Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Chapter Five - Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
from Part Two - Sexuality
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Summary
If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species–survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men—Adrienne Rich (‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, 637, italics in original)
Rich's ‘lesbian continuum’ incorporates multiple forms of woman– woman relationships that give first priority to emotional links to women. This community of women differs significantly from the materialist notion of a sex–class, revealing as it does the intimate connection between women's role in reproduction and compulsory heterosexuality. Patriarchal discourse, according to Rich, has produced a social system of coercion, which demands that women form primary relationships with men and sever their original ties to the mother. The different ways of associating with women covered by the lesbian continuum reach from rediscovering images of women in literature and history/historiography (as delineated above) to revealing the possibility of erotic relationships among women. Joanna Russ's texts experiment on this continuum, exploring the liberatory potential of consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others— precisely because this body is produced and reproduced by the patriarchal discourses that feminist thinking seeks to disrupt.
In her essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’ (1981) Russ identifies a theme in contemporary feminist utopian writing which she calls ‘the rescue of the female child’ (79). In these utopias, the following narra–tive pattern emerges: an older woman, who has struggled to an awareness of her position within a patriarchal culture, rescues a younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life fully determined by patriarchy. Russ explains this pattern:
Puberty is an awakening into sexual adulthood for both sexes. According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, it is also the time when the prison bars of ‘femininity,’ enforced by law and custom, shut the girl in for good.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Demand My WritingJoanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction, pp. 130 - 154Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999