Women and Magic, Part 2

by Jean Roberta

Heiresses of Russ 2016 is a best-of compilation of lesbian-flavoured speculative fiction stories which were published in 2015. The guest editor of this edition is “Alyx” (named for a character in the late Joanna Russ’ fiction) Dellamonica, who teaches writing at the University of Toronto in Canada and has won several awards for her own spec-fic. She is married to another award-winning female writer, Kelly Robson. It’s hard to imagine a writer who would be better-suited to co-edit this annual anthology with publisher Steve Berman.

As I suspected before I opened my review copy, several of the seventeen stories in this book originally appeared in the Lethe Press anthology Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists, which I reviewed earlier. This book contains introductory material about the history of science fiction by women AND of actual female scientists, some of whom were theorizing about the universe much earlier than you would probably guess, unless you have studied the subject in depth.

(At this point, I could go into a long riff about the erasure of women from history, but that’s been done, and I’d like to reserve some steam for another issue that I’ll bring up later on.)

One of the stories from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge) is about an advanced robot or artificial intelligence, which is one of the themes in that collection. Another of these stories (“Love in the Time of Markov Processes” by Megan Arkenberg) is about a kind of hermit-scientist who studies the ocean from an underwater lab, somewhat like Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The third story from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Eldritch Brown Houses” by Claire Humphrey) is set in the witchy New England of H.P. Lovecraft.

Like the previous ones, this edition of Heiresses of Russ is a spellbinding read, but it is more eclectic than Daughters of Frankenstein and other themed collections of speculative fiction. “The Wollart Nymphs” by Melissa Scott (a writer of well-constructed plots) starts out suggesting that the “nymphs” (actually three ships) have supernatural capabilities, but the historical mystery surrounding them is resolved by a factual explanation.

At the opposite extreme of mystery and sci-fi stories are those that use characters from fairy and folk tales (monsters, talking animals, evil monarchs who control kingdoms by magic) in symbolic ways. In “Where Monsters Dance” by A. Merc Rustad, a young lesbian who is terrorized by her stepfather is taught to dance by a protective monster from a parallel realm where dancing destroys hatred.

Speculative fiction by women often deals with alternative (imaginary) ways of creating new humans, or humanoid beings, but surprisingly few of the ones I’ve read really tackle the political implications of the fact that humans who were born female (including some transmen) can get pregnant, while those who were born male cannot. The term “patriarchy” points to time-honoured attempts to keep reproduction in the hands of men by controlling women, especially those capable of breeding.

“The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer is a sci-fi story in Heiresses of Russ 2016 about that very thing. The science part is based on the fact that conception in several species, including humans, is actually triggered by the pricking of the mother’s egg rather than by the addition of a father’s DNA per se. (Presumably the mixing of two sets of genes to produce a new individual is an evolutionary development.) In this story, a virus which is transmitted by males to females causes women to conceive during ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary), and the results are baby girls who are genetically identical to their mothers. Virus-infected women can no longer be impregnated by men.

Giving birth to girl after girl, all looking exactly like oneself, does not seem empowering to the unfortunate women infected by the virus, as it wouldn’t in real life. However, this phenomenon seems very threatening to men who don’t want their whole gender to become a genetic dead-end, as it would in real life. In the story, a lesbian journalist follows the trail of the virus. To add to her anxiety, she is pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor. Like a sexually-active gay man in the early 1980s, the protagonist in this story can’t be sure she is virus-free.

Although this story is definitely speculative rather than strictly realistic, it undercuts a currently-fashionable kind of queer theory that gender (however defined) is either a strictly personal choice, or at least a socially-determined set of characteristics with no real connection to biology. In biographical descriptions, various individuals now define themselves as “non-binary” and “gender-queer.” Since speculative fiction plays with imaginary spinoffs from reality as we know it, it provides a welcoming setting for androgynous characters who have floated free from binary classifications of all kinds.

As exhilarating as it can be to imagine that we are all living in a post-binary world, it just ain’t so. Young women are still afraid of the possibilities that scared me when I was young and fertile: I could be impregnated without my consent (possibly through rape), and I might not be able to get a safe, legal abortion--or I might not want to destroy the strange, tadpole-like being inside me. After giving birth, I might have trouble earning enough money to support myself and my child and to ensure that the baby would be cared for if I had to work outside the home.

I knew that I couldn’t rely on any man, including the biological father of my child, to help us survive. As I found out, none of the legal mechanisms of Western society (including marriage) really force fathers to accept responsibility for “their” children.

