Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York & London: Routledge, 2002.

WOMEN ALONE, MEN ALONE

Reuben, Reuben, I been thinkin'

What a grand place this would be
If the boys were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

Traditional song

ne way to find out just how men and women really differ might be
to catch them by themselves. Look at the way women behave when
there are no men around to bluster or be wrapped around little fingers.
Watch the men when no women can rescue them from their own messes or
hold them back from adventure. Men are most manly, according to this the-
ory, in combat or in the locker room. Essential womanliness can be found in
the nursery, the sewing room, the ladies' lunch.
The theory has obvious weaknesses, of course. First, it's impossible to
isolate the sexes thoroughly enough to demonstrate such absolutes of femi-
nine or masculine behavior. Second, the traditional examples are skewed.
Masculinity might be one thing on the battlefield, but it is something dif-
ferent in a choir of Benedictine monks. A definition of femininity based on

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 Women Alone, Men Alone

separation would have to include not only the coffee klatsch but also the
reunion of barnstorming aviatrixes. Women's groups now include feminist
political caucuses, rugby teams, and assembly lines in Asian shoe factories.
Men are less often alone now than in the days when whaling ships and Con-
gress were equally woman-free, but there are still Lion's Club meetings, Black
Muslim marches, and gay leather bars. A theory based on sexual separation
should take all of these into account.
Within science fiction, separation by gender has been the basis of a fas-
cinating series of thought experiments. The best known of these are the fem-
inist Utopias of the 1970s, the decade when women writers of SF ceased to
seem exceptional. Utopian fiction was generally considered a dead genre by
the early '60s, having petered out with Edward Bellamy and his commenta-
tors three quarters of a century earlier. Discredited by the totalitarian turn of
real-world Utopian experiments in China, Germany, and the Soviet Union,
the fictional Utopia had been replaced by dystopia, it was said. Rationally reg-
ulated societies could only be portrayed as earthly hells like Huxley's Brave
New World. Implied in this judgment was the belief that existing social sys-
tems, messy as they were, were better than anything that could come from
social engineering.
This consensus broke down when women began to ask, better for whom?
A number of writers began to toy with the idea that a world constructed on
feminist principles, whatever its flaws, could hardly fail to improve things for
most women. For many of these writers, such a world was imaginable only in
terms of sexual separatism; for others, it involved reinventing female and male
identities and interactions. The pattern of the feminist Utopia did not spring
into existence all at once, but only emerged gradually through the combined
efforts of writers and critics. Once the category existed, though, it gathered to
itself earlier texts and also stimulated newer variations on its themes, in the
collaborative mode characteristic of SF tropes.
Perhaps the agglutinative origins of the form can best be seen in a year-
by-year summary of the decade of its emergence. Some of the titles listed here
now belong among the "usual suspects" of Utopian studies. They would not,
however, have become standard examples, nor would there be a labeled cate-
gory for them to exemplify, if there had not been a concurrent and corre-
sponding growth of feminist scholarship, providing a context in which to
value the fictional texts.

1969
The feminist '70s may be said to have begun in 1969, making it a decade-plus-
one, or baker's decade. 1969 saw the appearance of two novels that differed
dramatically from one another and from earlier models of Utopian narrative.
The first of these, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is not, strictly
speaking, a feminist Utopia, since it does not portray a Utopian state, nor are
any female characters present. Rather, it is a thought-experiment in gender,

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imagining a world without sexual difference. Nonetheless, the implications are

both feminist and Utopian: a world in which no one is expected to be either
masculine or feminine automatically erases so many forms of injustice that its
societies, no matter how inefficient or authoritarian, seemed a major improve-
ment from the perspective of many women readers (and not a few men).
The other novel of 1969 is Monique Wittig's Les Guérilleres. Part man-
ifesto, part prose poem, Wittig's text imagines a group of women warriors
sometimes battling against, sometimes freed from, patriarchal restraints.
Their struggles will change or have changed the world (sequence in the book
is deliberately disrupted) so completely that a new language is necessary to
describe it. Wittig's text is more overtly Utopian than Le Guin's but it does
not offer as many details about the way the society will operate nor enough
narrative continuity to give a sense of life in the blueprint.

1970
The following year, Joanna Russ published her second novel, And Chaos
Died, a book that mainly concerned the transformation of a male hero into
a psychic superman but also involved a planet (reminiscent of the world of
James Schmitz's 1966 The Witches ofKarres) that secretly houses a Utopia run
along pacifist, ecological, and egalitarian principles.

1971
Wittig's novel was published in English in 1971, in a translation by David
Le Vay. The same year, Russ, stimulated by Le Guin's The Left Hand of
Darkness ("Afterword" to "When It Changed" 280), finished a book that
combined satire, metafiction, and feminist Utopia. It was not published until
four years later under the title The Female Man {To Write 133). She also
voiced some of the novel's concerns in an essay called "The Image of Women
in Science Fiction," published in a fanzine called Red Clay Reader and
reprinted the following year in an anthology of Images of Women in Fiction:
Feminist Perspectives. This anthology also contained Russ's classic "What Can
a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write."
The former essay complained that S F had squandered its capacity for
questioning social norms by portraying future societies in which spaceship
crews were always "red-blooded, crewcut, woman-hungry men, rather like
the cast of South Pacific before the nurses arrive" (85), while women were
stuck in "Galactic suburbia" (88). In the latter essay, she imagines things
otherwise: what if, she proposes, our supply of cultural narratives included
such alternatives as "Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early
West" or "A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a
bear" (3)? The Female Man was to include, as one of its Utopian premises,
just such a bear-hunt.
Also in 1971, Dorothy Bryant published The Comforter, later retitled
The Kin ofAtaAre Waiting for You. Bryant's novel is more fantasy than SF,

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 Women Alone, Men Alone

more arcadia than Utopia, but it does portray a society based on principles
often identified with women: kinship, pacifism, and unselfish love.

1972
The first public glimpse of Russ's separatist Utopia was a story called "When
It Changed." In it, the women of a world called Whileaway confront the
return of men to their stable, varied, pragmatic society. The men assume that
they will be welcomed, even if the welcome must be imposed by force. The
women see the return of an old tyranny.
Russ's story might have been a direct response to the stories reprinted by
Sam Moskowitz in his historical anthology When Women Rule, which appeared
the same year. (Russ went on to examine five examples from the volume in an
essay called "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fic-
tion," published in 1980.) The matriarchies imagined by Moskowitz's authors
(all male) are, as Pamela Sargent points out, "more a reflection of the fears or
wishes of their authors than serious extrapolation" ("Introduction," Women
xlix). Nonetheless, their republication in this volume contributed to a growing
awareness of the usefulness of SF tropes in exploring gender roles. More impor-
tantly, they made people want to argue.
1972 also marked the publication of the first academic essay on women in
science fiction, Beverly Friend's "Virgin Territory: Women and Sex in Science
Fiction." The subtitle is indicative of the traditional treatments of gender in
the genre: in early SF, women are sex; men are people. Despite the scarcity of
stories in which women are neither gadgets in disguise nor mere prizes for the
male heroes, Friend saw potential for better writing about women in two
trends: the emergence of more women writers and the trope of the all-female
society. Even though most treatments of the trope to date had been written by
men and nearly all depicted the women's world as a grimly repressive state
needing men's intervention, Friend noted the possibility of a more thoughtful
examination of gender, and in later revisions of the article she was able to point
to Russ's "When It Changed" as an example.

