Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond

By Marleen S. Barr

Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical alternatives to mainstream patriarchal society. Because feminist science fiction challenges male-centered social imperatives, it has been marginalized and dismissed from the canon--thus, lost in space. Moving beyond feminist science fiction itself, Barr goes on to examine other literary genres from the perspective of 'feminist fabulation'--a term she has coined to encompass science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and mainstream literature that critiques patriarchal fictions. Discussing the works of such writers as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Marge Piercy, Barr illuminates feminist science fiction's connections to other literary traditions and contemporary canons. Her critical analysis yields a new and expanded understanding of feminist creativity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469639765

Marleen S. Barr

Marleen S. Barr, associate professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory and Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction.

Book preview

1. THELMA AND LOUISE

DRIVING TOWARD FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION

This road movies brand of escapism offers transcendence, not instruction—and it rises above both the everyday and the limits of its genre. Thelma and Louise is transcendent in every way.

—Janet Maslin, "Lay Off Thelma and Louise"

I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. . . . For the mental desert form expands before your very eyes, and this is the purified form of social desertification.

Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed. All that is cold and dead in desertification or social enucleation rediscovers its contemplative form here in the heat of the desert. Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

—Jean Baudrillard, America

Thelma and Louise share Baudrillard’s search for astral America. Disaffected women who desert patriarchy, they embrace the America of desert speed, enjoy the freedom of the freeways, and contemplate themselves. Disappearing in the desert enables them to author an ecstatic critique of patriarchal culture. Their road trip is not, as they state, a journey to Mexico (a country, of course, offering no feminist haven) but rather a transcendent merger with the desert defined as transpolitical mental space. Submerged in the desert, which is a sublime form that banishes all sociality, all sentimentality, all sexuality (Baudrillard, 71), these escapees from dead-end female lives enter a terrain beyond patriarchal language—ultimately beyond all aspects of patriarchal reality. Ensconced in alternative space, they experience Baudril-lard’s question and answer: Why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there—a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profluidity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points (Baudrillard, 123—24). I argue that their journey in outer hyperspace, their drive beyond patriarchal meaning systems, conforms to feminist science fiction tropes. Thelma and Louise, transcendent in every way, offers feminist escapism—the ability to rise above the patriarchal real.

British director Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise has much in common with his science fiction films Alien and Blade Runner (the latter based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)¹ Ripley, the female protagonist of Alien, fights a monster on another planet. Thelma and Louise, who learn that females are treated as alien Others on planet Earth, battle the monstrous patriarchy. Further, while Blade Runner focuses on how Deckard, a police officer, hunts replicants (androids), Thelma and Louise portrays police chasing newly remodeled women who no longer replicate patriarchal imperatives. Thelma and Louise, hunted, recreated, alien women, soldiers poised to shoot anything resembling a patriarchal bug-eyed monster, try, when confronted with the end of their world, to create a women’s world of their own. The note Thelma leaves in the microwave communicates finality. The microwave, the waste disposal . . . this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world (Baudrillard, 31). The end of Thelma’s and Louise’s lives in the patriarchal world occurs when Thelma realizes that she inhabits a micro-world and Louise realizes that it is a waste to spend her life moving food from restaurant table to waste disposal. Their last resort is, in the manner of Ibsen’s Nora, to slam the door on