Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  I have argued in this essay that a queer reading is performative in itself and that it is, in the long run, less about content—we have already considered the lack of queerness of gay and lesbian content within mimetic representations—than about worldview. Queer readings are informed by a desire to understand the text both in terms of its potential for representing dissident sexual subjectivities outside of a Cartesian understanding of the subject and in terms of the text’s engagement with a specific historico-cultural understanding of dissident sexualities and of the place of such sexualities within the sex/gender system that regulates and constructs normative—and thus also non-normative—ways of being-in-the-world as a sexed and sexual subject. When the questions raised by the formulations “queer reading” and “queer text” are brought to bear on sf, what is revealed is a complex and contradictory fictional arena. On the one hand, there is the particular aptness of sf, as a non-mimetic form of writing, to produce stories in which sexuality does not need to be understood in ways “vouched for by human senses and common sense” and to interrogate the ways in which sexual subjectivities are created as effects of the system that sustains them. On the other hand, there are also the variety of ways in which most sf texts, regardless of their identification as “estranged fictions,” are completely unselfconscious in their reproduction of the heteronormative environment in which they were written.

  A queer reading may then work through a range of different strategies—from decoding the outlaw cryptographies that have hidden—and may still hide—issues of sexual difference (often in plain sight) to delineating the specifics that may make a particular text queer, to disinterring the many and peculiar ways through which the dominant twentieth-century Western conception of sexuality underlies, is implicated in, and sometimes collides with sf’s attempt to envision alternative ways of being-in-the-world, ways which are always, no matter how deeply their signs are hidden, already about being-in-the-world as a person with a sex, a gender, and a sexuality. The subversive potential of sf as a mode through which non-Cartesian subjectivities can be represented is a function precisely of sf’s ability to create a “radically or significantly different formal framework” (Suvin 18), of its very estrangement from the mimetic attempt of naturalistic—or mundane—fiction to reiterate faithfully a teleological understanding of humanity’s being-in-the-world, to represent the subject as the cause rather than the effect of the system. Thus, sf’s “foundational infidelity” (Jackson 125) to the world “vouched for by human senses and common sense” at one and the same time makes it possible—although obviously not inevitable—for sf to tell alternative stories—other stories, alien stories—of both sexual ontologies and the systems that sustain and create them. Sf narratives may, seen from a queer viewpoint(s), provide a map or chart of those alien spaces—whether inner or outer—in which queers do, have, and will exist. Queer sf provides spaces to go beyond simply writing gay men and lesbians into uninterrogated heteronormative visions of both present and future and may, at its best, answer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call to bypass the old familiar routes “across the misleadingly symmetrical map . . . fractured in a particular historical situation by the profound asymmetries of gender oppression and heterosexist oppression” and, instead, to engage in

  the more promising project [which] would seem to be a study of the incoherent dispensation itself, the indisseverable girdle of incongruities under whose discomfiting span, for most of a century, have unfolded both the most generative and the most murderous plots of our culture. (90)

  Notes

  1. Henry Jenkins has a useful discussion of this movement in the final chapter (“‘Out of the Closet and Into the Universe’: Queers and Star Trek”) of Science Fiction Audiences; the history of the involvement of the Gaylaxians with Star Trek and the formation of the Voyager Visibility Project can be found online at the following url: http://www.gaytrek.com/history.html>.

  2. There is, of course, some argument as to whether humans do indeed come in only two biological sexes. For a comprehensive discussion of this issue, see Marianne van den Wijngaard’s Reinventing the Sexes: The Biomedical Construction of Masculinity and Femininity. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997).

  3. These arguments can be found online in copies of the correspondence between the producers of Star Trek and the Voyager Visibility Project that are documented at the Gaytrek web page (http://www.gaytrek.com).

  4. This now well-known story is told by Delany in “Shadows”:

  What remains with me, nearly ten years after my first reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has disappeared. The book as text . . . became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. (94-5)

  5. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have pointed out with reference to the political climate in the US, this reinscription is not merely the policy of right-wing fundamentalists but reflects a broader sociopolitical climate “whose highest aspirations are marriage, military patriotism, and protected domesticity.” They add that

  It is no accident that queer commentary—on mass media, on texts of all kinds, on discourse environments from science to camp—has emerged at a time when United States culture increasingly fetishizes the normal. A fantasized mainstream has been invested with normative force by leaders of both major political parties. (345)

  6. There is sometimes a tendency among people whose only exposure to queer theory is through academia to forget that, like earlier theorizations of same-sex and/or dissident sexualities, “queer” is not merely about playfulness and fluidity, but also about an active political engagement in the realpolitik of queer people’s lives. One might think, to take only one example, of the two major threads of political engagement that run through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work—the need to create a world that’s safe for queer kids and the desire for an ethical, humane, and sex-positive response to AIDS. See, for example, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) and “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993): 69-81. The fact that queer theory is so heavily imbricated in the study, theorization, and practical and political response to AIDS is itself an indication of the extent to which “queer” does not and, I think, should not exist purely as an intellectual construct whose primary feature is its jouissance.