1973
Lyman Tower Sargent started the investigation, long delayed, of women's roles
in classic Utopian literature with an essay titled "Women in Utopia," published
in Comparative Literature Studies. The same year, though, the journal Studies
in the Literary Imagination failed to include gender as one of the significant
"Aspects of Utopian Fiction" covered in a special issue on the subject. Nor were
any women writers discussed, except for a brief mention of Le Guin by SF
scholar David Ketterer (Ketterer 99).

1974
When Pamela Sargent released the first of three anthologies of Women of
Wonder in 1974, she reminded readers of the major contributions to SF of

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writers such as Judith Merril and Katherine MacLean. In her introduction

she invited readers and writers to follow their lead in subjecting gender roles
to the same sort of examination that SF had traditionally given to problems
in planetology or time-travel paradoxes. Like Beverly Friend, Sargent saw
unexploited possibilities in the single-sex societies imagined by writers like
John Wyndham and Poul Anderson. She too saw those glimmerings being
realized in Russ's fiction.
Two texts from 1974 provided new grist for the mills of both feminist
scholars and utopianists. Having already produced one of the decade's first gen-
der explorations in The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin declared her
Utopian sympathies openly, if ambiguously, in The Dispossessed. Subtided An
Ambiguous Utopia, this novel posits twin worlds, one wealthy and sophisticated
but full of injustice, the other harsh and uniform but idealistic and egalitarian.
Neither world is entirely feminist, but rugged Anarres is run on the anarchis-
tic principles of the woman philosopher Odo. Hence, occupations like child-
rearing and physics have been largely freed of gender associations.
In contrast, Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World extrap-
olates from the most extreme patriarchal models of gender difference. Char-
nas turns many of the conventions of the SF genre upside down in a story that
begins like a standard masculine coming-of-age and ends up as a narrative of
female escape. In this book, Charnas highlights the dystopian implications of
a male-dominated society; her look at the female counterpart was to come four
years later.

1975
In 1975, Lyman Tower Sargent continued his examination of women's roles
in Utopian fiction in "An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women
in the English Eutopia." The questions Sargent raised, about why Utopian
thinkers failed to address women's roles and rights, were answered in various
ways by three other works appearing the same year: Naomi Mitchison's Solu-
tion Three, a new edition (the first since its 1890 publication) of Mary Bradley
Lane's Mizora, and Russ's The Female Man.
All three novels involve some separation of the sexes. In Mitchison's
imagined future, conflict and overpopulation have both been attributed to
heterosexual contact. Redirecting desire toward members of one's own sex
and replacing sexual reproduction with cloning have led to an era of peace
and plenty—but also to new problems stemming from lack of diversity and
from mistreatment of heterosexual deviants. Unlike many earlier thought-
experiments, Solution Three does not propose going back to a heterosexual
norm but onward to a more flexible version, Solution Four.
Lane's Utopia was originally produced as part of the nineteenth century
debate over women's rights. Rediscovered, along with many other works by
women writers, during the feminist revival of the 1970s, it took on new mean-
ing as evidence of a female tradition of speculative and Utopian thought.

no
 Women Alone, Men Alone

Even though Lane incorporated racist ideas and dodged issues of sexuality,
her assertion of women's strength and independence helped offset SF's
misogynist tradition and offered an important reading context for newer
experiments like The Female Man.
In Russ's novel, the futuristic world of Whileaway is not invaded by men
as it is in the story "When It Changed." Rather, it invades the male-dominated
present by sending back an emissary, Janet Evason. The visitor-from-utopia is
an effective twist on the Utopian trope, used earlier by William Dean Howells,
among others; in Russ's hands it offers opportunity for a variety of satirical
takes on gender roles, from the he-mannish stupidity of military leaders and
politicians to the bizarre rituals governing dating.
Janet Evason's story is only one strand of rhis complex and still-challenging
book. Another concerns an alternative universe in which men and women
not only form separate societies, but wage war on one another. Russ's Manland
is pure patriarchal dystopia: all violence and sexual posturing, with brothels
full of men altered to look like caricatures of women. Abuses within the
woman's land are not so obvious, but it too is dystopian in its violence and
its dehumanization of the male Other. One of Russ's characters suggests that
this female version of dystopia is a necessary step on the road toward green
and pleasant Whileaway.

1976
Like Russ, Marge Piercy, in Woman on the Edge of Time combines glimpses
of alternative futures, both Utopian and dystopian, with an indictment of
present-day gender politics. Because Piercy had already established a reputa-
tion outside of SF circles, her book received more attention from feminist
critics, though Russ's is the more complex treatment of issues. Piercy's ideal
state involves de-emphasizing sex roles: men nurse babies, women make art;
both feel free to form sexual attachments with members of either sex. The
androgynous society of Mattapoisett contrasts sharply with a militaristic,
male-dominated alternative future that is trying to come into existence in its
place. The seeds of both futures exist in the present, from which a woman
named Connie Ramos is journeying back and forth in time. Connie, con-
sidered valueless by her society because she is female, Hispanic, poor, and
emotionally vulnerable, is nonetheless one of the keys that will decide which
future comes into being.
Another story from 1976 likewise uses the device of futuristic visions,
although in a manner more sardonic than Piercy's. Raccoona Sheldon's story
"Your Faces, O My Sisters, Your Faces Filled of Light," published in an
anthology called Aurora: Beyond Equality, describes a young woman jour-
neying simultaneously across two landscapes. One is a pastoral, all-female
Utopia; the other, dangerous, cynical contemporary America. Unfortunately,
the welcoming community of women exists only in the mind of the young
courier; all others see her as delusional and defenseless, and the story ends in

