American author (1937-2011)
Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism and is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.
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What I think of the mystification I was exposed to, it was just hard. I’m seventy, but this must have started when I was eleven or twelve, being squashed. Somebody was saying that for gay women to come out, they usually do it a good bit later than gay men, because you can’t get a picture of yourself at all, one way or the other.
One thing I have tried to do when I write...was take the sex in my stories and simply make it part of the whole fabric. It’s not special, it’s not sacred, it’s not demonic, it just happens. It’s as much an ordinary part of life as heating your dinner up, or something, and I always worked very hard to get that over.
this is a public discourse in which female sexuality really doesn’t exist...If you believe the public discourse then you have to also believe that female sexuality is a dreadful thing and must be squashed at all costs, and so on. I just hope there are many, many more young people who are growing up without that, without all of it, anyway.
The mystery stories are very interesting because again, often the ones that women write are as good as or not as good as the ones the guys write, but the women write about personalities, about characters, and what is character-driven. The men tend not to; they are more comfortable apparently with technical problems. I think the best writers are the kind who do both at the same time.
there is no God in any of my stories or in my beliefs. In fact, if there's one thread running throughout my fiction it's precisely the lack of that kind of authority. My books, I would say, are designed to undermine that notion, to force readers to question the authorities governing their lives, be they literary, sexual, political, religious, whatever. Cosmic awe isn't religion. I'm an atheist, and I loathe having religion imported into my work. If you believe in religion, do it, but don't assume or insist that I do.
Women traditionally do an enormous amount of interpersonal work, but there's no public vocabulary for this sort of activity-just as there's no public vocabulary for what mothers do raising children, or what housewives do. Anne Wilson Schaef has pointed out that there is this public male reality and anything that isn't in it is either crazy or trivial or nonexistent. There's no consensual way of talking about what makes up the daily lives of most women, so it's not surprising that women have been exploring telepathy, ESP, magic, and alternative forms of communication. Marion Zimmer Bradley does, Le Guin does, I do, even Suzy Charnas-really, just about every contemporary woman SF author I can think of has worked in these areas.
For women, there's simply no easy way of finding some kind of fulfillment. The whole idea of going from your own world to an alien world makes sense only if you're not an alien in your own world. It's very hard to feel at home here when you're not. So women either don't go into space-you're either there or here but without much traveling in between-or you came from there and now you're here, but what the hell are you doing here?
The key for me wasn't the '60s but the early '70s and the feminist movement. Gloria Steinem once said that women get more radical as they get older because things start to pile up-the alienation, the outsideness. We don't age as men do; there's no reward. We get out or go under. Radicalism for any oppressed group isn't youthful; it's lifelong...Simply being a female so often has the effect of placing women so far out, so far on the margin, so far from being central or important, that when women go radical, they tend to jump a long way. Radicalism partly derives from the basic question, How much have I really got to lose? I'm not sure you can generalize about this, but it seems clear to me, from my recent researches, that black women are frequently more radical than white feminists and black lesbian feminists are more radical still, because just to stay alive they've had to become radical. Like Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga. Audre Lorde has a collection of essays called Sister Outsider that is magnificent on this topic. There is a tradition of women on the Left being overlooked that I myself just found out about quite recently. I discovered that in the most amazing ways it's always been women who were the most radical figures on the Left. Suppressed radicals, punished radicals. Not only has this happened before, but it's happened and happened and happened and happened. There have been something like two to four feminist movements in the last three hundred years. Dale Spender's book, Women of Ideas, has some evidence of this. We've buried the slave revolts, and we constantly bury radical events like the labor wars.
I've never lost the feeling of transcendental beauty and awe that attached itself to the physical world. Lucretius has a line in De Rerum Naturae that says something about how everything in nature fits together and gives a joy beyond expression. It's a feeling people have surely always had about the way the seasons or planets change, the way plants grow, a sense of joy or awe about what's around us.