The Female Man (Bluestreak)

by Joanna Russ

Paperback, 2000

Status

Checked out

Publication

Beacon Press (2000), Edition: 1, 224 pages

Description

Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality- she's a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive.

User reviews

LibraryThing member TadAD
For my part, this is a book that deserves its place in the canon of science fiction, feminist or otherwise. Without denying that some of it comes across as a bit dated, there's enough that isn't to make this a thought-provoking book today, and a humorous and engaging one at that.

Russ uses the
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device of traveling between parallel worlds to present us with four simultaneous perspectives on womanhood. At one end of a particular spectrum is Jeannine, expected and expecting to marry and become a dutiful wife. At the other is Jael, an assassin from a world where women and men have been in open warfare for decades. Somewhere in between sits Joanna, a feminist from a world close to ours who has come to the realization that she cannot win a fight to have women separate-but-equal to men, she must adopt the "male" role and become the female man. Lastly, in a direction orthogonal to the others, sits Janet, from a future world where there are no men and no need to submit, fight or adapt.

The story is challenging to read. Much of it is told in the first person, with the narrator changing constantly and no direct indication of who is speaking at any moment. Even the third person scenes sometimes shift viewpoint in mid paragraph. It's confusing and it's also terribly effective. You find yourself losing the distinctions that placing a label (this here is Jael; that there is Joanna) on a particular viewpoint normally allows. You come to understand that Russ isn't just using the conjunction "or" in presenting the alternatives, she is also using "and". When we finally learn (extremely minor spoiler here) that the women are the DNA analogs of each other from their respective universes, it makes a certain sense as a single woman with myriad aspects, more complex than any of their individual societies envisioned.

And yet, for all that, something seems missing. I perceive the geometry more as a pentagon than a quadrilateral, with one corner left unfilled—there is no woman who is simply equal to a man without seeing herself as a man. Janet comes closest but she does so by finding men irrelevant, almost mythical, rather than engaging them as an equal. I'm not sure what to make of this. Is Russ saying (perhaps because of where she stood in 1975, but perhaps not) that this isn't a possible position? Or, is she leaving the book, itself, to occupy that fifth point: pointing out to the reader that, if woman is this complex, embracing roles habitually seen as male as well as those female, that perhaps there doesn't really need to be a divide and roles are just roles, not gender-specific distinctions?

One of the beauties of this book is that these kinds of questions are there to occupy the reader, should the inclination be present. And, that Russ takes her shots—at both men and women, though men do get the worst of it—without completely getting your back up is an indication of her wonderful humor and her ability to subvert you and make you care. It's good speculative fiction.
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LibraryThing member questbird
For various reasons it has taken me almost a month to review this book since I finished it. This is not a bad thing, as I've needed to think a little before criticising it. 'The Female Man' is a product of its time, 1975. Major themes are: the feminism, the multiverse, environmentalism.

Four
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different women (or perhaps aspects of the same woman) are brought together by a multiversal event. They are Jeanine, Janet, Joanna and Jael. Their origin worlds are very different. Jeannine is from a world where the Great Depression never finished. She has a job and a bedsit and dreams of being married to a decent man -- except that there aren't any. Janet Evason is from Whileaway, a future state where there are no men. Whileaway is a utopia; Whileaway has no men, though the connection between the premises is weak. Joanna (also the author's name) is from a world closest to ours, a career woman in a "man's world". Jael is an assassin from a future world where the war between the sexes is an actual one.

There are no positive representations of men in this book (disclaimer, possibly required for reviewing this book: I am male). They are depicted as universally sleazy, stupid, charmless, controlling, vain, condescending or rapacious. Nevertheless, the presence or absence of men defines the worlds and worldviews of each of the protagonists. Men have long since vanished from Whileaway (originally due to a plague) and their absence is simply not missed. Janet Evason has only mild curiosity about men when she encounters them in the other dimensions. Whileawayean society and culture is described in detail: an underpopulated, technological, agrarian world. Its utopian vision had shades of Ursula LeGuin's 'The Dispossessed', but with less thought. Where was Whileawayean politics? Its police? Its dissidents? There are generalisations like 'Whileawayeans like big asses'. If the book had been simply about Whileaway I would have put it aside.

