Crumple, The Status of Knuckle (review)

Stories of all-female tribes go back to the Amazons of ancient Greece. During the 20th century all-female tribes expanded in literature to nations, and then to all-female worlds. Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967) proposed to eliminate all men except for biotechnologists working on artificial wombs and other men dedicated to eliminating themselves. Joanna Russ's science fiction novel, The Female Man (1975), went even further: a female scientist creates a sex-specific disease that completely exterminates the male half of the human race. With the help of biotechnology, female-female reproduction assures the future, and a lesbian utopia of radically diminished human diversity unfolds. Solanas gained notoriety for shooting Andy Warhol. Russ achieved literary renown, and was praised by Marge Piercy and Donna Haraway. Haraway brought The Female Man to the attention of academic audiences in The Cyborg Manifesto (1982) and discussed it glowingly in a later essay, Femaleman Meets Oncomouse (1997). And yet, The Female Man presents a genocidal vision that makes Hitler's goals seem modest. The power of the novel derives not only from its hatred, but from its tactical plausibility. The idea of a sex-specific disease may have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by work that the U.S. military initiated in the early 1970s to create race-specific weapons based on different body chemistries. Also, reproductive technologies were sophisticated enough by the middle 1970s, when The Female Man was first published, that female-female reproduction had become at least theoretically possible.

I do not know whether theory has become practice today, but in the late 1980s I heard from a biologist that "probably" a baby girl had been born who had two mothers and no father. The parents concealed the circumstances of the child's conception to avoid a firestorm of publicity. I am told that oocyte-fusion research continues, and work is being done now on haploidization, that is, insertion of a female's DNA into a sperm so that it can be used to fertilize her female partner's egg.

Over the last half century what has been missing in the art and literature of all-female worlds is male perspectives. The lone exception is Dave Cooper's graphic novel, Crumple: the Status of Knuckle. Cooper tells the story of two friends, Knuckle and Zev, who sometime in the future go to Hollywood seeking wild women. There Knuckle discovers that women have found out how to reproduce without men. Cooper has extraterrestrials do the work of biotechnology, but they serve his story well, because they allow for more vivid mythmaking than pipettes and petri dishes, as well as for weirder and more hilariously yucky graphics.

The male characters in Crumple have a lot to answer for. They exploit women whenever possible, do not defend them when they most need help, and are clueless about mutual pleasure. However, males are not quite the genetic scourge that they are in The SCUM Manifesto and The Female Man. Knuckle and Zev have plenty of redeeming, or at least poignant, qualities. They are classic losers, trapped in fantasy, victims of popular culture and the media. Knuckle is weighed down by awareness of his powerlessness and failings. And Zev is an amazingly ignorant schmuck but incapable of falseness. I couldn't help but care about their fates—but then, I'm a male.

So what happens to Zev and Knuckle after Hollywood? It's too good a story to give away, so let's just say that it does not have a Hollywood ending and that Cooper's sense of humor never fails. The graphic novel is brilliantly drawn, and paced just right. Get it if you are at all interested in the impact of biotechnology on imagination, and on the war of the sexes.