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The Girl Who Was Plugged In By James Tiptree

493 Words2 Pages

In the 1970s, James Tiptree Jr. was a popular science fiction writer. He wrote tales about the roles of men and women and questioned which gender should perform certain roles. Tiptree’s readers thought his stories were masculine, which is why it came to be a shock when his true identity was revealed. Tiptree was actually a woman by the name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. She created another name to write with because she wanted to be taken seriously in the male-dominated genre of science fiction. The name Tiptree was not just a name to Sheldon, he was a separate identity that had his own thoughts and feelings. Her stories were not studied deeply until after she was discovered to be a woman. Readers started to notice the way she didn’t support …show more content…

To study her writing style, I will be closely reading three of her short stories and finding evidence within them. This evidence will be used to show Sheldon’s beliefs on gender and explore how they relate to her different personalities. The first story I will analyze is “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and this was one of her most popular stories. This story will be my main focus because it will show how Sheldon is using Tiptree to live her life. In the story, the main character P. Burke is plugged up to wires in a lab and with the wires she is able to control another girl’s body. The way the main character controls the girl’s body mirrors the way Sheldon uses Tiptree. The other two stories that I will look at are “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” and “The Women Men Don’t See.” These two stories will be used to emphasize the power structures between men and women because the gender roles within these stories are not stereotypical. The women in them see men as a threat and either kill them or run away from them. With the three stories I hope to study Tiptree as a separate identity and how Sheldon uses him to create a new kind of

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The Girl Who Was Plugged In was written by James Tiptree Jr., a pen name used by American science fiction writer Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon used a male pen name to write during this time, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, because it was considered non viable for women to be successful science fiction writers. In 1977, her true identity had become known and she is noted for breaking down the barriers between writing as a “male” or a “female”. Originally, many had wondered if Tiptree was indeed female yet, her writing appeared to be strongly masculine. Her short story, The Girl Who Was Plugged In, won the 1973 Hugo Award for best short story and throughout the text Tiptree discusses various applied sciences and technologies of our future, making

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