Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction

A Biopsychosocial Approach

Derek Thiess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317551935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Following scholarship on gender in science fiction, this book explores the limits of considering age as a social construction, positing that an acknowledgement of aged bodies necessarily changes the way we read both age and science fiction. The volume employs contemporary clinical psychology, the biopsychosocial model, to demonstrate that age is an important and neglected topic relevant to the study of speculative fiction. While gender offers a vocabulary, the biopsychosocial approach provides a method to consider age (and gender) as an embodied synthesis of physicality, psychology, and social environment. This respected model of clinical psychology allows a unique and innovative lens through which to read age and the body in literature. Thiess offers readings of established sf classics including Octavia Butler's Parable series; Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game; and cyberpunk authors such as Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson, also exploring more mainstream speculative works including Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series and Joss Whedon's Firefly/Serenity. Visiting topics such as care work, sexuality, sport, and the military in these works, the book demonstrates that acknowledging a more fully embodied age is not only necessary for the individual subject, but will also enrich our understanding of other social categories, including gender and race. Taking a constructive—rather than adversarial—stance, this book does not merely question how much one can ethically and responsibly "bend" age, but suggests there is a great deal to learn when one explores those limits.

1 Science Fiction and the Abjection of Age

In a key moment of Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the abbot of a small monastery argues with a doctor charged with caring for—and potentially euthanizing—people suffering from radiation following a nuclear blast. The doctor, however, does not recognize the abbot as an authority, but feels society determines the law. In that context he declares, “pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight” (298). Even more important, however, is the abbot’s reaction: “Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time” (300). This scene highlights a critical tension in the context of aging and the body and highlights the relationship between pain and power. Pain and suffering is an important topic to both the young and the old as two groups especially vulnerable to it and also because there is a greater tendency to overlook the pain of the very young and the old. The present chapter briefly attempts to underscore the tense relationship of bodily pain (and pleasure) to the topic of age in the context of science fiction, focusing especially on a speech by Ursula K. Le Guin titled “An Envoy from Senectutus” and the novel version of James Gunn’s The Immortals. Reading these against theories of embodiment and sexuality, specifically as regards pain, reveals that the physical and psychological pain (and by extension the body) of both young and old is a banished, abjected presence that demands inclusion beyond the social order, in a holistic, biopsychosocial approach.

First, it is no accident that the notion of pain is raised in Miller’s novel in the context of heresy. There is a long history of tension in religion as regards the idea of pain and particularly of the control of the representation of pain. One of the key reasons, for example, that the gospel of Peter is now apocryphal is that, although it depicts the crucifixion of Jesus, it also says “But he was silent as having no pain.” This notion is contrary to Church teachings—essentially heretical—as according to doctrine Jesus must have suffered for the people of the world in order to erase their sins. In fact, this doctrine represents a critical moment in “Western” history, as it essentially relegates the notion of pain to something symbolic, even iconic. Following doctrine, pain is far from the only evil and, in fact, is demanded not only of Jesus but of all of his followers as well. In the act of proscribing the gospel of Peter, the Church declares that pain is secondary to Church teaching. In this moment pain is commodified—it enters what Judith Butler might refer to as a “matrix of power” or what Michel Foucault might call a “relation of force.”

These theorists notably also relate these forces and powers specifically to the body. Butler even anticipates, to a certain extent, the argument of the present volume that it is necessary to include the psychological and the biological in holistic treatment of individuals. She takes a firm constructivist position against any “realness” in these categories, however, as she argues against a “metaphysical endeavor to ground those constraints in a biological or psychological essentialism … [which] seeks to establish a certain ‘proof’ of constraint over and against a constructivism which is illogically identified with voluntarism and free play” (Bodies that Matter 94). Those who criticize constructivism, to Butler, do so by reducing it to a radical emphasis on free play (such that the constructivist destabilizes all categories) and by recourse to “essentialist” biological and psychological “proof.” This position is a “kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion” (8). The criticism is well taken that biology and psychology do tend toward a certain universalism, and that is precisely why the present volume does not seek to negate social constructivism wholesale. Moreover, there is a history of such universalizing biology and psychology reinforcing racist and misogynist acts of exclusion. The argument at present, however, is that neither does this egregious sociohistorical context negate the often painful (and sometimes pleasurable) realities of gendered and aged bodies.

