Feminist Fabulation
“Marleen S. Barr has been a pioneering figure in the study of women's science fiction and speculative fiction. Now she has gone even further and mapped a new genre, 'feminist fabulation.' At once informative and visionary, her book offers a different way of reading contemporary imaginings.”—Catherine R. Stimpson
“Marleen Barr's fervent new book bangs on the closed doors of mainstream, masculinist postmodernism and demands a place for feminist fabulation. Even feminist critics marginalize 'feminist science fiction,' but Barr's vigorous readings reveal some of today's most imaginative writers engendering futures that could replenish us all. Feminist Fabulation will fire up your mental rockets, as it scores a radical, metafictional commentary on every conventional version of the postmodern.”—Norman N. Holland
“What I found so remarkable about this book is that it hit home in a way I associate with fiction more than with criticism; its power reminded me of Kathy Acker, Angela Carter, and Joanna Russ.”—Brooks Landon
The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or super-genre of contemporary writing—feminist fabulation—which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women.
Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether.
Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called “feminist SF” is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list—and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.
Acknowledgments
Preface: Having "Nunavit"
I. Reclaiming Canonical Space
1.The Feminist Anglo-American Critical Empire Strikes Back
2.Canonizing the Monstrous
II. Redefining Gendered Space
3. "A Dream of Flying"
4. Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?
5. All You Need Is Love?
III. Reconceiving Narrative Space
6. Hesitation, Self-Experiment, Transformation-Women Mastering Female Narrative
7. Gender and the Literature of Exhaustion
Afterword: Back to the Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index