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 Decoding Gender in Science Fiction

a grim act of violence at the hands of the male gang that she sees as a group
of sisrers.
In the same anthology there appeared an equally powerful piece of
Utopian fiction by James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You
Read?" makes an effective companion piece to "Your Faces, O My Sisters,"
because it posits a future in which the female Utopia has actually come to
pass. While the perspective and the storytelling voice in "Your Faces" are
strongly feminine, in "Houston, Houston" both are convincingly masculine.
The thematic similarities between the two stories are easier to explain than
the stylistic differences, for James Tiptree, Jr., and Raccoona Sheldon were
soon to be revealed as pen names for the same writer, Alice Sheldon.
"Houston, Houston" follows the thoughts of one of three male astronauts
transported from the present. This point of view temporarily disguises the fact
that the view of reality they have brought with them, in which women are sub-
servient and male sexuality is venerated, is as delusional in the new social con-
text as the fantasy world of the courier in "Your Faces." We see the feminist
world only indirectly, as the viewpoint character becomes aware of such details
as the existence of lines of clone-sisters and the identity of the apparently male
"Andy" on board the rescuing spaceship as another female who has had andro-
gen treatments to increase "his" strength. With these adaptations, the women
have effectively eliminated any need for men, and they reluctantly decide the
astronauts are too dangerous to retain, even as curiosities.
A fourth influential story from 1976 came from a rather unlikely source.
Marion Zimmer Bradley had been publishing stories about a world called
Darkover since the early 1960s. Darkover is a fantasy world thinly disguised
as SF, combining romantic backdrops, Medieval costumes, swordplay, and
magical jewels redefined as telepathically-produced "matrixes." Darkovan
society is decidedly un-feminist: its aristocratic clans are governed by male
leaders and its women are confined in castles or cloistered in matrix-working
Towers. Yet for her tenth Darkover novel, The Shattered Chain, Bradley
invented a new institution that transformed the imaginary world and intro-
duced many fans of the series (who were not necessarily reading Shulamith
Firestone or Kate Millett) to feminist ideas. The Free Amazons of Darkover
form a community within the larger community, a Utopia that exists wher-
ever its members might gather. Free Amazons work at any occupation they
choose, they cast off clan rivalries and traditional marriage vows, and they
form a society of equals loyal to one another and to their calling.

1977
In 1977, the feminist journal Frontiers devoted an issue to "Fantasy and
Futures." One of the entries was Carol Pearson's "Women's Fantasies and Fem-
inist Utopias," revised as "Coming Home: Four Feminist Utopias and Patriar-
chal Experience" in 1981. Unlike earlier scholars, Pearson was not reduced
to talking about the dearth of believable women characters and the mis-

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ogyny that emerges when SF writers imagine matriarchy. Rather, she was
able to point to several recent or rediscovered instances of women writers
developing feminist ideas into full-blown Utopian fictions. There were enough
examples for her to begin identifying common threads among the imagined
societies, such as organization along familial patterns rather than formal insti-
tutional lines (65).

1978
In 1978, Suzy McKee Charnas published Motherlines, a companion piece
to an earlier work, the sequel to her novel Walk to the End of the World.
Like Tiptree/Sheldon, she described a female society of clone sisters: the
"Motherlines" that give the book its title. Charnas describes her initial
reluctance to omit men from the narrative: "I was terrified to discover that
leaving men out altogether was going to be 'right' for the new book" ("A
Woman Appeared" 105). Once she accepted the artistic necessity of this
decision, however, she found that, like Darwin's finches, women were per-
fectly capable of adapting to fill any niche: "with the spectrum of human
behavior in my story no longer split into male roles (everything active, intel-
ligent, brave and muscular) and feminine roles (everything passive, intuitive,
shrinking and soft), my emerging women had natural access to the entire
tange of human behavior" (106-07).

1979
1979 saw the appearance of Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground, a
lyrical set of sketches and tales, some published previously, about a tribe of
women who have reclaimed their lives and the natural world from patriar-
chal abuses. Most men are confined to the city, which is also the only place
where guns and machines still work. The lives of the hill women are portrayed
positively, in terms of psychic attunement to nature and sexual attachment to
one another. However, as Jennifer Burwell has pointed out, their society is
founded on a sense of outrage (Burwell 68). Its central ritual is the telepathic
sharing of memories of rape, to keep alive the anger that fuels their vigilance
against the men of the city. Could their Utopia exist, one wonders, without
the "remember guides" who "call up and re-play, for those who did not know
it, all or any part of the hill women's violent backgrounds . . . 'Lest we for-
get how we came here.' " (24)?
To complete the decade, 1979 was also the year when Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's Herland was finally published in book form, after being hidden
away in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner since its serialization in 1915.
Like Lane's Mizora, Gilman's is a separatist Utopia. Both books smack a bit
of the hygienic; they ate full of what Ursula K. Le Guin has called "smartass
Utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and
kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and
friends." (Always Coming Home 316). Gilman's women, like Lane's, are

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sexless: their erotic impulses are channeled entirely into motherhood, at least
until men arrive on the scene.
However, Herland is ultimately a much more useful precursor than
Mizora. It incorporates insights from Gilman's studies of history and eco-
nomics as well as her feminism; it cleverly undercuts readers' assumptions by
building them into the narrative in the viewpoints of three callow male
explorers; and it anticipates many of its successors' solutions to the problems
of patriarchy.
By the end of the 1970s, then, the feminist Utopia was well established,
with a respectable genealogy, a canon of standard examples, a reverse canon
of opposing works by anti-feminist men (some as recent as Edmund Cooper's
Gender Genocide, from 1972), and a set of shared assumptions, if not about
the nature of the ideal society, at least about the terms in which the debate
might continue.
And the debate has continued, in the form of additional rediscoveries,
reaching back to Katharine Burdekin's 1937 Swastika Night and even to
Margaret Cavendish's 1668 The Blazing World; further critical and biblio-
graphic work by Marleen Barr, Lynn F. Williams, and others; and more
works of thoughtful fiction, written by women like Pamela Sargent, Joan
Slonczewski, Suzette Haden Elgin, Sheri S. Tepper, Margaret Atwood, and
Nicola Griffith—and a few feminist-influenced men, notably Geoff Ryman,
John Varley, and Samuel R. Delany.
The standard historical account of the field is a rwo-stage evolution: first,
male writers invented the repressive matriarchy, then women responded with
portraits of more attractive female-dominated societies. Many of these fem-
inist Utopias, in fact, are portrayed within the texts as having emerged from
struggles against male-dominated dystopias, thereby reenacting the genre's
history. This model certainly accounts for most of the fiction from 1969 and
later, and it corresponds with common views of male and female behavior.
As Gwyneth Jones says in a review of a recent version of the separatist Utopia,
"We have often been told by feminist writers that women, freed from male
constraint, are not perfect but 'only human,' " so that we can expect from
them a system that at least respects human imperfections, while "men, in
similar isolation, are something else; and something worse" (13).
Existing social systems too often wink at or applaud the abuse of women
by men. If the sexes were only separated, it is easy to imagine that mistreat-
ment would vanish from the women's world and be redirected inward in the
men's. And men do often construct for themselves systems based on aggres-
sion and abasement, a statement that holds true not only of men in places
like prisons, says Jones, "but relatively true in any all-male situation, whether
it's around the water-cooler at the office, or in an elite public-I-mean-private
boys' boarding school" (13).
So it seems obvious that all-male worlds should be dystopias and all-female
ones at least evolving toward Utopia. Yet this formulation leaves out a number

