her as artistic object, not as creator of art, which
means that either she cannot write or she must become not-a-woman,
placing herself outside the social fabric. The statement quoted above,
however, links a meaningful existence to the system of production.
Paradoxically, the commitment to language and writing places a sig-
nificance on the text that partially contradicts such a materialist
analysis of society, upon which this statement is predicated.
This contradiction, which is paralleled in the concept of history that

prevails in Russ’s work, is at the centre of We Who Are About To …. The
novel’s primary themes are the paradoxical interactions between nar-
rating, political activism and history. Such a relationship between
women’s writing and their access to the writing of history also moti-
vates much of Russ’s critical work. In How to Suppress Women’s Writing,
for instance, Russ shows how women and women’s writing have
been silenced and excluded from history, tracing these forms of sup-
pression from early women writers such as Aphra Behn up to the pre-
sent. Russ argues that even though there are no longer any formal
prohibitions against writing for women, women are just as effectively
silenced in the late twentieth century as they have been in history.
Misogynist discourse thus still responds to a woman who writes with
what Russ calls ‘denial of agency’ or with the diagnosis that the
woman has mental problems: ‘… she couldn’t have written it … she stole
it, she’s really a man, only a woman who is more-than-a-woman could have
done it or she did write it but look how immodest it makes her, how ridiculous,
how unlovable, how abnormal!’ (36, italics in original). Russ quotes
Anaïs Nin, who was told by her psychoanalyst: ‘When the neurotic
woman gets cured, she becomes a woman. When the neurotic man
becomes cured, he becomes an artist … [T]o create it is necessary to
destroy. Woman cannot destroy’ (14).
Although these claims may not apply to the diverse positions occu-
pied by women writers in the late 1990s, particularly not to white
middle-class women in the West, they do intersect with Russ’s work
in significant ways. In her fictional writing more so than in her criti-
cism, Russ is able to play out the contradictions between the exis-
tence of oppression and its fragmentary and elusive character. Power
does not have a single location. To maintain political radicalism in the
face of this realization is one of the great accomplishments of Russ’s
fiction. I have, so far, stressed the liberation narratives in her writing,
which contain utopian hope for successful resistance and transfor-
mation. However, the story of authoring in such novels as The Two of
Them and We Who Are About To … simultaneously also strikes a less
optimistic note: Zubeydeh escapes the fate of being locked up as a
madwoman, but she carries an image of herself as other to her exile.
The narrator in We Who Are About To … does create a text, but, since
there is no hope that anyone will ever read it, she still remains com-
pletely isolated and outside history—sharing the fate of Charlotte
Brontë’s ‘madwoman in the attic’ from Jane Eyre and of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s narrator in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’.
Depicting the group’s dying instead of their survival, We Who Are

About To … satirizes and reverses the science fictional cliché in which
a group of hardy pioneers colonize a planet, re-enacting the myth of
Adam and Eve on a virgin world (Lefanu, 180). The text of the novel
is presented as a transcript from a ‘pocket vocoder’ recording pro-
duced around the year 2055 by a 42-year-old musicologist who does
not reveal her name until page 105 when she refers to herself in pass-
ing as Elaine. She is shipwrecked on a desolate, uninhabited planet
together with three other women, a 12-year-old girl and three men.
The narrative is the diary of the group’s dying.
In this respect the novel is a reversal of Picnic on Paradise, in which
the protagonist is left on a barren planet to help a group of people sur-
vive. The narrator in We Who Are About To …, who is as alien to the
group as Alyx was to the tourists, ‘helps’ her companions die. The
miniature microcosm in the vastness of space had started out in the
best Crusoean fashion: as soon as their little rescue shuttle landed, all
of them, with the exception of the narrator, busied themselves with
setting up a plan of survival and colonization, including a programme
for reproduction. To Elaine this plan is downright absurd: when one
of the men tries to convince her that she has to think of herself as a
‘child-bearer’ since ‘Civilization must be preserved’, she responds
laconically: ‘Civilization is doing fine … [w]e just don’t happen to be
where it is’ (31). She continues:
I said, ‘… we are dead. We died the minute we crashed. Plague,
toxic food, deficiency diseases, broken bones, infection, gan-
grene, cold, heat, and just plain starvation. I’m just a Trembler.
My God, you’re the ones who want to suffer: conquer and con-
trol, conquer and control, when you haven’t even got stone
spears. You’re dead.’ (46–47, italics in original)
In spite of this caustic criticism, the three men, with the collaboration
of the three other women, proceed to reinstitute a primitive form of
patriarchy which reduces the women to walking wombs. Thus, while
the rest of the group try to enforce a crude Darwinian narrative of sur-
vival, the sole dissenter confronts them with a troublesome counter-
narrative in the language of twentieth century medical science. This
counter-narrative reveals that the science fictional plot template of
unlimited space exploration and colonization is predicated upon the
erroneous notion that humans are made to master the universe.
The novel accentuates its critical reference to such science-fictional
stories of colonization through the violent confrontation between the
two opposing positions. The narrator leaves the group to die by her-
self in a cave up in the barren mountains, but the new self-defined
colony cannot allow this kind of dissent because it undermines the
story on which they intend to live. Four members of the group track
her down to either force her to agree or—if necessary—kill her. With-
out hesitation, Elaine in turn kills them all, except for the ones who
are already dead (one of the men had a heart attack and one of the
women has committed suicide). Slowly starving in her cave, she
thinks about her past: ‘And now I have to live with this awful, awful
woman, this dreadful, wretched, miserable woman, until she dies’
(155). Literally even more isolated than the narrator in ‘The Yellow
Wall-Paper’, the dying narrator moves further and further inside her-
self, since this, for her, is the only place to go.
In this isolation, the act of narration becomes synonymous with
life. Because all the others are dead, Elaine is the only one left to make
up the history of the failed colony—and the story of her life. She is
dying and what will remain of her is only her text: ‘Everything’s being
sublimed into voice, sacrificed for voice; my voice will live on years
and years after I die’ (128). She owns the only voice left on the planet
and has therefore in a sense reached the centre of power. However,
while the narrator is at the centre of her own narrative, she is com-
pletely outside the rest of human history: ‘Far, far away from the cut-
ting edge of change. God knows I’m private now. And on the
periphery now. As far from anything as one can get. Outside the out-
side of the outside’ (119).
In this situation of complete and irreversible marginalization, the
absent reader paradoxically receives central importance. Starving
alone on a desolate planet in outer space, Elaine knows that the
chances of anyone finding her recording are virtually nil. Unlike the
narrators in Russ’s work who are also the fictional authors of the text,
such as Joanna in The Female Man or the narrator in ‘Life in a Furni-
ture Store’, Elaine has no access to a story which would give her con-
trol over the act of publication. She is recording a diary whose
chances of ever finding a human audience are minuscule, yet as she
reconstructs the story of her life, she desperately reaches out for a
reader: ‘What do you know? Do you know anything? … Who are you?’
(76, italics in original). ‘If neither alien nor human, you’re God. Who
already knows. So I’m left talking to myself. Which is nothing and
nobody’ (115). She recalls a nest of fledgelings she once observed
which squeaked desperately for their parents: ‘Feed me! feed me!’ (157,
italics in original). Her narrative shrieks with comparable urgency:
‘Read me, read me, read me!’ (160).

Parallel to this exploration of the narrator’s psychic life, the diary
also critically examines her past as a political activist and the way in
which she had evaded the double bind of oppositional thinking. In
her mind, Elaine conjures up images of people she knew and relates
her present isolation to a time when she was a politically active com-
munist. The utopian goal of her activism had been to be ‘inside His-
tory’ (124). But the enormousness of the task had precluded any
tangible change as a result of her activism. The revolution did not
happen. Her political group was hunted by the ‘Civic Improvement
Association’ (CIA?), put into prison, and the media ignored them.
Looking back, she muses:
My God, how naive we were …
Although the Civic Improvement Association was worse (or
better?); anyway, they still thought they were at the center. You
have to think that or die. Either you limit what you think about
and who you think about (the commonest method) or you
start raising a ruckus about being outside and wanting to get
inside (then they try to kill you) or you say piously that God
puts everybody on the inside (then they love you) or you
become crazed in some way. Not insane but flawed deep down
somehow, like a badly-fired pot that breaks when you take it
out of the kiln and the cold air hits it. Desperate.
So I said Hey, if you’re going to send mobs against me, I’ll
change what I say; I’ll say God puts everybody on the inside—
and anyway it’s true and one must believe it—and I zipped like
lightning back to the edge of the board. (118, italics in original)
Getting out of politics because she did not want to die for her convic-
tions paradoxically meant virtual death: ‘without meaningful work
you might as well be dead’ (31). Like the narrator in ‘Life in a Furni-
ture Store’, she is out of a job and isolated from the rest of humanity.
In the story Elaine tells of her past when she was supposedly still ‘on
the edge of the board’, she had only three options, none of which
allowed her to lead a meaningful life within human history. She could
either fight for her politics and be killed—outside history; she could
turn inside herself and be considered insane—outside history; or she
could compromise and play by the rules—outside history.
These resigned assessments are quite in tune with the fading revo-
lutionary enthusiasm throughout the political left during the latter
half of the 1970s. Marilyn Hacker says about We Who Are About To …
in 1977, shortly after the novel came out:

Baldly—it is a bald book—it is about failure and death. It
reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s statement that after the critical
rejection of her first woman-oriented book, Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law, her next book, Necessities of Life, was, had to
be, about death—not as a response to critical neglect; as a
statement of what is, in our time the ultimate alternative to
political commitment. (76)
Still, I would contend that We Who Are About To … is more about the
impossibilities of life than about death, even if—undeniably—the
narrated events do culminate in the death of all protagonists, includ-
ing the narrator. It is precisely the analogy to events in Elaine’s life
which give the narrative of her dying a focus and meaning.
Furthermore, the novel does not culminate in a gesture of closure
which would fix the narrator’s death and link it to the death of polit-
ical activism. The text contains multiple stories which destabilize
such a reading. Elaine does indeed transform the history of the new
colony by preventing it from even starting. Hallucinating, she admits
that she did not, as she had claimed before, kill the others out of self-
defence or to spare them a slow, painful death:
I rather enjoyed killing them off and I don’t care …
No, I had to. I really had to.
But all the same I did. What ‘pocket genocide’? I guess so.
Up to the elbows in blood. Poetry. (155)
Killing the colony and writing its dying history, she has put herself at
the centre. But there is no agency in this centre. The only effect of
androcide in this story is that the narrator can die in peace and in the
process soliloquize the story of herself and the would-be colony. The
history that remains is the text.
Yet this history defies linear logic in ways similar to those in ‘What
Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ The narrator becomes
increasingly fractured and her tale incoherent. As her story pro-
gresses, Elaine gives up trying to control what she says, and the text’s
narrative logic dissolves. Elaine’s criticism of the narrative of con-
quest and colonization demonstrates that history does not progress
along a straight line as both idealist and materialist theory presup-
pose. History is also not cyclical, not even women’s history, as radical
feminism claimed. History may be both linear and cyclical or neither;
the text does not search for conclusive answers. But one painful frag-
ment of certainty emerges from her tale: history may just end arbi-
trarily, without the consolation of meaning.
Exploring the paradoxes of writing history, We Who Are About To …
thus connects with the moment in feminism which Kristeva identi-
fies with a rejection of linear and cyclical temporality. Since history is
a fictional text, and death is inevitable, what remains of the individ-
ual when she dies is a palimpsest of texts. Even her materialist polit-
ical activism, for which the link between economic development and
history was a necessary one, is ultimately just that, a story. For Elaine
the stories of the world are told by music, which conveys meaning
without directional logic: ‘All the music in the world says all the
things in the world—I mean the universe, of course—and that’s
everything there is. So it all cancels out’ (164).
CHAPTER NINE
Vampires, Cyborgs and Disguises:
Politics of the Theatrical
… laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for

