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The second chapter continues with the equation of the child in relation to the future, taking up the centrality of reproduction to any ethics premised on human survival. Through a reading of Joanna Russ’s 1977 novel We Who Are About To, it considers narrative structures that refuse generational survival and intergenerational rescue, as rescue requires everything to hold its shape, to remain as it is, long enough to be rescued. Therefore, it isn’t that the world is acausal but that causality is richer and stranger than rescue and survival narratives can imagine. Ideologies of reproduction are one of the modes by which we attempt to manage biological, chemical, and ontological affectivities.

To confront patriarchy's definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’ non-writer, ‘essentialist’ feminist discourses construct a female literary tradition based on a shared biology. Joanna Russ takes part in this discourse through her essay collection How to Suppress Women's Writing as well as her fictional work. Russ reconstructs women as authors and characters of fiction as part of the sexual politics of her explicitly feminist texts. Through the implicit references to Charlotte and Emily Brontö and to Frankenstein in her short story ‘My Dear Emily’, Russ creates a subtext of female authorship. This chapter examines the implicit or explicit links to women authors as well as strategies of authorisation in Russ's work, including The Two of Them (1978), ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’, ‘My Dear Emily’, ‘Life in a Furniture Store’, The Female Man, and On Strike Against God.

Due to its speculative possibilities, science fiction functions as a discursive space that makes it ideally suited for narrative experiments with alternative identities. By placing another version of a genetically identical woman in an imaginary cultural context, Joanna Russ is able to explore the ways in which the characters' sense of self and identity is determined by culture. In turn, this speculative freedom makes it possible for the text to experiment with strategies of resistance against determinism. Russ's novel The Female Man offers the most prominent examples of characters with alternate identities. In On Strike Against God, the narrator refers to the multiple overlapping texts that make up her self by using the metaphor of the palimpsest. Russ employs similar strategies to connect the science fiction narrative to the life of the fictional author and/or implied reader in her other novels, including The Two of Them and We Who Are About To....

Feminism(s) have had to reevaluate all-encompassing theories about ‘women’ and their ‘oppression’ in ‘patriarchy’. Owing to the totalising claims of the ‘information society’ over all aspects of lived social relations, finding discursive spaces from which to argue oppositional politics is nearly impossible. Joanna Russ seeks precisely such discursive spaces in her fiction and, like a number of feminist critics, has articulated feminist political positions which is not exclusively reliant on the integrity and homogeneity of the category woman. One such critic is Donna Haraway, who tackles the cyborg myth in her 1985 essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’. In the same manner, Russ uses the image of vampires and ghosts to destabilise the body and gender identities. Like the cyborgs of more recent science fiction, vampires and ghosts function as impersonators of ironic images of sexed and gendered humanness in her fiction. This chapter examines how Russ employs the generic conventions of science fiction and fantasy to explore the concept of the ‘natural’, ‘original’ human body in her fiction, including The Female Man, On Strike Against God, and Extra(Ordinary) People.

The stories of women's agency created in Joanna Russ's fiction are politically significant not in and of themselves, but in how they strive to relate to the material existence of women outside the text. The act of reading establishes a connection between the flesh and bones of real women and the acts of writing and narrating as well as the acts performed by characters in the narrative world. Three levels of narrative agency can be identified in Russ's early short stories: the agency of the characters in the narrated world, the agency of the narrator, and the agency of the (fictional) author. This chapter offers a reading of Russ's two short stories, ‘My Dear Emily’ (1962) and ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ (1965), to examine how the characters' (lack of) agency is related to the narrator's agency and to the agency of the fictional author. It also looks at how her book The Adventures of Alyx makes agency a conspicuous structural element of the text.

Radical feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, and Andrea Dworkin, who have been linked to Julia Kristeva's second moment in feminism, argue that heterosexual intercourse contributes to women's oppression in patriarchy. Based on this perspective, feminist interventions can eliminate oppression only from within patriarchal conceptualisations of sexuality. In Joanna Russ's fiction, the processes of feminist utopian speculation are not completed by attaining agency. Russ's central ‘heterosexual’ protagonists assert their agency by killing a man. The various types of sexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and autosexuality fulfil different functions in Russ's novels. Russ heavily relies on the categories of psychoanalysis to tackle lesbianism. In her later novels, including The Female Man and On Strike Against God, Russ explicitly explores the liberatory potential of masturbation scenes.

