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Joanna Russ
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 How
to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
"She didn't write it. She wrote it but she
shouldn't have. She wrote it but look what she wrote about. She
wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art.
She wrote it but she had help. She wrote it but she's an anomaly.
She wrote it BUT..." How to Suppress Women's Writing
is a meticulously researched and humorously written
"guidebook" to the many ways women and other
"minorities" have been barred from producing written
art. In chapters entitled "Prohibitions," "Bad
Faith," "Denial of Agency," Pollution of
Agency," "The Double Standard of Content,"
"False Categorization," "Isolation,"
"Anomalousness," "Lack of Models,"
Responses," and "Aesthetics" Joanna Russ names,
defines, and illustrates those barriers to art-making we may have
felt but which tend to remain unnamed and thus insolvable. With
the apparent proliferation of women writers in the last decade, is
this book still relevant? Ask yourself how many women you know who
are trying to make art? And how many find the time, resources, and
support to succeed? So long as poverty, lack of leisure, and
sexism - those "powerful, informal prohibitions against
committing art" - exist, How to Suppress Women's Writing remains
timely. -- From 500
Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
 What
Are We Fighting For? : Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of
Feminism by Joanna Russ
It has become fashionable
for younger feminists, known as the "Third Wave," to
consider themselves beyond the battles of the women's movement of
the 60's and 70's. Who better than a lively, long-standing
feminist to remind them, with wit and passion, of how much more
there is to be done?
In chapters such as "Mommy, Where do Baby
Theories Come From?" and "I Thee Wed, So Watch It,"
feminist critic and science fiction novelist Joanna Russ questions
the recent feminist shift in focus from politics to psychological
issues. Russ addresses the place of women of color, lesbians,
separatists, and socialists in the modern feminist movement, and
offers practical suggestions for how women can get back to the
real feminist fight. One strength of the book for those who want
to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of feminist history is that
Russ is extremely well-read in her subject, and taken to
extensively quoting the arguments and theories of other feminist
thinkers. She has also included an enormous bibliography of books
and pamphlets for further reading.Russ is both sassy and
well-informed--just the kind of woman from whom a 90's feminist
might take some lessons. --Maria Dolan
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Review by Doug Fratz, scifi.com
Excerpt:
Joanna Russ's classic 1970s SF novel features
four women from alternative Earths that each have very different
relations between the sexes. Joanna is from modern Earth and is
striving to find a feeling of personal self-worth that is
difficult to attain in a male-dominated society. She provides
stream-of-consciousness commentary on her society, its social
mores and sexual stereotypes. Jeannine is a meek librarian from an
alternative Earth with even more restrictive gender roles. She
yearns for more than her bleak second-class existence and
indifferent male-chauvinist boyfriend. Janet is from an
alternative future Earth, called Whileaway, where all of the men
died centuries ago and an all-female society has evolved, without
wars or poverty. She finds men both arrogant and repelling. Jael
is from an alternative future world where men and women live in
separate armed camps. She is an assassin who enjoys killing men
and who lives in isolated luxury with a male sex slave...
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From StrangeWords.com
Excerpt:
The Female Man is
an exciting book to read for three major reasons, device, style,
and gender treatment. From a strictly sci-fi standpoint, it
postulates a great probabalistic multiverse, which deals with a
lot of the pesky problems of "conventional" time travel.
Time travel is across parallel universes, and it is impossible to
visit your own past or future, only closely related worlds. It's a
neat way to do away with the paradoxes inherent in traveling
through time. The story also has a disjointed and muscular style,
jumping between POV's, characters, and times. The narrative style
is challenging and compelling, forcing the reader to work the
story, and assimilate it in more than one way. The most exciting
facet is Russ' deconstruction of gender and gender roles. She
builds a world without the "poisonous binary" of gender,
creating an all women utopia that is not anti-man, but pro-human.
The strong negative reaction by the (male) reviewing community,
who labeled it a male-hating diatribe, when it clearly is not, is
a testament to the strength of Russ' arguments...
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Names Index:
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