The Female Man

"This is one of the science fiction novels that influenced me from the very beginning. I read it when I was in college, having stopped reading science fiction for a while but come back to it. There’s definitely both a science fictional element and a kind of magic realist element to this book. It’s the story of three women living in different time periods, kind of alternate histories. As the book unfolds, we start to think that maybe these are all the same woman. One is living in a kind of alternate 1930s. One of them is from the future, where there’s a battle between patriarchs and feminists – she’s a warrior. And she comes back in time to the 1960s, the ‘present day’, to try to change things, where she winds up having an ambiguous romance with one of the women in the present. And, at the same time, on top of this time travel story – which is your classic ‘I’ve come to warn you about a dangerous future’ story – it’s also a record of all the mundane microaggressions that women are experiencing in all these different contexts and places. For me, that’s the part that really stood out. Joanna Russ is such a great observer of human behaviour, and she’s really sensitive to how different historical periods produce different kinds of gender-based insults and aggressions. “Time travel becomes a metaphor for how we change things in the present” There’s a fantastic scene at a faculty party for professors in a humanities department, which is written as a play. It’s just dude after dude making these snotty little assertions about women, and our character – who’s a woman professor – having to navigate this room full of assholes. That was set in what was then the present day. Reading it now, it feels like a glimpse of second wave feminist history. So it’s just delightful: really angry and fierce, just like all of Joanna Russ’s work, and it has some pretty weird twists and turns. It still holds up, especially if you look at it as a record of this moment in feminism when women were finally pushing back – and how they did it. One of the big existential threats for women, especially feminists, is that with just a few wrong turns politically, we could once again be reduced to property. That’s obviously the fear at the heart of The Handmaid’s Tale , where suddenly there’s a presidential decree that states that women can no longer control their finances. That’s the big turning point in the dystopia. So, like a lot of women, Joanna Russ was really haunted by that fear. You know: ‘What if I couldn’t have a job, and had to rely on men?’ That’s terrifying. So there are a lot of ways that can happen – through economic downturn, through the rise of a really right-wing government… And, like I said, this book is a smorgasboard of the terrible things that can transform gender relationships, and make them less equitable. Actually, you see this a lot in time travel books. It’s interesting. I mean, Joanna Russ was very much playing with the postmodern literary ideas that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, the ones that Kathy Acker was playing with later – putting yourself into a story. But one of my other picks, the Charles Yu novel, does the same thing."