graycastle's review
The Female Man
by Joanna Russ
graycastle's review
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
graycastle's review
rating:
bookshelves:
feminism,
scifi
recommended for: feminists, scifi fans, people who like narrative experimentation
This book is just so smart: witty, powerful, and acrobatic. It bends over backwards to anticipate its own reviews, the dismissals of its feminist message, and its eventual obsoleteness. I mean this in a great way: the book is very meta, experiments with levels of narrative (including a character who is the author) and does extremely new and interesting things with scifi conventions of time travel and alternate universes. What I love most about this book is the way in which it uses conventions and tropes already latent in scifi in order to create its feminist narrative - it's not just a feminist novel slapped onto a scifi novel; the two genres interpenetrate and inform each other in beautiful ways. It's also very 70s, but the scary thing is, I don't think it's all that out of date; many of the issues with which the narrative deals are still problems for women, for men, and for queer women and men, even almost forty years after it was written.