Joanna and Jeannine live in a world more like our own (or our own in the 1970s perhaps, since some progress *has* occurred in feminism since then). Jeannine just wants to get married, though her boyfriend is exploitative and doesn't seem to care about her. Joanna seemingly hates men, or hates having to deal with men or explain herself to men. In Joanna's case it may be more about self-hate too. Men are portrayed as the reason for bad female behaviour. There are imaginary dialogues in a nightclub and at a mothers' group which portray bitchy, exclusionary and negative female behaviour (notably absent from any Whileaway passages).

Jael is interesting. Her job -- and she gets quite a bit of job satisfaction too -- is murdering men in the constant hot and cold conflict which burns and freezes her world. Ironically she is heterosexual ('I love men's bodies, hate their minds') and keeps a pet man with the intelligence of a dog for that purpose.

This book is an angry salvo from the intolerant side of feminism, contemptuous and dismissive of men but with a measure of self-loathing too. Man-free Whileaway is depicted as a utopia with few drawbacks, but there was not enough exploration of its ideas to convice me of its plausibility. Try as it might, this book failed to convince me that the genders are better off without each other.
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LibraryThing member greeniezona
A classic of feminist science fiction that I put off for entirely too long. I loved it. Especially in this moment -- the #metoo, Trump presidency, #bluewave, #waveofwomen moment. That so much of this book is still so relatable is just disgusting. Four women from different moments in Earth's
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(alternate?) past/present/future and thus four different cultures, four different societal relations between men and women, are all brought together and their effects on each other and judgements of each other and their worlds are by turn spectacular/hilarious/tragic/questionable.

An intriguing, witty, surprisingly fresh take on humanity. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member xiaomarlo
Russ is burning with white-hot feminist rage in this book, which is mostly great. It feels so of its time (1975) - the bad old days, when being a feminist was fighting a war, even more so than it is today. In parts near the end it gets weird and gender-essentialist and transphobic, and that's a
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problem. But I am mostly glad this book exists. It's very unconventional, makes a lot of really good points, and is unafraid of being radical.
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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
An intense, messy, piece of speculative fiction that goes some interesting places but, I think, seldom succeeds and seems, at this point, a bit of a product of its time. Split into four female voices, including at least two that inhabit alternate realities and and one set in contemporary New York
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City, "The Female Man," the book seems less polyphonic than schizophrenic, as characters slide in and out of their settings and the text switches from fiction to polemic and then back again. The author's voice dominates the entire text, sometimes because Russ can't seem to differentiate her characters' internal monologues and sometimes because she doesn't hesitate to comment on her own text or, in many places, criticize their attitudes. At times optimistic and gentle and astonishingly cruel and reductive at others, it seems a book that born out of serious emotional and political turmoil. It reminded me a bit of Frantz Fannon's "The Wretched of the Earth," which, for all of its insight into the colonial mindset, also presents a bunch of rather indefensible moral conclusions. Of course, a forgiving reader could point out that it was written right in the middle of the Algerian War for Independence. In that same spirit, "The Female Man" probably could have only been written in feminist circles in 1974. But so much of it doesn't work now, and I suspect that many parts of it never really did.

