Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ
Joanna Russwas an American writer, academic and radical feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth22 February 1937
CountryUnited States of America
contrary faith turns usual
Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet.
fiction science-fiction women-in-science
There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.
writing adventure men
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
writing fiction facts
Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.
class racist way
To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.
real artist seems
Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.
taken garden each-day
... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.
toil withered
How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.
class use may
And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).