scattered thoughts

        Since I am between large formal writing projects, I thought I should make a greater effort to write for the blog.  I'm currently taking a few days to access the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which resides in the special collections of the University of California-Riverside library, in order to read through the lengthy debates between Samuel Delany, Ursula Leguin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. and others that occurred in the third and fourth issues of the Khatru fanzine.  I've only just started this process today, and have only read a later issue that catalogs a series of fan responses to the debate, responses that have ranged from the thoughtful to the esoteric.  It's a nice reminder that one can find genuinely interesting intellectual debate outside the academy, in a language that a lot of the inhabitants of that institution would probably not deal with very well.  Don't worry, I'll put up some of my initial thoughts as I start to read the actual conversations between the authors, which sound like they're fairly contentious, if the rather large secondary literature on the debates is true. 

       Asides from that, I'm trying to use my week of spring break to get myself prepared for the rather large amount of work that I am going to have to take on for the spring quarter.  I have to finally complete my chapter on the implicit debate between Ursula Leguin and Samuel Delany that can be found in their respective novels, The Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton.  Additionally, I need to edit my chapter on Judith Merril, along with my chapters on Joanna Russ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that those earlier chapters are not in as bad shape as the initial draft of the Gilman chapter that I took care of this quarter.  Finally, I need to put together a definitive prospectus/introduction to the project, based of the many earlier versions of that conversation.  I feel that I'm in a much better position to do this sort of writing, but I've never been good at that kind of abstract summary.  I suppose I need to figure out how to do this, if I want to apply for any jobs, or apply for grants of any sort.  Not my favorite activity in the world, but as Bertolt Brecht notes, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."

     In addition to that, we are going to have a lot of work ahead of us, politically, because of the contract negotiations that will be beginning in the summer, at latest.  I feel that we actually have a lot of positives on our side, from the passage of Prop. 30 to the long history of protests that have created a deep crisis amongst the upper administration of the UC system, but it's going to take a lot of work to move away from the older forms of bargaining that have defined the last couple contract negotiations.  We have introduced a series of demands that I feel are quite strong, but without concerted action on the part of the rank and file, it's going to be an uphill battle, at best.  Within this context, I think our reform slate has done a very good job of creating democratic structures amongst the representatives and has gotten rank and file activists deeply involved in the process of organizing, but we haven't as of yet created the democratic representative structures that we need to bring 12,000 members into the conversation, rather than a small portion of that.  In many ways, the folks at Berkeley seem to be about as close to that ideal as anyone, with their Contract Action Team structure, but we need to come up with a structure that makes sense to activists and members on the Irvine campus, a campus that sees a substantial amount of police repression, even of simple actions such as canvassing and handing out fliers.  One thing I am hoping we will do is create a lot more media about what we do, another thing we can learn from other activist groups around the state.

      In any case, I might find myself continuing the low output on the blog that you have seen over the past couple months, but just be assured that this doesn't indicate a lack of commitment to the blog, or my implicit plans to close it down.  It just indicates that I have a lot of work to do.   Incidentally, I will be giving a paper at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this year on The Stepford Wives.  More details on that in the very near future.

Another short essay on Joanna Russ: Biopolitics and The Femle Man

      I've been rereading Joanna Russ' The Female Man, while working on a substantial rewrite of an earlier paper that I want to turn into a dissertation chapter.  Within that context, I came across a fairly interesting passage that I had previously given very little thought, one that links the text with a very problematic biopolitical thread that can be found in feminist utopias, one that I had previously thought was left out of her work.  The relevant passage occurs in section viii of the first section of the book, which gives a brief historical sketch of the world of Whileaway,

      "Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C 344-426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's hand which had given her one mother's jaw and the other mother's teeth--orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway.  Her daughter's teeth, however, were perfect."

      This comment along with the obsessive concern about IQ in an earlier section point to a moment that the focus on social construction is briefly undone, and the eugenics of earlier feminist science fiction and utopias enters back into the picture.  If the initial conceit of the book is that the four characters, Janet, Jeanette, Jael, and Joanna are all the same individual within different social settings, the radicality of Whileaway can no longer be understood within the transformation of social structures, but in some sense draws on the eugenic construction of its subjects, placing it closer to the work of Herland than I'm sure Russ would have liked to be associated. 

       At the same time, a reasonably observant reader of the text could note that the description of Whileaway oscillates between satire and idealization, that is, between the world as a sending up of earlier traditions of science fiction that Russ thinks rather poorly of, and the radical possibilities contained in rereading, rewriting, and drawing from those traditions, in order to produce the type of cognitive estrangement that the genre has the potential of producing.  I would largely agree that one is not being a terribly attentive reader if one ignores Russ' satirical engagement with the history of the genre, but I would point out that it's a satirical engagement that papers over the racial implications in those utopian traditions.  This point is reflected in her own critical rereading of her review of Gilman's Herland, which notes the ways that she minimalizes the racism in that novel.

      To move on from this very particular moment in the novel, albeit one that gestures towards a set of significant contradictions in the text, the more I work through questions of social reproduction the the 20th century of the United States, the more I'm convinced that the question of racialization has to be put at the center of the forms of reproductive labor in the household, and more specifically the ways that those forms of labor are organized and valorized.  If the first half of the century is defined by a variety of attempts to incorporate new immigrants and elements of the working class into the dual regime of sexuality and consumption, those attempts simultaneously consciously worked to integrate these groups into an expanded whiteness, that only worked through a series of brutal acts of exclusion that denied the humanity of large sections of the world.  The civilizing discourse of Gilman, the settlement house movement, theorists of mass consumption operated on the premise of a sort of racial uplift, one that largely drew from the now discounted evolutionary theories of Lamarkian selection.

      These points are probably most substantially developed by Michel Foucault in his, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but several essays by Etienne Balibar do a good job of expanding on this in a number of essays in the text co-written with Immanuel Wallerstein.  There have been a number of substantial feminist critiques of Foucault based on his presumed discounting of sexual difference, and I would certainly accept that the intense weight put upon women in the bourgeois project of sexuality is not taken into account.  The figure that is utterly erased from the text is that of the mother, but at the same time, Foucault's reading of sexuality as a both bourgeois and racist project only just recently seems to be incorporated into contemporary feminist work.  This is not to say that feminists have refused to confront racism, but all too often its taken as a separate issue to the questions of sexuality that they are taking on.  This erasure all too often leads to the inability to recognize the way that a biopolitical project that's deeply embedded in the logic of the formation of race haunts the history of the twentieth century.

Informal Thoughts on Privilege

      I've been giving the concept of privilege a lot of thought recently, primarily in response to some of the criticisms that have been made recently from a number of perspectives.  Rather than taking my usual approach of close reading and critique, I thought I would put my thoughts down on the concept with a slightly more informal approach.  The usefulness of the concept of privilege largely comes out of its ability to provide a sort of conceptual lens to understand the often personal and informal problems that arise in groups of ostensible peers, particularly within radical and progressive activist circles.  After all, the framework of privilege largely arises out of W.E.B. DuBois' effort to understand the inability to produce inter-racial forms of working class solidarity within his analysis of the reconstruction period in his 1930's text Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.  DuBois argues that these alliances collapse due to the formal and informal privileges offered to white workers in order to keep them committed to the cross-class white nationalist formation of the United States, or to use David Roediger's later term developed out of this framework, white workers are offered a kind of psychic wage to compensate for other modes of inequality, a sort of wage of whiteness, to use his vocabulary.