The sections set Whileaway, an all-female future utopia are perhaps the ones that are most worth rescuing. If only because they demonstrate, once again, how much our fantasies can tell us about ourselves. At once futuristic and decidedly agrarian, these sections describe a society that is fluid and protean, where physical and societal structures are constantly being unmade and remade. It presents a charmingly optimistic take on the coming computer revolution, and -- very productively, I think -- attempts to describe social relationships and personal qualities such as strength, aggression and resilience, might evolve in a world where our gender binaries no longer apply. I found myself wondering how much these sections of the book owed to situationism, whose critiques of planning and permanent structures had such influence on Paris '68 protests and, later, on punk rock In another section of the book, a teenage lesbian who's still struggling to accept her own sexuality attempts to navigate family life in the seventies, which may be of at least historical interest to readers. The other sections, which depict a world in which men are pitted against women in a bloody, long-term conflict and a portrait of a woman with pre-feminist ideals in contemporary New York have aged rather less well, particularly the latter. While it's certainly possible that many of the attitudes and social constraints that Jeannine, the protagonist that calls this setting home, are depicted realistically enough, the author somehow manages to condescend to her even more than the various men in her life do. This section of the book feels less like a story than a particularly brutal consciousness-raising session and is a particularly joyless read. "The Female Man" may have been a wake-up call for writers looking to create more explicitly political science fiction, but, forty years on, the book seems overwhelmed by its own contradictions and knocked too far out of balance by the very force of the emotions it contains. It's more recommendable as a fascinating document than as a novel. Not an easy or satisfying read.
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LibraryThing member sussabmax
Oh, how I loved this book. It is a very angry book, but deadly accurate, and also such an interesting concept. I love the way she plays with the novel form, occasionally addressing the reader, and even addressing the book at the end. Just fascinating and wonderful.
LibraryThing member sturlington
Four women from alternate universes come together in this work of feminist speculative fiction.

Although The Female Man is billed as a "classic of feminist science fiction," I hesitate to call it science fiction. It's barely even fiction. More accurately, it is a feminist stream-of-consciousness
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rant that employs speculative what-ifs to imagine worlds both better and worse than our own, specifically the positions of women in those worlds.

Russ herself is one of the four women, the "female man" who tries and fails to make herself into a man in order to succeed in what is presumably our world, at least our world of the 1970s, when this was published. Russ's anger is quite palpable throughout, although she tempers it somewhat with snarky humor. Several times, I found myself wondering whether we hadn't moved past all this male-female behavior that Russ is criticizing, but truthfully, you only have to read a few Internet comments to see it alive and kicking in the 21st century. In that sense, Russ's book is still needed and we are not yet free.

Those readers who come to The Female Man expecting a more straightforward narrative are bound to feel stymied by the lack of plot and the jumping around, without explanation, from one world to the next. Besides our own world, there is Jeannine's world, where the Great Depression has never ended and women are primarily preoccupied with catching husbands, and there is Janet's utopian world of Whileaway, where there are no men at all. I was feeling fairly adrift in all this until about three-quarters of the way through the book, when we meet Jael, a woman warrior in a world where men and women live separately and spend all their time literally at war with one another. This is probably the most cohesive section of the book, where Jael explains more or less what's going on and the plot, such as it is.

Forget it, this book is not concerned with plot. It's concerned with women, with what we endure and how things can possibly be different. Unfortunately, Russ does not seem able to imagine a world where men and women can live together with women not being subject to oppression. I hope she's wrong about that.

Read for female science fiction/fantasy month (June 2014).
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LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
How I wish this book were more dated than it is. Russ shows a time traveler coming back to an America where the depression just kept going. She shows how women and men are trained for their roles, men in charge women cajoling, appeasing and appealing to their protective and sexual nature, men
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taking their dominance for granted. She shows a little blue book for accepted male actions with a little pink book for girls. They could be standard issue now. Baby, you haven't come such a long way after all. And that's not because Russ didn't point out exactly where we were but because the majority of people seem determined to stay there.
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LibraryThing member csoki637
A little hard to follow at times, but has some real gem insights and is, unfortunately, still very relevant today.
LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
Feminism is still relevant. This particular brand of it, thankfully not so much. Just - odd. I did not find it enlightening enough to fight past 20% with the almost simultaneous points-of-view. I don't care if all the women are aspects of the same person, or whatever; I still want to know who's
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thinking & doing what at any one time.

