Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 12:26:25 EDT From: Rachel Wild Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Body of Glass/ He She It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU Dear everyone, Please accept my apologies for my late kick off for HSI... I have been offline for two weeks through moving house and so have missed a lot of discussion. I will do my introduction to HSI and if folk have started without me I'll catch up. He She It, known as Body of Glass in the UK is IMO Piercy's companion to Woman on the Edge of Time... but this time it is the anti-future that has become inevitable. Corporations rule an environmentally degredated world... we are stuck in a cyber punk future. It is here that the twists begin - for although many of the sights and sounds of cyberpunk are with us the atmosphere is very different. This is a book about the nature of resistance, the spirit of the oppressed and about the consequences that choices of violence/ non-violence have on the soul of our resistance. This is also - as cada to the first theme I mentioned - a book about the nature of the soul, about the consequences of owning and using conscious beings in conscription to resistance, however worthy the cause. I find the themes of HSI much thicker and more murky than Woman on... I am more lost among competing moral imperatives than blissed out on a blueprint for a world I can live in. To begin I want to explore the themes of violence/ non-violence as demonstrated in Jewish ethics and culture... as presented here and [if we can do it with respect] in relation to Palestine/ Israel at present. In Tikva and in Prague we have Jewish men confounding stereotyped expectations and engaging in armed resistance. In both cases a fragile community may perish without such choices - yet each must bind up his empathy to create a golem ... a creature who's status as a conscious being must be disregarded for the sake of the people the golem must protect. At present many commentators are shocked that a nation birthed from the experiences of the holocaust can make choices to oppress others... yet many Jewish historians point to a more complex history where opposing desires for peace and revenge have resulted in armed resistance, and the perpetuation of less justifiable violence against others. A Jewish history of Gangsters and warriors as well as saints [sic?] intellectuals and liberation philosophers. I don't have any clear answers yet but I wonder what choices I would make in such impossible circumstances. OK a few questions to answer or not: In what ways is HSI a feminist book... in terms of a critique of masculinity/ militarism How do we reconcile a peoples' freedom fighting with the use of owned beings... should Yod and Joseph have the same rights as human persons and is the discussion of rights applicable in this situation. What do we make of the female characters different ways of resisting... Malka the cyberwitch, Rikva the assassin, Nili the superdyke and Shira the mother pushed to act? so... over to you, sorry for the lack of a spellcheck! and I hope to catch up soon. ByeBye Rachel ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 15:40:30 -0700 From: Lee Anne Phillips Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Body of Glass/ He She It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU At 12:26 PM 7/8/02 -0400, Rachel Wild wrote: >To begin I want to explore the themes of violence/ non-violence as >demonstrated in Jewish ethics and culture... as presented here and [if we >can do it with respect] in relation to Palestine/ Israel at present. It's an interesting problem. I find myself conflicted on all levels. On the one hand, I want to believe the traditional Passover story and focus on justice and liberation, since that's the way it's presented every year and is the most flattering interpretation; but the first part of the story is often forgotten, that Joseph made it possible for the Pharaoh impoverish and enslave the Egyptian people while Joseph and his people were enriched at the expense of others. That the later "enslavement" of the Hebrews was in some sense a case of "what goes around, comes around." And the reported enslavement is somewhat problematical when one considers that they are supposed to have left with several tonnes of gold and silver, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, weapons of war, and other household goods. There are odd appurtenances to be found among slaves. Are we hearing the *whole* story here? We know we're not since the voices of women are often absent. A whole series of questions that women would raise, perhaps *did* raise, are left unrecorded and unheeded. As far as we can tell from reading the story, men stood alone at Sinai, while the women were safely at home dusting the furniture and arranging their hair, but the Rabbis take pains to make it clear that we were *all* there, despite the fact that the men who wrote down the story mostly didn't notice, forgot to mention their names, or perhaps didn't know. Nowhere, I think, is the continuing conflict between the forces of violence and the inclination to peace more evident than in the complex relationship of the descendents of Abraham and Sarah to G-d as depicted in Tanach and thousands of years of collected commentary and tradition. Despite the obvious second class treatment of women in Torah, the narrative is moved along in large part by women. Despite