Margaret Galvan

Empowering Feminist Fabulation: Drawing Together Genre Criticism Further Frees Female Form

 

Joanna Russ, science fiction writer and critic, sees the speculative realm as the one in which female writers can escape the chains of patriarchy, which are projected onto characters as archetypes, and write “real women.”  However, Angela Carter and James Tiptree, Jr. very deliberately project archetypes onto their female protagonists in “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” offering these categorizations only to expose their nonsense and access the space for true female expression that Russ pinpoints. The projected characters Carter and Tiptree pile onto their female protagonists create layered readings of their short stories, where the false fronts visible in a surface reading dissolve to reveal the presence of these females in the interstices that cannot be pinned down by any one archetype. Further, their use of the respective genres of magical realism and science fiction allow this freedom of female expression through narrative uses of defocalization and mirroring. The hybrid and fantastic qualities of both these modes permit what critic Jenny Wolmark calls “complex articulations of difference,” such that Carter’s protagonist can be more than one-dimensional bride and wife and Tiptree’s P. Burke can be something beyond a horrifically ugly creature. In considering these two seemingly incongruously paired genres together, I will be engaging science fiction critic Marleen S. Barr’s idea of “feminist fabulation,” which invites an expansive consideration of speculative feminist texts and thereby illuminates new ways to read both short stories and investigate the presence of the female protagonists behind the false facades.

Margaret Galvan is a first-year PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, who originally hails from Los Angeles. When she isn’t freezing or scouring the city for decent Mexican food, she enjoys investigating the use and function of gender in speculative texts, particularly those penned by women.