I bet that when I was 19 or 20 I would have absolutely been blown away. If you're young, open to creative writing, interested in feminist history, you'll probably like this. I'm too old and cranky to work this hard for the scraps of enlightenment I can get more pleasurably from other books.
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LibraryThing member LyndaInOregon
This was very much a breakthrough book when it was first published in 1975.

First, it was written by a woman writer, using her real (and recognizably female) name; second there's nary a rocket ship in sight; third, it deals with feminism at its 70s-era angriest; and fourth, it tosses most narrative
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traditions right out the window.

Obviously, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some of it is dated. Some of it remains insightful and bitterly funny. And some of it attempts to shock with its frank sexuality -- and in these days of just-about-anything-goes, that may be where it shows its age the most.

The story, such as it is, wanders between three characters (and an occasional ephemeral, unnamed fourth) -- Jeannine, whose Earth never emerged from the Great Depression but which also never underwent WWII; Joanna, whose world is very much like our own; and Janet, whose world is not only vastly different than ours, but is also several millennia ahead of "our" timeline. There's a slight nod to the notion of diverging realities, in which each action splits off an entirely new future and which therefore allows the story to sneak in under the edges of the science fiction tent -- a tent which had been considerably enlarged in the preceding decade.

There is a vague plotline of sorts that emerges almost at the end of the novel, without which the entire book would be but a thin veneer over a feminist polemic pointing out how repressed, exploited, and psychologically abused women were at the hands of those beastly males.

At this remove, the novel verges on becoming an historical oddity -- angry and literate but flawed by its over-reliance on style over substance.
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LibraryThing member CurrerBell
Not a great sci-fi novel – and since that's what it's typically billed as, caveat lector – but I still give it 5***** for its very intricate use of multiple point-of-view narrations. Some readers will reject this as confusing, but it's worth some careful rereads to discover the intricacy of
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Russ's narrative style.
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LibraryThing member jen.e.moore
Much more Second Wave Feminism than I'm usually into, fascinating largely for the passage near the end portraying societies where women are entirely separated from men (due to a full-on, literal gender war) and each society has developed new genders. I've never seen a second-wave feminist do that.
LibraryThing member zangasta
I don't feel like giving the book a rating, but it was a worthwhile read.

If it hadn't been for the fact that I wanted to tick it off of a list I'm going through, I might not have finished it. It seemed bonkers, and the style certainly made it impossible for me to read it terribly closely and to
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make sure I understood who was who - quite frankly, I can't say there is any plot in there. But there are some brilliant explorations of different male / female interactions at varying degrees of unhealthiness which at the end make up for the difficulties - which I don't put it past Russ to have deliberately ...plotted.

On second thought: I'll give it a four star rating.
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LibraryThing member bhabeck
Of all the books that I read for the SF Reading Challenge on Shelfari, I have to say that this is the worst (and that's saying something considering how much I disliked both Artificial Kid and Neuromancer). The writing style is difficult to read and understand, there are few reasons to like the
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characters, and I'm just not into all the feminist BS.

I would definitely NOT recommend this book.
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LibraryThing member jazzycat
Thought I should familerise myself with this as it has been lauded as one of THE feminist scifi books to read, however I just got bored.....Am sure it is very good from a literature point of view , but not my cup of tea....
LibraryThing member hashford
The Female Man by Joanna Russ – Disappointing

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I have a special interest in sci-fi written by women, and I was vaguely surprised that I had never read any of Joanna Russ’s books before. So I was looking forward to reading it with pleasurable
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anticipation.

However, I was really disappointed, and gave up about half way through. (I won’t summarise the plot here, as that has been done exceedingly well in another review – so will move quickly on to my own personal responses to the book). For a start, I found the writing style exceedingly difficult to get on with; quite a lot of the time it’s hard to tell who is talking (or being narrated), but more importantly, there’s no clear connection between different parts. And so, because you can’t work out who is talking, or why they are saying/doing what they are, you can’t get to know and understand the characters. What’s more, there’s nothing even remotely resembling a plot (not that I found, anyway)!

