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.
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