The chapter discusses a range of science fiction texts from the 1930s to the present, in which technology and sexuality are both played or intersected figuratively in the form of the cyborg. The chapter discusses a novel by Joanna Russ entitled The Female Man. The female satire talks about conjunctures, intersections and sexual encounters that are monstrous, hybrid, perverse and — above all — political.

Throughout her career as a writer, Joanna Russ has continuously transformed and developed androcide as a means to give female characters power and credibility. This is evident in the stories collected in The Adventures of Alyx, where the female characters have the ability to control their actions and kill the opposite sex. This chapter examines the narrative function of androcide within Russ's texts and considers androcide as a narrative device and not to celebrate violence or advocate mass murder. It shows how androcide as a narrative device in Russ's fiction represents women's claim to agency and destroys established gender-specific narratives in the handed-down set of basic story lines available to (genre) fiction writers. It looks at a number of killings committed by women from various points in Russ's development.

In her novel The Female Man, Joanna Russ partially shares the radical materialist feminist premise that positions women as a sex-class in a dual system of oppression created by patriarchy and capitalism. The Dialectic of Sex, a 1970 materialist feminist classic by Shulamith Firestone, utilises Marxist concepts to interpret patriarchal power structures, highlighting sexual difference as the most fundamental category of social division. Firestone argues that women's childbearing functions necessitate the original division of labour and establish the biological family as basic unit of reproduction. Based on this logic, technology, particularly artificial reproduction, liberates women from oppression and frees both the child and the mother from domination by the father. This sex-class antagonism, grounded in women's reproductive function, is evident in the way female characters in many of Russ's texts often secure their agency by appropriating control over reproduction. This chapter explores the dialectic of sex/gender in The Female Man and compares the novel with the The Dialectic of Sex.

In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, Adrienne Rich talks about the ‘lesbian continuum’, a community of women that incorporates multiple forms of woman-woman relationships. The lesbian continuum reveals how women's role in reproduction is intimately linked to compulsory heterosexuality. This continuum is evident in Joanna Russ's texts, in which she explores the liberatory potential of consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others. In her 1981 essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’, Russ identifies a theme which she calls ‘the rescue of the female child’, whereby an older woman rescues a younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life entirely determined by patriarchy. This rescue pattern is pervasive in Russ's work, from ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) to ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982) and ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982). Russ's critique of patriarchy strongly intersects with psychoanalysis, with the recurrent rescue story upturning the relationship between mother and daughter in the patriarchal context.

The relationship between rescuer and rescued in Joanna Russ's 1967 short story ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) may be associated with Elaine Marks's ‘Sappho model’. The Sappho myth has been invoked to domesticate women's bodies and their relation to language in circumscribing the woman who loves women in a discourse that reduces her to her sexuality. This chapter argues that Russ's rescue stories are intimately connected to the Sappho model and that the maternal, the erotic, and the ‘autoerotic’ between two women of different generations in the texts emerge as reassuring yet unstable female spaces. It looks at the dynamics of sexual relationships between women, one of whom is significantly older, and how Russ's texts make the erotic tension explicit. In discussing sapphic intergenerational erotics, the chapter analyses four texts spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s: ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’ (1968), The Female Man (1975), ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982), and ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ (1983). Finally, it shows how Russ's texts destabilise gender and the female body as bases of identity.

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two (1948), authorizes the behaviourist model of the self by inscribing operant conditioning into long-standing progressivist discourses. But this is subverted by the novel itself, which persistently endorses historical, philosophical, and ethical discourses that have supposedly been rendered obsolete. Behaviourism is further undermined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and William Sleator’s House of Stairs (1974). These narratives juxtapose against behaviourism counter-discourses from different sources, including wisdom traditions such as world religions, and also antagonistic discourses such as psychoanalysis and existentialism. Social constructionism encourages science fiction to dissolve psychological and cultural givens of our time (such as heterosexuality or patriarchy) in a future or alternative social order. With enormously varying complexity and ethical sensitivity, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Edmund Cooper’s 1972 Who Needs Men? and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1974), explore the utopian and dystopian reconstruction of gender relations, but are troubled by issues of natural and cultural diversity.

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.