     The concept of privilege then has its origins in the attempt to understand the inability to produce radical political assemblages within the United States.  However, it would be possible to draw other genealogies of the concept.  For instance, a history of privilege could be created out the long and multiple feminist analyses, produced over the past century, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's analysis of the treatment of boys and girls for instance, or earlier thoughts.  We can see the need for this analysis arise out of most movements responding to a multiplicity of oppressions.  In each case, the analysis points out the unthought benefits assumed by a dominant group, or structure.  In many cases, such as the sex/gender system or structures of race, these forms of inequality were deliberately created in order to resist counter-systemic politics from forming, and some cases which those structures tie into modes of normalization such as homophobia, but in other cases, such as disability issues, the slights were unintended.  What a lens of privilege allowed for an ethical critique of those practices of inequality, in effect creating an analysis and framework of micro-power in the everyday structures of communal life.

     However, as the concept of privilege has become increasingly institutionalized, a number of intellectuals have tried to transform privilege into a lens that explains larger political phenomenon, the larger structures of capitalist accumulation, for instance.  The simple problem is that the notion of privilege does not explain the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and structures of violence and brutality associated with it, nor the institutional structures of white supremacy, or the structures of domination within our sex/gender system.  Attempts to do so produce a sort of atomism, assuming that the larger structures of our society are a sort of expansion of the small interpersonal relationships that exist in social movements and daily life.  They miss the obvious fact that these relationships are an effect of those larger structures, and a reinforcing mechanism, not an explanation for them.  By doing this, they often prescribe highly personalized and individualistic methods of solving structural problems, ignoring the social movement work that is necessary to actually solve such problems.  This is not to say that our ability to cooperate and work together isn't significant, or dismissing the implicit argument that those of us who benefit from those systems need to be the ones who shift our practices for the sake of the community, but to simply point out that the analytic of privilege is insufficient, although necessary, for a radical politic. 

     Within this context, it's not surprising that the analytic plays a significant role within non-profit politics.  As a number of folks have pointed out, the non-profit structure largely exists as a mediator within structures of inequality and domination, not as entities that exist to challenge or destroy those structures.  Communist philosopher Antonio Negri notably compares them to the Benedictine monks of the middle ages, an institution that often worked to ameliorate poverty, but in order to preserve the larger system.  I don't think that this fact in and of itself neutralizes the value of the institutions that produce this kind of work, but it does mean that we as radicals need to look at these institutional structures, whether in university activism or other movement organizing, with a skeptical and critical eye.  There is no way of returning to a pure form of radical analysis of privilege.  After all, the non-profit institutions are far too intertwined with genuine counter-systemic movements, but we can rework them into a new approach to radical politics, preferably one that translates into a new historical bloc far larger than previously seen.  The analytic of privilege answer to many significant questions to inter-subjective problems to every be fully erased, for all that they symptomatize a sort of neo-liberal subjectivity and collectivity.  A new radical assemblage can only be created through an engagement with these forms, not by avoiding them.

A more recent take on Gilman's Herland: An Opening Analysis

     Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia, Herland, is simultaneously an exploration of space through the complex, planned interactions between the land, a variety of social institutions, and the community of women who created and live within those institutional structures, and an exploration of temporality, producing a narrative dependent on the imagined shift from the primitive to the modern. The narrative explores this interaction through the pedagogical process of the society as it tries to bring the three outsiders, the three male explorers who play the role of the protagonists, into the new rationalized structures of social reproduction. One of the didactic passages near the end of the first part of the narrative offers a useful entrance into Gilman’s political project. As they are about to be released into the general society of Herland, the men are offered an explanation for their imprisonment, as well as the central organizing logic of the society. When the most patriarchal of the three protagonists, Terry, asks if their imprisonment was imposed because they feared the men, the response is immediate.

    “Oh no,” she said quickly, in real surprise. “The danger is quite the other way. They might hurt you. If, by any accident, you did harm any one of us, you would have to face a million mothers.”

     He looked so amazed and outraged that Jeff and I laughed out right, but she went on gently.

     “I do not think you quite understand yet. You are but men, three men, in a country where the whole population are mothers—or are going to be. Motherhood means to us something which I cannot yet discover in any of the countries of which you tell us. You have spoken”—she turned to Jeff, “of Human Brotherhood as a great idea among you, but even that I judge is far from a practical expression?”

     Jeff nodded rather sadly. “Very far—“ he said.

     “Here we have Human Motherhood—in full working use,” she went on. “Nothing else except the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth.

     “The children of this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them—on the race. You see, we are Mothers,” she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.” (Gilman 67)

     At the center of the narrative, shaping its conception of space, time and institutions, is the concept of motherhood. Operating in a multiplicity of modalities, motherhood simultaneously operates as a social institution, an ideological formation creating bonds of social solidarity, legitimating and enacting forms of collective violence, and as the means of enacting a progressive and teleological political project. Motherhood both constitutes and is constituted by the biopolitical category of population, placing the tending and caring for biological life at the center of its project. At the most immediate level, the imaginary of Gilman’s Herland has an uncanny resonance with what Betty Friedan would call ‘the feminine mystique’ some 47 years later. Motherhood is not only the destiny of the women of Herland, but it also plays a central role constructing the social bonds of the community. The raising of children defines the alpha and omega of the society, defining its institutions and political projects. Motherhood simultaneously individuates potential mothers based on their fitness, while at the same time, produces a grid of intelligibility for the community of women as a whole. Rather than offering an uncanny precursor to the feminist projects of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Gilman’s narrative gestures towards the very institutional formations of femininity and sexuality that those movements were protesting.

     But beyond that, the speech also insists on the social reproductive function of the institution. Motherhood links to the distant origins of the nation to the present, or as Moadine puts it, Motherhood creates a link “to the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth.” The link from an original sorority of the past provides a sense of connection to the contemporary political projects of the community. Those projects can only be understood in that context. Turning to the spacial metaphors of the quote, the ‘height’ of the social accomplishments of the community of women or the depth of commitment to that community is only measurable from the standpoint of the origin of the community. Or to translate this into the language of Benedict Anderson, motherhood creates the sense of continuity that allows for the formation of the imagined community of the nation. More notably, we can already see two of the significant conditions of the nationalist project, the sense of generational continuity and an open-ended sense of progressive time, which Anderson codified as empty, homogenous time of the nation, following the critical work of Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The domestic sphere becomes the prime locus for shaping and reforming the nationalist project, the creation of new form of the national-popular. This nationalist dimension needs to be understood within the context of her involvement with the Nationalist political project created by utopian novelist and political theorist, Edward Bellamy. Responding to the radical shifts in the economic structures of post-bellum United States, particularly the increased class stratification and struggle created by the increased industrialization of the country after the war, Bellamy imagines a potential future that neutralizes those conflicts through the rationalization of production and consumption. Gilman begins her political activism within this movement, and her earliest publications are contained in the movement’s publications. While Gilman never abandons the basic framework of Bellamy’s analysis, despite her engagement with a multiplicity of movements, she focuses her intellectual work on the sex roles of the society, adding a libidinal and racial economy to the politics of consumption and production explored by Bellamy. In effect, Gilman incorporates a reform Darwinist analysis of sex roles into Bellamy’s reform program, and perhaps more significantly, shits it into the temporality of a biological, social-historical temporality.

