My life in books

De Secretis Mulierum, L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp’s new work is both an uncomfortably accurate picture of sexism and male privilege in the academy, and a challenging speculation on what impact a discovery that some of the most heralded intellects of the European tradition had been passing women might have on our perceptions of gender and history.

Set in an unspecified future, the novella’s protagonist, doctoral student Jane Pendler, is doing historical research, using a new scientific discovery that enables researchers to view selected moments in the past by focusing on specific individuals through the use of bone scrapings. The first historical luminary to be subjected to this new technological tool is Leonardo Da Vinci – and in eavesdropping on the great artist and inventor’s public and private lives, the technique reveals Leonardo to have been biologically female. The predominantly male elite within the field of historical research – including Pendler’s mentor, dissertation advisor and lover Teddy – have managed to accept and adapt to this news, largely because of an assumption that this explains why Leonardo was so often seen as gay.

But then the time-scanning technology is focused on its second target – the brilliant theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas – only to reveal that yet another of the great icons of Western Civilisation – and one as inescapably masculine in both quality of thought and in advocacy of an extreme misogyny – is also a biological female.

What follows on this discovery is at the same time a critique of the power relations and reluctance to embrace new paradigms so often found in the academy, and a fascinating thought experiment – how would our understanding of history and the role of women in history change if we were to be presented with evidence that women have always been – no matter how disguised their biological sex or their own, unknowable, perception of their gender – full participants in the intellectual, scientific, and cultural spheres of life.

The final two volumes of L. Timmel Duchamp’s absolutely enthralling and thought-provoking Marq’ssan Cycle, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto are on my list of the best books I read in 2008.

In this series of novels, Duchamp has written not only an engrossing science fictional saga story about the effects of a global intervention by aliens proves the catalyst for meaningful change, and the women who in various ways give their lives to that change, but also a truly masterful analysis of how oppressive and fascist states and organisations (and personalities, there’s more than a whiff of Reich and Marcuse in some of Duchamp’s characterisations of both states and characters in these books) function and respond to resistance, and of the various ways of resistance to oppression, whether it be at the level of the personal, the social, or the state. It’s also a deeply feminist analysis of power relations and how they can operate constructively or destructively, depending on the means, methods and goals.

Reading the series, following the lives and thoughts of the various viewpoint characters in your head, is a curiously multi-layered experience – each book is at the same time a complex political/psychological thriller and a workshop in identifying, resisting, subverting and ultimately, replacing the fascist architecture built up in one’s own mind from years of living in a society where authority is defined as coming from without and from above, difference is used as a tool of control, not a resource to be shared.

This series really is some of the most important feminist and political writing out there at this time.

The Marqu’ssan Cycle, by L. Timmel Duchamp – Volumes 2 and 3
Renegade
Tsunami

I was blown away be the first volume of this series, Alanya to Alanya, which presented a detailed image of a profoundly fascist and anti-feminist state and began to explore both the ways in which such a state (and mindset) damages humans both individually and in community, and the ways in which such a state can be challenged without merely replacing one form of totalitarianism with another.

The second volume, Renegade, focuses more sharply on one of the themes of the first book, how fascist and oppressive structures pervert the human spirit and human relationships, while continuing to tell the broader story of the struggle of people raised in a culture dominated by such structures to resist their power and instead create non-oppressive societies and sociopolitical structures. The core of the book is a harrowing narrative of torture – both physical and psychological - and conditioning that is in its way even more devastating to read than the similar narrative written by Orwell in 1984. In Tsunami, the focus shifts more toward the process of resistance, both from within and from without, but continues to show how one philosophy of structuring and organising human society poisons and corrupts, and how new structures that can be developed that may promise better ways of co-ordinating society and living together as people without opression.

I continue to be profoundly affected and moved by this series, and am counting down the hours until the fourth volume, Blood in the Fruit, arrives. (It’s being published in January by Aqueduct Press, and yes, I have pre-ordered a copy.)

