> As for Delany's little experiment: it was some while ago, & he probably
> didnt travel during rush hour, but he was interested, as someone who
> self-identified as onside with feminism, in seeing what his own perceptions
> were. Once he rigorously examined his responses, he was rather horrified to
> see that what appeared to be neutral perceptions were way off, & he
> certainly does (did) wonder about what kind of learning went into
> constructing those perceptions.

The story about Delany and feminism has caught my imagination.

Behind the mask with its plastic shapes a-blob, the man
was saying: 'It's a decision many men, not to say women,
make . . . Indeed I read a report last week that said
almost three times as many women as men on our world
make this decision, though it doesn't seem my experience.
[Samuel Delany, Stars in my pocket like grains of sand. p13]

The first civil disobedience I was ever involved in was connected to
feminism, when I was, counting fingers, 14 years old in 1970. We had a
new French teacher who was a native speaker and we got the blurb from
the head of the school saying how privileged we were to be taught by
him. In the first lesson he ogled at the girls, who always sat on the
left hand side of the class in those days, and when one of girls
objected she was sent to stand outside the classroom. The usual
punishment for disrupting a class. The next time he came to teach us
French, he did the same thing. A murmur spread from the left
to right side of the classroom while he wrote up verb tables on the
blackboard. When he turned to continue with the lesson, asking us to
recite the verbs, we refused to participate. More rumbles and louder
voices began asking why he sent the student out. Someone went and got
the head of the school who came to the classroom straight away, since
the French class were refusing their lesson. We refused to comply with
her suggestion we continue with the class. Being determined not to
comply, we got a new teacher.

The so called genre novels or pulp fiction, like SF, gothic and fantasy
interest me greatly for their political powers of fabulation. The way
they create powerful modern fables that link with and are further
fabulated with political movements like feminism, gay rights,
anti-racism, disability, class oppression. The lack of an obvious
didacticism in these fictions seems to increase this power. Fans start
inventing their own stories from the fictions, also. For example, gay
rights fables: _Neuromancer_, a love that cannot speak its name; the
Turing cops in relation to the circumstances of Turing's suicide and of
course Delany. A colleague is doing her PhD on Star Trek fans, and fans
of SF, generally. The copyright owners of Star Trek tried to ban the
fan clubs from making up their own stories using the Star Trek
characters under copyright legislation. As a result, sales revenue from
Star Trek fell to an all time low, making the copyright almost
worthless. It was a political boycott by the fans against the copyright
restrictions.

It use to be modernism that was much more the political end of fiction,
prior to WW 2, especially. This seems now to be far more minor genre
fictions, which have also adopted and invented new forms of modernist
poetics with powerful political fabulation and the ability to create new
fables. Interesting....


Chris Jones

He said: ... "A man cannot love himself, but all men do, and so there is
no satisfaction in the world, for we must clasp another body informed by
another spirit to ourselves."
From: Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1934.