     In effect, motherhood plays the role of a central regulatory mechanism of the society, organizing every aspect of its collective existence towards the rational needs of its evolutionary development and reproduction. We’re offered the secret code that links the cultivation of biological life to a project of political economy. The institution of motherhood instantly rationalizes the latter in service of the teleological drive of the former. Moreover, the sociological significance of these mechanisms is explored through the use of a utopian narrative, and indeed a narrative driven in part by very conventional romantic narrative structures, as critic Kathleen Margaret Lant points out in her reading of the text, ‘The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Perkins Violation of Herland.’ In her biographical project on Gilman, Judith A. Allen argues for a privileging of her sociological works, effectively reading her fictional works as an extension of that work. Indeed, rather than challenging the bulk literary criticism of this process of reading comes close to defining the field of Gilman criticism, both her critics and her apologists. The most notable revisionist accounts of Gilman, Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization and Louise Michele Newman’s White Women’s Rights focus on her sociological work to the exclusion of her domestic and utopian fiction. Alys Weinbaum’s Wayward Reproductions is a notable exception, reading the racism of Gilman’s sociological work into her utopian fiction, although this engagement was driven less by a genre analysis than an attempt to respond to apologists attempt to place a firewall between her fiction and the problematic racial politics found in her sociology.

      I want to reverse that formula. Rather than reading Gilman’s fictional works, notably her utopian fiction of the Forerunner period as extensions of political sociological project, Gilman’s sociological work can be read as offering the intellectual infrastructure for a an evolutionary and progressive political project that finds its telos in the generic form of the utopia. We might take Gilman’s effort as a remarkable modeling exercise, akin to the architectural efforts on the part of Jeremy Bentham in his conceptualization of the panopticon, the idealized disciplinary model of the prison designed to reform the prisoner through the interiorization of the gaze of the guard. However, Gilman’s modeling, or perhaps more accurately, mapping doesn’t operate on the terrain of architecture. Instead, it finds its fullest form in the topography and temporality of the utopian and science fictional form. Rather than simply offering a vehicle for a set of sociological commentaries, the formal qualities of the utopia shape Gilman’s political project. Gilman implicitly sought to purify the empty homogenous time of the nation from its various impurities, placing the temporal marker of the primitive on them. Gilman re-imagines the nation through the regimes of consumption imagined by Bellamy, but with an emphasis on the domestic economy of the household. The sexual division of the household becomes the central obstacle to evolutionary progress of the race. Gilman’s Lamarckian framework simultaneously intensely biologists the sexual economy of the household and argues that this biological framework is malleable through social engineering. The utopian form binds these various elements into a coherent narrative, posing futurity as a critique and a foundational narrative of a future where the crisis is neutralized, and a new social symbolic is reestablished. This emphasis on futurity also places Gilman’s text on the borderline of a transition from the conventions of the classical utopian tradition to science fictional generic forms.

     Engaging in a generic analysis of Gilman’s work is an interesting exercise. Most analysis of her work is focused either on its position in the history of the feminist movement, or its political content in the form of its impact on social formations or its proposed political projects, leaving the question of how its formal qualities shape that work unanswered. Posing that very question strikes me as a significant one in understanding Gilman’s work because of the profound impact that popular generic forms had on the ways that Gilman framed and shaped her political project. Her engagement with utopian and domestic fiction was continually influenced by reform Darwinism producing an almost science fictional focus on the future. However, rather than seeing generic form as a simple vehicle for her scientific sociological analysis, that scientific discourse was constantly modified in order to fit generic convention. Gilman was not only a star on the popular lecture circuit, but a writer for popular magazines, including her own publication, The Forerunner, and a producer of domestic and utopian fiction, as well as mystery novels. She wrote short articles for Woman’s Journal, Saturday Evening Post, as well as traditional women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Good Housekeeping. This translates into her engagement with those forms throughout her work, which is defined by both the domestic narrative as well as the narrative utopian form. The present is always doubly haunted, by the primitive that continues to dwell in the repressive structure of its social institutions, and a progressive futurity that continually marks those limitations. This temporal framework not only dominates the logic of her fictional narratives, but provides an implicit temporal and therefore narratological to the non-fictional work.    
 
   At first glance, Gilman’s Herland reads like a conventional utopian narrative. The story is set in the present of its production, and operates within the traditional comparative narrative structure of earlier utopias, drawing from and satirizing the conventions of travel and exploration narratives. Susan Gubar, for instance, reads Herland in contrast to the patriarchal adventure narratives of H. Rider Haggard, most notably, She. The narrative also could be considered a lost race story, offering the novum or novelty of a lost racial history as a form of estrangement. It operates in that liminal space that Louis Marin argues defines the historical preconditions of the utopian narrative, despite the fact that the narrative falls out of the historical period that Marin argues operates as the horizon of the genre. Although there are some limitations to placing Herland, and the work of Gilman squarely within the traditional utopian form, engaging with the form allows for a productive understanding of the ideological horizons of the novel, along with its spatio-temporal logic. In the end, the novel ends up looking a lot more like traditional science fiction through its engagement with evolutionary biology in the form of a reform Darwinism in conversation with Social Darwinism and eugenics, but that shift to science fiction can only be understood through an engagement with the utopian form.

---

A short second posting on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's biopolitics

     I wrote a fairly lengthy posting on the ways that Gilman's biopolitical reforms were negotiated through a set of particularly economic terms. One of the points that I felt was left undeveloped was the linkage between biological race and economic structure. While working on my dissertation, I came across a fairly curious quote within Gilman's first major sociological treatise, Women and Economics. Within those pages, Gilman attempts to argue that the lack of women's economic independence leads to a sort of pathological development in the evolution of the race. In effect, women become a sort of evolutionary drag on the race, constituting a sort of primitive remainder of early individualistic economic practices. However, she one of her argument is through her interpretation of the impact of years of anti-semitic oppression on the Jewish diaspora.

     “As one clear, world-known instance of the effect of economic conditions upon the human creature, note the marked race-modification of the Hebrew people under the enforced restrictions of the last two thousand years. Here is a people rising to national prominence, first as a pastoral, and then as an agricultural nation; only partially commercial through race affinity with the Phoenicians, the pioneer traders of the world. Under the social power of a united Christendom—united at least in this most unchristian deed—the Jew was forced to get his livelihood by commercial methods solely. Many effects can be traced in him to the fierce pressure of the social conditions to which he was subjected: the intense family devotion of a people who had no country, no king, no room for joy and pride except the family; the reduced size and tremendous vitality and endurance of the pitilessly selected survivors of the Ghetto; the repeated bursts of erratic genius from the human spirit so inhumanly restrained. But more patent still is the effect of the economic conditions,--the artificial development of a race of traders and dealers in money, from the lowest pawnbroker to the house of Rothschild; a special kind of people, bred of the economic environment in which they were compelled to live.” (Gilman 4)

      It's immediately clear that we are dealing with an explanation of the diaspora that partakes in some of the same forms of anti-semitism that the short paragraph is trying to diagnose. Like a lot of contemporary analysis, we have a sort of reductive interpretation of a broad set of experiences, erasing the intense multiplicity of forms of labor and sociability in the life of the diaspora.  Working-class life disappears, experiences working the land disappears, intellectual life disappears, and what remains is a set of stereotypical expectations around finance.  Still, this aspect of Gilman's analysis isn't what I want to focus on.  As anti-semitism goes at the time, this is fairly mild stuff, and its not really a substantial part of Gilman's legacy within a variety of feminist movements.  Far more interesting is the sort of racial Lamarckian interpretation of economic life.  The experiences of historical racism creates a sort of pathology within the economic life of the 'Hebrew people' stunting their growth, producing 'a race of traders and dealers in money, from the lowest pawnbroker to the house of Rothschild.' 
    