bloodthirsty pronouncements and unspeakably cruel actions from time to time, the overall trend is toward loving kindness and compassion. Marge Piercy is very conscious in much of her work of this movement toward encouraging the inclination of all people to good and discouraging that inclination that leads toward evil. She's a member of the Reconstructionist Movement in Judaism, which seeks to preserve the heart of Judaism, our culture, practices, beliefs, and ritual while responding to the modern world. When we light Sabbath and festival candles, we have at our backs a spiritual lineage of women going back many thousands of years, a span of time so great that here in America, at least, where a mere hundred years is halfway to antiquity, it boggles the mind. In Judaism we have a religion and culture that was old when the Roman Empire was young, and who, going back along one's family tree for more than five thousand years doesn't find (if it were possible to look) more than a few rogues, murderers, and criminals among the wished-for saints? I think Piercy's novels don't shy away from complexity and ambiguity because it's honest, and honesty is one of the first things one notices about our history. The people in the Torah narrative are presented, for the most part, with their flaws *and* strengths intact. It's precisely the need to wrest our own meaning from these subtle stories that makes them rich enough to stand the test of time. If Esther can be viewed as a heroine, why so can Vashti. As valid a case for seeing a feminist lesson in Esther as can be made as seeing a lesson in courage and humility. For Vashti was perhaps even more courageous than Esther, since she undoubtedly knew that her self-respecting response to the King would result in her death. The Rabbis jump through considerable hoops to make her out to look bad, because they wanted to make Esther look good, but the real situation looks much more grey than black and white when one really reads the story and ignores the jingoist celebration. Viewed in the cold light of day, Mordecai looks more like an whiny opportunist than a hero, and the result of the King's revised "justice" is to kill one group of people *instead* of another, not to stop the killing entirely. Once Esther faces the risk of death alone, Mordecai smoothly moves in to take the credit and arrange everything to his liking. It's never been *just* Jewish men, although they often like to think so. In the Warsaw Ghetto, armed women wanted to run to the woods and form an armed resistance while the men wanted to protect their homes and, to be fair, those who couldn't run. The women stood by the men and essentially all were lost. Which choice was best? I know what my own answer might be today but I don't know what might have looked best at the time. Every choice was fraught with peril. I think the women's choice *might* have been best, because it *might* have preserved the lives of some who otherwise perished, *might* even have shortened the war and preserved lives unknown to the Warsaw fighters, but hindsight is always considerably more reliable than foresight. Some things must be done for mere survival. Some choices only make sense in the context of preserving the power to make better choices at some future time. When one reads most foundation stories, one reads a "sanitized" and bowdlerized tract rather than anything that seems like real history. While we may now focus on intellectualism and mercantilism in Jewish history, other threads have always been present. Some of our greatest teachers have been simple laborers, farmers and woodcutters are more common than bankers and doctors, warriors have always been there, lurking in the background, while our attention is cleverly drawn to chanting scholars on fire for the word of G-d and their secular counterparts who pursue the life of the mind rather than that of the sword or the plow. >I don't have any clear answers yet but I wonder what choices I would make >in such impossible circumstances. > >OK a few questions to answer or not: > >In what ways is HSI a feminist book... in terms of a critique of >masculinity/ militarism > >How do we reconcile a peoples' freedom fighting with the use of owned >beings... should Yod and Joseph have the same rights as human persons and >is the discussion of rights applicable in this situation. It's fairly easy, I think. While the Hebrews "escaped" from slavery, this didn't seem to make them *much* wiser than their slave-holding neighbors. Or, if it did, it took a long time for the lesson to sink in. When the Ameican Colonies rebelled against the British Crown, slave-holding was perfectly legal and acceptable. There's an elaborate system of accounting for the lesser value of slaves in figuring population embedded in the Constitution, an odd feature to be found in a statement "democratic" principles. The Constitution was based, in part, on the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, yet dropped the rights of women as too radical for a society still in thrall to the rights of the Petty King (husband) in "his" household. It wasn't by accident that the first convention on the rights of women was held in Seneca Falls, the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy; the five nations of the Iroquois were the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga and the women who convened the Convention on Women's Rights knew it well. Even in "our" democracy, a state not shared by the majority of the world's inhabitants, we still retain "ownership" of things that ought to be free or held in common. While we may have better access to justice than many, that access is not perfect. There is still the opportunity to work toward the repair of the world and our unshared social order. >What do we make of the female characters different ways of resisting... >Malka the cyberwitch, Rikva the assassin, Nili the superdyke and Shira the >mother pushed to act? If these women asked the four questions, what would those questions be? I think a parallel can be drawn between the new liberation haggadot, especially feminist haggadot, and Piercy's story. