Lit Bug (Foram)'s Reviews > The Female Man

New addition to the old review:

I'd wished to prove myself wrong in less than a year by declaring that I was in love with this book. Sadly, I'm even more indignant. The issue is topical. It isn't that it is outdated nearly 40 years after its publication. The issue is that the same ideas have been depicted in a far more interesting way in fiction since it was written.

It was radical at that time - Russ was one of those few female writers writing hard SF good enough to take credit for inspiring Gibson. She was of an even rarer breed for incorporating queers in feminist hard SF. Le Guin, Octavia Butler were writers of Soft SF. Understandably, it became an overnight classic.

However, its feminist arguments have been appropriated better in later fiction, especially in the feminist cyberpunk sub-genre by a number of brilliant women writers as well. Not all of them are lucid or flawless, but their books are far more interesting and far less confusing.

Even the plot is not an issue here - but the style is. It is easily one of the most difficult ones, structurally. Perhaps, if you're head over heels in love with modernist prose to the extent that you actually enjoy confusing narration, you'll rate it in full even if you do not agree with this particular brand of feminism (It is broadly based on what is called Nature v/s Nurture argument, or what Beauvoir summarized as "One is not born a woman; one becomes one." or what Judith Butler would say, "Gender is Performance".)

However, I'd rather read the beautifully written No Woman Born by C. L. Moore from her collection The Best of C. L. Moore, which makes the point much more clear.

Or maybe, I'm just so disenchanted with abruptly shifting storylines and narrators and narration POVs that this is really a classic I am not smart enough to appreciate. Whatever it is, I rate it 3 stars in consideration for its radical nature when it was written, and its feminism, and take away the 2 stars for lucidity and comprehensibility.

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Old Review but considerably Revised

A thought-provoking example of feminist sci-fi, "The Female Man is the story of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or remove the growing scandal of gender" as summarized by eminent critic Donna J. Haraway.

Each of the four versions live in a different world from ours, and when they meet, we see four versions of ideologies that have been perpetrated on the alternative worlds. Russ' planet Whileaway, notorious for the complete absence of the first sex, the Man, is present here, an ideal world that has lived blissfully without that warring species of humanity for 400 years.

Joanna, the titular Female Man, is a bright, edgy woman of the contemporary (1970s) woman, who realizes she is trapped in the role of women and wishes to become a man.

Jeannine is soft, docile and dreams of admiration. Her world is our world except that Hitler never took power, World War II never happened, Japan controls China and the Great Depression is still on.

Janet Evason, the resident of the planet Whileaway (our Earth in the distant future) without men, and who abruptly visits Jeannine's world, is one of the main characters in focus.

Jael, the most enigmatic character, is the puppeteer - in her alternative parallel world, men and women are segregated, and at war, set in the timeframe somewhere in between contemporary Earth and before Whileaway came into existence. Her mission is to get these four women together, to launch a hidden revolution against men in their own times.

While these women enter each other's worlds, they bring their own reactions to it, evidence of how the same woman has different opinions of the same thing in different parallel universes. (For an easier explanation, remember the movie Men in Black 3 - there are endless possibilities for each action, out of which, one will be played out and will determine our fates.)

As the women go back to their own worlds, though, they are visibly changed - they undergo transformations at the exposure to what their life could have been or still could be.

Unconventional, perhaps not titillating to a newcomer in sci-fi, but a delightful read ideologically as one becomes progressively aware of its ideological underpinnings and horribly complex and boring otherwise. More of an ideological sci-fi than a mainstream SF work.

But it is pointless, or counter-productive to make brilliant expositions on the nature of gender politics in a confusing, uninteresting way. Which is why I utterly dislike reading this book, though I love this book.