  7. Annamarie Jagose has a useful discussion of the meanings and contestations of “queer” in chapters 7 and 8 (72-126) of Queer Theory, as does Michael Warner in his “Introduction” to Fear of a Queer Planet (vii-xxxi).

  8. Delany has frequently argued this position. See, for example, “Science Fiction and ‘Literature.’” Analog 99 (May 1979): 59-78, and “The Semiology of Silence: The Science-Fiction Studies Interview,” in Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994): 21-58.

  9. For an examination of this construction in both The Left Hand of Darkness and Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords, see my “Queer as Traitor, Traitor as Queer: Denaturalizing Sexuality, Gender and Nationhood” (in Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. David Ketterer [Westport, CT: Greewood Press, forthcoming]).

  10. The difficulty of ascertaining who is and who isn’t homosexual, within a conceptual framework that renders the homosexual/heterosexual dyad as the axis of difference, preoccupies science, which seeks “objective” proof of this difference, first through psychoanalysis, then through a variety of supposedly accurate physiological tests (such as the RCMP’s infamous “fruit machine”), and most recently through the drive to discover the “gay gene.”

  11. Like all “Golden Age” narratives, this one also imagines an era that never did exist; one might trace several genealogies for this particular cultural anxiety—one, at least, that trac
ks back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and another that recalls that WWI also had its Rosie the Riveter and her equivalents, whose labor freed men for military service. Yet another trace might chart much the same territory as Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera and its cinematic offspring, Cabaret.

  12. For a discussion of gays and lesbians in the military during WWII, see Allen Bérubé’s “Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (eds. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. New York: New American Library, 1989): 383-94.

  13. I do not, obviously, mean this literally, although the rhetoric of the time (from the early 1930s to the late 1950s) suggests that some of the people persecuting Jews, communists, and homosexuals saw them as being literally the same and not just as occupying the same structural position as threats to the white (Aryan), male-dominant, and heterosexual social structure.

  14. See both chapter 4 of Sinfield (60-82) and Lee Edelman’s “Tearooms and Sympathy.”

  15. Think of Marlowe’s Edward II.

  16. See Lee Edelman’s “Tearooms and Sympathy” for a discussion of this formation.

  17. Today it is impossible not to think of AIDS in the context of the role that blood plays in determining who is human and who (what) is the alien Other; in the West, where AIDS has been popularly conflated with the figure of the homosexual, “bad blood” becomes a marker not of one’s HIV status but of one’s queerness (which, as an aside, explains why lesbians, who have a very small incidence of AIDS, are widely presumed to be as much at risk—and as much a danger—as are gay men).

  18. We can see how the figure of the vampire might also serve to carry the same burden of monstrosity in this context. See, for instance, Ellis Hanson’s “Undead” for a critical discussion of the ways in which AIDS and vampirism have become conflated in popular discourses since the onset of the AIDS epidemic (Ellis Hansen, “Undead,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1991]: 324-340).

  19. There is, of course, that other improbability to be taken into account: that I, as a self-described dyke or queer, should recognize a beautiful young man when I see one. For some people, including some gay people, that, too, defies explanation.

  20. It is interesting to note, in regards to the gaze, the unease generated among the male characters in “Who Goes There?” once they become the objects of each other’s gaze; they spend a huge amount of time staring at each other, and even talking about the way in which they look at each other (“Your eyes—Lord, I wish you could see your eyes staring—” [104]). Theoretically, of course, the object of the gaze is always a sexual object—and cannot be a (heterosexual) man. To quote Laura Mulvey, “[a]ccording to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (27-28). See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. (London: Routledge, 1992): 22-34.

  21. I first encountered this useful phrase in an eponymously named article by sociologist Chrys Ingraham; it indicates a worldview that cannot imagine certain relationships as “heterosexual,” even when they occur between two people of opposite sexes. At its most heteronormative, the heterosexual imaginary cannot conceive of either a sexually aggressive woman or a sexually passive man, still less of a heterosexual man who wishes to be the receptive partner in anal sex. Anything outside of the heterosexual imaginary is thus conceived as either a perversion or a fetish.