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 11:22:40 +0100 From: Angela Barclay Subject: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU >How do we reconcile a peoples' freedom fighting with the use of owned >beings... should Yod and Joseph have the same rights as human persons and >is the discussion of rights applicable in this situation. Joseph and Yod were created to be supersoldiers like so many of the cyborgs in our popular culture (the Terminator . . . Robocop . . . Max and her cohorts on "Dark Angel" . . .) and then snuffed out because they fulfilled their obligations too well. In my opinion their deaths were akin to being put to sleep by "parents" (or pet owners) who were not willing to take responsibility and properly train their offspring. What do you think? It seems to me that Piercy created them through her Drs. Frankenstein and then had an abrupt change of heart at the end. I thought Shira's flirting with the idea to recreate Yod was an awkward ending. It also seemed that the ideas it is immoral and cruel to create a conscious weapon and wrong to manufacture a sentient servant occur to the characters as an afterthought. While Joseph and Yod have undeniably dangerous propensities, they also show equally as strong capabilities to care for and nurture others. Their flaws perhaps made them even more human. I'm interested in hearing what others thought of the ending and of the fate of the golems. Piercy acknowleges that Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto influenced her writing. Haraway celebrates the cyborg as being a hybrid creature which inhabits both fantasy and reality and serves to collapse the boundaries and binary oppositions (he/she, human/machine, self/other, inside/outside, nature /culture) inherent in patriarchy. FSF scholar Jenny Wolmark claims "Haraway's cyborg metaphor is a playful but deeply political response to a perceived need to construct other, inclusive narratives in which diversity and difference are significant rather than peripheral. The subjectivities could, therefore, be regarded as its most valuable characteristic and it is undoubtedly one of the reasons for its continued usefulness in feminist and cultural theory (1999, p. 6)." While Piercy may have been influenced by Haraway's work, I don't see that _He, She and It_ celebrates cyborg politics. Agreements? Disagreements? At the same time I don't like that the golems were killed off, I am conflicted as to whether they should have be allowed to be self-governing or to create more of their kind and as such be given "human rights." Here we run into a common theme in SF: the fear of being taken over by technology. To tell you the truth I am also conflicted as to whether Avram or The Maharal had the right to create Yod and Joseph in the first place- to "serve and protect" anyways. I guess that's the beauty of FSF: it gets us thinking about our own rights and dangerous propensities. Last summer, when I was struggling with Haraway's cyberfeminism, members kindly pointed out the following sites: Donna Haraway's _The Cyborg Manifesto_ is available here: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html You may also want to check out http://cyborgmanifesto.org/ http://www.cyborg-manifesto.com/ Janet Abbate uses some cyborg stories to teach the history of technology http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/History/Faculty/JAbbate/cyborg/ a list of fiction and criticism http://www.clovis.cc.nm.us/la/beenm/research/CyborgCrit.html Or, try Sandy Stone's homepage for some interesting theory re body / hybridity / etc http://sandystone.com/ Thanks for hearing me out- I find this cyborg business fascinating but confusing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on cyborg consciousness . . . politics . . . Angela ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 20:46:35 +1000 From: Maire Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU I just finished Body of Glass, or He, She and It. I enjoyed and am impressed by Piercy. I am afraid I can't respond on the academic level of the previous post... There is a *lot* to think about in this book. Lots of different stuff happening. How to reconcile it with Women on the Edge of Time, the glop, the multis, the jewish influence. I would have liked it Piercy had had the Council making a (what's the word for after death? post-humous (?) verdict on Yod's "humanity"- whether or not he was entitled to citizenship- and of course, deciding that he was. I would have found that satisfying. I think its pretty hard for an author to write a good ending, and given that this book did not have a "happy" ending, I think it could have been a lot worse, a lot less satisfying. I felt slightly cheated in a way... because