Nicely put. I was trying to frame a similar post when I saw you had done the work already.
Intersectionality (as I understand it) is a way of describing social status, opportunities, and oppression by locating one’s various characteristics on a grid. I would do this (I’m a technical writer - I find diagrams helpful) by listing characteristics down the side (gender, dis/ability, ethnicity, economic level, education… many more) and social responses along the top (relationship to gov’t, to police, to institutions, to other citizens who are themselves characterized in many ways…).
It’s complicated. The writer in this article is pointing to a particular cell in the grid (in this case, the row is “women” and the column is "sci-fi establishment) to describe in some depth the details and history of that particular intersection. A commenter notes the similarity to other intersections (POC and the sci-fi establishment), and some take that as a “diversion.”
Understandable, I guess, but I think we can have a conversation. I don’t think the idea was to minimize what the OP was describing, especially since none of us occupy only one cell in the grid. We each have a complicated pattern that may shift over time; and via code-switching, some people even work out how to have more than one pattern at a time.
I haven’t actually tried to commit such a diagram to paper, because (a) I have a sense that it is more than 2-dimensional, and (b) I feel it might be taken as telling people how to feel or describing to them their situation - whitemansplaining, essentially. So maybe I’ll just journal it and let my kids find it…
We are having this conversation! Go us!
And no, I was not… pointing out that it’s layers of complicated stuff, more like.
The first two stories seem to have eugenics subtexts. I expect that a few of the later stories will as well. This may mirror what was happening in male science fiction of the period (1928,1931). Would be interesting to learn what Afrofuturism in Time and Space has to say about the period.
From what I can tell, despite contemporary association between eugenics and Nazism/racial supremacist ideologies, back in the 20s and 30s everyone was a eugenicist: fascists, socialists, capitalists, anarchists. The Spanish anarchists’ takes on eugenics were that an ideal society would maximize family planning and reproductive choice, and would support development across the lifetime, and the health of the population would thus improve. The Nazis, of course, were interested in a eugenics that would help them realize their incoherent loser ideology of a ‘master race’.
@anon61221983 have you tracked this? By “everyone” I mean that the concept of a eugenic program for population health—this was in the heyday of the urban public health and the public sanitation movements, likewise in the heydays of, oh, say, concentration camps for people with syphilis in the U.S.—had currency across the ideological spectrum.
It was definitely part of the mainstream discourse and was seen as a scientific fact of life. Not all of eugenics was about racial science, too. Margaret Sanger employed eugenics thinking, not as a means of excluding some races, but as a means of arguing for women’s control over their bodies as a social good backed by scientific thinking…
I would say yes… even many African American activists accepted a eugenics concept, not in terms of talking about superiority of one race over another, but as a means of advocating for black rights…
But it had negative consequences, too, along a class axis:
https://blackagendareport.com/black_eugenics_sterilization_black_poor
As with all things, it’s far more complicated than we’re often told in our history classes.
Scifi, fantasy, and horror have always seem like genera to explore liberal and progressive ideas, but the cold reality is that they where just as domimated by white men as everything else was. In the 1970s and 80s when feminist and liberal ideals where being explored, there was still a very heavy conserative prescents, just read anything by Jerry Pournelle, his best known book is about the US verse space communists.
Book review idea Mr Doctorow!
The orginal ‘Star Trek’ was the first TV show, that i know of, that exposed a mass audiance to proggressive ideas, with varying degress of sucess (lets not talk about the natvie american episode, CA-RRRRINGE). ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Alien’ where some of the first movies that explode feminist themes. Yes, they are not the best examples, Liea was a damsel in distress, but she was a damsel that knew how to use a gun and take charge of in a seemly hopless situation, Ripley ended up in her skivies at the end of the movie, but she also out witted a monsterous cosmic horror that could flay her alive.
On related themes:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-radical-notion-that-women-are-human-beings
I checked and I’m happy to see JAMES TIPTREE JR. is represented in this book.
What an amazing writer. And I was reading her stories BEFORE we knew she was a women.
yeah, Long time ago.
You do realize that women wrote books about all kinds of stuff, not just with a feminist perspective.
The point of this is that women were there, from the very beginning. It was never only white men writing sci-fi.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
