Promoting ethical response-ability in the classroom through Science Fiction Literature: A feminist close reading of Joanna Russ's The Female Man

Abstract

Literature can be a powerful tool in promoting ethical response-ability within the classroom if analysed from feminist perspectives. Besides, when certain literary subgenres, such as Science Fiction, are approached from feminist methodologies the potentialities are multiplied. Feminist close reading, which foregrounds gender as critical concept and considers a number of external factors to the production and reception of a text, may be a way of helping students to develop their critical abilities when they are faced with any kind of text. In this paper, we take Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) as a case study in order to show how feminist close reading may widen the range of interpretations of a text, mainly by considering, on the one hand, the context of production of that text —written at the peak of the so-called second wave feminism— and, on the other, the location from which it is analysed. The result is an alternative, “oppositional” reading of the novel which attempts to overcome the shortcomings of the ideological stances that gave shape to it and restore its potential for a 21st-century context. To that end, a literary critic needs to display the pressures at work in the crafting and understanding of a text, which seems essential in the process of resisting the dominant meanings foisted on the reader. As a result, the critic is able to question a text and the alleged authority of its author. We aim at illustrating that, in the context of the classroom, this process may be of use in the upbringing of ethically responsible/response-able adults, which is, indeed, an essential task given current neoliberal individualism.