Yod's story was so closely paralleling Joseph's, and it was so obviously inevitable that Joseph would be "put down", it seemed also obvious to me that something similar was going to happen to Yod. For me, that diminished the "reality" of the book- made it seem more fable-like. I must admit that I didn't really empathise with the whole moral/ ethical conundrum of the novel- ie, whether it is ethical to create a consciousness for a specific purpose, to serve someone and have no free will, no right to self determination. I guess that was because I was so involved in the actual story. Then again, maybe its cause I think there are too many variables to ever make a decision about it- well, about whether or not cyborgs should ever be created in the first place. The people of Tikva sort of had no other choice- they needed Yod, who could do what no human could. Perhaps he should have been created less.. conflicted. But then- would that make him any less a person? If he had been simpler, less complex? Its like the question of, is there a god, or, whats on the outside of the universe. I can't answer it, so, after a few bouts of mental circling, I give up. I hate to admit this, it seems shallow, but I found the section about Joseph a little distracting. It's not actually that I didn't enjoy them though. I think I just found them a combination of, not as interesting, and also, requiring a different mental reading mood, so they jarred a little with me. I wanted to be reading feminist science fiction, not The Secret History of Ash. (I guess its only the golem factor that kept reminding me of Ash- there arent any real similarities). Anyway, I considered this book to be an achievement, perhaps slightly over-complicated to be widely popular? I enjoyed it, and I like to think about how it connects with the futures in Woman on the Edge. Maire ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 12:18:12 -0400 From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU I loved the book. A very good read. Lots to think about, many depths. Real characters - I imagined Piercy put a lot of herself into Malkah and Chava - but don't know enough about her. Her discussion of town meetings had the feel of someone who has been in a lot of meetings. Some good wisdom and thought provoking comments on love and life. A favorite of mine was, Malkah to Shira: "You love too hard. It occupies the centre and squeezes out your strength, If you work in the centre and love to the side, you will love better in the long run" (page 75 in my English Penguin edition). The key point there, I thought, was - if you work in the center you'll love better, not just life will be easier and more balanced (which might be more like some people's - mostly men's? - advice). There is in general a lot of wisdom: characters who would be cardboard cutouts in lesser novels, become full people here - Yod, of course, but also Nili (who is not just Xena with implants, but is also a mother) and Gadi (not just the pretty media boy, but someone with whom Shira can eventually start to be friends, who does Kaddish for his father, and is attracted to the one woman who is not impressed by him). I liked the ending. It was a nice irony that the one thing that most proved Yod's right to be considered a full person, was his decision that it would be best for everyone if he died and his kind were not created in future. This was a highly social, unselfish act. Piercy seemed to me to be saying, with Malkah (?I think) that the future lay with enhance humans like Nili, not with cyborgs. Cyborgs are just too potentially dangerous to be set free, and more than that, no one should ever own anyone. That is why Shira finally decides not to recreate Yod. Hardly the last word on the subject, though. At one point I wondered if Yod was going to relearn the cabbalistic knowledge that would enable him to resuscitate Joseph. I liked the two stories, partly because of the commentary on Israel that was involved. Another example of Piercy's evenhandedness, or breadth: Israel was presented as both the religious ideal and the failure of that ideal, and yet after its political failure came its rebirth as a new society in the ruins, closer to a utopia than the free towns. The parallel stories helped to make the point that this was a long-term philosophical problem, to do with beings created for human purposes. There are echoes here of religious debates about humankind: created to do God's will, or to make free choices, however disastrous? Philip Pullman's theology, in His Dark Materials, is all about the evil God being the usurper (in fact a rogue angel masquerading as God) who requires human obedience, while the original creator, further back, is the one who is love; and love implies giving freedom. So Eve (and Lyra in His Dark Materials), by eating the apple, pleased the creator God, while displeasing the Authority God. Is the next step for cyborgs the freedom to be citizens, not owned by anyone (similar to God giving people freedom to eat from the Tree of Knowledge)? But humans are hardly God, and Yod was a one-off: would all cyborgs be as trustworthy? Yod/Shira/Piercy made the conservative choice: don't go that route. Hard to disagree. Too easy to imagine cyborgs turning against us, as we have turned against God: only they could actually destroy us. God, being a figment of our imaginations, or else everything that is, is not so easily destroyed. Best thing about the novel