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 Women Alone, Men Alone

of complications. It does not explain the process by which writers could

take something as anti-feminist as the "When Women Rule" trope and
transform it into feminist Utopia. It doesn't explain how one could apply
the Utopian ideal to the real world, barring the invention of a male-killing
plague virus. And it doesn't reflect the fact that fictional all-male societies
before the 1970s were not usually dystopian at all, but scenes of convivial-
ity and cooperation.
Examples of this last paradigm go back at least to Herman Melville's "The
Paradise of Bachelors," the companion piece to his dystopian "The Tartarus
of Maids" (published together in 1855). While the women toil in an infernal
factory, the men take their indolent pleasures—including the pleasure of one
another's company—in a city club. While Melville uses the male Utopia to
make a point about injustice, other writers invoked the same image without
irony. Arthur B. Evans describes the many enclosed societies of Jules Verne,
such as the miniature world aboard the Captain Nemo's submarine, as "vehic-
ular Utopias." Their Utopian qualities come not only from the labor-saving
gadgets with which the vehicles are equipped, but also from their insulation
from any form of "ideological contamination" (Evans 5). The men aboard are
sheltered from contact with anyone unlike themselves, which is to say anyone
who isn't middle-class, rational—and male.
The science fiction of the early twentieth century abounds in echoes
of Verne's vehicular Utopias; however, maintaining that ideal required a
certain degree of unselfconsciousness about class, gender, and sexuality.
Once writers like Russ and Charnas began to call attention to those issues,
the cozy male world became problematic. Notwithstanding this later loss
of confidence, the truism about the dystopian quality of all-male world
turns out, like most truisms, to be only true-ish.
In order to take such complications into account, I need to define some
terms more precisely. Etymologically, "utopia," Thomas More's "no place,"
means any fiction whose social setting is presented as a plausible and radi-
cally new alternative to existing cultures. Utopias need not solve all social
problems; they may be good, bad, or merely so different from existing sys-
tems as to offer a critical perspective. Within this larger category, we can dis-
tinguish between positive and negative formulations by calling the former
eutopia, "the good place," and the latter dystopia, "the bad place." Fictional
societies that fall between these two poles can be called "ambiguous" or, in
Tom Moylan's terminology, "critical" Utopias (10).
The heading of feminist Utopias includes both those composed of female
citizens only, like Russ's Whileaway and Gilman's Herland, and those of
mixed sex in which the social organization derives from women's modes of
thought and interaction: for instance, Piercy's eutopian Mattapoisett or the
dystopian world of Cooper's Gender Genocide. The contrasting masculist
utopia can consist either of men alone or of men plus women whose pres-
ence and influence are suppressed, as in Katherine Burdekin's Swastika

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Night. Classic social nightmares like 1984 are both male-dominated and
misogynistic and could be analyzed as masculist Utopias.
My justification for lumping single-sex Utopias with those in which the
population is mixed but the balance of power tipped one way or the other is
that the excluded sex is never completely excluded. There may be no men in
Whileaway, but men are present throughout The Female Man (at least for real-
world readers) in the form of the unlamented past, the pressure no longer felt,
the horrible example, the stolen prerogative. There seem to be no women in
the masculist society portrayed in Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan ofAthos,
but the book's protagonist discovers that his whole world depends on the
effaced, radically reduced women who are the unacknowledged mothers of all.
There is a spot of yin in the most scrupulously yang of Utopias, and vice versa.
Also present in every Utopian text are echoes of its predecessors. Robin
Roberts points out that Gilman's and other early feminist Utopias—or rather
eutopias—were a dialectical response to a long tradition of presenting female
power in terms of hive-like rigidity and irrationality. A typical hive world is
described in Wallace G. West's "The Last Man" (1929), in which citizens of
an all-female society are described as having evolved into "narrowflanked, flat-
breasted workers . . . with dull curiosity on their soulless faces" (1030). The
editorial comment on the story proclaims that it is "founded upon an excellent
scientific basis" (1030). The dystopian vision, she says, can give rise to the
eutopian without necessarily changing any element. Both views "share the
same tropes," she says, but "differ dramatically in their interpretation and use
of the paradigm of female ruler." The feminist eutopia "valorizes reproduction,
depicts mothering as a justification for female rule, and looks toward idyllic
futures brought about by the adoption of feminine values" (68). Earlier
dystopian fictions had portrayed the same pattern but called it anything but
idyllic. The relationship between the two is, then, not one of simple contra-
diction but of reversing values while retaining the basic configuration.
Taking a metaphor from art criticism, one might call this the intaglio
effect. Intaglio is low-relief sculpture in reverse; instead of carving away back-
ground to leave the figure, as in a cameo, the most prominent features are
sculpted most deeply. The effect is an optical illusion in which the eye trans-
lates concave into convex. However, if you put a regular cameo next to an
intaglio, under the same light, highlights and shadows will be eerily reversed.
Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World generates just such
an intaglio effect. Charnas portrays a horrible society: a band of survivors
from an ecological and military holocaust have instituted a system that priv-
ileges older white males by exterminating all other races and most animal and
plant species, enslaving women, and keeping even their sons in a permanent
state of smoldering rebellion. The novel isn't obviously feminist at first; the
viewpoint characters in the early chapters are young men, and the story seems
to be about their struggle for justice. Charnas plays on common themes of
male-centered SF: the young misunderstood genius, the uncovering of hidden

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Figure 4. In the Hive. Frank R. Paul's illustration for Wallace G. West's "The Last Man" (1929) sug-
gests the worker-bee uniformity ascribed by male writers to all-female societies, although Paul did
not follow the text's warning that such female workers would be "flat-breasted."