feminism—Butler (Gender Trouble, viii)
Situated within the historical context of postmodern culture in
transnational corporate capitalism, feminism(s) have had to reassess
all-encompassing theories about ‘women’ and their ‘oppression’ in
‘patriarchy’. The totalizing claims of the ‘information society’ over all
aspects of lived social relations make it nearly impossible to find dis-
cursive spaces from which to argue oppositional politics. Russ’s fic-
tion seeks precisely such discursive spaces. As my readings have
demonstrated, her work shows an uneasiness with stable identities
and sweeping, monolithic political claims from her beginnings as a
writer in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Russ shares this searching
uneasiness with a number of feminist critics, who have articulated
feminist political positions which do not solely rely on the integrity
and homogeneity of the category woman.
One of these critics is Donna Haraway, whose cyborg myth, carefully
constructed in her classic essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985),
illustrates this particular deconstructive stance and as a point of inter-
section highlights the political significance of non-human or partially
dehumanized characters in Russ’s fiction. Analysing the complex
workings of power and exploitation in what she calls the ‘Informatics
of Domination’, Haraway builds ‘an ironic political myth faithful,’ as
she says, ‘to feminism, socialism and materialism’ (190). Her eiron, her
dissembler in this constructed mythical story, is the cyborg, a hybrid
creature who takes pleasure in the confusion of boundaries between
machine and organism, between human and animal, and indeed
between social reality and fiction. Merging human organisms with
sophisticated machinery is an invention of science fiction, but also
part of social and bodily reality at the end of the twentieth century. Sil-
icon breasts, artificial hearts, prostheses of all kinds, titanium teeth
implants, contact lenses and other artefacts have become part of
VAMPIRES, CYBORGS AND DISGUISES 211
human bodies to the point of being indistinguishable from the ‘origi-

nal’. The cyborg did not choose to become such, but s/he consciously
uses this position as political ‘myth’ which makes possible the weav-
ing of oppositional networks of partial affiliations.
In articulating this destabilizing political concept, Haraway criti-
cizes earlier socialist and radical feminist perspectives—Kristeva’s
first and second moment—for claiming the status of complete expla-
nation. Both feminist positions in the heat of their revolutionary fer-
vour totalized their own (white, Western) concept of ‘woman’ as an
essentially homogenous group of innocent victims. Throughout this
book, I have indicated the ways in which Russ uses the image of vam-
pires and ghosts in similar ways to destabilize the body and gender
identities. The following sections will further examine how Russ
employs the generic conventions of science fiction and fantasy to
explode the concept of the ‘natural’, ‘original’ human body. If tech-
nology makes it possible to shape and manipulate the body according
to cultural definitions or ideological needs, the distinction between
bodily reality and discourse about it begins to become leaky.
In Russ’s fiction, dehumanized creatures such as vampires and
ghosts—like the cyborgs of more recent science fiction—function as
impersonators of ironic images of sexed and gendered humanness.
Cyborgs and vampires potentially undermine a humanistic concept of
‘nature’ and destroy its claim to original wholeness and innocence.
The vampire Martin Guevara, for example, as a character puts into
question the male’s biological link to the phallus and power. Ghostly
narrators such as Jael destabilize their ‘original’ female body. Jael’s
body is artfully crafted as a killing machine for the physical destruc-
tion of male bodies; her ‘female’ body, which was the site of her pow-
erlessness, becomes the site of power. Instead of searching for an
all-encompassing concept of humanness which would be universally
shared by all people, male or female, white or black, poor or rich,
Russ’s fiction plays with impersonations and performances of these
roles. This play is as serious as it is irreverent, yet it also never
exhausts the scope of the text.
A Female Man? Everywoman in Search of a Brand Name
I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I had just changed

into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my
body and soul were exactly the same (The Female Man, 5)
Joanna in The Female Man and Esther in On Strike Against God shape a
story of empowerment for themselves by embracing the category
‘woman’ as their own, as I demonstrated in Part Two. However, these
two characters simultaneously also reject this category as imposed on
them by a symbolic system alien to the narrative needs of their exis-
tence. In The Female Man, Joanna as narrator breaks free from the
identity defined for her by patriarchy. She explores possible alterna-
tive selves within the discursive framework available to her and
becomes what she calls the ‘female man’. Disintegrating the unified
narrator, Russ’s texts thus also dissolve the idea of a stable, unitary
self. In The Two of Them and The Female Man, as well as in On Strike
Against God, Russ splits the protagonist into two or more different per-
sonas/personalities, thereby subverting the notion of the stable iden-
tity created by revolutionary acts of power such as androcide or the
rejection of men as sexual partners. Russ’s writing throughout thrives
on such contradictions.
Materialist feminism has defined gender as a social category dis-
tinct from biological sex. This notion of woman as a suppressed
class—in analogy to the proletariat—is crucial in claiming agency in
patriarchal societies and in revealing the constructedness of gender-
role behaviour. However, this analogy also has its limitations because
in these theories gender, unlike economic class, is directly linked to
biology. If you are female in sex, supposedly you are inevitably also
feminine in gender. Within this terminological framework, conceptu-
alizing a genderless society—in analogy to the classless society—is
impossible. The quasi-genderless utopia Whileaway testifies to this
impasse: biological males on Whileaway would be unthinkable. How-
ever, even though the text does not project an androgynous utopian
vision, it does produce images of women who contest the biologized
linkage between gender and sex.
Such attempts to find a way out of biological determinism are not
new. As early as the nineteenth century, the American feminist Mar-
garet Fuller struggled to transform patriarchal language to truly
include woman in a genderless generic term:
By Man I mean both man and woman: these are the two halves
of one thought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either.
I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected
without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth
should be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the con-
ditions of life and freedom recognized as the same for the
daughters and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine

thought. (Fuller, 13)
Margaret Fuller—in the best idealist tradition—could still believe in
the power of reason and simply demand ‘woman’ to be included in
what she thought was the generic term, ‘man’. To a late-twentieth-
century materialist feminist this is not a viable solution, even if she
did believe that the heterosexual bond between a man and a woman,
‘two halves of one thought’, was the prototype designed by ‘Nature’
herself for ‘eternity’. However, for all the theoretical and ideological
differences, one central concern of feminist texts like Russ’s is the
same as Fuller’s: to create stories in which women act as equal agents
in society and in the process of signification. The materialist, of
course, does not rely on reason for change, but on revolution: ‘For
years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Reg-
ulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over’ (The Female Man,
140, italics in original). Russ’s narrator here could not care less about
the well-being of the other sex. Nor is this narrator willing to remain
fixed in her own ‘half’ of the supposedly binary human spectrum. The
alternatives she and other gender ‘misfits’ in Russ’s work explore will
be the focus of the remaining sections in this study.
Joanna: Not-a-Woman—Everywoman?
If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous

and rightnow [sic] very bright and beady little eyes, that I too
am a Man and not at all a Woman … you will think of me as a
Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your muddled, terri-
fied, preposterous, nine-tenth-fake, loveless, papier-mâché-
bull-moose head that I am a man. (And you are a woman.)
That’s the whole secret. Stop hugging Moses’ tablets to your
chest, nitwit; you’ll cave in. Give me your Linus blanket, child.
Listen to the female man.
If you don’t, by God and all the Saints, I’ll break your neck (The
Female Man, 140, italics in original)
This passage from The Female Man is a twentieth-century radical fem-
inist answer to the concerns politely raised by Margaret Fuller 150
years previously. The concept of the ‘female man’ expressed here
stands in gross contradiction to women acting on behalf of their sex-
class and bonding with other women which I have outlined in Parts
One and Two. Showing no particular alliance to women as a group,
the narrator here expresses the desire to deprive biology of those cul-
tural meanings which specifically affect her as a subject. The ‘you’ in
this passage is not a gendered opponent, but rather anyone, male or
female, who denies the narrator access to the process of signification.
This example shows how Russ’s later novels consciously use contra-
dictory strategies from within patriarchal discourse to undermine the
precepts of the oppressive system. The subject her texts try to liber-
ate is gendered because she is oppressed, but, as this passage shows,
the system of gender and sex is not taken as an essentially given
entity, which points to a—partially—autonomous subjectivity beyond
these oppressive categories.
Janet, ‘the Might-be of our dreams’ (The Female Man, 213), repre-
sents such a vision of a genetic female who is not a woman. Since
there are no men on Whileaway, gender is not a basis of oppression
and the category ‘woman’ is meaningless in the discourses of this cul-
ture. She takes no offence at the fact that her last name in English
translates as Evason because she does not define her existence in
opposition to an other who is male. When she witnesses Jael’s imper-
sonation of heterosexual intercourse with the android, Janet—quite
unimpressed—remarks: ‘Good Lord! Is that all?’ (198) What radical
lesbian-feminism identified as the sources of greatest suffering for
women in patriarchy are for her, if anything, sources of mirth.
However, it is the peculiar character of utopian visions that they are
not predictions of what the future will or even should look like, but
comments on what is wrong with the present. What distinguishes
utopias from other types of cultural criticism is that they are always
predicated on an element of hope. Tom Moylan in his book Demand
the Impossible shows that all utopian writing is a product of its culture:
[Utopian writing] is, at heart, rooted in the unfulfilled needs
and wants of specific classes, groups, and individuals in their
unique historical context … Developed within the context of
early capitalism and the European exploration of the new
world, the literary utopia has functioned within the dominant
ideology that has shaped the capitalist dream and within the
oppositional ideologies that have pushed beyond the limits of
that dream. (2)
Utopian writing, according to Moylan, always expresses oppressed
groups’ experience of lack, and is therefore simultaneously critical of
and based on dominant ideology. In his chapter on The Female Man,

Moylan outlines the economic structure of Whileaway as one that
‘combines a post-industrial, cybernetic technology with a libertarian
pastoral social system. Fulfillment of each person, not accumulation
of profit and centralization of power, is the goal of the economy’ (67).
I would go further and say that what the Whileawayan utopia con-
siders a ‘fulfilled life’ is shaped by the very capitalist, patriarchal indi-
vidualism it sets out to dislocate.
This alliance with the culture one wants to revolutionize, far from
being a shortcoming, is unavoidable and necessary because other-
wise the proposed society would not be recognizable as a viable alter-
native. Whileaway is thus both a critique of white middle-class
American culture and thoroughly grounded in its founding narra-
tives. I have already examined the way in which Russ’s texts appro-
priate for themselves American cultural narratives relating to the
Bible. The image of the frontier as formative element in white Amer-
ican individualism and American nationhood provides another such
cluster of narratives.1 These narratives were particularly instrumental
in forming the modern American systems of gender, class and race.
The Female Man uses the Whileawayan utopia to revisit precisely those
narratives and to disrupt their continuous reproduction of masculin-
ity and femininity, without, however, touching their implicit assump-
tions about race and class. The Whileawayan wilderness produces
individuals that appropriate elements of ‘frontier’ masculinity for
their culture. These individuals are not explicitly marked by race or
class; as a consequence they are, like the original ‘frontier man’, white
by implication. Whileaway also shares the basic assumption of all
American frontier narratives, namely that confronting the ‘wilder-
ness’ by oneself produces and shapes an independence which is
largely coextensive with masculinity.
Janet as paradoxical utopian character thus represents what the
novel calls a ‘female man’, a woman who is not a woman and not a
man, but still both masculine and female. Like most young adoles-
cents on Whileaway, Janet sets out alone for the wilderness to shape
her identity as an individual by surviving in a place removed from
society: ‘When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on
North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle. I
made a travois for the head and paws, then abandoned the head, and
finally got home with one paw, proof enough (I thought)’ (1). Survival
in the wilderness, according to the original narrative, turns the indi-
vidual into a rugged frontier man, who rejects the sophistication and
security of urban or agrarian communal living, which is, in turn, asso-