As far as I can tell, young women (including non-heterosexuals) still have reason to worry about these possibilities, and young men of all sexual orientations do not. Although I could say that menopause brought me “beyond” the reproductive binary so that I can be as sexually carefree as a male, the binary hasn’t been wished out of existence.

Now that Donald Trump is President of the U.S., and he is in touch with other right-wing politicians all over the world, reproductive rights for women are being threatened, as they always are when patriarchy objects to freedom of choice. At such times, speculative fiction can enable us to escape momentarily from grim reality and give us hope, but we can’t really live in another dimension or in perfectly invulnerable bodies just yet.
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Breaking the Barriers of Imagination

By Annabeth Leong

“You can’t be Luke Skywalker,” my cousin informed me. “You’re a girl, so you have to be Leia.”

I remember being confused by this, though I don’t remember the logic I used in my argument. As an adult, I would explain my confusion this way: none of us had Jedi powers, and yet it was possible for us to pretend to be Jedi. None of us flew spaceships or had light sabers or blasters, and yet we could pretend we did. None of us lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and yet that wasn’t stopping our flight of fancy. None of us were wookies, and yet one of my cousins was pretending to be Chewie.

Given the staggering acts of imagination already involved, why couldn’t I also imagine myself to be Luke, who happened to be a boy? Couldn’t I be girl Luke? Or couldn’t I be boy Luke for the course of this game of make-believe?

“No,” my cousin said, in response to whatever version of this I managed as a young child. “You’re a girl, so you have to be Leia.”

Leia. Donut hair head Leia. Not a person with a lightsaber. In fact, by this logic, there were no people with light sabers whom I was allowed to be.

It may sound silly, but it was one of my childhood’s deep hurts, a warning shot about all the things being a girl was going to mean for me, all the ways it was going to limit me and keep a lightsaber out of my hands.

I am a person inclined by nature to obey rules, though you might not guess it from who I am today. So, once I acquiesced to my cousin, I acquiesced in general. I never tried to dress up as a boy again.

Until (drum roll, please) last Saturday night, when I went to a costume party dressed as Illidan Stormrage, the part demon part night elf antihero from World of Warcraft (and star of the current Legion expansion).

The way I see it now, as an adult, I don’t eat demon hearts to gain power, though I can pretend to. I don’t have bat wings or horns. I didn’t tear my eyes out in the middle of a maddening apocalyptic vision, nor did I regain my sight through the use of dark magic. I don’t know how to fight with two fel-infused warglaives, and I don’t know how to fly. Given all these things, the smallest part of the leap of imagination here is that Illidan’s preferred pronoun is “he” and mine isn’t.

I can’t tell you how powerful I felt dressing as him. Some of it was that this costume freed me from the sexy/non-sexy dichotomy that seems to overshadow efforts to put on a character as a woman. I wasn’t dressing attractively or unattractively. I was dressing as Illidan, as a person who puts power above all else (and who gains a weird but largely irrelevant sex appeal in the process).

One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve played with gender is that part of what I feel while using she/her/hers is a constant sense of my sexiness or lack thereof defining me. It’s interesting and important as a woman (and as a society) to think about how to step out of that. It’s also wild to step into another gender, even just for a costume, and feel that change and fall away. (That’s my sense of this thing—your mileage may vary).

The other part of the power, though, wasn’t about Illidan. It stretched all the way back to that time I tried to be Luke. When I bound my breasts and put on a muscle shirt printed with tattoos to match Illidan’s, I felt like I finally had an answer for my cousin, three decades later. You say I can’t be Luke? You’re wrong. I can.

I’m not exactly sure if I was girl Illidan or if I was stepping into the role of boy Illidan or nonbinary Illidan or something else. That matches another part of what I’ve learned in my timid attempts to play with gender. Once I step outside the lines, I’m not always sure where I’m putting my feet. Not all questions need to be answered immediately, though, and what mattered most was how good I felt in my costume, how strong.

I said in a comment earlier in this topic cycle that I think one reason Halloween has historically been important to queer people is that it gives you a chance to step outside societal lines, and it eases some of the consequences for doing so. That’s certainly true for me, to this day. I’m not sure where I’m going with gender explorations, but dressing as Illidan Stormrage gave me a relatively safe way to do things I’d been too scared to do when it wasn’t Halloween.

Letting Them Win

by Annabeth Leong

I’ll never forget the way my stomach squirmed the first time I put on a bra. It was an unbearable sensation, and all I wanted was to take the thing off again. It felt mortifying to me that my dad had “noticed” that I “needed” one now. I didn’t understand what it meant to “need” this garment.