Yes, it’s true that there are sections of dialogue which are witty and satirical – it was these that kept me reading as far as I did get. And yes, I suppose it is ideologically interesting, but there’s far too much pontificating about male behaviour – or at least the author’s idea of it, which I thought was overly stereotyped (yes, I know she is making a point, but I think she is too heavy handed about it).

All in all, I found this book to be bewildering and uncoordinated. For me it didn’t work either as science fiction, or as “women’s literature”.
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LibraryThing member FKarr
SF novel of feminist dystopias (the current world and a world in which WW2 never occurred) and utopias (an atechnological world without men and a highly-technologized, sexually-segregated world)
LibraryThing member maybedog
I took a writing class from Joanna Russ and didn't know who she was until halfway through the course. I've still never read her books. I'm kind of embarrassed...
LibraryThing member DedicatedReader
Excellent science fiction dealing with fundamentals of self-identity and the burdens of gender biases, individually and as a society.
LibraryThing member lavaturtle
This book has a great premise. It has many scenes, with interesting dialog. Occasionally it shows hints of having a plot. Unfortunately, none of them are tied together in a way that makes sense.

I agree with most of the author's complaints about how suffocatingly sexist the world can be. It's
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enough to drive a person crazy. Which is perhaps what she was trying to express all the times she stopped telling the story and spewed words randomly onto the page.

The transphobic tendencies towards the end didn't make much sense, especially for a book that spends so much time playing with gender...

The best writing is in the descriptions of Whileaway, and in the "our reality" interviews with Janet.
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LibraryThing member joeydag
I had a very difficult time with this. There are some very modern, tricky reading issues involved. I had a hard time discerning characters. There are quite a few different narrators and several writing forms. I'm not sure I could describe a plot. Some passages are pretty direct feminist/gender
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issue oriented passages. There are references to multiple parallel universes, alternate histories, futuristic technologies and inventions. There's even a passage where the author addresses critics with just the issues I've raised and framed the critics as locked into their sexist perspective. I don't know if I would make the effort to try to read it again. It certainly raises the bar for experimental writing in the science fiction genre and for that reason may be considered essential reading but I do wish it had used some techniques to make it more accessible.
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LibraryThing member StigE

This is considered a classic by many and I really wanted to enjoy it. I expected it, like a lot of old sci-fi, to not be an easy read. I hoped it would challenge me the same way Steinem, hooks, Leckie, Hurley, LeGuin and others have challenged me.

I hated it.

The style this is written in makes it
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hard to read. The book has 4-5 POVs and it switches between them without warning or notice, making whatever plot there is difficult to follow. The Joanna character breaks the 4th wall frequently, and that makes her (probably on purpose) difficult to distinguish from the other 3 characters. Especially Jeanine. This is combined with an at times ranty stream-of consciousness and strange choices of similies (guilty like a box?).

The books is also, like a lot of 70s sci-fi, dated. I am not drinking from the same communal myth and meme pools as the author and that creates extra distance.

I think that someone more familiar with the time and context this was written, and more willing to spend time to analyze the book will enjoy this a lot more than I did. It's probably not a bad book, it just that this book and I are at very different stages in our respective lives.
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LibraryThing member ikeman100
I've read a couple of Russ SF books and liked them. This was not SF and it was not worth my time. Not sure who was responsible for giving it an award but they were not judging it on it's contribution to SF.

The whole man hating thing is important to Russ but it does not a good book make.

Could not
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finish it. Life's too short for this noise.
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LibraryThing member annbury
The book that wrote the book as far as feminist sci-fi goes. Published in 1975, it traces the lives of four different women living on four different worlds -- worlds where the lives of women are very different. The novel follows what happens as these women begin to come in contact. It may be a
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little dated now, but it it is still worth reading on its own merits. Russ is a tough and very funny writer.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1975-02

Physical description

224 p.; 5.4 inches

ISBN

0807062995 / 9780807062999

UPC

046442062992

Local notes

fiction

Other editions

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