Lost in Space

Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond

Marleen S. Barr

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469639765
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical alternatives to mainstream patriarchal society. Because feminist science fiction challenges male-centered social imperatives, it has been marginalized and dismissed from the canon--thus, lost in space. Moving beyond feminist science fiction itself, Barr goes on to examine other literary genres from the perspective of 'feminist fabulation'--a term she has coined to encompass science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and mainstream literature that critiques patriarchal fictions. Discussing the works of such writers as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Marge Piercy, Barr illuminates feminist science fiction's connections to other literary traditions and contemporary canons. Her critical analysis yields a new and expanded understanding of feminist creativity.

I. BEFORE FEMINIST FABULATION

Feminist Science Fiction

The Ultimate Sandbox by Michael Whelan
© 1984 by Michael Whelan

1. THELMA AND LOUISE

DRIVING TOWARD FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION

This road movies brand of escapism offers transcendence, not instruction—and it rises above both the everyday and the limits of its genre. Thelma and Louise is transcendent in every way.

—Janet Maslin, “Lay Off Thelma and Louise”

I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. . . . For the mental desert form expands before your very eyes, and this is the purified form of social desertification.

Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed. All that is cold and dead in desertification or social enucleation rediscovers its contemplative form here in the heat of the desert. Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

—Jean Baudrillard, America

Thelma and Louise share Baudrillard’s search for astral America. Disaffected women who desert patriarchy, they embrace the America of desert speed, enjoy the freedom of the freeways, and contemplate themselves. Disappearing in the desert enables them to author an ecstatic critique of patriarchal culture. Their road trip is not, as they state, a journey to Mexico (a country, of course, offering no feminist haven) but rather a transcendent merger with the desert defined as transpolitical mental space. Submerged in the desert, which is “a sublime form that banishes all sociality, all sentimentality, all sexuality” (Baudrillard, 71), these escapees from dead-end female lives enter a terrain beyond patriarchal language—ultimately beyond all aspects of patriarchal reality. Ensconced in alternative space, they experience Baudril-lard’s question and answer: “Why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there—a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profluidity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points” (Baudrillard, 123—24). I argue that their journey in outer hyperspace, their drive beyond patriarchal meaning systems, conforms to feminist science fiction tropes. Thelma and Louise, transcendent in every way, offers feminist escapism—the ability to rise above the patriarchal real.

British director Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise has much in common with his science fiction films Alien and Blade Runner (the latter based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)¹ Ripley, the female protagonist of Alien, fights a monster on another planet. Thelma and Louise, who learn that females are treated as alien Others on planet Earth, battle the monstrous patriarchy. Further, while Blade Runner focuses on how Deckard, a police officer, hunts replicants (androids), Thelma and Louise portrays police chasing newly remodeled women who no longer replicate patriarchal imperatives. Thelma and Louise, hunted, recreated, alien women, soldiers poised to shoot anything resembling a patriarchal bug-eyed monster, try, when confronted with the end of their world, to create a women’s world of their own. The note Thelma leaves in the microwave communicates finality. “The microwave, the waste disposal . . . this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world” (Baudrillard, 31). The end of Thelma’s and Louise’s lives in the patriarchal world occurs when Thelma realizes that she inhabits a micro-world and Louise realizes that it is a waste to spend her life moving food from restaurant table to waste disposal. Their last resort is, in the manner of Ibsen’s Nora, to slam the door on patriarchy.

Thelma and Louise allows viewers to look through the keyhole of Nora’s slammed door, to see fugitive women fleeing patriarchy by driving a “get away car,” a mobile room of one’s own on the road in a desert space outside society. In the wide open space of the American West, in Baudrillard’s fantastic, meta-representational desert hyperspace, Thelma and Louise are not corralled within spaces of female limitation. Thelma, no longer a Stepford wife (Ira Levin’s term), and Louise, no longer a servile meal server, proclaim that women are not components of a mindless female herd that men shepherd, that women are not electric sheep who follow automatically whenever patriarchy plugs in sexist master narratives.

Their proclamation answers the question Janet Maslin poses in her defense against charges that the film exemplifies toxic feminism. Maslin asks, “But what is it that really rankles about Thelma and Louise? . . . Once again, what’s so egregious about Thelma and Louise?” (Maslin, 11). What’s so egregious is that the film, like feminist science fiction, utilizes Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement to unmask and name constructed reality as toxic patriarchy. What’s so egregious is that, in both the film and feminist science fiction, “the men . . . don’t really matter[;] . . . they [men] are essentially powerless” (Maslin, 16). What’s most egregious is that the film and feminist science fiction, power fantasies for women, portray women who are essentially powerful. (I would like to remind those who criticize Thelma and Louise for deriving power from theft that a precedent exists for tolerating fictitious thieves. We do not, for example, routinely chastise Robin Hood for stealing from the rich in a location outside society’s mainstream. Although Thelma and Louise are expected to obey the law in the desert— and the black “boyz” are expected to obey the law “‘n the hood”— Robin Hood is exempt from this expectation in the forest.)