So I avoided wearing bras. I basically didn’t wear them at all until I started going to high school, at which point my mom managed to convince me to wear one for all of freshman year. Sophomore year, I stopped a second time, and didn’t put one on again until after grad school, at which point I was so desperate to get a job that I was afraid to do anything that might give someone an excuse not to hire me. I asked my sister in law to help me buy some bras before my first interview.

Over the years I didn’t wear a bra, all sorts of people felt free to tell me that I needed one.

To me, the embarrassment and discomfort produced by a bra outweighed whatever I might go through if I didn’t put the thing on. I hated being talked to about my breasts, but that discomfort was small compared to the panic I felt about them.

This earned me a ton of detractors, who fit into several categories:

A) The modesty police: These people seemed to believe that I was forgoing a bra in order to (pick one or more) steal their boyfriends, invite people to look at my breasts, attract men generally, or engage in other forms of sluttiness. Somehow, these people believed this despite the fact that the thing I wore most commonly over my breasts was a XXL black T-shirt, which I chose specifically for its shapelessness. This is a paradox I’ve never been able to sort out. Having now gone through a femme period, I can attest that wearing a low-cut blouse and demi pushup bra, the combination of which bares me nearly down to the nipple, wins me nothing but social approval. On the other hand, my anguish over this garment I couldn’t bear to put on, a fact I attempted to hide with the giant T-shirt, somehow made people think I was out to find a boyfriend.

B) The concern trolls: These people went out of their way to explain the health problems that would likely ensue from my refusal to wear a bra. According to them, I would have back pain and my breasts would sag down to my navel before I reached forty. It is truly amazing how many random strangers over the years have worried for me about the future perkiness (or lack thereof) of my breasts. It would be one thing, I guess, if any of these people had been my doctor. However, they tended to be people like the woman working the cafeteria line at my college, strangers at department stores, and the like.

C) People out to cop a feel: There were also people who believed that the only reason I wasn’t encasing my breasts in a bra was that I must want someone (they volunteered!) to grab my breasts. These people seem to ascribe to the bodies as valuable property metaphor which causes so many problems whenever it pops up. According to them, not wearing a bra was akin to leaving my wallet on a subway bench. I was, apparently, begging for them to reach in(to my shirt) and pull out my nipples/my money. These people varied from shouting their enthusiasm for my breasts to giving uncomfortably lingering hugs to actually reaching into my shirt. They were enthusiastic supporters unless and until I made it clear that my breasts weren’t for them, at which point they became heartfelt detractors.

***

Highlights of the experience:

That time I joined a club and the women called each other to figure out who should be the one to talk to me about how I ought to be wearing a bra. I found out when a woman did talk to me about it, and then later, the woman I was closest to in the club confessed to me that she’d gotten phone calls about this, too.

That time I went to (an open church service at) a monastery and a woman pulled me aside to hiss, “You need to wear a bra among these men.”

That time in college when my breasts were the answer to a trivia question in a joke quiz sent to the entire school.

All the times I got picked for greeting committees, handing out awards, or really any thin excuse to have me hug a lot of people (because my breasts were a special extra reward!).

***

One reason this always bothered me was I really felt incapable of wearing a bra for a lot of years. I’d panic at the department store, panic when I saw a bra, panic when I tried to put one on, panic when I saw myself in the mirror wearing one. If I did wear one, when I took it off at the end of the day, I’d feel this lingering, itching cling that I couldn’t get off.

I’ve never understood exactly what was going on with all this, but it put me in a weird position. My reason for not wearing a bra wasn’t on people’s radar, they kept making weird assumptions about why I wasn’t putting one on, and the last thing I wanted to do was discuss this awkward psychological state with hostile strangers.

These days, I wonder if there are elements of gender dysphoria to this. I’ve been curious how I would feel binding my breasts, and have wondered if that might give me some relief from my constant discomfort with them. It’s hard to explain how much fear I feel about this line of thinking, though.

I do wear bras now, but I still have a hard time buying them. I went into a Victoria’s Secret with my ex-girlfriend and started panicking just standing in line with her. I think the big reason I wear them at the moment is that I’ve gotten more afraid of all the unwanted attention from strangers. Though I know it isn’t true, there’s a part of me that fears I’d be inviting even more street harassment if I went back to dressing the way that makes me comfortable.

This is nonsense, though. I’ve received unwanted attention from strangers all my life, with and without bras, dressed well or dressed badly, in any and all conditions.

However, in the case of bras, the detractors eventually won the day. I put one on in the morning because it seems like I do “need” it if I don’t want my breasts to become a topic of conversation while I’m buying a coffee.