ciated with femininity. The original version of the survival in the
wilderness story gives the man a place in culture and an identity
which it denies the woman. On Whileaway, the big, strong male is
replaced by a thirteen-year-old girl, who nevertheless retains funda-
mental elements of his masculinity. Thus parodically evoking the
frontier narrative, the Whileawayan utopia functions simultaneously
within and outside the dominant ideology that has shaped the capi-
talist dream, and this is precisely what renders it so effective.
Janet’s story of individuation is particularly relevant for Joanna. As
I pointed out above, the ambiguity of the narrative connects Janet and
Joanna in specific ways which make the Whileawayan’s ‘masculinity’
available to Joanna as well. As a consequence, Joanna’s version of the
‘female man’ reverberates with references to the frontier girl. In the
passage quoted at the beginning of this section, Joanna’s choice of
diction (‘If you don’t … I’ll break your neck’) lends her the powerfully
independent voice of Janet.
Joanna consciously appropriates for herself an identity that is
inherently contradictory: a ‘female man’ in patriarchal terms does not
exist. By naming the unthinkable, she uses a conceptual space in
which genders may proliferate and in which she imagines potential
selves, such as Janet, outside the patriarchal confines of her sex. Jael,
on the contrary, cannot move beyond the gender war, because she
cannot name, i.e. conceptualize, the new version of herself after the
war. Shaping new, liberating stories from patriarchal narrative raw
material is thus a crucial subversive practice which creates a process
concept of utopia rather than a fixed image of a ‘better’ society. Tom
Moylan has called this type of subversive utopianism that emerged
from the oppositional culture of the 1960s and 1970s ‘critical’ utopia:
‘A central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of the limi-
tations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as
blueprint while preserving it as dream’ (10-11). Joanna’s concept of
the ‘female man’ and Whileaway represent such open, dynamic
utopian visions, which do not—as the static utopian model does—
provoke the question: What happens after the revolution? There is no
after: the revolution continues.
Esther, Cal and Jai: Something-elses of the World, Unite!
Esther, the narrator of On Strike Against God, like Joanna seeks to name
herself as other than a woman, at the same time as she connects to

women as a woman:
… every female friend of mine seems to have accepted in some
sense that she is a woman, has decided All right, I am a
woman; rolls that name ‘woman’ over and over on her tongue,
trying to figure out what it means, looks at herself in a full-
length mirror, trying to understand, ‘Is that what they mean by
Woman?’ …
I’m not a woman. Never, never. Never was, never will be. I’m
a something-else… . I have a something-else’s uterus, and a
clitoris (which is not a woman’s because nobody mentioned it
while I was growing up) and something-else’s straight, short
hair, and every twenty-five days blood comes out of my some-
thing-else’s vagina, which is a something-else doing its bodily
housekeeping. This something-else has wormed its way into a
university teaching job by a series of impersonations which
never ceases to amaze me … I do not want a better deal. I do
not want to make a deal at all. I want it all. They got to my
mother and made her a woman, but they won’t get me.
Something-elses of the world, unite! (18-19, italics in origi-
nal)
The way in which Russ modifies the radical battle cry of the political
left here crystallizes her strategy of combining existing narratives that
contradict each other to make ‘queer’ new stories for people who do
not fully fit the norm—which is ultimately most people. ‘Something-
else’ here is not an economic or social but a symbolic category. The
type of patriarchal discourse evoked by the passage quoted above
defines the woman as the other, in opposition to the male prototype.
Therefore, it is impossible to associate the term ‘woman’ with the self
without the experience of alienation: such a woman’s ‘own’ voice has
no place in dominant discourses. The critic Pamela Annas speaks of
this alienation as ‘dual vision’: ‘This duality of perception comes …
through the experience of having one’s reality defined not by oneself,
but by somebody else’ (144). The reified concepts of ‘woman’ and
‘man’ in the agreed-upon reality of patriarchal cultures force each
individual to either accept the reification or to seek out ways of
becoming not-a-woman or not-a-man, something-else.
Existing discourses already have such spaces that take up the
‘something-elses’ of the world; homosexuality has been one of them,
at least since the nineteenth century. Ironically, these spaces of
deviance or perversion are necessary as the abject other on which the

formation and maintenance of the norm depends. Lesbians and gay
men thus have a history of being both outside and inside the patriar-
chal matrix of sex and gender. Making these symbolic categories part
of a materialist politics of affiliation, as Russ’s work does, is therefore
a powerful strategy of resistance. Monique Wittig has claimed that a
lesbian, since she does not depend on a social relation to a man, is not
a woman: ‘We are escapees from our class in the same way as the
American runaway slaves were escaping slavery and becoming free’
(Wittig, ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ 20). None of the women in Russ’s
novels who enter the space of lesbian existence need to kill a man to
liberate themselves. Conversely, the women who do commit andro-
cide never proceed to sleep with a woman. Getting away without mur-
der in Russ’s texts is possible for lesbians because they are not full
members of women’s sex-class. The story of Jael in The Female Man
illustrates the inherent paradox of androcide as an act that affirms
woman’s existence. A society which eradicates all males loses the
chance of eradicating the pernicious sex/gender categorization, petri-
fying the very system that necessitated the revolution in the first place.
Only as a potential option is androcide therefore useful in the revo-
lutionary process. Lesbian continuum and lesbian existence allow the
women in Russ’s texts to assert their agency without direct depen-
dence on males, but even if a lesbian could be considered an ‘escapee’
from ‘patriarchy’, she would still have to function as part of a culture
which remains patriarchal. The category woman is not ‘just’ an eco-
nomic, political or even ideological category. It is inscribed by patriar-
chal discourse on women’s bodies and in their minds. Esther in
becoming ‘something-else’ may symbolically escape the gender
forced upon her, but she cannot fully escape the cultural meaning
attached to her body. Patriarchal discourse defines her uterus and cli-
toris as a woman’s—indeed, every single cell of her body bears the
brand of patriarchy: XX. Here, the metaphor of the runaway slave,
problematic as it is in the voice of a white European, may be more fit-
ting than Wittig may wish it to be: in the North, the black escapee—
although nominally free—was still not considered to be fully human.
Moreover, Russ’s fiction does not close these spaces of resistance to
males. Cal in The Female Man is a closet transvestite who fails to per-
form the masculine role in the relationship which he dutifully main-
tains with Jeannine, but who manages to find power and existence
on his imaginary stage. He, too, may be read as a version of the
‘female man’, appropriating as he does the theatrical effeminacy con-
ventionally associated with male homosexuality. His presence in the

text disrupts the clear-cut antagonism between men and women
which Jael enforces. Similarly Jai Vedh in the earlier novel And Chaos
Died—another ‘J’—rejects most components of masculinity in science
fiction. At no point in the novel does he have control over the plot,
although most of the text is narrated from within his mind. His par-
tially displaced homosexuality and his unstable physical existence in
the text let him occupy a number of different subject positions. Based
on his actions and positions in the plot one may read him as a gay
man, a bisexual man or even a lesbian woman—ultimately he resists
each of these identifications.
Russ’s texts thus function within an awareness that the identity of
the subject is not tied to her biology, but to the meaning the culture
attaches to her body and to her position in her culture. Russ creates
images of women and—to a lesser extent—men who search for an
answer to the question: Who am I? But this search has as its object
not primarily a kernel of truth at the centre of the self, but rather the
potentially liberating, quirky multiplicity of selves within the subject.
This multiplicitous subject, as I have shown, is always present in
Russ’s writing from her earliest publications, but her later, critically
feminist work brings its disruptive possibilities to the foreground.
Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth represents the desire to retain a
utopian vision while at the same time acknowledging the stark
impossibility of a utopian space beyond existing discourses. Russ’s
impersonators, her cyborgs, vampires, ghosts and aliens are expres-
sions of the same desire.
And Then They Saved the World, Right? Extra(Ordinary) People

and the Utterly Impossible, Positively Necessary
Utopic Imagination
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and

organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fic-
tion. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important
political construction, a world-changing fiction … The cyborg
is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what
counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century.
This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary
between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion
(Haraway, 191)
Extra(Ordinary) People (1984) is Russ’s most recent major work of

fiction and self-critically revisits most of the central themes in Russ’s
oeuvre, such as androcide, authorship and the Sappho model. In
terms of form, Extra(Ordinary) People enters ground that is both new
and familiar. A hybrid between a collection of short stories and an
episodic novel, Extra(Ordinary) People melds and modifies the two
major forms in Russ’s fictional work. The Zanzibar Cat and The Hidden
Side of The Moon, for instance, are collections of largely unrelated,
autonomous short stories. Similarly, The Adventures of Alyx combines
autonomous stories, but the main character, an extraordinary woman
warrior and con-artist, provides a connecting theme.
Extra(Ordinary) People goes further in joining the individual stories
together through several common themes and a narrative frame.
Although the stories also stand on their own, this frame formally
moves them closer to a novel. Filling the interstices between stories
with comments that position them in an ironic history of utopian
desires, the linking narrative echoes the scene of teaching that is one
of the central themes in most of the stories. Staging a series of inter-
actions between an anthropomorphic electronic tutor and an (ungen-
dered) ‘schoolkid’, the frame narrative focuses on the desire for and
impossibility of utopian visions. This scene of teaching also connects
the text as a whole with the ‘rescue of the female child’ theme and the
Sappho model in Russ’s earlier writing.
However, here, the scene of teaching is also skewed, since the
‘teacher’ is a machine which the schoolkid controls. This electronic
tutor presents the individual stories as ‘history’ lessons to the stu-
dent, whose central question remains throughout ‘Is that the way the
world was saved?’ (161, italics in original). The laconic answer of the
tutor is: ‘If you believe that … you’d believe anything!’ (93). The inter-
actions between the tutor and the schoolkid are reminiscent of the
struggle between Alyx and Edarra in ‘Bluestocking’, with the signifi-
cant exception that there is no emotional involvement between the
kid and the tutor. After the tutor tells the story ‘Bodies’, the student
temporarily turns it off; after ‘What Did You Do During the Revolu-
tion, Grandma’, s/he finally says ‘I don’t believe you’ (145). What the
schoolkid presumably learns through listening to the stories is not to
answer her/his question about the history of her/his society, but to
question her/his own assumptions. The tutor’s final answer after all
the storytelling is another question: ‘What makes you think the
world’s ever been saved?’ (161)
The narrative layers introduced by the interactions between this
frame narrative and the individual stories make the spectre of the fic-
tional author herself unstable, endowing her with self-mocking
cyborg qualities. The stories’ common themes and character types,
set in relation by the frame narrative, thus combine the individual sto-
ries with a destabilizing assemblage that refuses to pose as a unified
whole. This framing narrative also creates a tension between the
highly personal voices of the individual narrators and the deperson-
alized voice of the computer. The schoolkid as a character without
depth or individuality also stands in tension with the highly individ-
ualized richly narrated characters in the stories. The computer tutor
makes the process of learning infinitely reproducible in identical pat-
terns. An infinite number of interchangeable schoolkids can ask the
same questions and will essentially learn the same lesson. Conse-
quently, the framing narrative runs counter to the utopian thrust of
the stories and shatters a concept of history that depends on causal
links between events.
Extra(Ordinary) People thus also foregrounds the disruption of a lin-
ear temporality as it is assumed in Marxist concepts of historical pro-
gression as well as in materialist feminism. The Female Man, as I
demonstrated in Part One, still uses the notion of a dialectical move-
ment towards utopia. Extra(Ordinary) People not only destabilizes the
historical dialectic, but further shatters its logic, replacing the dialec-
tic with an apparently loosely linked assemblage of separate stories.
However, the revolution is still present, even if it moves to the back-
ground, disconnected from the utopia. Two of the stories, ‘Souls’ and
‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’, represent the utopian longing
of individuals with telepathic powers; ‘Bodies’ is the story of a
utopian society which realizes some of these visions. Yet the story of
the supposedly transformative event, ‘What Did You Do During the
Revolution, Grandma?’, only demonstrates that the revolution does
not directly result in a historical change, but is no more than its
expression. The final story, then, ‘Everyday Depressions’, is a sketch
of a lesbian gothic novel in the form of a series of letters which relates
the banal excitements of everyday life. Represented through the lim-
ited visions of the individual personal narrative voices in each story,
utopia receives an ironic undertone, without, however, being invali-
dated as an idea. The ‘revolution’, central to the solution of the sex-
class antagonism in materialist feminism, becomes an ironic yet
necessary (im)possibility.
‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ is a case in
point. ‘Grandma’, in a self-mocking parody of historical causality,
instead of focusing on the revolution in her narrative, indulges in