Women need power fantasies: feminist nonreaiistic fiction provides women’s only escape from a reality that brands them as Other. Yet the general public, and even some feminist critics, do not routinely emphasize this point. For instance, according to public opinion voiced in the form of a letter to the New York Times (in response to Maslin’s article), “I don’t remember that women were treated so badly by men in those buddy films, but the males really take it in Thelma and Louise. With one exception, every featured male character is either a sex freak (the truck driver), a dishonest lover preying on women (the hitchhiker), a hateful spouse (the husband), or a sniveling coward (the motorcycle cop)” (Cole, 4). With few exceptions, females living under patriarchy really take it from husbands, cops, and male characters of various sorts. The roles the letter writer describes exemplify the sorts of men women routinely confront. In other words, while I am not trying to cast all women as heroes and all men as villains, it is, for example, true that male truck drivers who harass women are more numerous than female truck drivers who harass men.

The truck driver’s lewd comments and actions epitomize a socially sanctioned toxic masculinism that is so routine, even The Guardian s female reviewer chastises Thelma and Louise—not the driver. The reviewer mentions “one of the movie’s most objectionable scenes, when Thelma and Louise hold up the driver of a petrol tanker who has been making obscene gestures at them. First they shoot out his tyres, then—in a wanton piece of environmental pollution—they blow his lorry sky-high” (Smith, 17). Thelma and Louise merely express an exaggerated opposing response to patriarchy’s dictum that women greet objectionable, dehumanizing male gestures in terms of the silence of the lambs. The obnoxious truck driver fares better than the male invaders who might deservedly face death in James Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” The truck, the elongated silver phallus on wheels, the invading enemy vehicle piloted by a polluter of Thelma’s and Louise’s woman-controlled desert environment, should be shot. The sight of the exploding truck imparts a new, nonpatriarchal meaning to the term “truck stop.”

Thelma and Louise is so egregious because it shows precisely how easy it is for women who no longer act as silent lambs and electric sheep to blow up a truck driven by a male chauvinist pig. The film shows precisely how easy it is for women to empower themselves, to command the male-centered environments truck stops epitomize, to pull the trigger, to kill the rapist—to explode patriarchy. What really rankles about Thelma and Louise is that it portrays a feminist version of the moment Joanna Russ calls “When It Changed.” In Russ’s science fiction story, the lives of a community of women change when men come to the feminist utopia called Whileaway; in Thelma and Louise, two women’s lives change when they leave the utopia for elite men called America. Like Russ’s story, the film is threatening and thus has been the target of much criticism. Patriarchy does not react well to women who change, to women who rewrite their lives in a feminist, postmodern act of defying patriarchal master narratives. Patriarchy does not react well to powerful, mobile women. The film challenges the notion that the American desert West was never meant to be a wide open space for women. The film reminds Saudi men exactly why they do not allow women to drive.

Thelma and Louise reach a point where they no longer want to engage with patriarchy. Louise turns down an offer of marriage. Perhaps, like the protagonist of Suniti Namjoshi’s The Conversations of Cow, she comes “to the conclusion that men are aliens[,]. . . the Men from mars, the Unearthly Aliens” (Namjoshi, 90) and does “not want to be married to a Martian” (Namjoshi, 93). Thelma, the former Stepford wife, steps forward to offer her own ideas about survival skills: she shoots the state trooper’s radio, obliterates the literal voice of patriarchal law. The trooper is imprisoned in his car; Thelma and Louise, liberated in their car, are free to interpret the desert as a vast natural space that does not necessarily adhere to patriarchal definitions. Inspired by the clear evidence that social and sexual intercourse with men yields trouble, like female feminist Huck Finns, Thelma and Louise light out from patriarchal civilization. This separatist action enables them to acquire a clear perspective about their lives. As Maslin explains,

One of the most invigorating things about this film is the way its heroines, during the course of a few brief but wildly eventful days, crystallize their thoughts and arrive at a philosophical clarity that would have been unavailable to them in their prior lives. By the end of the film, the director Ridley Scott and the screenwriter Gallic Khouri are ready to allow Thelma and Louise the opportunity to take full charge of their lives and full responsibility for their mishaps too. (Maslin, 16)

In Baudrillard’s terms, Thelma and Louise experience “an exalting vision of the desertification of signs and men” (Baudrillard, 63). Baudrillard comments further:

The natural deserts tell me what I need to know about the deserts of the sign. They teach me to read surface and movement and geology and immobility at the same time. They create a vision expurgated of all the rest: cities, relationships, events, media. . . . They form the mental frontier where the projects of civilization run into the ground. They are outside the sphere and circumference of desire. We should always appeal to the deserts against the excess of signification, of intention and pretention in culture. They are our mythic operator. (Baudrillard, 63—64)

The desert is Thelma’s and Louise’s transforming teacher, their Professor Henry Higgins who changes them from flowery feminine women to hardened freedom fighters who certainly are no ladies. The desert, like a feminist separatist planet, is their mythic operator, the place where they learn to reread patriarchal signs.