     Perhaps to put a bit more bluntly, Gilman is positing that collective economic activity produces biological race.  Or perhaps more specifically, economic activity defines the racial potential of a group, its relation to modernity, its commitment to a variety of discourses around civilization.  The tragedy of the Jewish people from Gilman's perspective is their homogenous experience, defined by the limited horizons above.  She implies that the Jewish is defined by the oikos, the realm of the family, the realm of economic production, to the exclusion of the political sphere, a sphere defined by nations, kings, and the ability to express pride in something other than the family.  In a curious sense, this links up with the limitations of (white) women who are kept in the even more confining space of the household.  The difference is that (white) women are biologically linked to (white) men, creating a heterogeneity that both is the tragedy of their situation, but also their possible salvation. 

Gilman, Biopolitics, Race, and Economics

      I thought that I would work out some of my ideas concerning Charlotte Perkins Gilman on this space, as a sort of rehearsal for my dissertation chapter that I am completing.  There something inhibiting about putting the ideas there, so I thought this might be a good way of thinking through my project in a slightly less formal way.  I want to make a particular argument about the relationship between race, labor, and consumerism within these pages.  As I have previously noted, there is a considerable amount of revisionist scholarship dealing with the centrality of race and specifically a type of evolutionary racism in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This work was initially started by Gail Bederman in her text, Manliness and Civilization, but it was continued by Michele Newman in her text, White Women's Rights, and Alys Weinbaum in her text, Wayward Reproductions.  Each of these texts places Gilman's racism at the center of her theoretical and political projects.  Bederman does this through Gilman's focus on rewriting the dominant discourses on the concept of civilization, which allow for a change in status for white women, while reinforcing ways of naturalizing racial domination.  Newman and Weinbaum each focus on the racial biopolitics implicit in Gilman's particular take on reform Darwinist project in conversation with both Social Darwinism and Eugenics.  These projects succeed in placing this racism at the heart of Gilman's political projects, rather than acting as some sort of unfortunate accidental remainder that marked her as a part of her times.  Instead, Gilman's racism and demands for gender reform share at their core, the same theoretical framework, one that constructs a hierarchy of races, and sees the need for more opportunities for women and a professionalized home economics as a way of fully bringing white women into modernity.

     At the same time, I think that these engagements with Gilman are incomplete.  Gilman is certainly drawing from a racialized notion of the biopolitical control of population, but as Foucault would note, the biopolitical is the borderline zone between a particular biological notion of man as species, and an economic conceptualization.  What I want to argue is that Gilman imagines her biopolitical projects of reform in economic terms, emphasizing the need to bring the labor practices and consumption practices of the household into the modern processes of mass production that were just beginning to be introduced into the factories at a multiplicity of sources.  My initial impulse to follow this train of thought came out of my reading of a short article of Gilman’s contained in the 1980 collection, The Politics of Housework. Gilman’s article, “The Home: Its Work and Influence” poses a substantial challenge to the 19th century cult of motherhood, but that challenge operates through her evolutionary, Darwinist framework. Gilman poses a need to modernize the ‘primeval’ labor of the household with the new forms of expertise developed in the disciplines of ‘Household Science’ and ‘Domestic economics.’ Building on this new disciplinary framework, she proposes the sweeping away of the amateur, sentimentalized labor of the isolate household replacing it with newer, efficient, scientific procedures and techniques. Critic Sally Stein amongst others has explored the impact of assembly line production techniques on the conventional structures of the household, bringing not only the new technologies of the era into the house, but also the techniques developed in the Taylorist division of labor. The same forms of time-motion study used in the workplace to economize the movement of the worker were envisioned and implemented in the transformation of household labor, producing an instrumentalized economy of the household. Despite Gilman’s ability to shock sensibilities, her new experimental household built upon the techniques of domination and exploitation developed in the workplace, rather than challenged them

      It’s important to note that Gilman’s vision of the new, managed space of domestic and reproductive labor is not the privatized space of the household that eventually becomes the dominant post-war structure. Rather than translating the scientific management of Fordist modes of production to the privatized space of the home, Gilman proposes a far more direct model, proposing collective modes of daycare, cooking, and other aspects of domesticity. Unlike the later attempts to organize around the concept of wages for housewives who saw their campaign as a larger struggle to bring down the capitalist world system, Gilman was genuinely committed to these modes of collectivized, trained wage labor positions. However, her vision of modernizing the labor of the household presented a similar challenge to the erasure of that labor within the sentimentalized guise of motherhood. Although Gilman’s projection of the Fordist collective household draws upon and legitimates the apparatuses of expertise later to legitimate what Betty Friedan would later call ‘the feminine mystique,’ it cannot be read as a simple blueprint of the post-war economy.

      Although it is perhaps unfashionable to mention this within current critical standards, it's important to note that Gilman's critique of the primitive nature of the household operates on a fundamental error.  As Ruth Schwarz Cohen amongst other have noted, the notion of housework as a separate category of labor was only comprehensible quite recently.  Before industrialization, the separation of household labor from other forms of labor was far less common.  Cohen points out some of the mythic aspects of the funtionalist analysis of the household, of the totally sufficient large agrarian family.  Earlier economic systems had specialized craftsman such as candlemakers, as well as servants.  But the workplace and the household were interconnected.  In truth the position of an isolated housewife arose with industrialization.  As new technologies were developed in order to store food, clean, etc., housewives become increasingly isolated.  On one hand, the workplace becomes increasingly disconnected, on the other hand, the middle-class household needs less servants.  Increasingly the middle class household is one without servants.  This affects both the middle class who are working on their own and working class who are no longer working in those households.  Let's be honest, these relationships were often contentious and exploitative, but they gestured towards a different type of collective labor in the household.  The lone housewife far from being a primitive hold over from an earlier era, was a carefully constructed function, through a combination of new consumer technologies which reached their height slightly after Gilman's height as a popular commentator, and a whole set of popular discourse disseminated in the form of books and magazines.  This shift leads to an intensification of labor on the part housewives.  The level of labor remains consistent, and that labor is tied to intensified emotional expectations on the part of the housewife, often symptomized in the form of guilt.

     This process cannot be separated from the sorts of policies of racial assimilation that are also advocated by Gilman.  To understand this, we need to look at the phenomenon of the settlement house, which Gilman was briefly apart of.  Settlement houses were often seen as civilizing missions, equivalent to the missions in colonized countries.  Instead of pacifying indigenous populations, these houses were in existence to assimilate recent immigrations, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe.  This work has ties to the attempts on the part of white women to provide forms of popular education to African-Americans.  In both cases, the civilizing process was tied to the modern division of the home, educating women in hygiene, new consumption patterns, and childcare, while implicitly disciplining men to act as waged laborers.  The empty homogenous field of the marketplace constituted the modernity that was needed to assimilate into the dominant society.  It's notable that the particular emphasis on a kind of Lamarckian racial theory wasn't universal, but it certainly constituted the primary drive in the case of Gilman.  Although she moved away from settlement work, she never moved away from these basic goals of assimilation, even as she became more skeptical of its prospects.  (Another example of this process were the reform efforts to assimilate American Indians around the same period of time, reform efforts that still have devastating effects on those communities to this day.)

       At this point, this is pretty rough, but I think it gestures towards a way of thinking through the complexities of biopolitics in a different way... a very initial step, to be sure....

