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I got Judith Butler; excellent, a postmodernist and queer theorist!

Much as I enjoy theory, I’d like to focus on non-fiction. If there is theory, can it be art-related? We’ve talked about voice; could we talk about gaze? Though I know this is an English course …My quiz results were telling indeed, and I’d prefer more recent theory to classics of feminist theory. I’ve never read anything by bel hooks, and I wouldn’t mind using this as an opportunity to do so. Same for Cherrie Moraga. I’d rather try to write in the Native American style than to read more of it.

I think that science fiction should always be on the feminist/queer menu. Scifi is speculative, it gives a writer (and zir readers) the opportunity to ask ‘what if’? Quite often, those ‘what if’ questions are about culture and society: family structure, the nature of gender, power relations, religion etc. (Not all scifi is like this, of course). Two writers whom I’d like to see be considered are Ursula K. le Guin and Octavia Butler.

(One of Butler’s short stories, “Bloodchild”, made many readers think it was about slavery, because Butler is African-American; but according to her, it’s a love story and a coming of age story and a story about two different species learning to coexist because they need each other; it’s also a story she wrote because she wanted to write about a man becoming pregnant for the sake of love.)

(One reviewer on amazon.com says: “She [le Guin] currently writes like the wise old crone she is, no longer "like a man", which readers may or may not appreciate.” Discuss …)

I think that getting outside the canon is important; not just The Canon, but also feminist, queer, and other canons. I’m not sure how canonical The Left Hand of Darkness (le Guin) and Kindred (Butler) are; they’re part of my canon, at any rate, and my impression is that Left Hand at least is fairly widely known.

I also think Orlando by Virginia Woolf would be interesting to use (and btw the movie adaptation is *gorgeous*). The Female Man by Joanna Russ, now that I think about it, contains a conception of a black swan society: when I was reading it, I wished I’d grown up on Whileaway, if only because of their education system, and because of the way they all keep busy. Lady Oracle, Surfacing, and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood have been recommended to me. Oh, and How To Supress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, which is non-fiction.