telling the story of pleasurable erotic activities with a 13-year-old
young woman. The story thus puts in place an ironic distance to the
most elevated objectives of radical feminism, such as inspiring a
world-changing revolution, saving young girls from compulsory het-
erosexuality, or creating stories that will transform the lives of women
and the course of history. However, this ironic distance, rather than
invalidating the political goals of feminism, makes them contingent,
open and adaptable, transforming static utopian visions into power-
fully transgressive thought-experiments. Foregrounding the sexual
pleasure implicit in the ‘rescue of the female child’ theme, ‘What Did
You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ also reconstitutes the
character of the maternal ‘rescuer’. Reminiscent of such characters as
Janet in The Female Man or Miss Edward in ‘Scenes from Domestic
Life’, the narrator in ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution,
Grandma?’ is an older woman whose narrative laughs about her
own desire and contributes to the discourses which aim to depoliti-
cize sex.
This type of character, which works with fragmentary biographic
allusions to the author, is one of the themes that hold Extra(Ordinary)
People together. Earlier novels such as The Female Man and The Two of
Them accompany such links between characters and the persona of a
fictional author with a split in the narrative between a science fic-
tional and a realistic story line. Extra(Ordinary) People abandons that
split, integrating the allusions to the life of the fictional author in the
science fiction or fantasy plot. For example, ‘What Did You Do During
the Revolution, Grandma?’ is partially set in Washington State, where
Joanna Russ lived when she wrote the story. The narrator/protagonist
is a spy and among other things teaches self-defence classes. Simi-
larly, the narrator in ‘Everyday Depressions’ is a lesbian college
teacher and writer. What links these characters to quasi-autobio-
graphic elements in Russ’s earlier work is their privileged position in
relation to the act of narration. These characters appear as primary
protagonists and/or narrators in each of the stories in Extra(Ordinary)
People, occupying positions of power and self-reflexive knowledge.
Their disillusioned yet still hopeful voices again correspond to the
central tension in the text between the impossibility and necessity of
utopian, revolutionary thinking.
In the first story, ‘Souls’ (1982), which won the 1983 Hugo Award,
such a character takes the shape of a medieval German abbess.
Although the simple-minded male narrator Radulf refers to the
abbess as a ‘demon’ because he is limited to the language of medieval

Christianity, her ‘alienness’ links her to Haraway’s cyborgs. Like the
other ‘cyborg’ characters in Russ’s fiction, such as Jael, the abbess’s
existence as both human and alien endows her with special power in
the story. Even though she is not the narrator, she controls both the
plot and the act of narration. Radulf purports to relate the events as
they occurred: ‘This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what
happened when the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me
but as I saw it, for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet
and errand-boy of me …’ (1). But the text contains direct speech, par-
ticularly one long monologue from the abbess, which, in its cultural
criticism and analytical dimension, is clearly beyond the grasp of
‘Happy Radulf’, the narrator. Moreover, the ambiguities of the narra-
tive itself are inconsistent with the self-image projected by the narra-
tive voice. The abbess Radegunde’s speech acts in some instances
directly contradict what the narrator says. Installing a distinct tension
between the simplicity and naiveté of the narrator and the complex-
ity and sophistication of the narrative, the text opens a third space
that remains beyond representation.
The particular power yielded by the abbess correlates once more
with an act of androcide, which, however, the text’s ambiguity
releases from its direct link to the woman’s agency. When one of the
Norsemen, who had raped a young nun, breaks his neck after Rade-
gunde had miraculously healed him from a fatal wound, the abbess
says: ‘To be plain: I have just broken Thorfinn’s neck, for I find the
change improves him’ (50). Yet a little further on in the narrative,
recalling the event itself, the narrator remarks without modifying
comment: ‘Young Thorfinn had gone out in the night to piss and had
fallen over a stone in the dark and broken his neck …’ (51). Leaving
the tension between the two versions of Thorfinn’s death unresolved,
the story partially disconnects androcide from the narratives of
causality and agency which had informed Russ’s earlier fiction.
Furthermore, these inconsistencies produce an unstable narrative
voice similar to the voices of the multiple narrators in The Female Man
or the ghost-narrators in other texts by Russ. The ‘ghost’ of the alien
woman controls the narrator’s speech acts, which reduces him to a
mere medium. He recalls: ‘And she said also: ‘Remember me,’ and
thus I have, every little thing, although it all happened when I was the
age my own grandson is now, and that is how I can tell you this tale
today’ (56).
The tale this narrator tells corresponds to the instabilities on the
level of narrative. The story recalls a medieval German abbey in a

moment of crisis, in the process of which the ambiguously non-
human character who acts as the abbess breaks with this role as the
saintly older woman. A group of invaders, Norsemen, sack the little
German village after a futile attempt by Radegunde to prevent the vio-
lence. As it turns out, Radegunde thinks of herself as an intellectually
superior being among ‘puppies and kittens’ who fight and kill each
other over mere ‘toys’. Hoping to end her suffering and intellectual
deprivation, she desperately calls to outer space for help: ‘I have
looked in all directions: to the east, to the north and south, and to the
west, but there is one place I have never looked and now I will: away
from the ball, straight up. Let us see—’ (46). Her encounter with the
aliens is reminiscent of James Tiptree’s parodic reversal of alien inva-
sions in science fiction which she created in her classic short story
‘The Women Men Don’t See’:
Then I saw, ahead of us through the pelting rain, a kind of
shining among the bare tree-trunks, and as we came nearer the
shining became more clear until it was very plain to see, not a
blazing thing like a fire at night but a mild and even brightness
as though the sunlight were coming through the clouds pleas-
antly but without strength, as it often does at the beginning of
the year.
And then there were folk inside the brightness, both men
and women, all dressed in white, and they held out their arms
to us and the demon ran to them, crying out loudly and weep-
ing … (‘Souls’, 53)
The abbess, although she turns out to be an ‘alien’ herself, pro-
duces a superior performance of perfect humanness. The narrator
describes her as ‘a prodigy of female piety and learning’ (3) and
emphasizes that she ‘was kind to everyone’ (3). Indeed, her ‘alien’
qualities, for instance her ability to perceive events and people’s
thoughts telepathically, equip her to be more perfectly human. Julie
Linden in her thesis on The Female Man and Extra(Ordinary) People
points out that Radegunde ‘is aware of and controls her own identity’
(61). I agree, but the identity she assumes is also controlled by the
historical moment and place in which she operates. She appears in a
medieval German town and it is no coincidence that she chooses as
her ‘identity’ the role of an abbess, a woman in a position of learning
and power who does not have to directly submit to anyone. Since she
is also an ‘alien’ to the human system of signification, she can use this
system for her own purposes.

Like the vampire Martin Guevara in ‘My Dear Emily’, the woman
who performs ‘Radegunde’ destabilizes both sex and gender. Since
Radegunde is only a role she plays, the ‘sex’ of her ‘true’ body is irrel-
evant. When she drops Radegunde like a ‘garment’, she points out
that there was only one way she could pass as a human woman in
human society: ‘I could stay here long years only as Radegunde …
none of us can remain here long as our proper selves or even in our
true bodies’ (54). The narrator’s sparse representation of the tele-
pathic aliens projects a utopian vision of a society in which neither
race, class nor gender has symbolic meaning or economic function.
Since in Radulf’s system of reference an ungendered and unsexed
humanity is unrepresentable, he can only represent the being that
plays Radegunde as non-human.
‘Bodies’ (1984) further develops the idea of a utopian society in
which sex and gender have become irrelevant in economic terms and
merely function as pretexts for playful performances which seem
campy from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As in
‘Souls’, the narrator does not fully understand the utopian society in
her tale. The story is in the form of a long email message from one of
two visitors to the utopia to the other. Rose Marie, the narrator, is an
older woman who acts as a teacher to James, the recipient of her mes-
sage. Consequently, she does not write for a large, anonymous audi-
ence, but directly addresses James in the intimate voice of a personal
letter. Both central characters have been transported to the future
world from the twentieth century, James from London in the 1930s
and Rose Marie from the US in the 1970s. Both of their original lives
were determined by their homosexuality, which exposed them to
painful persecution and discrimination but also gave them a stable
identity. Furthermore, both participated in the subversion of gender
categories in their own cultures, but remain aliens to the culture
which realizes the utopian dream of sexual non-suppression. Because
sex, gender and sexuality are unrelated as well as unfixed in this
utopian society, Rose Marie and James lose track of their sense of self
which was based on their fixed position in oppression.
James, newly hatched from a machine which regrew his life-infor-
mation picked up moments before his real death in the 1930s, initially
despairs with bewilderment at these confusions. The utopian soci-
ety’s playful proliferation of gender-roles and its changed interactions
between erotic fantasies and power both titillate and frustrate his
desire for sexual exploration. When he considers flirting with Billie
Joe, a mechanic in overalls, and learns the person’s ‘true’ sex, he is

disappointed:
‘Will he be at the party?’
‘She.’
‘Oh.’ (100)
In addition to disrupting James’s expectations concerning the corre-
lation between gender and sex, the utopian society also disrupts his
sexual fantasies. His erotic encounter with Harriet, ‘six foot four of
sunburnt blond cowboy in range clothes’ (101–02) with a handlebar
moustache, reduces James to tears because the object of his desires
destroys his fantasy of submission to an act of brutal masculine dom-
inance. Instead of acting out his role as Visigoth conqueror of Rome,
Harriet puts on perfume and flowers, disrupting James’s part as
‘proud Roman patrician lad’ (104).
An erotic encounter with the narrator, whose gender performance
seems to approximate James’s idea of masculinity most consistently,
also falls flat because he cannot cope with the oddness of her female
body. The text once again evokes the ‘rescue of the female child’
theme, but disrupts the correlation between sex and gender in both
protagonists. Male and female do not necessarily correspond to mas-
culine and feminine. Further transforming the ‘rescue of the female
child’, the text produces another variation on the theme as a broken
‘rescue of the deviant male child’. The letter is an extended apology
and invitation to resume a friendly relationship after a traumatic sep-
aration in the wake of the failed sexual interaction. The narrator, 30
years James’s senior, uses the narrative to give the 20-year-old invol-
untary time-traveller ‘maternal’ advice, further disrupting fixed links
between sex, gender and sexuality: ‘I too spent my first year out of the
tank getting it on with anyone who would, first the women (of
course) and then the men’ (112). The underlying assumption of this
utopia is that the specificity of lesbian and male gay desire, as soon as
homosexuality is not stigmatized as unnatural, ceases to exist. The
two twentieth-century characters’ experience in a society that repre-
sents their own utopian longings are based on the idea that sexuality
is historically and culturally specific rather than a natural given.
‘James wants to be adored by a real man (thought I) and that will be
hard on him in this world where the men and women all vanished
years ago’ (105).
On the whole, ‘Bodies’, like the other stories of Extra(Ordinary) Peo-
ple, destabilizes gendered narration as well as the gender, sex and sex-
uality of the characters, continuously disrupting the correlation