"Presentist" Some of the tangents from my reading of the criticism of Gilman

     Judith A. Allen's biography, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism largely operates as an apologia for its central figure.  Within that process, Allen offers a substantial exploration of Gilman's political and literary work, linking her reform Darwinist analytical approach that runs through her sociological work with her literary works, particularly the utopias.  The best moments of her work put Gilman's work within the context of her times, both in terms of the larger intellectual, political, and social formation that she lived in, as well as her interpersonal relations.  However, this same approach leads Allen to a strange reading of the recent critical trend in Gilman scholarship, defined by the work of Gail Bederman, Alys Weinbaum, and Louise Michel Newman.

      The immediate point of conflict is contained in the evaluation of Gilman.  Allen wants to defend Gilman against the various accusations of racism and classism introduced by recent feminist critics, but there is also a methodological conflict as well.  For Allen, the various critics of Gilman fall into the trap of what she calls 'presentism.'  The various critics judge Gilman's works on the basis of a set of standards that are incongruous with the world that Gilman lived in.  She makes some interesting points in this argument, pointing out that Gilman avoided many of the static assumptions made by her contemporaries about hierarchical racial categorization.  It's also significant for Allen that Gilman's contemporaries, including critics such as W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, didn't target her for criticism despite their focus on 'racial subjugationists.'  At the same time, Allen's definition of racism is limited, defining the term in purely genetic or hereditary terms, effectively ignoring modes of racialization that don't operate within those limited terms.  Perhaps more significantly, Allen never deals with the deeply embedded racial assumptions contained in Gilman's reform Darwinism, as well as her latent Lamarckism.

     But perhaps more significantly, Allen makes a substantial misreading of the revisionists that she is debating.  She is correct in diagnosing that her opponents are interested in the present, but not quite in the way that she assumes.  Rather than statically placing a set of present assumptions on the past, these thinkers are interested in posing the question, how did we get to the present that we exist in?  And perhaps more significantly, how has the feminist movement contributed to the reproduction of forms of racism, rather than opposing them?  Allen places the revisionists within the debate between the 'second' and 'third' waves of feminism, but I would argue that these works are more influenced by the interventions by Black feminists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  These works are historical in nature, but they are not 'historicist' in nature.  Instead, they offer an engagement with history that has a linkage with the concept of history taken up by Michel Foucault, and theorized by the literary critic, Walter Benjamin, in his "On the Concept of History."  Benjamin notes in his oft quoted passage,

        "Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it "the way it really was."  It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.  Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger.  The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it.  For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes." (Benjamin 391)

     Within this context, we can see the 'revisionist' interventions as a set of interventions into the present.  Rather than operating within the historicist context of Allen, these authors attempt to shift the feminist movement of the present through a set of engagements with the history of that movement.  The moment of danger, 'the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes' is the way that the intertwined history of feminisms and racisms have shaped and constructed the institutions and forms of collectivity and subjectivity in the dominant structures of feminism.  It allows for a critical reassessment of current practices, as well as the sort of examination of familiar assumptions that Hegel puts at the center of critical theory.  On the other hand, we need to recognize a sort of pitfall in this approach.  To often academics have seen these sorts of interventions as a politics in and of itself.  No history is going to change social formations in and of itself, and those who think so are bound to end in either despair or self-deception.  Instead, we can think of these engagements as a sort preface to political engagement, a form of framing and conceptualizing projects and interventions.

My Eaton Conference Talk on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

I'm currently working on transforming this into my first chapter for my dissertation, and I thought that I would put this initial draft up to see what folks think. What is worth saving and expanding, and what should be gotten rid of? I was fairly happy with this as a talk, although it was not universally popular with the small crowd there. I believe the work was referred to as 'presentist', which I think means that it didn't as as apologia for Gilman. At the same time, I should note that I am not interested in acting in the role of the prosecutor, either. Rather I am interested in exploring her work as a sort symptomatic formation, gesturing towards the forms of expertise and institutional structures that would arise in the post-war period. Or perhaps more precisely, I'm interested in looking at the way that it aligned with the social forces of its time that would eventually form those policies. This is not to say that Gilman's vision aligns perfectly with what Friedman would call the 'feminine mystique.' After all, Gilman was working towards a end of the isolation of housework, but both her work and the post war period were interested in modernizing the household economy through a combination of technology and a grid of discourses of expertise. I think I will leave the conversation at that.

The reception history of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland fits nicely into a fairly conventional narrative of academic feminism. Gilman was significant not only for her fictional work, but for her substantial popular sociological work as well. Gilman produced several books and countless articles critically analyzing sexuality, gender, evolutionary theory, and economics. Gilman biographer Judith A. Allen noted that Gilman’s rediscovery by historian Carl Degler in the 1950’s and 1960’s, “appeared in the wake of widely lauded postwar feminist texts,” the English translation of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1953 and the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. (Allen 6) Feminist scholarship of the 1970’s and the 1980’s saw Gilman’s work as a precedent for their calls for women’s liberation, tying into academic feminism’s cross-disciplinary effort to create a theoretical and historical archive for the movement. Herland ties neatly into those later collective feminist efforts. Originally published as a serial in Gilman’s monthly magazine Forerunner in 1915, the novel was only rediscovered in the 1970’s and was finally published in book form in 1979. The novel becomes one of many rediscovered artifacts during the initial phase of feminist scholarship of the 1970’s and 1980’s. In particular, the novel played a significant role in conceptualizing the subgenre of feminist science fiction, providing a significant precedent for the genre, linking it to the longer tradition of the women’s movement.

Gilman’s work also fit into the critiques posed by Black feminists and other feminists of color, beginning with the critical interventions made by the poet Audre Lorde, feminist critic bell hooks, and the later work produced by Gloria Anzaldua amongst others. This work challenged the assumptions of the primarily white academic analysis of radical feminism, focusing on the gaps, lacunae, and contradiction in their analysis of the category of woman. That work very easily implicates the work of Gilman, particularly through the assumptions implicit in her evolutionary, neo-Darwinian framework. As Allen notes, there have been, “intense debates since the 1990’s over Gilman and class, race, ethnicity, and eugenics, particularly as contributed by advocates of new race history, whiteness studies, third wave feminism, and antiracism.” (Allen xiv) Even as Gilman used this framework to critique the domestic structures of the household, she legitimized the larger framework of Eurocentric, white supremacy. That framework operates through a logic of what Johannes Fabian in his critique of anthropology calls the absence of co-evalence, the “persistent tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” (Fabian 31) Within that context, Gilman poses an evolutionary hierarchy of humanity, legitimizing and reinforcing the racialized categories of colonialism, along with a set of racializing assumptions about the working classes and new immigrants. However, the concerns about Gilman’s politics within critical studies of science fiction start earlier than that date. Joanna Russ’ 1979 review of the text brings attention to Gilman’s racism, and critiques its hierarchical, evolutionary logic.

My particular engagement with the work of Gilman is aligned with the emergent reassessment of her work. Gilman’s feminism is inescapably marked by the white supremacy and class politics of her time in ways that are not easily dismissed. My argument is that we can begin to read those aspects of her politics as congruent to her larger political aims, rather than in contradiction to them. As Allen notes, Gilman’s critique of the heterosexual institutions of sexuality and domesticity, are tied into her opposition of the provincial labor of ‘sex’, to the far more profound labor of ‘race,’ which derives from her Darwinist framework. This is developed in small section from her work, Women and Economics.

“Natural selection develops race. Sexual selection develops sex. Sex-development is one throughout its varied forms, tending to only to reproduce what is. But race development rises ever in higher and higher manifestation of energy. As sexes, we share our distinction with the animal kingdom almost to the beginning of life, and with the vegetable world as well. As races, we differ in ascending degree; and the human race stands highest in the scale of life so far.

