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Beth Plutchak:
Feb. 14th, 2018 04:55 pmBeth Plutchak’s collection of essays, Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, is a part of Aqueduct Press’ Conversations Pieces Series. The works - both fictional and non-fictional - in this series are intended to generate and explore conversations about science fiction. The conversations engendered by this series come in many forms, and touch on many things. The ways that genres influences each other, the ways that writers create works to augment, or subvert, or interrogate earlier works, the creation of variations on themes, the ways that social movements and political and historical events change our understanding of science fiction or key sciencefictional works or themes.
Beth Plutchak’s collection of works are a part of these ongoing conversations. The publisher’s description of the collection says:
“The personal is political, and the political is personal. This collection of essays and an sf tale explores the intersections of representation, science fiction, feminism, social justice, and fandom, specifically in relationship to the feminist sf convention WisCon. Plutchak argues that to build a new future we need new stories, stories that tell us where we have been as well as show us where we are going, and she uses feminist theory to analyze feminist sf fandom's history, present, and future.”
In the first of the essays in this collection, “Is WisCon Feminist?” Plutchak interrogates both the meaning of feminism and the positioning of WisCon as a feminist science fiction convention, drawing on the proceedings of a panel on the title subject at WisCon. She begins with her recollections of her early engagement with second wave feminism, and looks at the ways in which it failed:
“But, I always feel that what we really owe these young women is an apology; I think we need to tell them that if feminism seems irrelevant to their concerns, it’s not because it is irrelevant, it’s because we lost. We made compromises to achieve narrow goals; we threw our sisters of color under the bus. We convinced ourselves we weren’t like poor white women. We asked poor women and all women of color to wait. We wouldn’t ask for full reproductive rights; let’s get abortion and birth control first, we said. We wouldn’t ask for a restructuring of corporate capitalism we’d just be satisfied with equal pay and equal access for now. We wanted the ERA, equality with the boys, even though what the boys had varied wildly by race and class. We weren’t brave enough to think that through, not to mention the white women who never wanted to anyway, thank you very much.
Why do you think the same battles are being fought all over again? It’s not entirely our fault. We were played. But, we have to recognize that and own our part in it.”[1]
Plutchak goes on to discuss the struggle for a safe space for people of colour at WisCon, and how initial failures to act on that need were failures of feminism, and how anger at that failure led to the founding of the Carl Brandon Society. She closes with a discussion of the ways in which supporting the stories of the marginalised is one if the most important functions of an organisation that sees itself as a feminist science fiction convention.
In the next essay, “Challenging the Narrative of the Undeserving Poor” Plutchak takes on an issue very close to my heart, when she says: “We want to help the poor, I suppose, but we don’t want to help people who don’t deserve it, people who won’t help themselves. But, how do we know who is and isn’t deserving? Who controls that narrative? Let’s unwind this a little bit, shall we?”
I’ll interject myself into the conversation for a minute here. I get very annoyed when people make judgements about who “deserves” social assistance programs and who does not. If I was the ruler of the world, everyone would have a guaranteed annual income sufficient to provide them with a private and comfortable place to live, healthy food, full medical care, as much education as they want, clothes and access to recreational facilities, accommodations for disabilities on an individual needs basis. And this means everyone, even the hypothetical lazy slacker who gets all this and does nothing “productive” in return. Because we can’t measure “productivity” in any meaningful way. Lillies of the field, and all that. And simply by being a live human being, one deserves to be provided with the essentials for physical and emotional well-being. And fuck the judgements. So, back to Plutchak.
In this essay, she takes on the master narratives of poverty as the consequence of poor choices and the “culture of poverty.” She discusses the ways in which a comfortable white middle class person may fail to realise that poverty and marginalised status eliminate options that others may have, and that decisions that look like poor choices from outside may be the best way to survive.
In “Reinvent the Future, Change the World,” Plutchak makes visible the connections between science fiction, representation of the marginalised, social change and hope.
Plutchak includes two shorter essays which were included in WisCon souvenirs books (Plutchak edited the convention’s souvenir books for several years) and concludes with an essay looking at the history of WisCon from a perspective of working toward a feminist theory of decision-making that prioritises the needs of the marginalised, those with less voice and less opportunity to influence or create spaces that are both safe and fun for them.
Plutchak has titled this collection Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, but as I read these works, I think that the recurring and overarching theme is more the failure of the imagination and how that has limited what science fiction can do - and how we can reinvent our world by truly expanding our imaginings, by telling the stories we haven’t had enough imagination to tell, or to accept and understand and inhabit when others tell them to us. I see this message in the single piece of fiction included in this collection, the short story “Game Theory.” This is a brilliant deconstruction of the generation ship/closed society trope in science fiction, and makes the point that until the patterns of dominance we have built into our society are altered, there can be no changes to our outcomes - and that story, the ability to imagine a different way, is part of how we come to change those patterns.
[1] As a feminist in her 60s who also began her journey tiward a feminist life with the theory and praxis of second wave feminism, I agree with this analysis. White feminism did focus on white concerns, abandoned anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles, failed to understand - or perhaps chose not to try - when, for instance, the Combahee River Collective showed us a path toward what is now known as intersectional feminism. Instead, we settled for a few victories in limited areas that benefited white women more than other women, other sexual minorities, other marinalised peole of any gender. We could have committed to the hard choices, to the long struggle for true social justice and a restructuring of a system that marginalised all but the wealthy and white. But we didn’t.