between the protagonists’ sexed body, gender performance and sex-
ual desire. The utopian vision of ‘Bodies’ therefore responds to and
goes beyond the earlier utopia in The Female Man. Whileaway pre-
serves and repeats the categories of oppression, such as sex-class and
deviant sexuality. ‘Bodies’, on the other hand, takes another step
away from biological determinism, basing its dissolution of cate-
gories on disjunctive performances rather than on revolution. Since
the utopian society in ‘Bodies’ is largely incomprehensible to the nar-
rator, she can only represent it as a vague sketch herself, leaving room
for a spectre of the unrepresentable. However, ‘Bodies’ does not
attempt to envision a society completely without gender, which
would inevitably reconfirm the system it negates. In proliferating
gender instabilities as they already exist in twentieth-century gay cul-
tures, ‘Bodies’ plays with and loosens but does not supersede the link
between sex, gender and sexuality.
Impersonations and gender uncertainties thus affect all levels of
Extra(Ordinary) People. The novel/collection further develops the
deconstructive and self-reflective aspects that have always served to
counterbalance the partial ‘essentialism’ in Russ’s work. More thor-
oughly than earlier texts by Russ, Extra(Ordinary) People ruptures
totalizing separatist strategies and identity politics without abandon-
ing empowering women-only spaces. In other words, this most
recent collection/novel puts the strongest emphasis on deconstruc-
tion and indeterminacy, although, as I have shown, on many levels it
also intersects with the stabilizing discourses discussed in Parts One
and Two. Extra(Ordinary) People picks up and develops the central
themes in Russ’s oeuvre, androcide, the Sappho model and specifi-
cally the ‘rescue of the female child’ plot, as well as narrative voice
and authorship. Again, the development is marked not by a complete
paradigm displacement, but rather by a slight yet distinct shift in
emphasis.
These simultaneities have baffled and continue to baffle Russ
scholarship. Sarah Lefanu in In the Chinks of the World Machine, for
example, stresses the deconstructive moments in Russ’s writing, dis-
missing her separatist utopia and largely ignoring her materialism:
Russ is hailed as a feminist first and foremost for an aspect of
her work that, in my view, is comparatively minor: her partici-
pation in the feminist utopian tradition with her creation of the
planet Whileaway. This sub-genre of SF … relies to a certain
extent for its feminism on an essentialist, unitary view of

women … I would contend that Russ’s feminism is to be found
not so much in her utopian creations as in her deconstruction
of gender identity, of masculine and feminine behaviour.
(174–75)
My readings suggest that it is precisely the tensions and contradic-
tions between the ‘essentialisms’ and the deconstructive elements in
Russ’s fiction which make up her most significant contribution to
feminism. Russ’s speculative fiction utilizes the three feminist
moments identified by Kristeva to create open, unstable texts which
undermine existing dominant narratives. These texts are explicitly
political, yet do not provide monolithic, reductive conclusions.
Through my readings I have also delineated the development in
Russ’s fictional writing beginning with her earliest short stories. This
delineation partially builds on the work by Samuel Delany and Mari-
lyn Hacker, who distinguish between an early, ‘pre-feminist’ and a
mature, ‘truly’ feminist Russ (Hacker, 73; Delany, ‘Orders of Chaos’,
116). However, my interpretations stress a continuity of major con-
cerns in Russ’s work and suggest a third, critically feminist phase,
which most fully develops the indeterminacies that destabilize these
concerns. Thus, Russ’s work before ‘When It Changed’, such as the
novels Picnic on Paradise and And Chaos Died, puts a central focus on the
critique of capitalism. The later short stories and novels move
towards a stronger, more explicit critique of patriarchy, without, how-
ever, giving up the interrogation of the capitalist economy. But even
her earliest stories such as ‘My Dear Emily’ or ‘Life in a Furniture
Store’ as well as her first two novels Picnic on Paradise and And Chaos
Died create defiant female characters who live up to the women in
Russ’s later novels. Extra(Ordinary) People, then, gives shape to the
third phase in Russ’s writing, which remains explicitly feminist but
self-critically shifts further towards instabilities and performative,
provisional identities.
Russ’s fiction in all of these phases speaks with narrative voices
that demand attentive reading. Along with this demand comes an
urgent concern for authorship and the act of narration. Her writing
moves the ‘public’ form of genre fiction to more ‘private’ forms which
borrow from autobiography, diary and particularly letter. Extra(Ordi-
nary) People completely abandons narrative omniscience. Four of the
five stories in the collection/novel use an epistolary form in which the
narrator addresses an audience of one specific person. The narrative
voice in all of the stories is distinctly sexed, even if the sex of ‘Joe
Smith’ in ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ remains ambiguous.
As I have demonstrated for representative stories from each of the
previous phases in Russ’s writing, this quasi-autobiographical narra-
tive voice is also closely affiliated with the scene of teaching and the
‘rescue of the female child’, a combination which corresponds to
Elaine Marks’s Sappho model. Directly addressing a ‘you’ as intimate
friend, Extra(Ordinary) People, in a similar way to the novel Kittatinny,
also pulls the reader into this erotic pedagogy. In all of these short sto-
ries and novels, the maternal and the erotic between two characters
of different generations become unstable liberatory spaces.
These liberatory spaces in the interstices of patriarchy are the sites
where cultural transformation can occur. This transformation does
not come in the shape of a monolithic, phallic universal revolution,
which would inevitably revert to old structures of hierarchy and
power distribution, but as an infinite number of possible revolutions
and subversions on every level of human interaction. Effectively com-
bining the political enthusiasm and thrust of the early 1970s with an
anticipation of the distrust in monolothic concepts of reality of the
1980s and ’90s, Joanna Russ’s fiction is a challenge to feminist the-
ory. In its radical vision, Russ’s fiction goes far beyond even her own
critical work. The generic possibilities of speculative fiction allow her
texts to explore alternative possibilities simultaneously and to carry
each of these possibilities to its radical conclusion. Materialism, fem-
inist separatism and poststructuralism may fundamentally contradict
each other, but their combination propels Russ’s texts beyond the
necessity to hold on to reductive concepts of power. Rereading and
rewriting feminism, such texts can transform patriarchal discourses,
possibly before the effects of these discourses have destroyed the last
remnants of a liveable environment—a while away.
CHAPTER ONE
Notes
Introduction
1. For a detailed discussion of feminism and genre fiction cf. Anne

Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990).
Part One
Introduction to Part One
1. The collection first came out in 1976 under the title Alyx and con-
tains stories first published individually from 1967 to 1970. The ear-
lier edition contains an Introduction by Samuel Delany.
Chapter One
1. Mieke Bal in Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative gives

a useful summary of the various approaches to these homologies
(11–12).
2. I use the term fictional author to refer to the author-character
inscribed in the text, e.g. through such phrases as ‘I’m the spirit of the
author and know all things’ (The Female Man 166). As I will show in
this and Part Two, the presence of such a fictional author, who is
sometimes conflated with the narrator, gives the narration a sexed
authority. The term is distinct from Wayne Booth’s implied author
which is an abstract construct.
3. Russ wrote the story in 1963 (Delany, ‘Introduction’, v) under the
title ‘The Adventuress’ and it came out in 1967 in Orbit Two. Signifi-
cantly, Russ renamed the story ‘Bluestocking’ when it was collected
in Alyx (1976). My quotations are from ‘Bluestocking’ because it is
more readily available than the first printing.
4. Delany’s long introduction is one of the finest appreciations of
the Alyx sequence to date. He locates the stories in relation to Russ’s
NOTES 231
predecessors in pulp sword-and-sorcery and science fiction as well as

to her own later work up to 1975.
5. In her brilliant and insightful essay ‘Lesbian Intertextuality’, in
which she explores the paradigm of women loving women in written
texts by women and men, from Sappho to Wittig.
6. Kathleen Spencer in ‘Rescuing the Female Child’ (1990) makes a
similar point: ‘In a later story, this moment would most likely lead to
a recognition of sexual attraction between the two women …’ (169).
7. This does not exclude potential references to such writers as
Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or to William
Faulkner’s short story ‘A Rose for Emily’.
8. The page numbers of the quotes from ‘What Can a Heroine Do?’
refer to Russ’s more recent collection of essays, To Write Like a Woman
(1995).
9. Susan Lanser in Fictions of Authority explores the pervasiveness of
this ‘heterosexual writing plot’, the origin of which she locates in the
eighteenth-century with writers such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel
Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (35).
Chapter Two
1. The story was reprinted in Alyx (1976) and in The Aventures of Alyx
(1983) under the title ‘I Thought She was Afeard Till She Stroked My
Beard’. All further references are to the 1985 edition by the Women’s
Press.
2. Russ, introductory note to ‘When it Changed’ (9).
3. Russ, Afterword to ‘When It Changed’ in Again, Dangerous Visions
(280–81) cited in Hacker’s ‘Science Fiction and Feminism’ (73).
4. All references are to the reprint in The Zanzibar Cat (1984).
5. I will discuss intersections between the biblical story of Jael and
Russ’s rewriting in Part Two, ‘Sexuality’.
6. The reference is to the 1995 reprint in To Write Like a Woman.
7. I will expand on this intimate nexus between sexuality and
oppression and its relevance for Russ’s novels as part of feminist dis-
course in Part Two.
8. Thelma J. Shinn also points this out in ‘Worlds of Words and
Swords: Suzette Haden Elgin and Joanna Russ at Work’ (210). How-
ever, I do not fully agree with the linear development she sets up
between Russ’s female protagonists. Even though Irene shares super-
ficial characteristics with Alyx, she is a profoundly different character,
whose story is a fundamental critique of precisely the assumptions

that motivate Alyx’s texts.
Chapter Three
1. If it had not been for my students who pointed me to Cal I would

probably have overlooked the inconspicuous yet pitiful character as
well. In a letter, Joanna Russ also reminded me of Cal.
2. Maggie Humm in The Dictionary of Feminist Theory defines ‘femi-
ninism’ as follows: ‘A term used by cultural and essentialist feminists
to describe the ideology of female superiority. Feminism, to writers
like Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig, represents a narrow bour-
geois demand for egalitarianism. Femininism, on the other hand, can
celebrate feminine plurality’ (93).
3. In reference to but clearly distinct from Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety
of influence’.
Part Two
Introduction to Part Two
1. Feminist thinking in the late 1980s and the ’90s, e.g. Dianna
Fuss’s Essentially Speaking (1989), has exposed this opposition
between ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ as a theoretical trap. The move
beyond this dualism will be the concern of Part Three.
2. In Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s, Angelica
Bammer analyses the ways in which writers in the 1970s appropri-
ated nineteenth-century American utopian writing by women.
Bammer also criticizes the stark racism of these utopian visions.
Chapter Four
1. The story was reprinted in The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). All
further references are to the 1989 edition by the Women’s Press.
2. Russ says in 1995: ‘Unfortunately … the book can be interpreted
as anti-Arab. If I were going to write it again, I would stress that the
folks on Ka’bah are not descendents of Arabs but fake Arabs, middle
Americans from Iowa or whatever, who are trying to re-create their
own fantasies about a society that was, after all, a real one’ (Letter to
NOTES 233
the author, 9 March 1995).