Thelma and Louise author their own version of Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” When she shoots Thelma’s attacker, Louise, who was raped in Texas, announces that Texas—and all America—must read (or understand) that she will no longer suffer abuse. After attempting to reinterpret Texas as an unreal location, Thelma and Louise remind themselves that it is impossible to travel from Oklahoma to Mexico without passing through Texas. When they leap beyond reality at the conclusion of the film, Texas’s location no longer matters. Because they have become so adroit at rereading reality, because they know that for women “this country [America] is without hope” (Baudrillard, 123), Thelma and Louise can only perceive Texas—and patriarchy—as an absence.

Baudrillard’s ideas apply to the point that Thelma and Louise can never return to a mainstream vision of the world; they can never emerge from the desert. With these observations in mind, I offer a positive view of the aforementioned letter writer’s opinions about the film’s conclusion. He asks, “Since when is not facing the music by suicide paying the price for crime?” (Cole, 4). I argue for interpreting according to a different tune: patriarchy is criminal— and it pays no price. Thelma and Louise are not suicides, not Kate Chopin’s defeated Edna Pontellier. Because their awakening makes returning to patriarchal reality unacceptable, they, instead, forge ahead into a new fantastic reality. They are akin to Tiptree’s Ruth and Althea Parsons, the protagonists of “The Women Men Don’t See,” who choose to leave Earth, join extraterrestrials, and embrace the cosmos. In contrast to Ruth and Althea, Thelma and Louise possess a spaceship of their own: their car.

The spaceship/car in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise evokes the spaceship/car in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Godard’s Natasha Von Braun and Mr. Johnson/Mr. Caution, who are not “logical” according to this word’s definition in Alphaville, enter another galactic zone when driving their Ford Galaxy through what the film’s computer commentator calls “our splendid galactic thoroughfares.” Thelma and Louise, who no longer assume “logical” female roles in patriarchal America, act in kind. Their behavior echoes Natasha’s comment “I am no longer normal,” and their fate can be understood in terms of a particular phrase Natasha quotes from a book: “dying or not dying.” Thelma and Louise are not dying. They are, instead, Natasha’s fellow female travelers on splendid galactic thoroughfares. And, unlike Natasha, they do not depend on a male savior/chauffeur.

When Thelma and Louise consult and decide to drive over the Grand Canyon’s edge, they live Baudrillard’s “crucial moment.” According to Baudrillard, the “only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? . . . Aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end” (Baudrillard, 10). Their key: the decision that their journey beyond patriarchy should have no end. Thelma and Louise choose to hurl themselves into a fantastic zone. As Baudrillard explains, the desert is replete with signs and the Grand Canyon is a magical, living, surrealistic presence: “Among this gigantic heap of signs—purely geological in essence-—man will have had no significance. . . . For the desert only appears uncultivated. . . . The long plateau which leads to the Grand Canyon . . . [is] alive with a magical presence, which has nothing to do with nature (the secret of this whole stretch of country is perhaps that it was once an underwater relief and has retained the surrealist qualities of an ocean bed in the open air)” (Baudrillard, 3). Thelma and Louise plunge into a magical place of nonhuman signification; they enter an alternative text. By doing so, they themselves become fantastic, magical, surrealist. Their car does not adhere to the laws of gravity; instead of immediately falling, it flies. Thelma and Louise are no longer brought down by patriarchal law. Instead of allowing an army of men and machines to capture them, while ensconced within a vehicle that transcends the laws of nature, they enter a magical space—a place better than America/Alphaville. Never achieving the questionable goal of reaching Mexico, another patriarchal country, Thelma and Louise enjoy “an ecstatic form of disappearance” (Baudrillard, 5). These women who have been dehumanized transcend humanity and mortality.

After all, another letter writer observes that the “beauty of Callie Khouri and Ridley Scott’s road movie is that Thelma and Louise are pitted in a no-win battle that man and woman alike fight daily—against a dehumanizing society” (Ellsworth, 4). Thelma and Louise underscores that in this battle men fare better than women, that patriarchy dehuman...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Marleen Barr’s Lost and Found
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Patriarchal Hocus-Pocus
• Part I. Before Feminist Fabulation: Feminist Science Fiction
• Part II. After Feminist Fabulation: Feminist Postmodernism
• Permissions
• Index