Joanna Russ is fairly well-known in the world of Science Fiction. Some of her works in this area inculde:
She is also an acclaimed essayist, writing penetrating essays on Feminism, writing and Science Fiction.
These are collected in:
How to Suppress Women's Writing
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays
To Write Like a Woman
She has also written a novel (actually, it's more a novella) called On Strike Against God which I highly recommend you get if you can find it. This book is one of the most lyrical and triumphant coming out stories I have ever read. I enjoy it so much that I read my (much battered) copy at least once a year.
Here's a sample from the introduction of To Write Like a Woman:
If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. As a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it, "There's less here than meets the eye." hence, my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it.
From To Write Like a Woman, Indiana University Press, 1995
And here's a sample from her essay "Not For Years but For Decades":
...I knew that I did not really want to sleep with men. But that was sick. I did want to sleep with men - but only in my head and only under very specialized circumstances. That was sick. In short I had - for close to twenty-five years - no clear sexual identity at all, no confidence in my own bodily experience, and no pleasure in lovemaking with ay real person. I had to step out of the heterosexual institution before I could put myself back together and begin to recover my own bodily and emotional experience. When I did, it was only because the women's movement had thoroughly discredited the very idea of "real" women, thus enabling me to become a whole person who could then pay some attention to the gay liberation movement. (My most vivid feeling after my first lesbian experience: that my body was well-put-together, graceful, healthy, fine-feeling, and above all, female - a thought that made me laugh until I cried.)
From The Original Coming Out Stories, edited by Julia Penelope and Susan J. Wolfe, The Crossing Press, 1989.
I plan to include a quote from On Strike Against God as soon as I locate my copy.
Get your own Free Home Page
Return toHome Page