3. Joanna Russ in a letter criticizes scholarship for its neglect of the
connection: ‘… nobody seems to recognize Irene Adler, the woman—
I suppose literary educations don’t include Conan Doyle and Sherlock
Holmes’ (Letter to the author, 9 March 1995).
4. Part Three, ‘Indeterminacy’, will further explore such subvertive
refusals to identify one single, unified self as origin and utopian vision
in Russ’ fiction.
5. Although On Strike Against God was first published in 1980 by Out
and Out Books, the manuscript was finished by 1977 (Hacker, 77).
Chapter Five
1. Russ later combined ‘Daddy’s Girl’ with ‘The Autobiography of

My Mother’ under the title ‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’ in The Hid-
den Side of the Moon (as well as in the first edition of The Zanzibar Cat).
Chapter Six
1. Person is critical of tying ‘female liberation’ to sexuality: ‘… one

ought not to dictate a tyranny of active sexuality as critical to female lib-
eration’ (624). However, as I have tried to demonstrate, the effectiveness
of Russ’s texts rests on the strategy to accept the premises of the oppres-
sive system for the moment of liberation. After all, even the decision
against an active sexuality depends on current concepts of sexuality.
Part Three
Chapter Eight
1. We Who Are About To … was first published in parts in 1975, 1976

and 1977 in Galaxy magazine but came out as a novel in 1977 (cf. also
Lefanu, 177).
Chapter Nine
1. Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay ‘The Significance of the Fron-

tier in American History’ (1893) inaugurated the study of the frontier
myth in American culture. Twentieth-century cultural historiography,

beginning with Henry Nash Smith’s The Virgin Land, has identified
Turner’s thesis as part of the myth-making process and elaborated
the analysis of whose interests it served.
CHAPTER ONE
Bibliography
Primary Bibliography: Joanna Russ
A: Short fiction
‘Nor Custom Stale’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 17:3
(1959): 75–86. Repr. in Russ, The Hidden Side of the Moon: 124–137.
‘My Dear Emily’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction July 1962.
Repr. in The Zanzibar Cat: 116–46; and in The Dark Descent, ed. David
G. Hartwell. New York: Doherty Assoc., 1987.
‘There is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side’. The Maga-
zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction September 1963. Repr. in The Zanz-
ibar Cat: 147–65.
‘I Had Vacantly Crumpled It Into My Pocket … But My God, Eliot, It
was a Photograph from Life!’ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fic-
tion 27:2 (1964): 12–21. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 53–63;
and in Cthulhu. A Lovecraftian Anthology, ed. Jim Turner with illus-
trations by Bob Eggleton. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1995.
‘Come Closer’. Magazine of Horror 2:4 (1965). Rep.The Hidden Side of the
Moon: 64–69.
‘Life in a Furniture Store’. Epoch 15:1 (1965): 71–82. Repr. in The Hid-
den Side of the Moon: 162–74.
‘Mr Wilde’s Second Chance’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
31:3 (1966): 65–67. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 71–73; in 100
Great Fantasy Short Stories, ed. I. Asimov, T. Carr and M.H. Greenberg.
New York: Doubleday, 1984; in In Another Part of the Forest. An Anthol-
ogy of Gay Short Fiction, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Craig
Stephenson. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994; and in
Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, selected by Marvin Kaye.
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993.
‘The New Men’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 31 (Febru-
ary 1966). Repr. in The Zanzibar Cat: 244–55.
‘This Night, at My Fire’. Epoch 15:2 (Winter 1966): 99–104. Repr. in
The Hidden Side of the Moon. 49–52.
‘I Gave Her Sack and Sherry’. Orbit 2. New York: Berkley Books, 1967.
Repr. in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes 1–10, ed. Damon Knight. New
York: Putnam, 1975; and as ‘I Thought She Was Afeard Till She
Stroked My Beard’, in The Adventures of Alyx: 29–45.
‘The Adventuress’. Orbit 2. New York: Berkley Books, 1967. Repr. as
‘Bluestocking’, in The Adventures of Alyx: 9–28.
‘Visiting’. Manhattan Review (Fall 1967). Repr. in The Hidden Side of the
Moon: 197–99.
‘Harry Longshanks’. Fiction as Progress, ed. Carl Hartmann and Hazard
Adams. New York: Dodd and Mead, 1968.
‘Scenes from Domestic Life’. Consumption 2:1 (Fall 1968): 22–33.
‘The Barbarian’. Orbit 3. New York: Berkley Books, 1968. Repr. in
Another World: A Science Fiction Anthology, ed. with an introduction
and commentary by Gardner Dozois. Chicago: Follett, 1977; and in
The Adventures of Alyx: 49–67.
‘This Afternoon’. Cimarron Review. 6 (December 1968): 60–66. Repr. in
The Hidden Side of the Moon: 42–48.
‘A Short and Happy Life’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
36:6 (1969). Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 95–97.
‘Oh! She Has a Lover’. Kinesis I (February 1969).
‘The Throaways’. Consumption 2:3 (Spring 1969): 26–31. Repr. in The
Hidden Side of the Moon: 98–102.
‘What Really Happened’. Just Friends I (October 1969).
‘Cap and Bells’. Discourse (Summer 1970).
‘Not for Love’. Arlington Quarterly (Fall 1970): 63–89.
‘Suffer a Sea-Change’. The William and Mary Review (Fall 1970).
‘The Man Who Could Not See Devils’. Alchemy and Academe, ed. Anne
McCaffrey. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Repr. in The Zanzibar Cat:
121–34; and in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by
D.G. Hartwell with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1988.
‘The Precious Object’. The Red Clay Reader 7 (November 1970). Repr. in
The Zanzibar Cat: 222–43.
‘The Second Inquisition’. Orbit 6. New York: Berkley Books, 1970.
Repr. in In Dreams Awake: A Historical-Critical Anthology of Science Fic-
tion, ed. L.A. Fiedler. New York: Dell, 1975; in More Women of Wonder:
Science Fiction Novelettes by Women About Women, ed. with an intro-
duction and notes by Pamela Sargent. New York: Vintage, 1976;
and in Adventures of Alyx: 163–92.
‘The View from this Window’. Quark 1, ed. Marilyn Hacker. New York:
Paperback Library, Coronet, 1970. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the
Moon: 175–94.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 237
‘The Wise Man’. Cimarron Review 13 (October 1970): 44–63.

‘Visiting Day’. South 2:1 (Spring 1970). Repr. in The Hidden Side of the
Moon: 200–05.
‘Window Dressing’. New World of Fantasy 2. New York: Ace, 1970. Repr.
in The New Women’s Theatre, ed. Honor Moore. New York: Random
House, 1977; and in The Hidden Side of the Moon. 74–80.
‘Poor Man, Beggar Man’. Universe 1, ed. Terry Carr. Repr. in Nebula
Award Stories 6, ed. D. Clifford. New York: Doubleday, 1971: and in
The Zanzibar Cat (Arkham House edition).
‘Foul Fowl’. The Little Magazine 5:1 (Spring 1971): 25–27. Repr. in The
‘Gleepsite’. Orbit 9, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Putmans, 1971.
Repr. in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes 1–10, ed. Damon Knight. New
York: Putnam, 1975; and in The Zanzibar Cat: 84–92.
‘The Zanzibar Cat’. Quark 3, ed. Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker.
New York: Paperback Library, Coronet, 1971. Repr. in The Zanzibar
Cat: 274–86.
‘Dear Diary’. Northwest Review 12 (Fall 1972): 43–50.
‘Nobody’s Home’. New Dimensions II, ed. Robert Silverberg. New York:
Doubleday, 1972. Repr. in New Dimensions, ed. Robert Silverberg.
New York: Harper & Row, 1980; in The Zanzibar Cat: 93–115; in The
Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, ed. R. Silverberg
and M.H. Greenberg. New York: Arbor House, 1983; and in Women
of Wonder: The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to
the 1970s, ed. and with an introduction and notes by Pamela Sar-
gent. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Com-
pany, 1995.
‘Useful Phrases for the Tourist’. Universe 2, ed. Terry Carr. New York:
Ace, 1972. Repr. in Infinite Jests: The Lighter Side of Science Fiction, ed.
Robert Silverberg. Radnor, PA: Chilton Books, 1974; in The Zanzibar
Cat: 192–97; and in Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction
Short-Short Stories, ed. I. Asimov, M.H. Greenberg and J.D. Olander.
‘When It Changed’. Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. New
York: Doubleday, 1972. Repr. in The New Women of Wonder, ed.
Pamela Sargent. New York: Vintage Books, 1978; in The Zanzibar
Cat: 10–21; in The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces,
ed. Robert Silverberg and M.H. Greenberg. New York: Arbor House,
1983; in Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction
Stories, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1984; in
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985: 2262–69; and in The Best
of the Nebulas, ed. Ben Bova. New York: Doherty Assoc., 1989.
‘Laura, The Camp, and That Terrible Thing’. Monmouth Review (Spring
1973).
‘Old Pictures’. The Little Magazine 6:4 (Winter 1973): 49–50. Repr. in
‘The Soul of a Servant’. Showcase, ed. Roger Elwood. New York: Harper
& Row, 1973. Repr. in The Zanzibar Cat: 42–64.
‘A Game of Vlet’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February
1974). Repr. in The Zanzibar Cat: 256–73.
‘An Old Fashioned Girl’. Final Stage, ed. Edward L. Ferman and Barry
N. Malzberg. [N.p.]: [n.p.] 1974.
‘Passages’. Galaxies (January 1974): 50–51.
‘Reasonable People’. Orbit 14. New York: Harpers, 1974. Repr. in The
‘Innocence’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 26 (February
1975): 82–83. Repr. in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Stories, ed. I. Asi-
mov, M.H. Greenberg, and J.D. Olander.
‘A Few Things I Know About Whileaway’. The New Improved Sun, ed.
Thomas M. Disch. [N.p.]: [n. p.] 1975: 81–97. Repr. in The Norton
Book of Science Fiction. North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990, ed.
Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. New York and London: Nor-
ton, 1993: 337–49. [Excerpts from The Female Man]
‘Daddy’s Little Girl’. Epoch 24:2 (Spring 1975). Repr. combined with
‘The Autobiography of My Mother’ under the title ‘Old Thoughts,
Old Presences’, in The Zanzibar Cat (Arkham House edition); and in
‘Existence’. Epoch, ed. Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood. New York:
Putnam’s 1975. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 81–90.
1975 ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’. Epoch 25:1 (Fall 1975). Repr.
in Prize Stories, 1977: The O. Henry Awards, ed. and with an introduc-
tion by William Abrahams. New York: Doubleday, 1977; in Between
Mothers & Daughters: Stories Across a Generation, ed. and with an intro-
duction by Susan Koppelman. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press,
1985; and in Ms. (May/June 1991): 54–60. Repr. combined with
‘Daddy’s Little Girl’ under the title ‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’,
in The Zanzibar Cat (Arkham House edition); and in The Hidden Side
of the Moon: 206–29.
‘The Clichés from Outer Space’. The Witch and the Chameleon (1 April
1975). A longer version repr. in Women’s Studies International Forum
7:2 (1984): 121–24. Repr. in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female
Mind, ed. Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu. London: Women’s Press,
BIBLIOGRAPHY 239
1985: 27–34; and in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 103–11.