Thus in Butler’s work the necessary byproduct of the social constructivist position is an omission of sources of biological and psychological pain and pleasure for the individual body. These become for Butler the very constraints that performativity imposes on the individual subject. Performance of these sources of pain and pleasure, that is, becomes the very means by which the individual is compelled to enter the social order—to essentially “do” a gender. They are merely iterations of an already established structure of power. To her, then, “This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of production” (95). Butler is drawing on psychoanalysis, here, and specifically discussing sex. From her perspective (and to a large extent from Foucault’s as well, who also discusses sex), fear of life and death are the motivating factors that lead the individual to concede to the matrices of power that are always already “compelling the shape” of their performed subjectivity. However, it is also necessary to challenge this zero-sum game, even if life and death impulses are largely symbolic to the psychoanalyst focused on sex and sexuality. What of pain that does not necessarily lead to death? What of suffering, whether of the physical or psychological body? Those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

Taking such a position might make one that critic who oversimplifies the constructivist position. However, it does not necessarily suggest that “the social construction of the natural presupposes the cancellation of the natural by the social” (5). Few biologists and psychologists would not be open to the idea that our notion of matter is actually “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9, original emphases). But one must still note that the notions of a bodily pain or a bodily pleasure are almost entirely lost or dissolved in Butler’s description of this “process” above. Fear of death may compel the individual, but neither pain nor pleasure may do the same. This may be the reason that the two bodily sensations become so closely entwined as to be indistinguishable in Butler’s writing. For instance, when she discusses Paris is Burning she concludes that “The film attests to the painful pleasures of eroticizing and miming the very norms that wield their power by foreclosing the very reverse-occupations that the children nevertheless perform” (137). Pain and pleasure mysteriously intermingle in this account of “children” drag performers, because they too have become in Butler’s analysis a part of the symbolic order. There is no need to discuss the pain or pleasure of the individual (some of the performers were hurt or killed), because each of those experiences is only a part of the production that is already an iteration of a heteronormative matrix of power.

To clarify, the shortcomings one finds in the postmodern, constructivist account of the body lie not merely in the complete negation of pain (and pleasure) but also in its relegation to the margin and ironically its elevation into a social order. Butler later (2004) writes about grief and its tense relationship with discourse, the inability of discourse to account for or to represent grief. Thus grief displays “the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide. …My narrative falters, as it must” (Precarious Life 23). In the process of naming grief (even, of psychological pain) Butler inevitably makes it that which cannot be inscribed, for which one’s narrative must falter. Elaine Scarry has driven this point home even more forcefully, declaring that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). Moreover, Butler and Scarry both emphasize the manner in which the body and its relationship to pain underscore the unintelligibility of the pain itself—to embody pain is to be unable to speak of it.

However, it is the almost complete absorption of this bodily pain in the social order that ultimately relegates it to something unknowable, unpronounceable. Pain, for Butler, is only comprehensible in its collective form, repackaged as the “grief” of the social body. Thus to Butler, “The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (Precarious Life 26). The individual’s body is therefore necessarily a political body for Butler because “we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another” (27). If the assertion that discourse fails to articulate pain did not fully banish the latter to someplace irretrievably present, then its absorption into the social order will neatly wall it off from the individual’s access. This is because the insistence on pain as a social phenomenon—as something that “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order”—is in fact a discourse but a discourse from which the pain of the individual is almost entirely excluded (22). This point will be underscored in the third chapter, which clearly pits social and cultural imperatives against the pains of the individual. For now it is important simply that the one obscures the other, that the elevation of pain into the political is complicit in the very act of making unintelligible the pain of the individual.

It is for this very reason that Scarry elucidates at length the “objectlessness” of pain, or its lack of direct reference to the outside world, which in turn makes it impossible for one to detect and acknowledge another’s pain. As she explains, “It is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the ‘it’ one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual ‘it’” (4). Of course, she takes war and torture as extreme examples of the both impossible and willful ignorance of others’ bodily pain. And yet Scarry also locates the experience of pain (because language fails) in the “imaginary,” in the act of making and unmaking “the dense sea of artifacts and symbols that we … move about in” (162). Thus the body in pain is always again elevated to the social, political order of symbols, or even “separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or use or instance of political authority” (62). In the construction of pain, then, there is no “the body,” but only the body as incorporated into the larger social and political structure.