When, then, it can be shown that sex-distinction in the human race is so excessive as not only to affect injuriously its own purpose, but to check and pervert the progress of the race, it becomes a matter for most serious consideration. Nothing could be more inevitable, however, under our sexuo-economic relation. By the economic dependence of the human female upon the male, the balance of forces is altered. Natural selection no longer checks the action of sexual selection, but co-operates with it.” (Gilman, Women, 37)

As Allen correctly notes, all references to race contained in Gilman’s work reference the human race, rather than any specifically, socially constructed category. But, that category itself is understood within the logic of an evolutionary hierarchy, moving from the primitive to the modern. Sympathetic critics have read Gilman’s work as an unacknowledged predecessor to Foucault’s critical analysis of sexuality, arguing that her construction of an analysis on the basis of the ‘sexuo-economic’ basis of sex and gender relations presages Foucault’s work within the History of Sexuality. (Allen 10) I would argue that, on the contrary, Gilman is better read is better read as contributing to the maintenance and intensification of that structure, proposing new and more efficient forms of reproductive labor. Gilman’s critique of the ‘sexuo-economic’ system is rooted in that evolutionary ideology, marking the conventions of reproductive labor as ‘primitive.’ The dependence of women upon men in this primitive system of ‘sexual selection,’ a category of evolutionary process that Gilman associates with conservation or the tendency “to only reproduce what is” disrupts the hierarchical evolutionary process of ‘natural selection.’ It’s difficult to avoid the similarity in this language to the various text examined by Foucault, focused on the instrumentalization of the bourgeois child’s body, regulating and shaping its reproductive energies.

I want to look at Gilman’s interest in domesticity, technological innovation, and the biopolitics of eugenics in relationship to the post-war formation of domesticity critiqued by Betty Friedan amongst others. My argument will be that, aside from the emphasis on collective motherhood, Gilman’s utopian conception has an uncanny resonance with the discursive formation of cold war domesticity, with its emphasis on expertise, reified notions of femininity, and whiteness. As Elaine Tyler May notes, the domestic sphere was seen a space to neutralize the class struggle of the previous era. Gilman similarly gestures towards the utopia of Herland as an escape from the logic of class struggle. Gilman also contributes to the process of the slow integration of the working classes into the discursive apparatuses of sexuality, a process beginning in the 19th century and concluding in the middle of the 20th century. Additionally, this process of integration of the working classes into the regime of sexuality ties in neatly with the attempts on the part of Fordist intellectuals to create what Stuart Ewen calls a social democracy of consumption, the attempt to incorporate workers into the system of industrial mass production capitalism as consumers, rather than simply as cogs. That project aimed to restructure the aspirations and desires of the restless and excluded working classes, while maintaining the larger apparatus of capitalist accumulation.

My particular engagement with Gilman’s novel is strongly informed by Phillip Wegner’s analysis of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards contained in his text, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity and is largely complimentary to that argument. Gilman was strongly influenced by Bellamy’s work, and was briefly involved in the Nationalist movement that Bellamy created in the wake of the success of his utopia, Looking Backwards. In turn, that text informs the formal and political engagements of Gilman’s Herland. Both texts are written in response to the reorganization of American society in response to the rise of industrial, mass production, Bellamy’s text produced at the beginning of that process and Gilman’s text produced well into its formation. Wegner argues that Bellamy’s text argues, “the modern American nation state can be formed only through a collective act of forgetting, a breaking of the bonds of the past, and a reorientation toward a single future.” (Wegner 63) That process of forgetting, as Wegner notes, is crucial to the process of reproducing the imagined community of the nation. Bellamy’s text is able to imagine a new, more powerful nation arising from the current tumult of industrial class struggle through the erasure of the relations and means of production. Instead, we are offered a unified, middle class vision of the nation, built upon consumption based on the newly created department store. Wegner states, “The whole of society in Bellamy’s utopia thus has been transformed into a giant marketplace, occupied by a population that now functionally defines itself according to the sheer circular formality of the commodity process: the endless consumptions of fetishized goods, objects that magically seem to produce themselves, becoming a social end in itself.” (Wegner 80) Gilman’s work, rather than reducing the world to consumption, reduces it to the biopolitical realm of reproductive labor, focusing on motherhood and the raising of children, but expanding into the biology of animal husbandry and horticulture.

My initial impulse to follow this train of thought came out of my reading of a short article of Gilman’s contained in the 1980 collection, The Politics of Housework. Gilman’s article, “The Home: Its Work and Influence” poses a substantial challenge to the 19th century cult of motherhood, but that challenge operates through her evolutionary, Darwinist framework. Gilman poses a need to modernize the ‘primeval’ labor of the household with the new forms of expertise developed in the disciplines of ‘Household Science’ and ‘Domestic economics.’ Building on this new disciplinary framework, she proposes the sweeping away of the amateur, sentimentalized labor of the isolate household replacing it with newer, efficient, scientific procedures and techniques. Critic Sally Stein amongst others has explored the impact of assembly line production techniques on the conventional structures of the household, bringing not only the new technologies of the era into the house, but also the techniques developed in the Taylorist division of labor. The same forms of time-motion study used in the workplace to economize the movement of the worker were envisioned and implemented in the transformation of household labor, producing an instrumentalized economy of the household. Despite Gilman’s ability to shock sensibilities, her new experimental household built upon the techniques of domination and exploitation developed in the workplace, rather than challenged them.

It’s important to note that Gilman’s vision of the new, managed space of domestic and reproductive labor is not the privatized space of the household that eventually becomes the dominant post-war structure. Rather than translating the scientific management of Fordist modes of production to the privatized space of the home, Gilman proposes a far more direct model, proposing collective modes of daycare, cooking, and other aspects of domesticity. Unlike the later attempts to organize around the concept of wages for housewives who saw their campaign as a larger struggle to bring down the capitalist world system, Gilman was genuinely committed to these modes of collectivized, trained wage labor positions. However, her vision of modernizing the labor of the household presented a similar challenge to the erasure of that labor within the sentimentalized guise of motherhood. Although Gilman’s projection of the Fordist collective household draws upon and legitimates the apparatuses of expertise later to legitimate what Betty Friedan would later call ‘the feminine mystique,’ it cannot be read as a simple blueprint of the post-war economy.

However, the difference between Gilman’s vision of domestic and reproductive labor and the feminine mystique of domesticity blurs considerably as we enter into her utopian vision of Herland. The shift from the negative work of critique to the positive work of imagining an alternative society reintroduces the conventionality of reproductive labor and introduces a mystique of motherhood. It constructs this new model through a journey of intensive epistemological work, moving from the generic form of the primitive jungle, to the capture of the protagonists in the modernist Grecian city of Herland, and then to the enclosed space of the school house and the larger training space of the society. Within that explicitly epistemological framework, the reader is expected to follow the educational journey of the naïve male protagonists of the novel. However, satire supplements this educational program. As Joanna Russ notes, “There is the primitive delight of wish-fulfillment, i.e. escorting American men all over Herland (the book follows the classic Utopian pattern of lots of tours and discussions) and hearing the say, “Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Feminism is the hope of the world.”” (Russ 152) The end point of this pedagogical journey is marriage, created in the modernist terrain of the utopia of the city, rather than the primitive jungle of the old household.

