Feminist Fabulation

For my independent study this summer, I'm looking at several books that theorize science fiction. Here's a reading response for the first book on my list that I recently submitted to Dr. Wegner.

Barr, Marleen S. Feminist Fabulation: Space/postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Print.

I chose to read Barr’s Feminist Fabulation because of my interest and continuing reading in feminist SF. Donna Haraway outlines several feminist SF texts in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” including authors such as Joanna Russ (The Female Man), Alice B. Sheldon (The Girl Who Was Plugged In), Vonda McIntyre (Superluminal and Dreamsnake), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She, and It), Ursula K. Leguin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler. Haraway also points to several male authors of feminist SF, such as Samuel Delany and John Varley (Titan). Barr is similarly open to the idea of male feminist authors. I view this group of authors as a powerful example of how wide-ranging SF is in its imaginative, political, and ethical aims; the notion that science fiction is a white male-dominated genre might have been true early in the twentieth-century, but it would be difficult to make such an argument today.

Barr, however, is less concerned with the genre-specific features of science fiction than she is with challenging the canon of “postmodern fiction.” She valorizes a group of female authors of postmodern fiction whom she believes have been marginalized by a male literary establishment; women’s SF has been dismissed as “genre fiction.” Barr also problematizes the label “science fiction” as it is sometimes applied to women authors. Often women writers are less concerned with science and imaginative extrapolations of technological advances as they are in applying insights drawn from feminist theory to create speculative worlds that challenge patriarchy. The “novum” of feminist fabulation, so to speak, is not a scientific or technological one (like a time machine or a mutated virus) as often as it is derived from feminisms (a new, non-patriarchal social structure, for instance). As Barr writes, “‘Science,’ in the sense of technology, should be replaced by a term which has social connotations and focuses upon new sex roles, not new hardware” (5).

Barr believes feminist fabulation “is a catalyst for social change . . . [and] feminist literary scholars should surely strive to affect society by introducing these imaginative texts to colleagues, to students, and to the general public” (5). Barr, quoting William Sims Brainbridge, also reminds the reader that “SF has become a major category of popular culture and one of the most important media for the development and dissemination of radical ideologies” (4). Barr defines feminist fabulation as “the postmodern age’s idea of how to retell, from a feminist point of view, the patriarchal stories which construct the world” (272). She further argues that “postmodern canons should contain space for feminist fabulators” (272).

Barr also attempts to resituate contemporary feminist fabulators within the tradition of women’s literature. She charts connections between modernist mothers such as Hurston and Woolf and postmodernist daughters Russ and Tiptree. Early chapters focus on space: flying, domesticity, and social space shared by men and women. Later chapters focus on “female protagonists who transform after… conducting self-experiments based upon rewriting partriarchal narratives” (xxiii). Barr refutes Zimmerman’s observation that “more arguments exist for a postmodern feminist aesthetic than do examples of one” through many in-depth close readings of feminist fabulators. Although Barr seems ultimately concerned with altering the contours of the canon of postmodern fiction to include women, the text provides a useful way to conceptualize feminist SF and its different speculative concerns as they compare with more traditional male “hard SF” and cyberpunk.