MailBucket home // ieet-images
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:07:37 -0400
http://io9.com/363356/greet-your-new-lesbian-overlords
Greet Your New Lesbian Overlords! [Lesbian Empires]
By Charlie Jane Anders
With Y: The Last Man wrapping up and turning into a movie, the science
fiction cliche of the female-dominated planet is red-hot once again. The
cosmos is safe for our red-blooded spacemen to venture to worlds where
there are no men, or where men are subjugated and the women wear funny
headgear. But what about the subset of gynarchic cultures where
everyone's a lesbian? It turns out science fiction is full of those,
too, and it's time they got the appreciation they deserve.
Many, many thanks to Liz Henry with the Feminist SF blog for helping me
put together this exhaustive list of lesbian-dominated cultures in
science fiction. Smug Sappho! There are way more than I'd expected.
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. A weird virus on the planet Jeep kills all
the men, and most of the women, and the women who survive are changed,
gaining access to a sort of Jungian collective unconscious. Deprived of
access to men's precious bodily fluids, the women start mating using a
weird ritual called "deep trance." One reviewer was annoyed that all
these women, who presumably aren't naturally lesbians, seem way too
comfortable turning to lesbianism and don't seem to miss the men at all.
Ammonite won the Tiptree Award for science fiction that considers gender
themes, prompting also-ran David Brin to complain that he'd been robbed.
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. A trio of astronauts
blast off into a mission around the sun, but a solar flare knocks them
forward in time a few hundred years, to an era when a plague (again!)
has wiped out all the men and most of the women. The surviving women
reproduce via cloning, and a few of their girl-babies are dosed with
androgens early on to make them grow up bigger and stronger. The three
male astronauts are thrilled at the chance to be the only men on Earth
-- either to become patriarchs, or just to have lots of sex -- but then
it turns out the women rulers have no intention of letting the men live.
They're happy without men around, and don't want to upset their groovy,
stable society with annoying menfolk.
Walk To The End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas. A
horrendous gay male-dominated society that locks up women in breeding
farms. But then a free lesbian society, the Motherlines, springs up and
shelters the refugees from the ebil male society. And the nomadic,
horse-riding lesbian culture has an... interesting way of reproducing.
In a nutshell, they, ummm... collect semen from their male horses and
then use it as a catalyst to reproduce themselves. Or as Liz puts it,
"horsefucking lesbians."
The Marq'ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. In the dystopian future of
2076, everything's run by lesbians, and somehow the world is still
totally fucked. The novel pits the lesbian Anarchist Collectives in the
Women's Free Zone against the evil Executive Class, which runs the rest
of the world and is equally lesbiotic. Ideomancer explains:
Executive men are 'fixed', which means they are capable of
reproduction but entirely uninterested in the act except as a mean to an
end. They derive no physical pleasure from the act, which frees them to
pursue their vocations and hobbies without internal conflict. Executive
women are almost entirely homosexual, except when it is necessary to
bear their executive men children-and it is a distasteful act: in
Renegade, one executive woman speaks of the obvious perversion of
heterosexuality-but there is a very strong prohibition against
executive-with-executive sex: executive women are only to have sex with
service-tech women, who are sometimes available during parties much as
champagne and caviar are provided. Executive women are also taught
self-defense against un-fixed men.
Champagne, caviar and service tech women. Good times!
The Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. The planet Valedon is
materialistic and has a rigid class system, but its moon, Shora, is
covered by a shallow ocean full of water-breathing lesbians who live in
harmony (but don't have any goats.) The Sharers of Shora are pacifists
and super-advanced biologists, who communicate across long distances by
talking to the insects, and reproduce by parthenogenesis. They live in
peace... until an army from Valedon comes to "develop" Shora. Here's
sample dialogue after the army has taken a few Sharers prisoner:
"We seek our sister Sharers," Merwen said.
"Who might they be?"
"Lerion Nonthinker, Ronesha the Coldhearted, and Oo the Jealous, who
were last seen with Valans on Nri-el raft."
My new nickname is totally going to be Oo the Jealous. The sisters who
have been taken prisoner aren't communicating, because they're in
"whitetrance." I think I've been to that club before.
The Wanderground by Sally Gearhart. A linked collection of stories about
a future lesbian utopia, where women can communicate telepathically, not
ju
Long message truncated by MailBucket.