LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:3 March 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Theme of Gender and Space in Joanna Russ’s Novel
The Female Man

Ashima Bharathan P.K., M.A., B.Ed., SET


Abstract

The American feminist writer Joanna Russ (1937-2011) finds her way to claim women’s position not only in society but also in ‘life’ in the feminist utopian genre.Her famous work The Female Man was hardly the first feminist science fiction novel. It was originally written in 1970 and first published in 1975 Russ creates While away , the literary utopian space of The Female Man, a world that resembles paradise where no man lives, and where woman ‘while away their time’ and live life their own way. The character Joanna in the novel calls herself the “female man” because she believes that she must forget her identity as a woman in order to be respected. A relatively common motif in speculative fiction is the existence of single-gender worlds or single-sex societies .These fictional societies have long been one of the primary ways to explore implication of gender-difference in science fiction and fantasy. The novel follows the lives of four women living in parallel worlds that differ in time and place. When they cross over to each other’s worlds, their different views on gender roles startle each other’s preexisting notions of women hood. In the end, their encounters influence them to evaluate their lives and shape their idea of what it means to be a woman

Keywords: Russ, feminism, gender identity, space, sexual ambiguity

Joanna Russ and Her Novel The Female Man

Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and radical feminist who died after a stroke aged 74,was a unique, thinker as well as a most entertaining and challenging science-fiction novelist. She began publishing in the 1950’s,but her feminist concerns did not emerge until the appearance in the late 1960s of her stories about Alyx, a tough- minded and intelligent female assassin from the classical Greek period. Russ herself once said that it was the Alyx stories that gave her the breakthrough in confidence to deal with feminist issues in fiction. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to suppress women’s writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike against God, and one children’s book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire and the story “When it Changed.” The female man did not appear until 1975 ,after publisher delays. She had written it six years earlier, around the time she first publicly declared herself a lesbian.

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AshimaBharathan P.K., M.A., B.Ed., SET
“Vaishnavam”
Pooja Nagar
Kallekulangara
Palakkad-678009
Kerala
India
ashima.bharathan@gmail.com
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