‘The Experimenter’. Galaxy 26:9 (October 1975). Repr. in The Hidden
Side of the Moon: 138–55.
‘Corruption’. Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Susan Janice Anderson and
Vonda N. McIntyre. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1976. Repr. in The
Zanzibar Cat: 205–21.
‘My Boat’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1976).
Repr. in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 22nd ser., ed.
Edward L. Ferman. New York: Doubleday Science Fiction, Double-
day, 1977; in The Zanzibar Cat; and in Tales of The Cthulhu Mythos, by
H.P. Lovecraft and Divers Hands, with illustrations by Jeffrey K. Pot-
ter. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1990.
‘How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Sci-
ence Fiction 52:2 (February 1977). Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon:
33–41.
‘Kit Meets the Dragon’. Sinister Wisdom. (Fall 1977): 9.
‘Dragons and Dimwits or … Lord of the Royalties’. The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1979). Repr. in The Zanzibar
Cat: 198–204.
‘The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand’. The Magazine of Fan-
tasy and Science Fiction (September 1979). Repr. in Nebula Winners,
Fifteen, ed. Frank Herbert. New York: Harper, 1981; and in The Zanz-
ibar Cat: 22–41.
‘It’s Important to Believe’. Sinister Wisdom 14 (1980). Repr. in The Hid-
den Side of the Moon: 70.
‘Little Tales from Nature.’ WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy Stories and
Art by Women., ed. Claudia Laperti. Lebanon, NH: New Victoria Pub-
lications, 1981: 17–21.
‘Russalka: or, The Seacoast of Bohemia’. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Con-
temporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, ed. Jack
Zipes. London: Methuen, 1981.
‘Elf Hill’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 63:5 (November
1982). Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 112–23.
‘Souls’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 62:1 (January 1982).
Repr. in The Nebula Awards # 18; in Souls. [bound with ‘Houston,
Houston, do you Read?’ by James Tiptree, Jr.]. New York: Tor SF,
1989; and in Extra(Ordinary) People: 1–62.
‘The Little Dirty Girl’. Elsewhere, ed. Terry Windling and Mark Alan
Arnold. Vol. 2. New York: Ace, 1982. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the
Moon: 1–22; and in What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Fem-
inist Supernatural Fiction, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, with an
introduction by Rosemary Jackson. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist

Press, 1989.
‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’. Speculations, ed. Isaac Asimov
and Alice Laurance. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Repr. in
Extra(Ordinary) People: 62–92; and in Worlds Apart: An Anthology of
Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Camilla Decarnin, Eric
Garber and Lyn Paleo. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986.
‘Main Street: 1953’. Sinister Wisdom 24 (Fall 1983): 11–13. Repr. in The
‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed with Homage to (Who Else) Amy
Lowell’. Heroic Visions, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson. New York:
Ace, 1983: 157–62. Repr. in The Hidden Side of the Moon: 23–28.
1983 ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’. The Seattle
Review 4:1 (Spring 1983). Repr. in Extra(Ordinary) People: 118–44.
‘Bodies’. Extra(Ordinary) People: 95–114.
‘Everyday Depressions’. Extra(Ordinary) People: 147–60.
‘Let George Do It’. Women’s Studies International Forum 7:2 (1984):
125–126.
‘Invasion’. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. (Jan. 1996). Repr. in
Years Best Science Fiction 2. Ed. by David G. Hartwell. New York:
Harper-Prism, 1997: 124–130: ‘Excerpts from a Forthcoming
Novel’. The Seattle Review 9:1 (1986): 51–58.
B: Novels
Picnic on Paradise. New York: Ace, 1968. Repr. London: MacDonald,
1969. [included in Alyx and in The Adventures of Alyx]
And Chaos Died. New York: Ace, 1970. Repr. New York: Berkley, 1979.
The Female Man. New York: Bantam, 1975; London: Star, 1977. Repr.
with a new introduction by Marilyn Hacker. Boston: Gregg Press,
1977; London: The Women’s Press, 1985.
We Who Are About To … New York: Dell, 1975. Repr. Boston: Gregg Press,
1978; London: Methuen, 1978; London: The Women’s Press, 1987.
Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic. Illustrated by Loretta Li. New York: Daugh-
ters Press, 1978.
The Two of Them. New York: Berkley, 1978; London: The Women’s
Press, 1986.
On Strike Against God. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, 1980. Repr. Tru-
mansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1985; London: The Women’s
Press, 1987.
Extra(Ordinary) People. New York: St Martins Press, 1984; London: The
Women’s Press, 1985.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 241
C: Short Story Collections

Alyx. With an introduction by Samuel Delany. Boston: Gregg Press,
1976.
The Adventures of Alyx. New York: Pocket Books-Simon & Schuster,
1983; London: The Women’s Press, 1985.
The Zanzibar Cat. New York: Baen, 1983. Also printed as a slightly dif-
ferent collection [contains ‘How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring’,
‘Poor Man, Beggar Man,’ and ‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’] with
a foreword by Marge Piercy and drawings by Dennis Neal Smith.
Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984.
The Hidden Side of the Moon. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987; Lon-
don: The Women’s Press, 1989.
D: Plays
‘Window Dressing’. Confrontation (Spring 1973): Repr. The New
Women’s Theatre, ed. Honor Moor. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
E: Poems
‘To R. L.’. Epoch 6 (1953/1955): 242.
‘Family Snapshots—Botanical Gardens, A la mode’. Epoch 7
(1955/1957): 35.
F: Criticism
‘Daydream Literature and Science Fiction’. Extrapolation 11:1 (Decem-
ber 1969): 6–14.
‘Communiqué from the Front: Teaching and the State of Art’. Colloquy
4:5 (May 1971).
‘Genre’. Clarion, ed. Robin Wilson. New York: Signet, 1971.
‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’. The Red Clay Reader [N.p.]:
[n.p.], 1971. Repr. Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives,
ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Popular Press, 1972: 79–94; and Vertex. 1:6 (Feb-
ruary 1974): 53–57.
‘The Wearing Out of Genre Materials’. College English 31:1 (October
1971): 46–54.
‘The He-Man Ethos in Science Fiction’. Clarion 2 (1972).
‘What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write’. Images of
Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornil-
lon. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press,
1972: 3–20. Repr. in To Write Like a Woman: 79–93.
‘The New Misandry.’ The Village Voice (12 October 1972).
‘Setting’. Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader, ed. R.S. Wilson. New
York: New American Library. Mentor, 1973: 149–54.
‘Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction’. Extrapolation
15:1 (December 1973): 51–59. Repr. in To Write Like a Woman:
15–25.
‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The
Modern Gothic’. Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1973): 666–91. Repr. in
To Write Like a Woman: 94–119.
‘‘What if …’ Literature.’ The Contemporary Literary Scene 1973, ed. Frank
N. Magill. Englewood, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1974.
‘Dear Colleague: I Am Not an Honorary Male’. Colloquy: Education in
Church and Society 7:4 (April 1974).
1975 ‘Introduction’. Tales and Stories, by Mary W. Shelley. Facsimile of
the 1881 Lippincott edition. Boston: Gregg Press, 1975, p. v–xviii.
Repr. as ‘On Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’ in To Write Like a Woman:
120–32.
‘This is Your Life’. Khatru 3 & 4. Symposium: Women in Science Fiction, ed.
Jeffrey D. Smith. First printing November 1975. Second printing
with additional contemporary material, ed. Jeanne Gomoll, May
1993. Madison, WI: Obsessive Press, 1993. [Suzy McKee Charnas,
Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Raylyn
Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Luise White, Kate Wil-
helm, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Virginia Kidd.]
‘On the Nature of Concrete Phenomena and Rhetorical Sleight-of-
Hand’. Khatru 3 & 4. Symposium: Women in Science Fiction.
‘Risk’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 26 (June 1975): 157.
‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction’. Science Fiction Studies (July
1975): 112–119. Repr. in To Write Like a Woman: 3–14.
‘The Scholar as Translator (Contra)’. Translators and Translating:
Selected Essays From the American Translators Association, Summer
Workshops, 1974, ed. T. Ellen, Crandell. Binghamton: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1975: 61–64.
‘Outta Space: Women Write Science Fiction’. Ms Magazine (January
1976): 109+.
‘Alien Monsters’. Turning Points: Essays in the Art of Science Fiction, ed.
Damon Knight. New York: Harper, 1977: 132–43. [Philadelphia Sci-
ence Fiction Convention speech delivered November 1968].
Comment on ‘Prostitution and Medieval Canon Law’. Signs: a Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 3:2 (Winter 1977).
Comment on ‘“The Exquisite Slave”: the Role of Clothes in the Mak-
ing of Victorian Women’ and ‘Dress Reform as Anti-feminism’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
Signs: a Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3:2 (1977).

‘“Technology”, The Immense Red Herring’. Forum on Technology and
the Literary Mind, Proceedings of the MLA Convention, December
1977. [n.p.: n.p.], [n.d.]: 1–22.
‘SF and Technology as Mystifications’. Science Fiction Studies (Novem-
ber 1978): 250–60. Repr. in To Write Like a Woman: 26–40.
Comment on Nacy Sahli’s ‘Smashing: Women’s Relationships before
the Fall’ Chrysalis 8 (1979); Chrysalis 9 (1979).
‘Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction’. Sci-
ence Fiction Studies (March 1980): 2–15. Repr. in To Write Like a
Woman: 41–59.
‘Women and Science Fiction’. Science-Fiction Studies 7:21.2 (1980).
‘On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s.’ Science-
Fiction Studies 7:22.3 (1980). Repr. in To Write Like a Woman: 60–64.
‘Not for Years but for Decades’. The Coming Out Stories, ed. Julia Pene-
lope and Susan J. Wolfe. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980.
Repr. in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts:
17–42.
‘Recent Feminist Utopias’. Future Females: A Critical Anthology, ed. Mar-
leen S. Barr. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1981: 71–75. Repr. in To Write Like a Woman: 133–48.
‘Howard Philips Lovecraft’. Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, ed.
Curtis C. Smith. New York: St Martins Press, 1981.
‘Power and Helplessness in the Women’s Movement.’ Sinister Wisdom
18 (1981).
‘How to Write Book Reviews’. The Feminist Review/New Women’s Times
(July–August 1982).
‘Being Against Pornography’. Thirteenth Moon 6:1–2 (1983).
‘Introduction’. Uranian Worlds, ed. Camilla Decarnin, Eric Garber and
Lyn Paleo. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.
‘To Write Like a Woman: Transformations of Identity in the Work of
Willa Cather’. Journal of Homosexuality (Winter 1987).
‘Introduction’. The Penguin Book of Fantasy by Women, ed. A. Susan
Williams and Richard Glyn Jones. London: Penguin, 1995.
G: Books
How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1983.
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays.
The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing
Press, 1985.
To Write Like a Woman. Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloom-

ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism.
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998.
H: Book Reviews
College English 33:3 (December 1971).
The Village Voice 14 June 1973; 9 September 1971.
Frontiers 5:5 (Fall 1980); 4:2 (Summer 1979); 4:1 (Spring 1979); 3:3
(Fall 1978); 1:1 (Fall 1975).
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 2 (1980); 11 (1979); 6
(1979); 2 (1979); 11 (1976); 4 (1975); 3 (1975); 1 (1975); 2 (1973);
12 (1972); 11 (1971); 4 (1971); 2 (1971); 2 (1971); 7 (1970); 1
(1970); 9 (1969); 4 (1969); 12 (1968); 7 (1968); 19 (1967); 12
(1966).
The Washington Post 10 May 1981; 24 February 1980; 27 January 1980;
9 May 1979; 1 April 1979; 21 January 1979.
Sinister Wisdom 12 (Winter 1980).
I: Interviews
‘Reflections on Science Fiction: An Interview with Joanna Russ’.
Quest 2 (1975): 40–49.
Walker, Paul. Speaking of SF: The Paul Walker Interviews. Oradel, NJ:
Lima, 1978: 242–52.
Platt, Charles. Dream Makers II. Berkely, NY: [n.p.], 1983. [Contains
biographical information and interview.]
Johnson, Charles. ‘A Dialogue: Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ on
Science Fiction’. Callaloo: An Afro American and African Journal of the
Arts and Letters 7:3 (22) (1984): 27–35.
Shervington, Sharon. ‘Letting all the voices speak. An interview with
Joanna Russ’. The New York Times Book Review (31 January 1988):
16.
McCaffery, Larry. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contempo-
rary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1990.
Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1993: 287–311.
Brownworth, Victoria A. ‘Battling Back’. Lambda Book Report. A Review
of Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Literature 4:7 (1994): 6–7.
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—— Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann
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Shelton, Robert. ‘The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Dis-
ease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias’. Literature and Medicine 12:2
(1993): 161–77.
Shinn, Thelma J. ‘Worlds of Words and Swords: Suzette Haden Elgin
and Joanna Russ at Work’. Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of
Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Jane B. Weedman. Lubock: Texas
Tech Press, 1985: 207–22.
Smith, Jeffrey D. (editor). Khatru 3 & 4. Symposium: Women in Science
Fiction. First printing November 1975. Second printing with addi-
tional contemporary material, ed. Jeanne Gomoll May 1993. Madi-

son, WI: Obsessive Press 1993. [Suzy McKee Charnas, Samuel R.
Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Raylyn Moore,
Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Luise White, Kate Wilhelm,
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Virginia Kidd.]
Spector, Judith A. ‘Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde: Gender-Related Conflict
in the Science Fiction of Joanna Russ’. Extrapolation. 24 (1983):
370–79.
—— ‘The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy,
and LeGuin’. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, ed.
Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood, 1986: 197–207.
Spencer, Kathleen L. ‘Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of
Joanna Russ’. Science Fiction Studies 17:2 (1990): 167–87.
Stableford, Brian, Lefanu, Sarah, Wolmark, Jenny et. al. ‘Foundation
Forum: Feminism and SF’. Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 43
(1988): 63–77.
Tiptree, James, Jr. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’. Women of Wonder. The
Classic Years. Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s, ed.
and with an introduction and notes by Pamela Sargent. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Walker, Nancy A. Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contem-
porary Novel by Women. London: University Press of Mississippi,
1990.
Weedman, J. B. (editor) Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science
Fiction and Fantasy. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1985.
Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. Trans. David Le Vay. Boston: Beacon
Press. (French edition, Paris: Les Editions Miniut, 1969,)
—— ‘One is Not Born a Woman’. in Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other
Essays. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992: 11–20.
Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens And Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Post-
modernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. ‘Feminist Fiction and the Postmodern Chal-
lenge’. Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. Larry
McCaffery. Movements in the Arts, 2. New York and Westport, CN:
Greenwood, 1986: 175–88.
Index of Names
Allison, Dorothy, 158 Defoe, Daniel, 231n

