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31  3 A History of One’s Own Joanna Russ and the Creation of a Feminist SF Tradition Lisa Yaszek In her essay, “Recent Feminist Utopias” Joanna Russ proposed that contemporary women authors are compelled to tell stories about all-female futures for one simple reason: because men “hog the good things of this world” (emphasis mine; 1981, 140). Among these good things, of course, are literary tastemaking and canon formation. Although these processes are most often associated with critical assessments of realist or mainstream literature, they affect scholarly discussions of popular genre fiction as well. Such was certainly true when scholars turned their critical gazes on science fiction (SF) in the 1960s and 1970s. Given that feminists of this period were still fighting for basic recognition of their ideas, it is perhaps not surprising that most of the SF histories published in this era were indeed written by men about men—and, by extension, primarily for men. The boom in feminist SF in the 1970s and the advent of feminist SF studies in subsequent decades signaled a significant shift in the ownership of taste- and tradition-making practices, and by now it has become commonplace to talk about the existence of a feminist SF tradition. Although feminist SF scholars vigorously debate the exact nature of this tradition, they almost universally recognize Joanna Russ as central within it.1 This chapter builds upon such recognition to demonstrate the equally central role that Russ played in the development of feminist SF scholarship as well. I will begin by briefly reviewing the early decades of SF scholarship and the implicit construction of SF authorship as a masculine activity and then examine how the critical essays Russ published on feminism, SF, and women’s writing between 1971 and 1981 constitute a counterhistory that positions feminist SF at the center of SF writing practices. I will conclude by considering the feminist SF tradition Russ constructs in relation to both prevailing assumptions about what constitutes “good art” and Russ’s own early experiences as an SF author in her own right. 32 Criticism and Communit y Battle of the Sexes for Science Fiction Round One: History Although the SF community understood itself as a distinct, self-regulating entity throughout most of the twentieth century, there were relatively few formal histories of the genre published until the 1960s and 1970s. Such histories emerged at the very moment SF became a viable object of inquiry in academia: the first SF panel appeared at the Modern Languages Association’s annual convention in 1959, and Mark Hillegas taught the first accredited SF class at Colgate University in 1962 (Parrinder 1980, 131). By 1976 there were three major SF studies journals (Extrapolation, Foundation, and Science Fiction Studies) and more than two thousand SF courses offered across a variety of disciplines (Gerlach and Hamilton 2003, 162). More often than not, what early SF scholars had to say about the relationship of SF to Western history and culture took one of two forms. Throughout the early 1960s authors—including Kingsley Amis, Sam Moskowitz, and Robert M. Philmus—all discussed SF as part of a six-thousand-year-old Great Western Tradition of Speculative Literature that included Plato and Lucian, Kepler and Shakespeare, Vernes and Wells, and, in the present day, Frederik Pohl and John Brunner. Although their subject matter might have been novel to many literary scholars, these authors presented it in comfortingly familiar ways. For example, Kingsley Amis begins New Maps of Hell (1960) with the proclamation that “although what attracts people to science fiction is not in the first place literary quality . . . they may well come to find such quality there” (7). In a similar vein, Sam Moskowitz assures readers in his introduction to Explorers of the Infinite (1963) that “the men and women who shaped the direction of modern science fiction were by no standards ordinary people or hack writers. By any measure they were among the most colorful and nonconformist literary figures of their times, and a few of them were among the greatest” (14). By emphasizing the literariness of SF, Amis and Moskowitz take what otherwise might seem to be a crudely upstart form of mass culture and render it palatable to those institutional authorities who thought of themselves , in proper cold war style, as the gatekeepers of Western civilization. By the late 1960s a second, more culturally specific mode of SF history began to appear with increasing frequency. Like Amis just a few years earlier , authors...

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