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Feminist Gender Roles In Joanna Russ's The Female Man

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Science fiction is “a fiction of the imagination rather than observed reality” (Roberts, 2006, p. 1). It is a genre which enables readers to envisage and express new ideas of the workings of our society. According to Lefanu (1988), science fiction can be used “metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of woman” (p. 180). Hence, I believe that portraying and imagining a new society through a feminist lens can be especially formidable. Feminist science fiction predominantly addresses the female gender role in society, exploring the construction of social gender roles. It extrapolates and addresses the issues that women face in the present world (Donawerth, 1997, p. 112). This can be illustrated through a …show more content…

The novel revolves around four different women: Janet, Jeannine, Joanna and Jael and their individual sufferings in dealing with men. It was written amid the second wave feminism with the intention to point out how malignant male behavior towards women is. Women in the novel want to free themselves from traditional social gender roles and grapple with the perception that they cannot be the females that society wants them to be. Janet is from Whileaway, an all female society in the future. In contrast, Jeannie is entirely locked and conformed to traditional gender roles during the Great Depression. As an active feminist from the 70’s, Joanna seems to represent the author herself. The last character Jael is from a dystopia world where men and woman are in a continual battle. When the four characters meet, they exchange different perceptions on gender roles and change one another’s pre-existing views on womanhood. Jeannine and Joanna help Jael to bring women soldiers into their worlds to fight men but Janet refuses to. In the end, they went back to their own worlds to reflect on their lives and their identity as a …show more content…

80). This corresponds to Wittig’s (1986) opinion as he feels that one needs to understand that “men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been and is continually at every moment, appropriated by men” (p. 66). Since patriarchies always position themselves from the male point of view, the female culture is often submersed and feminine traits are culturally held to be inferior as a

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Therefore, Russ’s work is divisive amongst races and, furthermore, to many other feminists’ ideals, to be sure. However, Russ cavils the minimal that are both material feminist and science fiction enthusiasts. Ursula K. LeGuin’s and James Tiptree, celebrated as groundbreaking and revolutionary, in Russ’s eyes were no more than patriarchal works that focused on women instead of the deconstruction of women. Farah Mendelsohn states, “Russ argues that despite the close attention that women authors pay to women characters and to inventing worlds marked by gender equity, the gender stereotypes that pervade science fiction by men show up “just as often” in the science fiction written by women.” Mendelson attributes that some of the assailment could be attributed to competition.

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Throughout history, women have made a name for themselves. By rising up and fighting for something that they believed in, the Mirabal sisters made a name for themselves in the Dominican Republic and in Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies. By applying a theory to a novel, readers can relate the book to the world they are living in today (Davidson). Feminism can be defined as a dynamic philosophy and social movement that advocates for human rights and gender equality (“Feminism”). Feminist Theory involves looking at how women in novels are portrayed, how female characters are reinforcing stereotypes or undermining them, and the challenges that female characters face (Davidson).

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