Annas, Pamela, 217 Delany, Samuel, 3, 4, 19, 58, 98, 157,
Atwood, Margaret, 109 159, 228, 230n
Austen, Jane, 100 Dickinson, Emily, 100, 122, 231n
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 104,
Bal, Mieke, 230n 109–111, 233n
Bammer, Angelica, 232n Dudevant, Aurore see Sand,
Barnes, Djuna, 101, 115 George
Barr, Marleen, 3, 6 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 1, 2
Barth, John, 43 Dworkin, Andrea, 97, 155
Bartkowski, Frances, 86
Behn, Aphra, 204 Elgin, Suzette Haden, 100, 105–109,
Benstock, Shari 118
Blake, William, 26, 34, 104 Eliot, George, 100
Bloom, Harold, 232n Ellison, Harlan, 56
Booth, Wayne, 230n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25–26
Boston Women’s Health Book
Collective, 96 Faderman, Lillian, 176, 179, 182
Brontë, Anne, 100 Faulkner, William, 231n
Brontë, Charlotte, 25, 100, 122, 204 Firestone, Shulamith, 10, 11, 76–77,
Brontë, Emily, 25, 100, 122 83, 85, 89–90, 144
Butler, Judith, 90, 170–172, 210 Freud, Sigmund, 95
Fuller, Margaret, 66, 212–213
Carroll, Lewis, 38, 104 Fuss, Dianna, 232n
Cather, Willa, 100
Charnas, Suzy McKee, 58, 97 Gearhart, Sally Miller, 97
Cixous, Hélène, 170, 232n Gilbert, Sandra, 24, 32–35, 90, 102
Cleaver, Eldridge, 71, 72 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 56, 60,
Colette, 100, 101 97, 116–117, 122, 204, 231n
Cooper, Edmund, 62–63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 26
Cranny-Francis, Anne, 5, 230n, Greer, Germaine, 197
Gubar, Susan, 24, 32–35, 90, 102
Daly, Mary, 11, 96, 128, 141, 142,
155, 166 Hacker, Marilyn, 4, 64, 163,
207–208, 228, 231n, 233n Nin, Anaïs, 204

Haddawy, Husain, 113
Haraway, Donna, 170, 210–211, 219, Perry, Donna, 1
223 Person, Ethel Spector, 131, 157,
Heinlein, Robert, 158 233n
Hemingway, Ernest, 43, 104 Piercy, Marge, 1, 86
Holt, Marilyn, 69
Howe, Florence, 6 Rich, Adrienne, 11, 93, 97, 105, 128,
Humm, Maggie, 232n 130, 141, 144, 147, 155, 165, 208
Hurston, Zora Neale, 100, 101 Richardson, Dorothy, 101
Richardson, Samuel, 231n
Irigaray, Luce, 170 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 231n
Ruether, Rosemary Radford,
Knight, Damon, 3 146–147
Koppelman, Susan, 42, 128
Kristeva, Julia, 7–9, 15, 95, 169–170, Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, 100
196, 209, 211, 228 Sand, George, 100, 102–103
Sappho, 19, 93, 174–175, 231n
Lane, Mary E. Bradley, 97 Shakespeare, William, 104
Lanser, Susan Sniader, 26, 45, 99, Sheldon, Alice see Tiptree, James Jr.
100–101, 103, 138, 231n Shelley, Mary, 24, 32–34, 44, 100,
Law, Richard, 86 102, 122
Le Guin, Ursula, 1, 2, 56, 58, 159 Shin, Thelma, 106–109, 231n
Lefanu, Sarah, 4, 5, 30, 39, 101, 205, Smith, Henry Nash, 234n
227 Smith, James, 158
Leiber, Fritz, 104 Spencer, Kathleen, 132–134, 139,
Linden, Julie, 224 142, 174, 231n
Lovecraft, H.P., 104 Stein, Gertrud, 100, 101, 143
Lowell, Amy, 100, 103 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 100
Sturgeon, Theodore, 158
Marcus, Laura, 59
Marks, Elaine, 19, 100, 155, Tiptree, James Jr., 1, 33, 58, 224
174–175, 229, 231n Turner, Frederick Jackson, 233n
Marx, Karl, 95
McIntyre, Vonda, 58 Walker, Nancy A., 86
Milton, John, 24, 32, 34 Wells, H.G., 137
Moers, Ellen, 100, 102, 103 Wilson, Woodrow, 115
Moi, Toril, 8, 96, 170 Wittig, Monique, 1, 13, 15, 218,
Moore, C.J., 158 231n, 232n
Morgan, Robin, 71 Woolf, Virginia, 100, 107
Moylan, Tom, 88, 199, 214–215 Wordsworth, William, 26
Index of Novels and Short Stories
by Joanna Russ
‘A Game of Vlet’, 47 126–129, 132, 142, 155, 160–166,

Alyx see The Adventures of Alyx 188, 198, 201, 212, 216–217, 233n
And Chaos Died, 57, 59, 77, 98, Picnic on Paradise, 47, 52–55, 57, 59,
158–160, 186, 219, 228 64, 73, 98, 106, 133, 156, 156, 192,
‘Bluestocking’, 18–23, 33, 40, 41, 42, 205, 228
43, 47–49, 71, 131, 133, 139, 174, ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’,
190, 220, 230n 175–182, 183–185,188, 189, 222
‘Bodies’, 134, 159, 220, 221, ‘Souls’, 221, 222–225
225–227 ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed with
‘Come Closer’, 41 Homage to (Who Else) Amy
‘Daddy’s Girl’, 142, 233n Lowell’, 100–104, 183
‘Everyday Depressions’, 221, 222 The Adventures of Alyx, 7, 16, 18,
Extra (Ordinary) People, 8, 98, 134, 47–55, 68, 115, 135, 155, 220,
188, 194, 196, 219–229 230n, 231n
‘I Gave Her Sack and Sherry’, 47–49, ‘The Adventuress’ see
231n ‘Bluestocking’
‘I Thought She Was Afeard Till She ‘The Autobiography of My Mother’,
Stroked My Beard’ see ‘I Gave Her 133, 131–147, 148, 150–151,
Sack and Sherry’ 152–153, 165, 174, 233n
Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic, 151–154 ‘The Barbarian’, 49–51
‘Life in a Furniture Store’, 16, 18, ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’, 36
23, 36–45, 49, 90, 102–104, 139, The Female Man, 11, 16, 18, 22, 30,
142, 183, 206, 228 41–42, 46, 55, 56–64, 65, 68, 70,
‘My Dear Emily’, 16, 18, 23–36, 40, 72–73, 74–75, 76–91, 98, 106–107,
42, 44–45, 50–52, 57, 61, 80–81, 112, 121, 122–126, 133, 140, 155,
90, 102, 104, 122, 175–177, 225, 158, 160–164, 166, 170, 176,
228 182–188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
‘Nor Custom Stale’, 1, 36 197–203, 206, 211–219, 221, 222,
‘Not for Years but for Decades’, 224, 227, 230n
142 The Hidden Side of the Moon, 36, 220,
‘Old Pictures’, 142 233n
‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’, ‘The Little Dirty Girl’, 36, 131, 133,
233n 141–142, 147–151, 165, 166, 174
On Strike Against God, 115, 122, ‘The Mystery of the Young
Gentleman’, 131, 176, 188–196, 231n, 233n

221, 229 We Who are About To …, 39–40, 162,
‘The Second Inquisition’, 135–141, 203–209, 233n
151, 152–153, 166, 174, 190 ‘What Did You Do During the
The Two Of Them, 16, 42, 55, 64–70, Revolution, Grandma?’, 159, 161,
73–74, 98, 100, 104–121, 122, 123, 176, 188, 194–196, 208, 220,
133, 136, 155–156, 162, 190, 198, 221–222
201, 204, 212, 222 ‘When It Changed’, 23, 55, 57, 59,
‘The View From This Window’, 36 77, 90, 91, 105, 181–182, 228,
The Zanzibar Cat, 24, 36, 47, 220, 231n

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Demand My Writing

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

General Editor DAVID SEED

1. ROBERT CROSSLEY, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, ISBN

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1999 Jeanne Cortiel

The right of Jeanne Cortiel to be identified

All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Part One: Agency

Part Two: Sexuality

Part Three: Indeterminacy

Primary Bibliography 235

Secondary Bibliography 245

Index of Names 251

Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ 253

One moves incurably into the future but there is no future; it

Intersection: Speculative Fiction

Few critics feel comfortable with clear-cut definitions of science fic-

introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction addresses this issue,

known to be known. … If the author offers marvels and does

manipulation in the areas where it is most effectively perpetuated:

Intersection: Feminist Theory

When there is a respectable, academically acceptable ‘femi-

This linear concept of time, according to Kristeva, was rejected by

nism is not the only concern in Russ’s writing, it does structure

Part One, ‘Agency’, focuses on the materialist aspect of Russ’s work

and ‘man’ and has extensively theorized the classic terminological

therefore dispensable from a feminist activist point of view. Further-

THE WOMEN AFFIRM IN TRIUMPH THAT ALL ACTION IS OVERTHROW—

The story of feminism as told by Julia Kristeva in ‘Women’s Time’

authorship, narration and reading as sexed and gendered acts figure

What can a heroine do?

In this delineation, the stories around Russ’s sword-and-sorcery

Designs of Becoming a Destiny: ‘Bluestocking’

… there is one and only one way to possess that in which we

women exist in plenty—so do those with gray eyes—but this woman

about women in which women were losers, and adventure sto-

Oh Dear, One Bite Too Many: Vampire meets Emerson

Emily’s blood is drawn by her subconscious or half-conscious

‘It’s not a joke!’

However, no discourse is ever purely and entirely ‘patriarchal’,

geois social interactions. The roles in this imaginary underside of cap-

Emily, in her changed state as a vampire, has transformed her ‘femi-

the myth of creation as interpreted in Paradise Lost filtered through the

What is significant in terms of agency about these various intertex-

ination. In the interview in Quest from which I quoted above, Russ

ues to develop in her writing. Her short story ‘Life in a Furniture

In, in, in, to where the worm lies in the middle … :

When I became aware [in college] of my ‘wrong’ experience, I

cal relationships, relying on a few marginal narrative elements. The

ing experiences, particularly Alice in Wonderland and Through the Look-

shop-face brilliant as a cave; with a whirl of last year’s leaves

self-consciously feminist writer. The conflict is between the desire to

paragraph determines a seemingly clear, linear chronology for the