Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation—The Female Man(191)

Materialist feminism operates with the assumption that sex constitutes the most basic social class distinction. The utopian goal, then, is to eradicate sex as a socially relevant category by way of a feminist revolution. Beginning with the stories around Alyx, Russ's fiction develops androcide as the focused representation of a revolutionary war. Taking the life of a member of the sex that has denied women the capacity to act opens new ground for female characters in the existing archive of comprehensible and permissible story lines.

I will, therefore, examine androcide in terms of its narrative function within the texts, shunning too ready conflation between the ‘real’ lives of women and the stories of characters in fiction. Thus, while I acknowledge the analogy between the stories people live and fictional narratives, I also want to point to this analogy's limitations. Presupposing structural similarities between the stories of female fictional characters and the stories cultures tell about women's lives does not suggest their complete identity. In my reading of Russ's fiction, androcide is therefore not the celebration of violence, not advocacy of mass murder, but a narrativedevice, which (partially) endows female characters with the ability to act independently. In Russ's texts, androcide as a narrative device represents women's claim to agency, destroying as it does established gender-specific narratives in the handed-down set of basic story lines available to (genre) fiction writers. Women, who are conventionally supposed to givelife, especially to male offspring, transcend this demand of patriarchy by taking the life of a grown man. Women, who are conventionally expected to help the male hero, become the heroes of their own stories, destroying precisely those characters in the story which would bar their access to heroism.

In the course of her career as a writer, particularly in the phase that I labelled ‘explicitly feminist’, Russ has continuously transformed and developed androcide as a means to give female characters power and credibility. I will discuss a number of such killings from various points in Russ's development. The sword-and-sorcery character Alyx, in the stories collected in The Adventures of Alyx, is a single, outstanding woman whose ability to control her actions marks her exceptionality.