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truths about the world, jockeying for status in a quasi-military organization,

conflicts between social convention and science, and fights that result in
apparent enemies becoming allies. She even throws in a son's quest to find
an absent father.
There are no named women characters in the first section of the book.
After a brief historical prologue, the only female presence is an occasional
glimpse of or derogatory reference to "ferns." Ferns are workers, drudges, some-
times "hags." It is not clear until much later that ferns are human at all. Not
until the narrative adopts the viewpoint of the fern Alldera, about two-thirds of
the way through, does it begin to be evident that the story is not a conventional
masculine quest but a story of feminine escape from an intolerable system.
The elements that make up Charnas's masculist dystopia include a set of
powerful institutions—clans, military companies, guilds, a school that is also
a mechanism for culling unsuitable boys, and a priesthood—all governed
along strictly hierarchical lines, like ranks within a Masonic order. The laws
authorizing these institutions are enforced by scarcity and threats; moreover,
they are revered as if they were both divine and natural laws. The system is
reinforced by an ancestor cult that includes reciting the names of long-dead
iconic figures—the Chants Commemorative.
This society is maintained by an invisible labor force of slaves, the ferns.
The role of women in producing offspring is diminished and disparaged: boys
are taken from their mothers as soon as possible and the goal of education is
to eliminate the womanly taint resulting from imprisonment in the womb.
Women are so abject that any contact with them, including sexual contact, is
humiliating. Both desire and loyalty are properly directed only toward one's
equals, which means male members of one's age cadre. Sex is described as a
power struggle, compulsive and violent like sex in the cat world. Indeed, a par-
ticularly enticing male character is described in explicitly feline terms: "heavy-
muscled, smooth-moving, a tawny-colored night-slinker, a prowling predator
with a broad, blunt-nosed face and a wide-curling mouth . . ." (9-10).
With sexual desire thus separated from reproduction, and both from
females, reproduction can be redefined as recruitment: new citizens are not
born of women but selected and trained by men. At the end of the process
of recruitment, the ordinary citizen becomes a Senior, holding the power of
life and death over others and in possession of such ancient knowledge as
has survived.
When I first read Walk to the End of the World, I found this whole pat-
tern naggingly familiar, but I didn't identify the source of that familiarity
because of the intaglio effect. I could not pin it down until I began to describe
the social structure to myself as neutrally as possible, without the emotional
charge given it by Charnas's narrative. Then pieces of the pattern began to
be recognizable as echoes of earlier SF works. There was some of Kipling's
comradery in it, an echo of Verne's Utopian vehicles, a hint of Doc Smith's
cadre of Lensmen, and a whole lot of Heinlein. That was the clue: somewhere

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in Heinlein there was a story in which a society much like Charnas' Hold-
fast was portrayed as a eutopia. The story turned out to be the 1948 juvenile
novel Space Cadet.
Space Cadet is vintage Heinlein: smoothly written, tightly paced, subtle
in its introduction of futurisric wonders, and flattering to the reader who
identifies with its idealistic hero. I had never thought of it as a utopia, but its
coming-of-age theme turns out to be a dandy disguise for the stranger-tours-
ideal-society structure of the classic Utopian novel.
So what sort of society is it that Heinlein's young hero Matthew Dodson
is inducted into? It is, first and foremost, hierarchical. The Patrol is, after all,
a military institution, modeled on the Air Force with which it shares the Col-
orado setting of its Academy. It is all-male, unlike Heinlein's later Starship
Troopers. It is selective—the first and most effective section of the novel con-
cerns Matt's successful negotiation of the rigorous weeding-out process. It is
an institution to which members are expected to commit not only their pro-
fessional efforts but also their personal loyalties and their spirituality. Heinlein's
description of Patrol rituals makes it clear that it is not merely a branch of the
military but also a cult, complete with icons such as heroic dead whose names
are chanted at the end of each roll call. And, like most cults, this one is jealous
of prior loyalties. Paralleling Matt's induction into the traditions of the Patrol
is his gradual detachment from home and family.
One of the most uncomfortable scenes is Matt's first visit home after his
initial training. He discovers that home now seems small and tasteless, old
friends are now strangers, and his family is unable to understand his new life.
His mother, in particular, shows herself to be out of touch with everything he
has learned to value: she doesn't understand astrophysics or maneuvering in
free fall and she refuses even to think about the orbiting bombs maintained
by the Patrol as a deterrent to earthly conflict. Matt's father, only slightly more
aware of the Patrol's high calling, explains privately to Matt that "Women get
worked up so easily" (123).
Other women in the story don't come off much better than Mrs. Dodson.
Matt's old girlfriend Marianne is dismissed after he discovers that she "was
the sort of girl who never would get clearly fixed in her mind the distinction
between a planet and a star" (117). Matt's roommate Tex must abandon his
collection of photos, his "harem," when the cadets take off for space: they, and
by implication the women they portray, are excess baggage (52). Women in
Heinlein's version of space stay in the background: the "decorative young
lady," for instance, who sorts out candidates arriving at the Academy (11),
and the unseen "feminine voice" that talks the shuttle in for a landing at
Terra Station (90). These anonymous functionaries stand for the many
workers who provide earthside support for the Patrol station, which is obviously
not self-sufficient.
Though the novel frequently pays lip-service to women's "decorative"
qualities, any actual or intended sexual encounter with females results in

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humiliation. On leave at Terra Station, the cadets try to pick up a scantily

dressed shopper who promptly puts them in their place. (She is a sketch for
a number of later Heinlein characters who look like Playboy models but talk
like senior officers—baritone bimbos all).
When the cadets set out in search of more suitable female company, the
ringleader Tex ends up drunk and vomiting, and on the teturn trip his box
of souvenir candy depressurizes—his chocolate cherries burst embarrass-
ingly all over his uniform. So much for (symbolic) sex. No wonder, as Matt
muses, "most Patrol officers do not marry until their mid-thirties, after
retirement" (117).
But lack of heterosexual activity doesn't necessarily mean absence of
desire. Matt's intense interest in the uniform and physique of an older cadet
contrasts with his indifference toward Marianne: "The cadet did not hold
himself erectly; he crouched the merest trifle, knees relaxed and springy, hands
ready to grasp. His feet glided softly over the floor. The effect was catlike, easy
grace. . ." (13).Matt, says the text, "wanted very much to look like him" (13).
This is a safe sort of desire because there is no way for it to become overt.
Heinlein's Patrolmen are happily celibate, channeling all their sexual energies
into sports, bomb-tending, soul-stirring ceremonies, and close relationships
with their buddies—there is a lot of negotiating for the right roommates. This
is, after all, a book for boys, so the cadets are portrayed as sexually immature
despite their ages. Rather than displaying the catlike grace that attracts Matt,
his peers look like "a basket of kittens" (58). Sex, like alcohol, is for some
unspecified time in the future. After the humiliating encounter on Terra Sta-
tion, the boys decide to wait to try out the pleasures of drinking in a setting
free of feminine influence:
"Maybe some day," says Matt, "I'll get you to chaperone me and find out
what happens. But not in public."
"It's a date."
"Say," demanded Pete, "what goes on here?" (98).

That, I think, is a very intriguing question.

