Fantastic Metropolis

Josh B. Lukin: Reviewers, in discussing the rich historical milieux of your work, have described your writing as “scholarly”—no surprise in the case of a writer who’s read over twelve thousand scholarly articles since finishing college. Which scholars and theoreticians have had the most direct influence on your writing, fiction and nonfiction, in the past few years?

L. Timmel Duchamp: Twelve thousand? I know that I once told you that as a first-year graduate student I took my advisor’s advice to read an article a day and have maintained the discipline ever since. An article a day over the span of thirty years would put me at slightly less than eleven thousand. Although in the earlier years I often read more than one article a day, and when I’m doing research for my fiction I may read several articles a day, I do, on occasion, skip my daily reading. When I attend WisCon, for instance, although I try to read an article at breakfast, in recent years it’s become almost impossible to do so. And there’s no time after breakfast. And I missed reading an article a day the entire week I attended the 2003 Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference.

Before I stick my neck out, let me say first that I am not an academic. People often say that I am. I don’t have an academic position and although I completed all the course work and exams for a PhD, I never finished writing the dissertation. I am, though, a trained historical scholar, which means I’ve been imprinted with a certain way of observing and thinking that has been thoroughly incorporated into my mental organization. And I spend a lot of time thinking. So if I weren’t such a maverick, I could probably claim to be an intellectual. But because my thinking is wild, alternative, and largely unbridled by or in response to the dominant discourse, I’m not an intellectual, either.

Your question about “direct influence” on my writing in the past few years is problematic. Sure, we could go through a bibliography of my published work, fiction and nonfiction, and I could compile lists for you of which scholars and theoreticians leave the footprints of their thinking in particular pieces; a woman studies professor who has been assigning my fiction in her courses for years now once told me that she could do that. Such traces of theory in my work tend to serve discrete functions—to provide the language for engaging a story’s ethical focus (as Carter Heyward’s theology does in “A Question of Grammar”), to provide a character’s perspective (as with Kleinian psychological analysis in “Bettina’s Bet”), or to lay out the theoretical basis for the depiction of a fictional society’s social psychology and gender politics (as Susan Bordo and Michel Foucault do in “Transcendence”). I assume that many sf writers call on the work of scholars and theorists to help them construct the situations, societies, characterizations, and political and ethical problems in their fiction: this has something to do with why sf is often so much richer than mundane fiction. Since the number of scholars and theorists my work makes recourse to would be very long and wouldn’t tell you much about anything except certain components of the stories (or essays) themselves, I’m going to assume you’re wondering if I see my work as a whole having been significantly affected by recent reading.

I may be wrong about this, but because every time I’ve looked back at things I wrote fifteen, twenty-five, thirty years past, I’ve discovered that although my thinking has spread out and developed and changed vocabulary along with both intellectual and popular culture, I’ve retained the core conceptual structures that have directed my way of looking at and understanding the world since the mid-1970s. So sure, although in the last ten years I’ve being reading Bourdieu, Felski, Berlant, Said, and Grosz, what I’ve taken from all my reading are the parts that resonate with, amplify, and elaborate on my longstanding intellectual formation. More important, probably, are the earlier “influences.” I’m sure that chief of these is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I read it in the early 1970s. Which is followed in no particular order by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Griselda Pollack and Rozsika Parker’s Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Teresa de Lauretis’s Technologies of Gender, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. There are numerous important texts I’m not mentioning, but I think the reason such texts worked so well for me was precisely because they suited my intellectual formation. For example, I engaged eagerly with Foucault’s elaborations of Nietzsche—but even at the moment of first encountering his work, it engaged me precisely because certain of its kernels spoke to ideas already at work in my head thanks to Nietzsche.