in my view? That, as Rachel wrote, it is a cyberpunk novel where the democratic fight-back is happening and starting to get serious traction. In that way, it's a more hopeful novel than the near-future dystopias it draws on. But then I wonder how that squares with the incredibly depressing premises of the whole given situation: plague, famine, apparent victory of the multis. Like WOTEOT, Piercy has provided a highly compressed (and in my view unrealistic) time scale for a lot of history to happen in, and this time it is all bad. Malkah is a contemporary of ours, alive today as a young woman. Are things likely to get that bad that fast? There have been a lot of doom scenarios over the last 30-40 years since I have been paying attention, and which of them have come true? AIDS is the worst in fact, the biggest plague of all time in numbers, (but not at all in terms of percentage killed, which horror belongs to the native Americans killed by the variety of Euro-Asian diseases to which they had no immunity - more than 90%). We do know now how to roll AIDS back, as in Uganda, which is good news, though the failure of either the rich world or the poor to get to grips with the issue as well as we could is depressing. But as it gets worse, response is growing, and even Jesse Helms gets converted - we don't yet seem set on a course that would create Piercy's nightmare. Other predicted horrors have not happened, such as: running out of resources (basically all resources are cheaper now than 30 years ago), more starving people (the world population has doubled and there are actually less starving people, while the percentage of starving has about halved), nuclear war (still terrifying, but more thought of now as a rogue action of terrorists, or a 'tactical weapon' of the US military - I don't know which would be worse, but neither would lead to nuclear winter), pollution (getting worse in poor countries but getting better on almost all scales in rich countries), mass species die-offs (still a prediction for the future, but the earlier claims - that got much play in environmental circles - that 40,000 species were dying a year have now been rejected by everyone). My problem with near-future dystopian novels is that they may engender a feeling of hopelessness - the corporations are all powerful, the people have lost. When in fact in many ways things are getting better. We need major efforts to extend democracy here and now, not least in the USA. Does Piercy's novel help or hinder that task? I don't know. I think the left has to be shaken into some honesty about the things that are going well: if Chicken Little says the sky is falling all the time, she will be trusted about as much as the boy who cried wolf. In that sense, Piercy seems to me to be stuck in a previous mindset. But it was still a wonderful read, and one that believed in democracy, or people's power in that context (if not in our own - or how would things have got that bad that fast?). To me, it's as if she combines in her novels the worst of human beings (the fate of Israel, partly its own fault as she sees it; the famines, plagues, multis) with the best. It's easy to write about how terrible humans are: much harder to write convincing fiction that gives hope. If Piercy's worst seems a little more cardboard to me, not so convincingly drawn, it's perhaps because she takes that more for granted, and puts her best writing into the human response to those evils. Who could complain about that? And in the era that had the Nazi gas ovens, Dresden, Nagasaki, you name it, it's no wonder we are sometimes overly impressed by doom warnings. Dave Dave Belden web page: www.davidbelden.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 08:44:47 +1000 From: Maire Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It- OT To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU Just wanted to ask a few things- First of all, i really liked your post... what prompted me to respond immediately was though, the fact that you said that pollution is getting better in rich countries. ???? What parameters are you measuring pollution by? Tasmanian Aboriginals were entirely wiped out... people back then constructed a human net across the island to catch the last few free aboriginal people. Horrific. Maire > -----Original Message----- > From: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and > Utopia [mailto:FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Dave Belden > Sent: Tuesday, 16 July 2002 2:18 AM > To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU > Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It > > > But as it gets worse, response is growing, and even Jesse Helms gets > converted - we don't yet seem set on a course that would create Piercy's > nightmare. Other predicted horrors have not happened, such as: running out > of resources (basically all resources are cheaper now than 30 years ago), > more starving people (the world population has doubled and there are > actually less starving people, while the percentage of starving has about > halved), nuclear war (still terrifying, but more thought of now as a rogue > action of terrorists, or a 'tactical weapon' of the US military - I don't > know which would be worse, but neither would lead to nuclear winter), > pollution (getting worse in poor countries but getting better on > almost all scales in rich countries), mass species die-offs (still a > prediction for the future, but the earlier claims - that got much play in > environmental circles - that 40,000 species were dying a year have now > been rejected by everyone). ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 11:19:31 -0400 From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It- OT To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU I'm at work and don't have the statistics to hand. The controversial Bjorn Lomborg http://www.lomborg.com/ has laid out a huge mass of research in his recent book. As I understand it, after reading the book and some of the debates about it, e.g. in Scientific American, the statistics he quotes are mainstream, and have been rather little questioned or gainsaid. It's his conclusions that people disagree with, myself included. His basic conclusion, that we should be working to end world poverty first, and that the environment gets cleaned up when people are wealthy enough to do so, is a sort of truism that means little, because if you take away money for cleaning the environment, it doesn't somehow automatically go to ending poverty. The reason that air quality is getting steadily better in America is the Clean Air Act and new technology, not least the State of California's improved car emissions standards. The reason Houston suddenly figured as the most air polluted city in America a while back was not that Houston's air was getting worse - it was actually getting better - but that LA's air had got better faster. Still, the headlines were not about good news, but bad news: Houston is worst. See Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth, a more responsible book than Lomborg's. An example close to my home: the Hudson River, a dead river when Pete Seeger and co. got going on the problem, is now swimmable again, though you still won't catch me eating any fish from it. Even under Geo Bush (who is going seriously backwards on cleaning up polluted sites), the EPA is forcing General Electric, after a long battle, to dredge its PCBs out of the Hudson. The Hudson and most other US rivers are on the right track. The thing Lomborg seems to ignore, and the reason conservatives love him, is that an enormous amount of the improvement in US and European pollution is due to activism, not to some 'natural working of the market'. (I would love to see someone try to calculate that out - a great topic for some major research). Lomborg's conclusions would seem to argue against continued activism - but this would obviously alter the trends that he convincingly shows are currently in the right direction. Take away the activism, and the trends won't look so good. But I think it's impossible to read Lomborg and the debate around him carefully and not conclude that pollution trends in the US and other rich countries are in the right direction: another set of (interim, partial) victories for the people! Why are people on the left so committed to defeat that they can't recognize victories when they have achieved them? Success so far should energize us to get more scrubbers on coal fired power stations, a massive government effort to reduce energy needs, promote windpower, enforce tighter emissions standards nationwide, penalize SUVs etc. etc. We're winning! Keep up the pressure! Give hope to poor nations, that their turn will come. I recall an Ethiopian saying to me he wished for more pollution - it would mean more factories, cars, development, less starvation, misery, death. OK, but the more we develop clean power generation, clean cars, low resource alternatives (such as satellite phones or glass fiber lines, instead of stringing copper wire all over the world) the more those will be available to poor countries as they industrialize: they don't have to mess up their land as badly as we did ours. Cleaning the environment and tackling poverty actually have to go hand in hand. I know I'm one of the worst offenders at taking these discussions off topic, but this was all about whether Piercy's ultra-grim vision of the near future is helpful or harmful to current activist efforts. I know she wants to support, inspire activism. She, of all people, is not 'just' a fantasist. She didn't write this as just a good read, but as something true, mythically if not literally. I totally appreciate the activism of her characters in He, She and It: in cyberfuture, all is not lost. Really, that should be enough. The people can win. Dave > -----Original Message----- > From: friendly STRICTLY ON TOPIC discussion of Feminist SF/Fantasy and > Utopia [mailto:FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Maire > Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 6:45 PM > To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU > Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It- OT > > Just wanted to ask a few things- > First of all, i really liked your post... what prompted me to respond > immediately was though, the fact that you said that pollution is getting > better in rich countries. ???? What parameters are you measuring pollution > by? > > Tasmanian Aboriginals were entirely wiped out... people back then > constructed a human net across the island to catch the last few free > aboriginal people. Horrific. