Feminism and SF

Early feminist criticism can be dated as far back as you care to go—for example, to Sappho the Greek poet (circa 600 BCE). But the modern feminism that we are discussing in this class began to develop in America the mid-1960s and became a powerful force in the 1970s and 1980s. It focused upon literary portrayals of relations between the sexes in which men trap women in social/sexual roles that they are unable to escape without tremendous sacrifices. In the literature praised by feminist criticism, women must accept the ideology of the mother-woman and sex-object, or else declare themselves through abrasive behavior to be unsympathetic and desirous of being left alone completely: i.e., not feminine in the culture’s general view. In this literature, feminism sought and found portrayals of men who are obsessed with appearances, egocentric, domineering, and petulant (or petty, or both). Politically, feminism’s goal was a critique of chauvinist society. In literature, it sought the same thing.

Part of that critique involved dispelling the "myth of romance." A female protagonist’s choices have been limited by her conditioning to be dependent upon a romantic fantasy that was born in her when she stood on the threshold of puberty. This critique asks readers to see how society diminishes women by casting them in art and imagination as always the possessions of men—unable to imagine themselves fulfilled in any other role.

A feminist criticism promotes feminist art, and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness was greeted as a major achievement for feminism when it appeared in 1969. It won the 1969 Hugo and the 1970 Nebula awards, securing the attention of the a wide public audience of readers and critics. Le Guin challenges the accepted ideas that men possess the external space and women the interior, men the central space, women the marginal. She manages to define a space that is not "built" but full of fluidity and feeling. Not hot, but cold. Tracing such adjectives, metaphors and analogies through the novel would be the work of a feminist criticism, and it would need to arrive at conclusions about whether such lists of male/female oppositions can be resolved.

Much feminist criticism reacts against Freud in defining a writing that is not “phallic” (the macho world of Hemingway, for example, as in “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story about a man and woman arguning about whether she should have an abortion). The androgynous people of The Left Hand of Darkness are part of a huge “thought-experiment” that Le Guin pursued through multiple novels.

Below you will find a PDF listing numerous works that deal with female-dominated societies, including Le Guin's.