The diction of the passage—”quirk, peculiarity, silly”—works along the axis of the same tension between triviality and importance that characterizes the novel’s treatment of gender identity in total. The passage suggests that while Hildy is embodying a female stereotype of the narcissistic woman, this characterization is ‘no big deal’ because it is just a silly quirk; our narrator remains the same Hildy we ‘knew and loved’ in the earlier portion of the narrative. The novel tries to recuperate these stereotypes under the rubric of personal choice and preference, suggesting that they are merely one valid choice among many. At the same time, however, it privileges the ‘choices’ of the status quo, both through the failure to interrogate a contemporary ideology which would see them as the necessary and inevitable, and by making them the personal choices of our sympathetic narrator.
The novel uses the gender switch to ‘allow’ Hildy to engage in behaviour that she had not been able to do as a man. The plot of the novel concerns finding out the reason behind Hildy’s suicide attempts, all of which are made while Hildy is a man, reinforcing the stereotype of masculinity as a condition of acting. After the switch to being a woman, Hildy begins to reach out to her friends and talk about these experiences, drawing on a stereotype of women as emotional. The narrative also treats Hildy differently after the sex change: there are many more passages describing her appearance, apparel, and sexual activity than in the ‘male’ sections of the novel. Finally, while the novel does try to signal a deconstruction of the sex/gender system by arguing that any individual can occupy any position within this system, it also suggests that the entire world changes when one changes gender:
It turns the world on its head, Changing. Naturally, it’s not the world that has altered, it’s your point of view, but subjective reality is in some ways more important than the way things really are, or might be; who really knows? Not a thing had been moved in the busy newsroom when I strode into it. All the furniture was just where it had been, and there were no unfamiliar faces at the desk. But all the faces now meant something different. Where a buddy had sat there was now a good-looking guy who seemed to be taking an interest in me. In place of that gorgeous girl in the fashion department, the one I’d intended to proposition someday, when I had the time, now there was only another woman, probably not even as pretty as me.
It is difficult to imagine a stronger statement of how important the sex/gender system is to identity and social organization. Unlike Delany’s novel, which explicitly points out the social origin of these constructs, Varley’s continues to insist that these are just natural and inevitable ‘quirks.’
Conclusion
At this point, I want to return to my original question: how useful the malleable body enabled by the discourse of SF is to cultural theorists of gender. In my reading of these two novels, it is clear that Delany’s work performs its own cultural critique, using the imagined future to diagnose Bron’s attachments to our contemporary gender constructions as pathology in a more enlightened future. Delany uses the tropes of SF to best effect, creating a world whose changed ideology demands that it produce different social subjects from the ones that inhabit our world. Varley’s novel also works to construct a future in which no one is tied to a gender identity, suggesting that the category of gender has become irrelevant to social organization in his more enlightened age.
However, despite these protestations, gender identity remains an essential category of identity to Varley’s characters. The contrast between these two novels suggests that the malleable body of SF is as problematic a category as the transgendered body for cultural theorists attempting to work through the sex/gender system and its social effects. Just as the acts and self-representations of particular transsexuals are open to readings at both ends of the political spectrum—Butler’s sense that they reveal the absence of the authentic original and Raymond’s sense that their raison d’etre is precisely to shore it up—so, too, is the malleable SF body open to multiple and contradictory readings. Simply creating a world in which the gender or sexual orientation of a body can easily be changed is not sufficient to dismantle the authority of gender as a category of social discrimination.
But I would also argue that the problem is deeper yet. There is a danger in works such as Varley’s which explicitly support the elimination of gender as a category while implicitly relying on many of its axioms. Such works can mitigate against the development of a critical consciousness, encouraging the reader to engage with the surface narrative of gender equality while ignoring the persistence of gender stereotypes in a world in which, seemingly, anything goes. This kind of SF reveals the degree to which an unacknowledged and unconscious allegiance to the notion of gendered behaviour as natural continues to structure our social perceptions and choices, even our perceptions of alternate worlds.
Let me quickly add, in case this sounds as if I am advocating that we stop reading ‘inferior’ works such as Varley’s, that I don’t think that metaphorically seeing no evil is an effective solution. Instead, it is important to critically read and discuss works like Varley’s, works that both circulate popularly and that embody the contradictions of the sex/gender system, so that our discussion can make these tensions more evident. Although gender, like race, may no longer have any standing as a biological category, it continues to have concrete effects as a ideological one.
I’d like to end by arguing my case for both/and, extending the use of the term beyond an understanding of gender as a spectrum rather than a set of poles. I am not arguing that the malleable body of SF is a better tool for cultural critics than the material transgendered body, but I am also not arguing that it is a simple or unproblematic tool. We should use both tools, and we should be aware of their limitations. The malleable body of SF is both a useful tool for interrogating the category of gender and a tool that can be used to reinforce the sex/gender system; its limitations and ambiguity do not preclude it from serving as a useful point of departure for critical analysis.
However, as the comparison between Delany and Varley reveals, simply showing that protagonists can shift gender is not enough, just as treating gender as a performance through drag is not enough for the performance to be critical. The appeal of drag can lie in the fact that it is an acknowledged performance, relying on the gap between the performance and the ‘true’ gender beneath to produce its effect. Similarly, the gender-malleable body of SF can work to reinforce constructions of gendered behaviour as natural or inevitable by suggesting that they would persist in a context where gender was fluid, as is the case with Varley’s novel.
I want to end by stressing that my purpose is not to argue the obvious point that Delany is a more sophisticated novelist than is Varley and hence is self-conscious and critical when using the category of gender to construct his SF worlds. Rather, it is to argue that the transgressive potential of SF’s representation of gender is not achieved by the fact that the fictional world can allow things like gender changes to happen, but in how thoughtfully the reader engages with the implications of these changes. The malleable SF body, like the transgender body, does not mean one thing or the other; form is not enough alone, but the form’s potential to be politically enabling is a useful starting point.
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Sherryl Vint holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta. She is currently working on a project about the intersections of sciences studies and science fiction. She completed a dissertation on representations of the body in science fiction in 2000. Send her email.
Bibliography
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York, Routlege, 1993.
Delany, Samuel. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York, Pantheon Books, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.
Varley, John. Steel Beach. New York: Ace Books, 1992.
Making Believable Planets
By Peter Jekel
2/25/02
The Forecast: “Rain on Mongo”
“It was raining on Mongo that morning.” This is SF writer Jerry Pournelle’s way of encapsulating the syndrome of oversimplication we sometimes see in the creation of planets for science fiction stories. Too many novice writers have a simplistic vision of an ice world, a jungle world, or even an ocean world. In the capable hands of some writers, such concepts can work. For example, Stanislaw Lem described an ocean world in his hypnotic novel Solaris, as did Jack Vance in The Blue World. Frank Herbert’s enduring classic, the Dune series, is set on a desert world, and Bruce Sterling also successfully created a desert world in Involution Ocean, in which men travel the nearly waterless world hunting down dustwhales. Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet with Antarctic-like conditions, appropriately named Winter. By way of contrast to these one-environment worlds, take look at our planet. It’s hardly a one-ecosystem world, with deserts, oceans, jungles, mountains, plains, and ice caps. There are many concepts to consider when creating a planet, and we’ll look at several of them in detail below. This is not to say that you must address each of these items when creating a world, but it is at the very least essential to keep these considerations in mind.