There is no denying the importance of this social order or the importance of the diversity of collective, political bodies (i.e. female bodies, lesbian bodies, black, Muslim, indigenous, etc., bodies). But in the context of bodily gender and age this positioning of the political body against the individual’s, and via an insistence on the unintelligibility of pain, also involves the necessary inclusive exclusion of bodily pain and pleasure. In this, one might again echo a caution from Butler:

Thus every insistence on identity must at some point lead to a taking stock of the constitutive exclusions that reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials, exclusions that each articulation was forced to make in order to proceed. This critical reflection will be important in order not to replicate at the level of identity politics the very exclusionary moves that initiated the turn to specific identities in the first place. (Bodies that Matter 118)

Given this statement, oddly pain and pleasure appear to be ironically excluded from the constructivist position. This exclusion is doubly ironic because of the history associated with this power to include or exclude pain from the discourses of power. In abjecting (to use Butler’s terms) pain from her own discourse, Butler inverts the exclusion of the patriarchy of the Church, but as she would also be quick to point out, this movement does not necessarily indicate a negation. In claiming this right to exclude, there is still a tacit acceptance of the social order, a willingness to play by the rules.

The pain discussed in this chapter, then, is an individual pain defined against the body in pain that is co-opted into the social order. It is also a pain that one must necessarily attempt (whether successfully or not) to include in one’s discourse. Thus, whereas one might cede the location of the body and its pain within a social environment, an ethical embodiment must demand a discourse beyond the social. Scarry suggests that “physical pain is able to obliterate psychological pain because it obliterates all psychological content, painful, pleasurable, and neutral” (34). Interestingly, she connects this experience to the aging, for whom bodies become “increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects” (32). However, this obliteration of the psychological is most often not the case. Even her own examples of the torturer or the soldier of war will often—though entirely unaware of the pain of his victim/enemy at the time of inflicting injury—experience a pain (a psychological and often somatic one) long after he or she has returned to attempt a “normal” life. More importantly, there is a problematic Cartesian dualism at play in direct opposition between the physical to the psychological, as if the synapse existed independently of the sensation and vice versa. Like Sherryl Vint (more on this in chapter five), I argue that this mind-body dualism is not representative of an ethical embodiment. Moreover, a more holistic, biopsychosocial approach to the body and its attendant pain and pleasure, while not negating the social, allows one at least to avoid the exclusion of the individual’s pain at the expense of the social.

Aging and Pain

A brief reading of a short Ursula K. Le Guin piece demonstrates this exclusion, placing it more clearly in the context of age. As is often the case in such venues, Le Guin’s keynote speech at WisCon (a conference for feminist science fiction) in 1996 was a semi-fictional piece composed in the mode of science fiction. It is the report of an envoy from a land called Senectutus (from the Latin for “old age”) who calls herself the “Mobile from Geriatrica.” The speech becomes Le Guin’s characteristic call to action, exhorting the younger generation to raise “its own hell [and] its own daughters and sons to seek justice, seek equality, seek freedom” (3). Before this turn to activism, she comments on the aging process in her own unique way—making it a physical land:

The trouble with the country I live in now is that it is treacherous. All quicksand and precipices, and volcanoes popping up underfoot. The maps can’t keep up with the way the terrain changes. Whenever you think you know what it’s like, it gets worse. One day you lose your waist, it’s gone, next day you lose a friend, she died, next day you lose your job, you’re retired. Things get lost, more and more things, until it’s all the things. This is the badlands. Learning to live here is learning to lose. (1)

Life and death are concerns but not the main focus of the inhabitants of Senectutus. Rather learning to navigate an unfriendly landscape is their primary concern, and this navigation is intimately tied to dealing with loss. Moreover, this loss is clearly something with which one must deal psychologically and to which one must physically adjust. Earth people, for example, “have hormones, a concept that troubles many of us here. Some of us in fact take hormones to feel that we are still Earth people, but it doesn’t work” (1).

