Fantastic Metropolis

To answer the second part of your question—about the distinction I’ve drawn between “oppositional” and “alternative” and to elaborate on how that relates to the “oppositional” character of feminist sf—requires my laying a bit of conceptual groundwork first. Two key themes in my thinking come into play here: the problem of the “oppositional,” as Nietzsche formulated it in The Genealogy of Morals, and the problem of intelligibility.

Let’s start with the problem of intelligibility. Most people are used to thinking that there is no reason that texts can’t be absolutely transparent, provided their authors speak with sufficient clarity and plainness. This (utterly mistaken) assumption in turn results in the judgment that when a text is misunderstood, either its author is at fault for using unnecessarily “difficult” and obfuscatory language, or its reader is at fault for being stupid. While I’m perfectly willing to grant that texts are seldom as clear as they could be and that most readers are unwilling to make much of an effort to grasp the meaning of anything they read, hear, or see, such reasoning misses a much larger problem in a world where texts constantly travel outside the discursive space in which they have been produced. Take the example I ran across in yesterday’s scholarly reading. In “Bourdieu’s Refusal” (Modern Language Quarterly 58:4), John Guillory takes as his point of departure “the suspicion, even hostility” with which Bourdieu’s work has often been greeted in the US academy. Guillory finds it especially interesting that “the same field that permitted so favorable a reception of Derrida or Foucault, especially in the humanities, should have occasioned so different a response to Bourdieu.” Guillory is saying, in other words, that the widespread misunderstanding of Bourdieu’s work in the US has nothing to do with the conceptual difficulty of the texts in question, since if that were the case the notoriously “difficult” theory of Derrida and Foucault would not be so widely accepted (and understood) in the US academy. Guillory observes, “Surveying the most typical misapprehensions of Bourdieu’s theoretical positions, Loïc Wacquant reminds us, much in the spirit of Bourdieu, that the reception of any foreign oeuvre is mediated by ‘structures of the national intellectual field’.” The phenomenon of Bourdieu’s being so often misread in the US, in short, is a problem of intelligibility. The discursive spaces of the French and US intellectual spheres overlap, but are not identical. Certain ideas and the texts expressing and exploring them, considered outside their discursive space of origin, are subject to being distorted and misunderstood.

Last year I published an essay in Extrapolation that briefly discussed the continued existence of a feminist sf discursive space; my essay predicted that because feminist sf was still not fully intelligible in the larger discourse of science fiction, the discourse known as “feminist sf” would likely be around for some time to come. In saying that feminist sf is “not fully intelligible” outside the discursive space of feminist sf, I mean that because the larger, more general discourse of science fiction has not absorbed the canon, concepts, and interests of feminist sf, it cannot yet provide a sufficiently meaningful context for feminist sf. A good example of this can be found in the limited understanding possessed even by its admirers of Karen Joy Fowler’s Nebula-winning story “What I Didn’t See,” as evinced in the often contentious discussion of the story on sff.net in Summer 2002. Like much of Karen Joy Fowler’s work, “What I Didn’t See” may be characterized as “elastic”; i.e., it is open to a variety of meanings besides the one the author had in mind when writing it. (Although she has not told me so, I suspect that KJF is fully aware of the elasticity of her work and may even strive to achieve it.) And so while it is possible to enjoy “What I Didn’t See” as “literary” fiction that “isn’t really sf,” the story is only fully intelligible to readers who have been long steeped in the literature of feminist sf and who have some familiarity with the ideas found in Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions. Read out of the context of feminist sf, the story appears to be something very different from its author’s most conscious intentions. It is not, in other words, fully intelligible to readers who have not been steeped in the discourse of feminist sf. Interestingly, I have several times encountered the attitude that it is in fact better not to know all that is going on in KJF’s fiction—that her prose is so delightful that analysis (and full understanding) is an affront to its beauty. But then I’ve also been assured that an intellectual understanding of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven ruins the listener’s pleasure rather than enhances it.