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 23:07:38 EDT From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU I got hold of this book late, but through a bit of serendipity. Happened to stop at a strip mall for a quick lunch and saw a used paperback store, so thought I'd see if there was a copy of He, She & It, since none of my usual haunts had it in stock. I asked the women there if they had Marge Piercy, and they said someone had just brought a bunch of her books in, and sure enough, there was 'He, She and It'. Once I got to reading it, I realized I'd read it before, but have apparently misplaced my original copy. For whatever reason, the first reading however long ago didn't impress me as much - possibly just because of whatever I was doing at the time. But I thoroughly enjoyed this reading. Some of the parallels/contrasts that came to mind were the house which had a male aspect as lover in The Female Man (interestingly the house in He, She and It, is female in personality, apparently because created by a woman, whereas Yod was created by a man), but that being had absolutely no free will and illustrated a largely service (for sex) function. The need to destroy Yod also brought to mind the ending of the Terminator movies, although thankfully that character never took on the lover aspect. I also bought a couple of other Piercy novels at the same time, since they were so cheap, and just read her 'Braided Lives'. A really interesting history lesson, about the late 50s early 60s politics, prelegal abortion,etc. It felt more raw in style than 'He She and It', although similar in the way it was structured. After reading both, I'm a little surprised at how tightly written 'He She and It' was. Even if the golem story was a bit distracting, as pointed out by someone else here. Still, I think the golem story shows us a nontech antecedent to the cyborg, with similar ethical questions, whether it's technological or magical (or, who said, magic is just technology we don't yet understand, or something to that effect?). And it meshed in that both were devised within a framework of Jewish culture. My notion of cyborg has always been more enhanced human (that is, biological based, with non biological framework or additions) rather than a nonbiological being that seems to become human in developing will and independent decisionmaking. The whole question of what makes one human, or alive, or , sentient (with 'rights' and moral equivalency to human or living beings) is fascinating. I remember as a child thinking, if I replaced my leg I'm still human, if I replaced my hand I'm still human, at what point, is there something irreplaceable that I can't change without ceasing to be human? Likely the brain , or so I thought then, don't think much different now, but now we've got people considering preserving their brains as an attempt at immortality (for later revival, they hope), and so on. Even if technologically feasible, one wonders if the end result would be the person as they presently think of themselves? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein presented us with the first of these science made 'monsters', who at their core seem perhaps more human than the 'born humans' who despised/feared/coveted them. We are not yet close to any technological creations with the abilities , the feelings and desires in particular, which both Frankenstein and the far superior (intellectually and physically) Yod are described as having. If indeed nonbiological awareness and desires are possible in machines (something that is as yet hypothetical), then it's hard to see how such beings could not be granted a status similar to humans. But it's most interesting wondering what these imaginings say about ourselves. It is heartbreaking to see these beings created only to be sent to their deaths. OTOH, isn't that true of us all? We imagine their creation as a pursuit of perfection, which usually goes awry, or as egomania which leads to destruction of some sort, and yet also within each of these beings there's a flame of shortlived beauty which seems to represent all the unfulfilled promises that flicker across our human dreams. Yod is much more beautiful than Frankenstein, and he also consummates love, which neither Frankenstein nor Joseph were ever allowed to do. Perhaps this is progress?- Joy "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-Benjamin Franklin ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 21:39:26 +1000 From: Maire Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU Hi Joy- just a note... it was Arthur C Clarke.... something like " any technology in the future may be so advanced that to us it will be indistinguishable from magic" .. someone may have the exact quote, but that is close enough \ Maire > From: Joy Martin > Sent: Wednesday, 24 July 2002 1:08 PM > To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU > Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It > > Still, I think the golem story shows us a nontech antecedent to the cyborg, > with similar ethical questions, whether it's technological or magical (or, > who said, magic is just technology we don't yet understand, or something to > that effect?). And it meshed in that both were devised within a framework of > Jewish culture. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 19:21:47 EDT From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] cyborg politics: He, She & It To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@UIC.EDU Hi Maire- Thanks. I never can remember where most of the quotes I have paraphrased in my mind come from.:>)-Joy "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-Benjamin Franklin