"You've Been a Bad Girl Again" - Transgressive Perspectives on the Good Woman in Marge Piercy's Feminist Speculative Fiction Woman on the Edge of Time.

Abstract

Med bakgrunn i kvinnebevegelsen i USA på 1960 og 1970-tallet vokste det fram en ny litterær retning som forsøkte å beskrive hvordan kvinner følte seg undertrykte i samfunnet gjennom private institusjoner, de erklærte at det "personlige var politisk". Marge Piercy's feministiske spekualtive roman Woman on the Edge of Time (Kvinne ved tidens rand) tar for seg denne problematikken, og hun utfordrer de kjønnsbinære forholdene i samfunnet som gjør at kvinner er undertrykket mannen. Gjennom virkemidler fra science fiction og den utopiske sjangeren dekonstruerer Piercy det binære patriarkalske bildet av kvinnen som enten iboende god eller ond, og viser hvordan kvinner også er allsidige mennesker som skal behandles på lik linje med menn i samfunnet. Piercy overskrider også patriarkalske normer gjennom en utopisk prosess, hvor prosessen og ikke det utopiske forslaget blir vektlagt som særs viktig. Gjennom den utopiske prosessen lærer protagonisten, Connie, at de strenge rammene for kvinnelig oppførsel som hun har lært kun er sosiale konstruksjoner som derfor kan bli avvist og dekonstruert. Denne prosessen er ment å ha en påvirkningseffekt på leseren, som igjen skal bli påvirket til å vurdere hvordan sitt egen samfunn kan være undertrykkende for kvinner, og hvordan hun i respons kan motsette seg dette gjennom en endret bevissthet.

With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, feminist women writers employed the novel as a political tool of opposition to renounce society’s institutionalized sexism and to demonstrate how their personal issues as women were of political concern. Two genres that were particularly adopted and deconstructed for this purpose were the predominantly male genres utopian fiction and science fiction, genres which enabled both social critique and social dreaming. The combination of the two genres resulted in a new form of narrative – the feminist speculative fiction. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) expresses a rhetoric of resistance and hope symbolic of the movement, which is integrated in the novel’s plot, narrative and form. The novel explores how the binary dualism of good/bad womanhood is situated within the patriarchal ideology, and how women’s worth is measured based on their ability or inability to fulfill society’s expectations based on this dualism. In particular, the novel investigates how women's reproductive bodies are ideologically related to the patriarchal ideal of motherhood, and it demonstrates how failures at fulfilling good motherhood can characterize a woman as a threat to the social order, which exposes the society’s need to dispose of her. This is the case of Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, the novel’s protagonist, a poor, Hispanic woman who is objectified and abused because of her marginalized body and her inability to be a good woman. Connie’s failures in her own world are juxtaposed with a gender-neutral future utopia that she visits, where she learns that the feminine ideals she has been taught to internalize are socially constructed, and as a result can be deconstructed and renounced. Connie’s change of consciousness enables an agency in her that expresses the novel’s didactic and political aim, which is to influence its reader into questioning her own accepted assumptions about the way in which patriarchal structures enables the suppression of women.