You have to have conventions and rigid symbols and patterns before you can upset them. - Joanna Russ

Who's Elaine Beach?
Just the one you'd expect. The shy one. The sandy-haired one with freckles. The unhappy one who isn't good-looking. The one who came back to town after a two weeks' absence, claiming she'd been to Chicago and had a baby. The one who's always listening to something else. The one who, on autumn nights, looks as though she can hear something else. The one who hates parties. The one who won't talk about it.
The one to whom supernatural adventures ought to happen.

The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years.

Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")