2014 read #78: The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
215 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 5 to August 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The only way I can grok this book, it seems, is to think of it in terms of '70s-style avant garde film. Not that I'm an expert on that domain --  Zardoz (if it can be counted as avant garde, and not merely trying-hard-to-be-cult) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain are pretty much the extent of my exposure. But The Female Man shares much with The Holy Mountain: the burlesque on gender in different societies, the satirical exaggeration of social arenas such as the military and housewifery, the broad allegory, the non-linear structure, the metafictional incorporation of the auteur within the work, the occasional lack of actually making sense in any way.

Unlike The Holy Mountain, The Female Man additionally lacks much in the way of what I could recognize as a plot; what little there is could more aptly be described as a situation. A man-killing assassin (from a world in the multiverse where Manland and Womanland are locked in perpetual war) gathers together her equivalents from other worlds in the multiverse, whose stories and attitudes are used to amplify the arguments of second-generation feminism. As with all materials from second-generation feminism, women of color are mostly invisible, and transgender folks are depicted with what I feel is distaste verging on scorn, positing “transsexualism” as an aberrant identity forced into being by the needs of militant masculinity and a phobia of "true homosexuality."

The Female Man is best where Russ waxes angriest. Her extended rants, dripping with sarcasm and venom, hit with a hundred blows, most often on the mark. Where the story pauses to develop a half-assed science-fictiony framework for the parallel worlds and the different depictions of (white) womanhood is where it sags. I derived some amusement from the idea that a second-gen feminist would have to resort to alternate universes to present the role of enculturation and expectations on otherwise identical women, as opposed to noticing the experiences of women from different racial categories or levels of affluence or anything of that nature. Intersectionality, at this stage of ideological development, seemingly only referred to intersections of the multiverses.