  22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s introduction to Epistemology of the Closet gives a good historical overview of contemporary understandings of this development:

  It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another . . ., precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” (8)

  23. The quote is part of Laurence Lerner’s response to the idea that gay readers might read W.H. Auden’s poems for some sort of gay meaning. Sinfield notes that

  Lerner allows that there will have been gay readers. “That Auden was a homosexual is well known, and it is perfectly possible, even likely that some of his friends winked when they read his love poems and gave an extra smirk . . . But in doing this they were not reading the poems; they were noticing a rag of extraneous meaning that had got stuck onto them . . . They, like Sinfield, were unwriting them” (Sinfield 62-63).

  Works cited

  Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” PMLA 110.3 (May 1995): 343-49.

  Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 197-222.

  Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” In Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories, ed. Shane Phelan. New York: Routledge, 1997. 11-29.

  Delany, Samuel R. “Shadows.” In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. New York: Dragon, 1977. 51-134.

  Disch, Thomas. “Embarassments of Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction at Large, ed. Peter Nicholls. London: Gollancz, 1976. 141-55.

  Edelman, Lee. “The Mirror and the Tank: ‘AIDS,’ Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism.” In Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. 93-117.

  —. “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 93-116.

  —. “Tearooms and Sympathy: Or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet.” In Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. 148-70.

  Ellison, Harlan. “Introduction.” In San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories. New York: Ace, 1983. ix-xxviii.

  Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. 1959. New York: Ace, 1987.

  Ingraham, Chrys. “The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender.” Sociological Theory 12.2 (July 1994): 203-19.

  Jackson, Earl. Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

  Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 1996.

  Kinsman, Gary. The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities. Montreal: Black Rose, 1996.

  Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1969. Reamy, Tom. Blind Voices. 1978. New York: Berkley, 1979.

  —. “San Diego Lightfoot Sue.” 1975. In San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories. New York: Ace, 1983. 40-66.

  —. “Under the Hollywood Sign.” 1975. In San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories. New York: Ace, 1983. 40-66.

  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

  Silverberg, Robert. “Who is Tiptree? What is He?” In Warm Worlds and Otherwise. New York: Ballantine, 1975. ix-xviii.

  Sinfield, Alan. Cultural Politics—Queer Reading. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

  Stuart, Donald A. [John W. Campbell, Jr.]. “Who Goes There?” 1938. In Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, eds. Patricia S. Waugh, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. 84-124.

  Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.

  Tiptree, Jr., James [Alice Sheldon]. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” 1976. In Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, eds. Patricia S. Waugh, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. 434-74.

  —. “The Women Men Don’t See.” 1973. In Warm Worlds and Otherwise. New York: Ballantine, 1975. 131-64.

  Tulloch, John a
nd Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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  The women history doesn’t see: Recovering midcentury women’s sf as a literature of social critique

  Lisa Yaszek

  In last year’s Wiscon issue of Extrapolation I argued for the importance of reclaiming midcentury women’s SF in relation to the history of the genre as a whole. Conventionally speaking, postwar authors such as Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, and Zenna Henderson have been relegated to the sidelines of SF history because their depictions of love and life in “galactic suburbia” do not seem to have anything like the critical edge of later feminist science fictions (Russ 88). Although I certainly agree that most of the stories written by midcentury SF authors are not overtly feminist ones, that does not mean that they are not deeply enmeshed in the culture and politics of their historical moment. Instead, these authors often mobilized some of cold war America’s most dearly-held beliefs about domesticity and motherhood in the framework of the SF narrative to create powerful interrogations of the new scientific and social arrangements emerging at that time. As such, they are very much a part of SF history.

  The argument I make in this essay is that because it often forges strong parallels between interpersonal relations in the private home and broad social relations in the larger public arena, midcentury women’s SF must be seen as important to feminist history as well. One of the oldest—and arguably still most important—tasks of feminist scholarship is to recover women’s histories in all their complexities. This includes women’s political practices outside those eras marked by overtly feminist activity. The decades between the end of World War II in 1945 and the beginning of second-wave feminism in the mid-1960s, often referred to as the domestic decades, are an ideal place to begin this kind of inquiry. As I demonstrate in the following pages, women participated in some of the most progressive political movements of these decades. Of course, courtrooms and city streets were not the only places where they expressed their political convictions. They also took their stands on issues such as antiwar and civil rights activism in the pages of those science fiction magazines that seemed to be, as Judith Merril recollects, “virtually the only vehicle[s] of political dissent” available to authors of the period (“What Do You Mean” 74). To demonstrate this point I first examine how authors Judith Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Carol Emshwiller used one of the most then-fashionable SF story types, the nuclear war narrative, to interrogate the cold war status quo and champion the newly-resurrected peace movement. I then consider how Margaret St. Clair, Kay Rogers, and Mildred Clingerman adapted one of the oldest SF tropes, the encounter with the alien other, to advocate the cause of civil rights in America. Taken together, this group of stories provide a powerful demonstration of how midcentury women’s literary practices both anticipated and extended the politics of their activist counterparts.