Joana Russ’s The Female Man: A Utopian And Dystopian Science Fiction perspective

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

Department of English Language and Literature

المستخلص

       This paper will attempt to show that The Female Man (1975) could be a Utopian and dystopian novel at once. The Female Man is one of the most famous novels of feminist science fiction, written by Joanna Russ, one of the strongest writers of the first era of explicitly feminist SF and one of the most challenging. Along with Alice Sheldon and Sheri Tepper, she is probably the best known author whose approach tended towards the directly confrontational. She is also a noted essayist, critic, and reviewer. The Female Man is about four different women: Jeanine, Joanna, Janet and Jael. They are parallels of sorts but from far different cultures, alternate worlds displaced in time. This is a book written from a place of righteous anger combined with keen social observation and a desire to point out how different the world could be. The book starts with Janet Evasson who was not born on our earth. From the very beginning we get to know that she is lesbian. The second is Jeannine Dadier who is a librarian in New York city . The  Joanna, who had turned into a man. The fourth is Jael who comes from an alternative world where Womanlanders are at war with Manlanders; men and women live in separate armed camps. She is an assassin who enjoys killing men. The four J’s have met each other on our Earth that brings both good and evil. Janet comes to our Earth where she meets Joanna and Jeannine to study men as there are none on her world; Whileaway .

الكلمات الرئيسية