Conditions of existence in Senectutus include a very poignant physicality and psyche—things are difficult and, even though Le Guin does not say it precisely, painful. To the, often humorous, performance of the stereotypically elderly for whom “glasses usually either don’t fit, or they need a new prescription, or they can’t remember where they put the Goddamn things,” the envoy also implicates a body in physical space, a biology that may be in a changeful process, but that has real issues with which to contend. Moreover, and seemingly in response to theorists such as Butler and Foucault, Le Guin highlights sex as one of Senectutus’ very conditions of existence: “if you think life is sex, if you think life is thrills, if you see life as basically a big bungee jump, then you can’t believe old people are actually alive. … They have no bodices to rip” (1). This is not so far from the claim of the feminist gerontologists who argue that because the aging are thought to have an “unproductive future,” their time and energy are less important (Allen and Walker 157). More importantly, what sex draws attention to in this piece is the exclusion of aging bodies from all discourse—whether those that maintain hegemonic force or that oppose it. With the exclusion of pleasure, the sex of the aging, comes a necessary exclusion of pain, a dissolution of the body.

Senectutus, old age, means an exclusion from discourses of the social order of things. But this raises many questions. If sex is this discourse of power, and this is mixing Foucault with Butler, if it is that which enters us into the social order as we “assume” a gender, what do we do with those who have exited? Where do old people, who are presumed not to have a sex, fit in this constructivist approach to power? They are, Le Guin suggests, as invisible to such theory as they are in quotidian life: “most of us who live there are invisible, most of the time. The longer we live there the more invisible we get. Earth people walk right through us” (1). Le Guin uses the word invisible, but the idea that Earth people are able to walk “through” the inhabitants of Senectutus implies a much more complete dissolution. They have become phantasms, altogether different from what Butler outlines, in that their bodies have become wholly non-physical. At the risk of stretching Butler too thin, one might say that their bodies neither matter nor have matter. Unless they are “being wise, and cute, and spry, and wearing purple,” they are excluded from material existence.

Working backward, therefore, from the pain they feel that is not included, to the pleasure they are presumed not to feel, the aging become bodiless. There is a relationship, then, between the exclusion of pain (or pleasure) in the constructivist approach to sex and the exclusion of old people from any discursive realm such that they are both necessary abjections for that systematic approach’s coherence. Yet Le Guin throws down a gauntlet. If we include age and the aging in our discourse on power and allow the pain and pleasure of those in Senectutus, then we must deal with an altogether different kind of power—one that does not simply control through discourse, but also through pain and through pleasure and through bodies. That people “walk right through” the aging and do not believe they are “actually alive” ought to remind one of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” that figure excluded, even banned, from the sovereign state, yet within its borders. In this “bare life” condition it exists but as something less than its counterparts who enjoy “full life.” Agamben, however, while he at least places pain and suffering at the center of his philosophy, still says of the body that it “always maintains a close tie to bare life” (125). The Mobile from Geriatrica would disagree.

The elderly may enjoy something like “bare life,” but it is not by sovereign decree. Rather it is the direct result of other exclusions but primarily of the exclusion of their bodily pain and pleasure from the social order of things, an exclusion in which the constructivist approach is also complicit. What one finds here is a mingling of structures of power. On one hand, one must acknowledge that there is no sovereign decree, no pre-existing law, that excludes the elderly from either activities of daily living or from discourses of power themselves. Yet one must also admit that the discourse on sex excludes the pain and pleasure, even the bodily existence of the aging from its own discourse. It is vital to create a critical space in which accounts of discursive power are better able to deal with the body. In short, a biopsychosocial approach may, even in a humanistic setting, repair some of these exclusions. First, however, are two more examples demonstrating more clearly why such an approach is needed, one from Foucault and the other from sf again.

Age, Sex, and Silence

Butler is not alone in what may be a rather silent, cosmic irony. One might, in a limited sense, include Foucault as well. This inclusion is limited, because he does in fact elaborate on the idea of pain and the body in his Discipline and Punish, though he largely relegates it to a historical construction for which our modern discourse on “humanization” is responsible. However, if one focuses on work on sexuality, and places him in the same context as Butler, there may be an equal exclusion of the notion of pain. Rather than begin from this exclusion (as with Butler, The History of Sexuality is indispensible for the critic approaching sex, gender, and power), however, it makes sense to proceed from a somewhat surprising moment of inclusion in Foucault:

We must not think that by saying yes to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Science Fiction and the Abjection of Age
• 2 Bad Girls (with Older Men): Differently Aged Relationships in the Twilight Series
• 3 Care Work, Age, and Culture in SF
• 4 The End of Games: Sports, Anger, and Young Masculinity in SF
• 5 Age in the Machine: Aged Bodies in Cyberpunk
• Conclusions: “No Power in the ’verse Can Stop Me”
• References
• Index