To accomplish this work, Gilman’s utopia works through the convention of what Frederic Jameson calls world reduction. We are given glances of a large urban society, but are only given fragments of information about the structures of administration and production in that city. The initial description of the city combines the orderly fantasy of the garden city with the exoticism of ‘pre-Incan architecture in Peru, combining the clean lines of modernism with mosaics of monoliths. (Gilman, Herland, 35) During the return of the three protagonists to the city after an initial escape attempt, the narrative offers a brief description of the nation of Herland. “We rolled through many villages and towns, and I soon saw that the parklike beauty of our first-seen city was no exception.” (Gilman, Herland 44-45) But beyond the assurance of the nation’s uniform beauty, we are offered no information about administration or governance of the land beyond a brief reference to the coveted status of ‘overmother.’ Additionally, we have no way ascertaining either the modes or the relations of production of the land. Instead, we are given a world defined by the reproductive labor of domesticity. The walls of the household are broken down and the work of raising children, educating them, caring for them spreads across the nation of Herland as its exclusive project. Even the biological labors of breeding animals and the tending of gardens ties back into the central function of motherhood, operating as thin metaphors for family planning and the eugenics project. The nation becomes an overwhelming metaphor for the new household, redefined by the novum of a system of evolutionary rationality.


To define that system, the novel must first open in the terrain of the primitive. The group of adventurers, Jeff Margrave, poet and botanist, Terry Nicholson, who studied geography and meteorology, and the sociologist narrator, Vandyck Jennings began their journey of exploring, “the thousand tributaries and enormous hinterland of a great river, up where the maps had to be made, savage dialects studied, and all manner of strange flora and fauna expected.” (Gilman, Herland, 4) The narrative offers no more detail concerning the location of the utopian space of the narrative. Instead, the space is marked as the generic primitive, outside the maps, anthropology, and the botanical and the zoological sciences of Europe. The structure of this generic primitive defines the journey into the land of Herland, shifting from the predictable anthropological journey into the exploration of the novum of Herland.

“As we got further and further upstream, in a dark tangle of rivers, lakes, morasses and dense forests, with here and there an unexpected long spur running out from the big mountain beyond, I notice that more and more of these savages had a story about a strange and terrible “Woman Land” in the high distance.

“Up yonder,” “Over there,” “Way up”—was all the direction they could offer, but their legends all agreed on the main point—that there was this strange country where no men lived—only women and girl children.”

Had no one else gone? Yes—a good many—but they never came back. It was no place for men—that they seemed sure of.

I told the boys these stories, and they laughed at them. Naturally I did myself. I knew the stuff that savage dreams are made of.” (Gilman, Herland, 4)

The nation of women exists within this generic, primitive space, but it stands outside of its generic logic. The “strange and terrible “Woman Land”” could only be seen “in the high distance” of that primitive space. The ‘savages’ of Gilman’s narrative operate outside of the cognitive map of its modern other, unable to even identify its location outside of a broad sense that it sat above them, hostile and alien. The society of the ‘savages,’ returning to Fabian’s critique, operates in a different temporality of the modern society of women. The protagonists of the story laughed at the obscure narratives of the ‘savages,’ but they are equally implicated in the temporal critique of the narrative.

As the group prepared to discover the nature of the society, they speculated on the nature of the society.

“We talked and talked.

And with all my airs of sociological superiority I was no nearer than any of them.

It was funny though, in the light of what we did find those extremely clear ideas of ours as to what a country of women would be like. It was no use to tell ourselves and one another that all this was idle speculation. We were idle and we did speculate, on the ocean voyage and the river voyage, too.” (Gilman, Herland, 10)

Despite ‘airs’ of civilizational and disciplinary superiority, the men entering the utopian space of the community of women were no more able to predict or immediately comprehend what they would find than the surrounding ‘savages.’ The protagonists themselves were caught in the same ‘primitive’ logic of the surrounding villages. As the narrator notes, “We were not in the least “advanced” on the woman question, any of us, then.” The incomprehension of the ‘idle speculation’ of the narrators returns us to Gilman’s critique of the household economy, which was also defined as ‘primitive,’ in opposition to the modern forms of science and technology defining the rest of the society. The narrators must begin their journey within the terrain of the generically primitive precisely because they themselves are defined by the primitive state of the domestic labor of the individual household. The three figures could accomplish little more than the derided savage. However, this critique makes no effort to mark their dismissive assessment of the local population as skewed or biased in any way. Instead the critique embedded in the linkage between the two groups is grounded in the very binary between the modern and the primitive. The figuration of the generic primitive frames and grounds the critical framework of the narrative, its invisible walls enclosing the utopian space of the novel.

The movement into the utopian space of Herland immediately begins to challenge the expectations of the protagonists, shifting from the primitive to the intensely controlled space of the garden city.

“The road was some sort of hard manufactured stuff, sloped slightly to shed rain, with every curve and grade and gutter as perfect as if it were Europe’s best…. Here was evidently a people highly skilled, efficient, caring for their country, as a florist cares for his costliest orchids. Under the soft brilliant blue of that clear sky, in the pleasant shade of those endless rows of trees, we walked unharmed, the placid silence broken only by the birds.” (Gilman, Herland, 20.)

The movement from the space of the primitive to the country of women is not simply a shift in space, but is also a shift in temporality, moving from the generic space of expedition to the modernist space of ‘Europe’s best.’ The first signifier of this shift is the existence of the modern roadway, but the passage lingers on the description of the flora and the fauna of the place. The sign and seal of modernity is the ability to tend to the plants and animals, to shape them, and to construct a neat and orderly landscape, defined by tranquility and the sound of birds. The architecture was noted for its integration into this landscape. In contrast to the ‘offensive mess man made in the face of nature’ that defined the cities of California, the architecture complimented the natural surroundings. Modernity is then defined by the ability to shape biological material from the chaos of the primitive, and to construct architecture that blends into the modernized ‘endless rows of trees’ and carefully shaped and pruned landscape. In short, the modernity of Herland is biopolitical, not industrial. Just as significant, the land was described in terms of the household. “We felt like small boys, very small boys, caught doing mischief in some gracious lady’s house.” (Gilman, Herland, 20)

The narrative expands on the scope and intensity of that political shaping of life, or what Foucault called the shift from the sovereign act of ‘letting live’ and ‘making die’ to the regulatory act of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die.’ Through the educational process of the protagonists, we discover that the society regulates all aspects of life within their domain, selectively breeding cats to make no noise and to refuse to hunt birds, for instance. In addition, they had let several species die, including cattle, horses, and the domesticated dog. It’s difficult to avoid reading these moments within Jameson’s linkage of the utopian form with the Freudian reading of the daydream as a form of wish fulfillment. The narrative, after all, offers the fantasy of cats that don’t kill songbirds, an absence of the violence of dogs, etc. But focusing on that would miss out on the ability of the society to shape every aspect of life in its boundaries. Operating within an orthodox Suvinite framework, this biopolitical control is the novum of the narrative. Beyond those acts of making live and letting die, Gilman states, “They had worked out a chemistry, a botany, a physics, with all the blends where a science touches an art, or merges into an industry, to such a fullness of knowledge as made us feel like school children.” (Gilman, Herland, 65)

That knowledge of the sciences and the intense regulatory mechanisms of life that defined the society were directed towards the central function of the society, motherhood. The society was created out an elaborate history of a slaveholding, polygamous people, destroyed by conquest, during its decline. The women of the society took over when the slaves attempted to take over the society. After the slaves killed the remaining men, they were killed by the women. Shortly after, the women began to give birth by parthenogenesis, allowing for the society to continue. Motherhood is described in terms that would later appear in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

“Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by motherhood they lived—life was, to them, just the long cycle of motherhood.