The system Heinlein outlines is aimed at creating and perpetuating an
elite brotherhood, a corps of officers armed with arcane knowledge and bound
together by ties of loyalty, desire, deprivation, and shared responsibility. Care-
ful selection and rigorous training render each member of the Patrol fit to
make life-or-death decisions over the rest of humanity.
The entire system depends on the benevolence of its elders and the wis-
dom of its laws. If, as has been suggested, successful Utopias must either be
ruled by angels or populated by saints (Russell 62), the masculist pattern opts
for angels—for coercive government by incorruptible rulers rather than self-
control by virtuous citizens. A character in the story even compares the typ-
ical Patrolman with his orbiting bomb to "an archangel, charging around the
sky and brandishing a flaming sword" (105). But not all angels are benevo-
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lent and not all laws are wise. The rulers of Charnas' Holdfast are no less
righteous in their own eyes than Heinlein's officers, but they are fallen angels
nonetheless.
This list doesn't exhaust the parallels between Heinlein's utopia and
Charnas's intaglio version of it. Both are ritualized, hierarchical, homosocial,
legalistic, misogynistic Utopias. It is just that everything good for you, in one
model, is bad for you in the other. But Charnas's dystopia is more than just
a critique of the attitudes Heinlein stands for. It is also the first step toward
creating an alternative social vision. The intaglio effect is not the only way in
which one Utopia can generate another. Walk to the End of the World was fol-
lowed by Charnas's feminist utopia, Motherlines (1978), which demonstrates
a different generative process.
The society, of Riding Women that Charnas portrays in Motherlines is
related to that of Holdfast, not as a reverse rendering of the same values but
as a manifestation of everything left out of the first book. Utopias are, among
other things, filtering mechanisms. They filter out anything incompatible
with the author's intention: everything that might adulterate the prescrip-
tion or weaken the warning. A lot of things got caught in the filter when
Holdfast—and Heinlein's Patrol—were created. Among them are female
agency, kinship ties, links with nature, freedom of movement, freedom of
conscience, diversity among women's personalities, noncompetitive sexual-
ity, female desire, childbearing, and social change. There are other things
missing as well—the class of excluded things is always potentially endless—
but these are the ones that the text implies and then denies. Heterosexual love
is missing as well but is outside the bounds of the fictional universe. It's irrel-
evant, as are aliens and spaceships. They were never there even as implied
contrasts or excluded options.
What Charnas does in Motherlines is to look in the filter for all the odds
and ends left out of the earlier novel, tip them out into a fictive Petri dish, and
"culture" them. That is to say, she makes a culture out of them, grows an entire
social system from ideas Holdfasters have rejected. In place of their top-down
system, the Riding Women illustrate the power of non-institutionalized forms
of social control, especially sexual bonding, shared responsibility for children,
and the authority of custom and oral tradition. On the scale of angelic rulers
versus saintly citizens, this is a utopia of saints, but their sainthood is relative
and grounded in ethnographic and sociological observation. The result is a
eutopia more fully imagined than the dystopia it critiques, a compelling
narrative in an appealing world. Whereas Walk and Space Cadet illustrate the
intaglio effect, Motherlines shows how Utopias may be related another way,
through the filtration effect.
The dialectical nature of Utopian thought means that no single text can
be the final word on the subject. Filtration and intaglio may be used in turn
to generate new Utopias from ideas embodied in Motherlines; moreover, these
are not the only devices available. A writer can, for instance, portray the same

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society with the same scale of values but put it in a new frame that dramati-
cally alters its implications. Nicola Griffith's Ammonite ( 1992) takes place on
a world that closely resembles the land of the Fading Women, but reframes
a number of key concepts. Instead of a post-apocalyptic future, this is an alien
planet; the role of patriarchal Other is played by a corporate structure rather
than a fortress full of bickering men; women play villains as well as heroes;
the mechanism that has allowed women to live and reproduce without men
is not an exercise of mental power but an alien virus (the same virus that
killed off the men—two boons from one bug). These are changes that not
only alter the internal dynamic of the story but also reflect the reframing
effect of a decade of struggle and adaptation within feminism itself.
Several feminist Utopias use the filtration effect to generate masculist
dystopias within the same narrative. Manland, in Russ's The Female Man is
a filtered version of the Utopian Whileaway. In Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate
to Women's Country (1988), warrior garrisons are deliberately created to
hold the residue—both cultural and human—filtered out of the eutopian
women's towns.
These masculist dystopias, in turn, can be subjected to reframing or rever-
sal by intaglio effect. Ursula Le Guin's "The Matter of Seggri" (1994) puts
the men into an enclosure and leaves the women outside. A series of off-world
observers describe the men of the planet Seggri variously, depending on their
own assumptions about gender. Either they are privileged lords waited on by
female drudges or sexual slaves for the free women. Only in the last section of
the story do we get a look at life inside the male preserves, and it is a life from
which the male narrator of that section is desperately grateful to escape.
Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords (1993) supposes that even a warrior
society can be based on principles other than female subjection and armed
hostility among males. The men of her society of hwarhath are in some ways
caricatures of masculine-coded traits: militaristic, restless, arrogant. But they
are also subtle, adaptable, loyal to their clans, respectful of the women clan
leaders back on the home world, and capable of forming deep and lasting
sexual attachments to one another.
One of Arnason's innovations in this novel is to look at the male Utopia
from around a corner, as it were. Her main viewpoint characters are not
hwarhath males or females, nor even ethnologists sent out to study them, as
in Le Guin's "Seggri." Instead, we get to know the masculine utopia first
through the eyes of a human woman who is observing a human man who
has been adopted into it. We get her take on his understanding of the culture
in which he is a partial participant—and his sense of the alien ways is filtered
in turn through the perceptions of his hwarhath lover and other contacts
within the society, who do not necessarily agree on the way their culture
works. These multiple screens allow Arnason to present the same set of tra-
ditions and behaviors simultaneously as paranoid and honorable, aristocratic
and egalitarian, violent and restrained, rigid and cautiously flexible. Half

