I don’t normally post about science fiction related things here, since it’s not really the focus of the blog (although that will probably change since it’s pretty much my life right now), but it is something I’m really into. So, NPR had a story yesterday about James Tiptree, Jr., called The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B. Sheldon. They interviewed the author of a new biography of Tiptree that came out earlier this year. This isn’t news to me, and won’t be to some of you, but I still thought it was really cool to hear something about such an influential female SF writer on a mainstream program.

For those of you who don’t know who she was and don’t want to have to follow the link, I’ll sum up with the written introduction on the NPR page:

Science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr. earned the reputation of being a male author who understood women.

Tiptree’s stories often addressed gender issues — on Earth and in worlds beyond.

One story in particular involves a woman opting to live with an alien nation, for the sole reason of avoiding the feeling of confinement she has in her male-dominated society.

There was a deep secret behind Tiptree’s sensitivity: In reality, he was a she. Alice B. Sheldon (1915 - 1987) used the male pen name to write in a time when male authors could expect more success in the realm of science fiction.

Julie Phillips wrote James Tiptree, Jr., a biography subtitled: “The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.” Phillips tells Andrea Seabrook why she was inspired to write the book, more about who Sheldon was and how the nom de plume changed Sheldon’s life.

Tiptree has really been an influence on my life and writing. Not because I’ve been influenced greatly by her style and subject matter, although I do think some of her writing is excellent, but more because her life and approach to it is so fascinating. I’ve always found the “feminine” gender role limiting. Until a few years ago, growing up, I felt I could solely identify with male role models, because I knew of few women who lived the sorts of lives men have always been allowed. It seemed that being female, feminine, limited you to a certain set of expectations, potentials, possibilities. Whereas being male or at least acting like it allowed anything to be possible. Men could do anything, be anyone. Women could be wives, mothers, and love interests. (Failing that, temptresses, witches, and Lady Macbeth. These have always been the feminine archetypes I preferred.)

I grew up in Utah, where gender roles and gendered expectations are alive and well and much more overt than in many other parts of the US, and this profoundly affected me. My mother was surprisingly feminist considering her background, and even though she was a stay at home mother of five (who now regrets her decision not to work), she always told me there was nothing wrong with being a girl and that I could do anything I wanted to do, anything a boy could. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, even if our parents are wonderful they are not the only influences on our life, and what I heard from my mother seemed to contradict the reality that assaulted me every day.

While I never did not believe I could not accomplish anything I wanted, it was in spite of being a girl, not because the playing field was level. I did not see success as a female achievement; it was masculine by nature, and the few women I did see who managed had earned, in my mind, an honorary entry into the “male” category, the male world, because they had succeeded despite being women. They had breached the male realm and managed to hold their own. It was not a gender-neutral space and it was not fair to women. I had few professional female role models, notably Sheri S. Tepper and Isabel Allende but mostly them, exclusively. But, at the time, I didn’t recognize this as being a gendered thing, a phenomenon in which men are human by default and women are something else; I simply felt I couldn’t relate to women and girls.

I simply did not identify with them, felt I shouldn’t be one of them, felt we had nothing in common. I was ambitious and aggressive and the women around me were not; the ones who were, I recognize now, I ignored as being exceptions rather than realizing one does not have to strictly adhere to the gender role to be feminine or female. And this made me angry. It was unfair I should have to be female. I never asked for it. I didn’t want it. I wanted to be recognized in a neutral manner without the assumptions a woman is subject to for being a woman — I want that still, but now I direct my anger at the establishment rather than at other women. At the time, I was very young, did not know how to process or express this feeling of inequality. I just knew that I rejected the notion I’d been given of what it meant to be female and that the easiest way to solve that problem would be if I could somehow, in some sense, be male.

Given that, the escapist desire I had to disassociate from the female experience, the story of James Tiptree, Jr., appealed to me. This was a woman who wrote sensitive prose, yes, which considered women’s place in the world and examined what she considered to be the basic inequality between men and women in society. But, at the same time, she was alienated from other women, and, by all accounts I’ve read, had at best ambivalent feelings about being one. Her stories usually come from a male perspective, from the voice of a male narrator, because she could not seem to envision women who had lived the life she had, her experiences, her viewpoint. She did not write a strong female characters; they were either victims or completely alien, unfathomable creatures. What I have read of her suggests they were not written this way because she was trying to demonstrate what women seem to be from a male perspective, but because she genuinely felt women were alien, Other, and that she was not really or should not be one of them. The Tiptree persona, then, was Alli Sheldon’s way of quieting the cognitive dissonance, bridging the gap between her identity and her biology. Who she was, was a gruff, heroic persona, an almost-legendary figure compared in life experience to Hemingway; but how could a woman be that? In her mind, she wasn’t really a woman. Women were not that sort of people. And I think that’s where her anger came from, her feminism; it was unfair she should be treated that way based only on her body, since she didn’t relate to it the way that was considered normal.

I’ve written about my own struggle with this, my own ambivalence about identifying as a woman, my own difficulties embracing a definite gender identity. The difference is: when I decided I hated women, hated femininity, hated femaleness, because it meant people treated me a certain way I didn’t like, rather than hating misogyny, I was in high school and reluctant to identity myself as a feminist. I’m 20 now and I’ve realized that was a flawed way of looking at the situation, and that the problem is the underlying framework, not women themselves from being oppressed. Alli Sheldon was much older, and she never seemed to resolve this struggle about what it meant to be a woman in her own mind. She never seemed to accept that, well, she was a woman and she’d had the life she had, so wasn’t that a role women could adopt? That there was nothing inherently masculine about it?

In my speculative fiction, I do not want to write about women the way Tiptree did. She demonstrates consistently in her writing both a reverence for and apprehension about the power of women. She explored what it meant to be a woman (interestingly enough, not what it meant to be a man) but never seemed to find any answers. Women, to her, remained a mystery — but, I think, only because she was looking too hard. The answer was right there before her: women were not simply mothers, daughters, wives, but also women like her, who had been in the military, worked for the CIA. Women like her mother, who traveled to unknown, dangerous, exciting parts of the world. Strong women, soldiers, spies, explorers. These are not exceptions to the rule of what it is to be female — these are part of the spectrum of possibilities.

And so I write strong characters. Women of all types: gentle and loving, a little too quick to defer to the needs of others rather than stand up for themselves; serious and all business, with no time for nor interest in love; complex and impossible to comprehend, alien creatures with ways of thinking entirely different from our own; sexy and seductive, taking what they want and making no apologies; butch, strong as or stronger than the men around them but still unmistakably female; androgynous and awkward, not fitting in anywhere, only possibly concerned with that fact.

And, more important, the men I write encompass all those roles as well. Fair is fair, and moreover, complex and unusual characters with distinct personalities are much more fun to write and read about than cookie-cutter stereotypes.

An unrelated note on the linked story: there’s also some interesting related links at the bottom of the page, including an obituary for Octavia Butler (that page also links to an interview with her that I have to go listen to now), an interview in 2002 with Sheri S. Tepper on Fresh Air, and an article about science fiction themes becoming normalized in mainstream literary writing. (To paraphrase Terry Prattchet, “People say they don’t like science fiction. That’s just because they don’t know what it is.” Which is pretty much what I’ve been trying to tell my non-SF-inclined friends for years who somehow think my writing is okay, and “isn’t really” SF because it’s not Star Wars. Sigh.) I have found the secret archive of SF-related NPR stories!! I am a nerd!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Gender and Sex, In The News, Random, Speculative Fiction, Writing.