But very early they recognized the need of improvement as well as of mere repetition, and devoted their combined intelligence to that problem—how to make the best kind of people. First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education.” (Gilman, Herland, 61)

The structures of the society are focused on the raising of children, and more significantly, all the needs and desires of the society are directed to this end. That work is collective and is the work of every member of the society. The utopian space of Herland may have shattered the binary of private and public, but it has done so by totalizing the domestic and reproductive labor of motherhood, leaving no outside to its responsibilities. Within that project, the society intensely controlled the process of who can and cannot have a child, banning ‘unfit’ mothers from having children. The society was defined by a Eugenics project of population control, as well marking the fit and the unfit. The intense control of the flora and fauna of the land is replicated in the control of the human society. The mystique enters into the picture explicitly through the universal consent to these policies, accepting the universal goal of motherhood and furthering the reach.

Despite the explicit Eugenic dimension contained in the social structure, the primary tool used to transform the society was education, as noted by the passage above. This pedagogical dimension of the society defines the majority of the narrative, following the protagonists of the society as they moved from the primary school of their initial enclosure to the secondary school or university of young women that they later graduate into. That process, which was ostensibly staged as an exchange of information, trained the protagonists into the logic of the society. They learned the language, the institutions, and the scientific knowledge of the society. That process of learning was defined by one on one education by a set of older women, labeled ‘Aunts.’ Later, the men learned from the women who they later married in a strange ceremony, publicized throughout the nation. This pedagogical process, ostensibly collective, was put into practice in a manner that was both individuated, and conventionally heteronormative.

That heteronormative process defined the telos of the process, creating a new form of the heteronormative marriage, directed towards the goals of the society. Rather than refusing the erotic as Joanna Russ’ reading claims, the narrative offered a new norm of heterosexual marriage, one directed towards synthesizing the ‘sex’ work of reproduction with the ‘race’ work of evolutionary transformation. That model failed through the limitations of the men of the narrative, but Gilman’s narrative continued in a sequel in which the women of the narrative moved out into the world at large, advocating the combination of eugenics and motherhood, mirroring the political work of Gilman herself.

Tiptree vs. Gilman?

     An initial engagement with the work of Tiptree and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  I was initially interested in producing  a comparative engagement with these two works, but I have grown more interested in the work of Gilman and the comparative approach has been dropped.  In any case, the initials thoughts are still somewhat interesting....

          James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) has garnered a great deal of academic interest in the past decade, although this work has focused on her curious biography, rather than on her literary work.  Most notably, Julie Phillips’s biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, but Larbalstier’s analysis of fan culture in The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction also puts the enigma of her double life in the center of her narrative about gender in fan culture, through her involvement (and expulsion) from the Khatru debates, the misinterpretations of her prose style, and the revelation of her true identity.  Tiptree’s biography becomes central to the feminist narrative because of its ability to challenge any number of assumptions about gender roles.

            Tiptree is the one who could hide her identity through the use of a series of devices she learned in the CIA, but she was also able to convince her audience of her masculinity.  Larbalstier notes that she not only fooled readers, but also longtime correspondents such as Ursula Leguin and Joanna Russ.  For Larbalstier, this narrative “break(s) down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing”[1] and her work has been read to explore their themes, primarily through the narrative of the biography.   However, the actual literary work of Tiptree has gotten much less attention.  The chapter will focus on one of Tiptree’s more famous novellas “Houston, Houston, Can You Here?”  The narrative has been used as an important example of the new critical utopia by Tom Moylan.  Moylan reads the narrative as a crucial model for the new critical utopia in his chapter on the new utopias in Scraps of the Untainted Sky, but neither he nor other readings of the text have noticed that the narrative is a rewriting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.

            This response uses the same comparative methodology introduced by Hans Robert Jauss in his analysis of Valery’s rereading of Goethe’s Faust.  However, this chapter will use Jauss’ methodology to explore the evolution of the utopian form, from the feminist appropriation of the genre in Herland to the more contemporary novella by Tiptree.  The retelling shifts the narrative style, the historical logic of the utopian community, producing the utopian space through that catastrophism of biopolitics, rather than through the isolation of geography.  The narrative offers a totalizing vision of the world through the novum.  The exploration of this shift allows for an understanding of the transformations in the expectations of the genre, the expectations of the audience, and the transformation of the utopian form through the expectations of the formation of the genre of science fiction.

            Perkins’ Herland is not set in any specific location.  Instead, it’s located in the generic space of the primitive, signified through the description of wildlife, references to tribal life containing obvious references to tropes of travel writing, ethnography, and adventure stories.  The three protagonists, as explorers and scientists, fit this narrative as well.  The local residents tell of a community of women living in an isolated, who are feared by the indigenous population.  The men decide to investigate the society, and are quickly captured by the women of the society.  They are then held as prisoners so that the women can understand the outside world that they had left years ago, after the destruction of a strange “Aryan” kingdom through a lengthy and mysterious invasion.

            The remainder of the story creates a sort of ethnography through the narrative.  Its defined by a combination of gender essentialism and, more implicitly, by the contemporary science of eugenics.  The focus of the society, which is profoundly egalitarian, is defined by the collective raising of children, although the ability of the society to reproduce is not explained in scientific terms, linking the narrative to the fantastic.  The raising of children and the utopian quality of the society are both linked to a nature that is ‘essentially feminine.’  This nature is cultivated through the focused and planned raising of children, allowing only ‘suitable’ mothers to raise their children.  The eugenic dimension of the text is not explicitly marked until the sequel, however, eugenics are implicitly brought into the text through the planned animal breeding program.  The society, however, is as completely asexual as the all women worlds mocked by Joanna Russ in her essay, “Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction” and the introduction of ‘romance into the community of women both drives the narrative arc, and eventually creates the logic for the expulsion of the men from the community through an attempted rape.

            Tiptree’s work mirrors the three protagonists of the first novel, however, rather than playing role of colonial explorers, the three are astronauts, who are thrown into the future.

As noted earlier, the community of women expands from a small section of a valley to the entire world through the catastrophe of biowarfare, creating a society of clones which are variants of the 11, 000 survivors.  The clones work towards exploring the potential through their various types, both through genetic experiments, along with elaborate collective narratives on the potentials in the lifespan of the type.  The three men are brought onto one of the remaining spaceships in order to be tested for their compatibility with the new society, through a drug that lowered the men’s inhibitions, and the group is put under examination.  The narrative follows the same pedagogical path as the original narrative, but it takes a much more narrative path, as the lead protagonist slowly discovers the nature of the society, and the inability for the three protagonists to adjust to it.

            The shift in the narrative takes on the obvious differences in the scientific knowledge of the two eras, from the rejection of eugenics and the development of the understanding of genetics, from the isolation of the structure in 1869 to the the full understanding of its form and function in the late 1950’s. But the narrative also re-imagines the nature of gender, rejecting the essentialism of the earlier text.  Instead, the women involved are capable of both deception and violence, although the question of sexuality never gets fully explored.  The forms of knowledge produced by the clones  These shifts lead to a much different narrative structure, moving from a traditional pedagogical structure to a more conventional narrative, which uses those deceptions for the brakes to create suspense in the narrative.  Along with this transformation in narrative, the utopian transformation must be imagined as total, and constructed through a complete catastrophe, linking up to Jameson’s claims that the utopian form must be radically reimagined in the integrated capitalist system.

---

[1] 2