But oh, what wonders we would miss!
Adapted from Astronomical Games, November 2001.
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Brian Tung is a computer scientist by day and avid amateur astronomer by night. He is an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and runs his own astronomy Web site. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Both/And: Science Fiction and the Question of Changing Gender
By Sherryl Vint
2/18/02
The figure of the transsexual or transvestite circulates as an extremely charged image in contemporary debates about sex and gender. From Judith Butler’s celebration of drag as that which reveals that all gender is a performance, to Janice Raymond’s characterization of transsexuals as an empire of men bent on subverting feminism from within, theorists of gender have found in transgendered people an extraordinary range of meanings and ideological agendas.
Readings such as Butler’s argue that the production of gender identity as a cultural system extends even to the materiality of the body itself, unduly limiting the range of bodily morphologies that could materialize, in Butler’s double-meaning of that term. Other critics, such as Raymond, insist that the material body remains essentially male or female, and that the target of critique should be the system of gendered social behaviours that we attach to these gendered bodies. Transgender people themselves are torn between occupying a subject position that inherently challenges the sex/gender system and a requirement (now receding) to articulate their ‘problem’ in terms of essentialized gender identity so that they meet the psychological standard for gender reassignment surgery. Both their own self-representations and the use of their image by cultural theorists struggle with the nature/nurture, biology/culture debate, and the question of how best to challenge the current sex/gender system.
In this article, I would like to consider what speculative fiction (SF) can contribute to this discussion. In the world of SF, gender reassignment surgery can occur with an ease that is not possible in our own world. Through the trope of perfected technology, SF is able to raise questions about the malleability of gender identity given a perfectly malleable body. Not limited by what Anne Balsamo has called “the irreducible distinctiveness of the material body,” SF bodies can inhabit any gender—male, female, something in between, or nothing at all—and can switch with ease from one to the other. This ability makes SF bodies a potentially useful site for challenging the cultural construction of gender.
I’m going to explore the representation of the gender-fluid SF body in two SF texts, Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia and John Varley’s Steel Beach, to interrogate their representation of gender and the effectiveness of this representation as a critique of the sex/gender system. The larger question I want to ask concerns the malleable body and its usefulness to cultural theorists of gender: is the SF body a more useful image than the transgender body for this kind of cultural work? In order to answer this question, I will first provide a description of the malleable body in each of these novels, before turning to an analysis of the ideological effects of each representation.
Delany: Trouble On Triton
Delany’s novel begins with an epigraph from Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. The Douglas quotation reminds us that “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” signaling Delany’s understanding of the body as a product of culture rather than an artifact of nature. The subtitle of the novel, “an ambiguous heterotopia,” comes from a quotation from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, a work which addresses one of Delany’s recurring concerns about how language can model reality: what is the relationship between words and things. In both cases, these references signal Delany’s consciousness of the social power of language and naming and his explicit engagement with the way ideology constructs social common sense.
The social/sexual world in Delany’s novel includes the ability to switch from one gender to the other and to change one’s sexual orientation through a neural process called refixing. There is no explicit prejudice against either homosexuality or heterosexuality, and prostitution is legal, although most prostitutes are male on the moons while most are female on Earth. The narrative does note the peculiarity that male prostitution is illegal on Earth while female prostitution is illegal on some moons. Most people live in co-ops—which are specific to gender and sexual orientation, although mixed co-ops also exist. Some people live in family units composed of multiple parents whose gender, sexual orientation, and parental title may shift. A social space exists for almost any combination of sexual desire and bodily morphology that can be imagined.
The plot in Trouble On Triton recounts the experiences of Bron, a resident of the moon Triton, during a war between some of the outer colonies and Earth. At the beginning of the novel, Bron is male and lives in an all-male, non-specific sexual orientation co-op. Significantly, the residents of Triton describe the war as being over the inviolable right to subjective reality. The standard on Triton is that the state can’t interfere with the choices of its citizens up to the point of “destructive distress—and the destruction must be complained about by another citizen; and you must complain about the distress.” The driving force of the novel is the fact that Bron cannot be happy within this heterotopia because he does not know what he wants. His crisis of identity begins with the rejection he experiences when the Spike, a woman he is attracted to—obsessed with might be a more accurate characterization—refuses his advances.
The turning point for Bron occurs during an incident in which he constructs himself as a heroic male who has rescued the familiar helpless-woman-of-patriarchal-construction and said woman fails to appreciate his heroism. In this act of heroism, Bron happens to be near the home of Audri (a female coworker) during an incident in which the city is experiencing random losses of power, which cause certain areas either to lose their artificial gravity or to experience an extreme increase in gravitational force. The women in Audri’s co-op are being harassed by an ex-husband of one resident and have locked themselves inside. The man leaves (and is killed by a gravity fluctuation) as Bron approaches. Bron breaks a window of the co-op, but discovers that this action is unnecessary as the crisis is now over and because the women were not even aware that the gravity problem existed. Shortly after Bron’s arrival, the authorities announce that it is now safe for everyone to go home.
Bron finds that he doesn’t want to go home, but instead wants to remain and “have the women give him coffee and a meal and talk and smile and laugh with him”—his earned reward of deference for this act of heroism. Bron’s disappointment over the women’s failure to respond in a manner he considers appropriate to his heroism, and his anger at the Spike for rejecting him, lead him to the decision to switch both gender and sexual orientation, becoming a woman who desires males. He explains his decision to Lawrence by arguing that women don’t understand “normal, heterosexual men,” and that he must become this kind of woman “to preserve the species.” Bron argues that “what gives the species the only value it has are men, and particularly those men who can do what I did … the bravery demanded there.” These men, he continues, “deserve more than second-class membership in the species,” but are currently not getting their due because “that kind of man can’t be happy with an ordinary woman, the kind that’s around today.” Bron’s decision to become a woman, then, is based on his desire to be the woman he thinks he deserved as a man, in order to ensure the existence of such a woman. He is the epitome of everything Raymond fears transsexuals represent: a man who uses the material of a female body to insist upon, to embody, a definition of femininity that suits patriarchy.
Delany’s narrative distances itself from Bron, however, by continually undermining Bron’s perspective through the response of other characters to it. Bron complains to his counselor, “I just don’t feel like a woman. I mean all the time, every minute, a complete and whole woman.” The counselor responds, “When you were a man, were you aware of being a man, every second of the day? What makes you think that most women feel like women,” demonstrating to the reader that Bron’s perspective on being female is precisely that, a male perspective on femininity. Bron’s plaintive reply, “But I don’t want to be like most women” again suggests a narrative distance from Bron revealed in the irony of his contradictory demands: he wants to be a real woman but insists that real women must be women as he wants them to be. Delany uses Bron’s experience as a woman to diagnose how damaging the category of ‘ideal’ woman can be. Bron attempts to live up to his conception of the perfect woman, a conception that is markedly similar to the patriarchal construction of woman.