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eutopia and half dystopia, the novel doubles as an alien thought-experiment

and a portrait of human masculinities, which, it implies, are likewise manifold
and contradictory.
As depicted in Ring of Swords and in several short stories and an as-yet-
unpublished sequel called Hearth World, hwarhath women and men have
their own customs, social structures, even favored art forms. The men like
hero plays and prose romances, while the women prefer decorative arts and
animal plays. Men seem to favor high-tech solutions to problems (and live
in space, where such solutions are necessary), while women prefer the sim-
plest devices that will get the job done, like trains and trolley cars. The men,
who are in a sense permanent exiles, form passionate and lasting romantic
attachments with one another, while the women, more anchored to place
and family, tend toward shorter, more casual liaisons or "long-term long-
distance romances where the two lovers visit back and forth, but are more
often apart than together" ("The Lovers" 38).
The rigid separation between the sexes among the hwarhath is reminiscent
of many Mediterranean cultures, from ancient Athens to present-day Sicily or
Tunisia. Outsiders, with some justification, view these cultures as oppressive
of women, but a view from outside can overlook the measure of autonomy and
influence afforded to women in such a system. Arnason's thought experiment
brings out separatism's potential for equalizing gender relations. The hwarhath
system eliminates not only the abuse of women by men but also overpopula-
tion, child neglect, homophobia, environmental degradation, and male rest-
lessness. Women gain power and security; men gain, among other things,
freedom from the need to define themselves as un-womanly.
But there are trade-offs. Hwarhath women do not travel freely; hwarhath
men have essentially relinquished their home world. While each gender role
offers more variety than human codes typically offer, the limits are more
absolute. And heterosexuality is not even a marginalized option. We meet a few
such deviants among the hwarhath, but they do not play the exception-that-
proves-the-rule, as homosexuals do in many earthly societies. No gender safety
valve exists among the hwarhath. There is no place for the woman warrior or
the male homebody. For such a person, eutopia must quickly become dystopia.
By contrast, Lois McMaster Bujold, m Ethan ofAthos(\986), suggests that
a world of men might be structured along the lines of a feminist utopia, with
an emphasis on child-rearing, kinship, and pair-bonding rarher than on mili-
tary prowess and rank. Bujold's novel may be an intaglio version of A. Bertram
Chandler's Spartan Planet (1969), which portrays an all-male dystopia of
hypermasculine soldiers and effeminate nurses (it is implied that all sexual pair-
ings include one of each type: butch and femme). In Chandler's novel, the mas-
culist society depends on deception: the planet's true history is suppressed, the
need to import ova to maintain the population is disguised, and the existence
of a few women prostitutes is a secret known only to the doctors who make up
the planet's elite. Once the soldier protagonist comes into contact with an

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off-world woman, he immediately throws off all conditioning and reverts

to heterosexuality.
In Bujold's revision of Chandler's scenario, sexual separation has freed the
male colonists of Athos, like the warriors of the hwarhath, from the need to
prove their rejection of femininity. Thereby men are authorized to demonstrate
a full range of personality types and interests, rather than dividing into butch
and femme camps. There are men of Athos who, if they were not so xeno-
phobic, would be perfectly comfortable living among Arnason's hwarhath.
They would certainly approve of hwarhath sexual arrangements, for the world
of Athos was settled by men so virulently misogynistic that they consider any
contact, especially sexual congress, with women to be corrupting. There are
other Athosians, though, including the title character, who would like nothing
better than to find a good man, settle down, and begin raising children. Ven-
turing off planet, the unusually open-minded Ethan even finds it possible to
form a friendship with a woman. Unlike Chandler's hero, though, he has no
sudden inclination to change his sexual orientation.
Bujold's recognition of difference within—rather than between—genders
may represent an evolutionary advance in the masculist utopia, a stage
reached slightly earlier by feminist Utopias. Whereas Gilman's Herlanders all
seem pretty much alike, the world of Griffith's Ammonite is populated by
farmers, warriors, mystics, artisans, traitors, boors, scholars: in other words,
a full range of female persons. In earlier separatist Utopias, the assumption
had been that men and women would differ most sharply in isolation from
one another, while more recent versions show them converging.
The feminist-influenced masculist eutopia has, so far, only come from
women writers such as Bujold and Arnason. If you map out recent Utopias
by subject and writer, you find feminist eutopias by women, feminist dystopias
by men, masculist dystopias by women, and a great gap where you might
expect masculist eutopias by men. There are several possible reasons for the
silence of male writers on the subject:
First, men have less reason than women to question cultural assumptions
about gender because those assumptions generally give males more preroga-
tives and more power—why should men want to exclude the very people
who make their lives easier?
Second, reimagining men in terms of personal ties and social obligations
requires separating those ideas from the category of woman, or in other
words, having already worked through feminisr principles.
Third, the writer must be familiar enough with domestic economy and
child raising to give those activities a central place in the social system, rather
than leaving them invisibly offstage. A Vernian vehicular Utopia may be a
pleasant place to live, but it cannot sustain itself without replenishing its sup-
plies and membership from outside.
The fourth hurdle, though, may be the most difficult for many writers
to get over: in Heinlein's day sexual arrangements could be left undefined,

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but a contemporary blueprint for masculist eutopia has to consider possible

sexual ties between males.
Sex, it turns out, is not only a means of reproduction but also a mecha-
nism for resolving conflicts and creating communal bonds. Recent studies of
species like dolphins and bonobos have challenged an older model of sex as
a limited commodity embodied in females and competed for by males. In
those species, sexual contacts of all sorts and between individuals of any sex
serve to defuse aggression and encourage cooperation within the group. Most
feminist Utopias since the 1970s echo (or anticipate) this perspective on sex.
Desire between Utopian women serves as a sign of female self-affirmation and
self-sufficiency and integrates the outsider or misfit into the Utopian system.
By contrast, male homosexuality in utopia, if acknowledged at all, is rep-
resented in terms of dominance and humiliation. Within older SF in general,
only a few stories by gay male or gay-friendly writers like Edgar Pangborn,
Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Theodore Sturgeon challenge this perspective.
Bradley's 1963 story "Another Rib," written with John Jay Wells, is one of
the first SF stories to posit not only a version of gay marriage but also male
motherhood. When I read this story (alerted by Lynn Williams's bibliogra-
phy on gender and Utopia), I thought I had finally found the rare all-male
eutopia by a male writer—until I discovered that John Jay Wells was a pseu-
donym for Juanita Coulson.
More typically, SF stories that portray groups of men alone adopt a "Don't
Ask, Don't Tell" policy with regard to sexual activity. Philip Wylie's 1951
novel The Disappearance is typical in this regard, though it challenges many
other SF norms. Wylie's novel is a double dystopia, half feminist and half mas-
culist. Its premise is that humanity suddenly splits into two separate realities:
a world without women and one without men. In the women's world, lack of
technical expertise and leadership experience lead to one sort of apocalypse,
while the men engineer their own downfall through war and tyranny.
The book sometimes seems to be making claims about biological deter-
minism, as when the narrator describes rising hostility in the male world in
terms of "Temper that rose from an absolute and insatiate hunger, an utter
frustration, and an inner loneliness . . . temper which made the presence of
men, and of only men, a constant source of bursts of violence" (197). At
other points, though, the text decries the cultural bias underlying sexual divi-
sions that have left half of humanity unprepared for leadership and the other
half incapable of harmony.
Though Wylie attempts to keep both strands of his narrative parallel, the
men's world seems ruled primarily by instinct, while flaws in the women's
world are attributed to cultural conditioning and are thus easier to overcome.
Nowhere is this distinction more evident than in the treatment of sexuality
after the Disappearance. Wylie's Freudianism doesn't let him ignore the pos-
sibility of homosexuality in a single-sex world. But in the women's world,
women begin fairly quickly to form attachments modeled after schoolgirl