In my time, I've read some great feminist dystopian novels (some of which are also feminist utopian novels, because things change or a vision of a different world is offered). Just off the top of my head, there's Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World, Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue series, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sheri Tepper's Grass and Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.

To this list I must now add L. Timmel Duchamp’s Alanya to Alanya. I rather expected that I would find this book to be both profoundly meaningful and deeply enjoyable, because it comes highly recommended by one of my science fiction heroes, Samuel Delany: “The coupling of real thoughtfulness and rip-roaring excitement is as rare in science fiction as in any other genre. But here, in Alanya to Alanya, they're locked together in the most exciting-and certainly the most intelligent!-tale of alien invasion I've read in decades.”

The first volume of a projected five-volume series, the novel presents a profoundly worrisome (because so much of it is only a nudge beyond where we in the Western world are today) dystopia in which the developed nations of the world have evolved a rigid class-based society in which the Executives – with the males as leaders and the females as support personnel - run everything and reap most of the rewards, the Professionals are the knowledge class and have some freedoms and some benefits, and the Service-tech class performs the labour, and go essentially unrewarded save for mind-dulling mass entertainment and “tube food” – the bread and circuses of the future.

Into this rigid, controlled and repressive world comes an alien race, the Marq’ssan, who have come to liberate the Earth from itself. A species which either has no gender or does not use gender as a signifier of identity, and which has painfully evolved a non-hierarchical system of organising and managing the efforts of their society as a whole, the Marq’ssan intend to help humanity develop their own version of a non-oppressive society. Their first act is to block the functioning of most electronic devices on the planet, essentially demobilising most of the world’s industrial, military and communications potential. Their second act is to demand immediate talks with three representatives of all political entities on Earth – and to specify that all of these representatives must be women. Once gathered together, however, the representatives discover that the intention of the Marq’ssan is not to negotiate or present demands to Earth so much as it is to teach the women of Earth to negotiate effectively for their own needs with the power elites of their own planet.

The novel centres around the path taken by one of the US representatives, Kay Zeldin, a historian (and hence a member of the professional class) who has unexplained ties to one of the most powerful Executives in the US, as she learns more about the Marq’ssan, the nature of her own society, and herself, and makes her choices. At the same time, we have a vivid picture of how all factions in this encounter – Earth’s Executives, human radicals and dissidents, the representatives, and the Marq’ssan themselves – react, interact, and change in response to each other and the changes in circumstances. The aliens are not always right – and they are not always unified, no more than all of Earth is unified in their thoughts and actions.

It is interesting to note that Duchamp originally wrote these novels in the 1980, and it is rather chilling to see how the political and cultural conditions in the “developed nations” have inched closer to her projections over the past 20 years. It is also fascinating to see how a novel written before September 2001 keys into the basic mindset of the “war on terror” and positions it as both consequence and perpetuating influence of an essentially fascist mindspace. Duchamp’s Executives cannot even entertain the possibility that the Marq’ssan are actually aliens – their entire response strategy is initially based on the assumption that they are some scientifically advanced but human terrorist organisation pretending to be aliens.

Inasmuch as Alanya to Alanya is an out-and-out dystopic vision, it appears that that in future novels, Duchamp intends to engage the reader in the process that the Marq’ssan have initiated among some humans – almost all women – in this first book, which suggests that we may, in future volumes of the series, see more of the workings of the Marq’ssan society, and changes in human society which the women being taught in non-hierarchical means of interaction and communication attempt introduce. Whether this results in a shift in tone from dystopia toward a more utopian vision, remains to be seen.

I’m definitely in for the long haul on this series. I want to see where the people of Earth take what tools the Marq’ssan have given them, and what kind of future evolves. But this is more than a political novel – the characters are compelling, and I’m just as eager to find out what happens to Zeldin and the other main characters, human and Marq’ssan. The action is complex and the writing is very well paced – this pages almost flew under my fingers as the story intensified and the stakes got higher and higher.