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crushes. The female protagonist, Paula, seriously considers having an affair

with her attractive neighbor Kate. Wylie's psychoanalytic perspective inter-
prets the attraction in terms of Paula's hitherto concealed masculine streak,
which she renounces as soon as she becomes conscious of it: once again, "She
was satisfied to be a woman" (326).
In the men's world, though, homosexuality is entirely defined in terms
of female-substitutes: pre-Disappearance stag movies, life-size "Miss America"
dolls, and female impersonators. Paula's husband Bill is never tempted by
these ersatz women; the possibility is never even raised that he might be more
interested in his wife's onetime lover: handsome, accommodating, perennial
bachelor Teddy Barker. Yet Teddy shows up in just those sections of Bill's
narrative that parallel Paula's flirtation with Kate. The closest thing to an
acknowledgement of attraction between the two men is a conversation about
Teddy's affair with Bill's wife, after which Bill:
did not think: this man stole the affections of my wife, or, this man has
shared my wife, or, here is a man by whom I have been made cuckold.
He thought: This is our friend.
He walked halfway home with Teddy. (211)

In SF of the 1950s, a man could only walk halfway home with Teddy.
Wylie's men, even more than his women, were locked into conventional
behaviors and acceptable character variations. Acceptable behavior included
violence but not acknowledged sexual desire toward other men; tyranny but
not interpersonal negotiation; death, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out in the same
decade, but not love. Hence, though both worlds devolve into dystopia, the
men's world becomes more immediately and more thoroughly dystopian
than the women's.
The depiction of male homosexuality in The Disappearance both dates
the book and calls into question many of its assumptions about sexual dif-
ference. In the decades since its publication, several different models of
homosexuality have emerged, from the bisexual ideal of glamour rock to the
macho-man promiscuity of early gay liberation to the post-AIDS emphasis
on stable partnerships. None of this variety is even hinted at in The Disap-
pearance. The thought of multiple versions of homosexuality does not appear
in SF until Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984),
Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden (1989), and John Varley's Steel Beach
(1992). The societies imagined within these novels are given a tinge of utopia
by the open-endedness of gender coding within both homosexual and hetero-
sexual relationships.
Bujold's and Arnason's Utopias likewise invoke multiple versions of
gay identity as a means of shaking up gender norms and conventional social
structures such as the family. Other texts, in turn, examine what might hap-
pen if one particular model of homosexuality were to replace heterosexual
norms. Lucy Sussex's "My Lady Tongue," and Geoff Ryman's "O Happy

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Day!" both demonstrate the need to resist enforced notions of gender even
in the guise of Utopian reform, while Karen Joy Fowler's "Game Night at the
Fox and Goose" asks whether utopia can cope with the intricacies and
ambivalences of human desire.
In Sussex's story, a young woman growing up in a feminist enclave is
thrown together with a man who does not fit the masculine image she has
learned. As the story's title hints, the two, like Shakespeare's Beatrice and
Benedict, fight their way to friendship and then to love. At least he falls in
love. She, unlike her predecessors in a host of male fantasies, is not over-
whelmed by the first male she sees. Instead, she elects to return to the women's
Utopia, though with the knowledge that things are more complicated than she
has been led to believe. She goes back, but we are invited to believe she will
always be a questioner, keeping the female haven from becoming too rigid.
Ryman depicts a harsh revolutionary society in which heterosexual
men are sent to extermination camps and homosexuals are tolerated so long
as they collaborate with the unseen female overseers. The narrator attempts
to rescue one prisoner, Royce, by pretending they are lovers, but Royce
offends the camp bully, who rapes him, leading to reprisals from the over-
seers. It is a terrible scenario but there is nothing in it that is not implicit
somewhere among feminist Utopias. The narrator wonders where to assign
blame: previous injustices toward women, male proclivity for hierarchy and
sexual violence, or the revolutionary higher-ups who have created a situa-
tion in which there is no decent way to act. Where is the place for a man
who identifies neither with the patriarchal system nor the dystopian rule
that has replaced it?
Fowler's protagonist has just been abandoned by a married lover. In the
Fox and Goose bar, she is approached by a tall, unusually confident woman
who tells her about an alternative reality in which women have rebelled
against male duplicity and abuse. "Is it better there?" asks Alice. "Better for
whom?" the woman responds (240). Alice decides to accompany the woman
to her home universe (via the women's restroom in the bar), only to find that
she has been deceived, again, by a man. He has disguised himself to fetch her
to be the "small thing" that can "tip the balance" between women and men
in his world (241). Why Alice? The story does not exactly say, except that we
know she likes men, is heterosexual, is vulnerable (and pregnant), and tends
to blame herself in bad situations. Is she destined, simply by her sexuality, to
betray the feminist society?
Focusing on misfits in utopia, these three stories examine generalizations
about gender proposed by previous Utopias. These stories ask whether any
single system can account for the varieties of experience and inclination
found among actual women and men. Other stories exploring the same ques-
tion have been discussed by Wendy Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Ann
Weinstone in a special issue of Science-Fiction Studies devoted to the rela-
tionship between SF and queer theory.

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So how do women behave when they are left alone? What would men
be without women? Do masculist texts represent natural, hard-wired, instinc-
tual masculinity? Which of the feminist Utopias most truly expresses women's
needs and desires? The dialectical nature of utopia indicates that no answer
to these questions can be complete or final. A central premise of Utopian
thought is that the cluster of attitudes and behaviors that we call "human
nature" is not fixed but can be altered by indoctrination and by social systems
that favor certain behaviors over others.
As history keeps reformulating the issues, writers keep reframing, filter-
ing, and inverting the Utopian systems that embody them. The latest take on
gender and utopia seems to be that gender itself can become a dystopian sys-
tem. Forcing all members of either sex into a single pattern will inevitably
result in dystopia, while the most positive visions of society are those in
which women and men are similarly free to defy norms.
So the single-sex utopia, paradoxically, ends up asserting a peculiar sort of
continuity between genders. In most of these Utopias, differences are not flat-
tened out but redistributed, so that the sex one belongs to no longer determines
the sex one is attracted to, or the role one plays in battle, or one's ability to care
for offspring. Men alone may turn out to be more like women than we thought,
and women more like men. Such redistribution alters the meanings not only
of masculinity and femininity, but also of possible overlap between them, and
thus invites new readings of androgyny and of the text that signaled the begin-
ning of the Utopian revival, Le Guin's The Left Hand ofDarkness.

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