Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man by Michael Pitts

Abstract

Reviewed by: Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Manby Michael Pitts Ezekiel Crago Manhood Revised. Michael Pitts. Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man. Lexington, 2021. 174 pp. $95 hc, $45 ebk. Michael Pitts's Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fictionis a book that needed to be written. It sheds light on a body of work underappreciated for its critique of hegemonic masculinity and its effects on society. Pitts traces the development of this critique over several decades as it evolves along with feminist discourse, becoming more intersectional and historically situated. He argues that "gender and national identity are mutually constitutive concepts" (1), using Todd Reeser's theory of a "gendered nation" (7). The novels analyzed in the book help to question how these concepts and identities are produced using a feminist utopia as a lens. This is a "critical utopia, for feminist writers seeking to critique masculinities in ways not available to them by realist fiction" that limits utopian imagining, instead "imbuing it with revolutionary feminist reframings of the good society" in which these writers imagine "the transformation of masculinities" (4). Pitts begins his exploration with novels published in the early 1970s that were "utopias directly opposing normative masculinities, [and] they outline the changes masculinities must undergo for the better, feminist society to be realized and, while challenging essentialism and the overlooking of race and sexuality within feminist circles, generally reflect second-wave feminism" (8). The first chapter discusses Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You(1971), a novel that offers the presumed sf audience of young men a cautionary tale about toxic manhood. It traces the transformation of a man who ascribes to hegemonic patriarchy, telling how he learned to perform and identify with a healthier, feminized masculinity that cares for others rather than only himself. He begins as an exploitative, rapacious bully who, through his encounter with a feminist utopia, develops empathy and compassion along with an ethics of care. Pitts argues that this novel represents the possibility of men learning alternative masculinities. The second chapter moves on in the decade with an analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974). This novel poses the ever-present danger of hegemonic manhood by showing how enticing capitalist patriarchy is for [End Page 190]men, offering privilege and power to the violent, dominating manhood it validates. This book, according to Pitts, usefully shows how vigilant men must be to avoid performing this version of manhood through the novel's depiction of a man raised in a feminist utopia with no division of genders who is seduced by a society similar to the contemporary US, which offers power over others. The third chapter examines Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time(1976). Pitts notes that this novel crucially pivots from a focus on men to a story about a Latina woman, depicting how she must navigate systemic racism and patriarchal authority in both domestic and institutional medical settings, contrasting this with a feminist utopia in a possible future. This future is threatened by another possibility presented as a hypermasculine future that further subjugates women, rendering them into commodities to be rented by wealthy men. The novel is intersectional in its exploration of subjugation and offers a choice of futures between feminist and hypermasculinist. The fourth chapter discusses Octavia Butler's X enogenesistrilogy (1987-89), expanding on the discourse of intersectional feminism with a post-apocalypse protagonist, Lilith, a Black woman rescued by an invasive extraterrestrial colonizing species to enable them to breed a new hybrid species of humans and Oankali, as they call themselves. These novels, as Pitts explains, radically reimagine gendered and racialized social positions after our contemporary society has been eradicated by nuclear war. Ultimately, they posit a possible feminist utopia founded by Lilith's hybrid child, a non-binary human/Oankali/Ooloi who plays the role of a third crucial sex for reproduction of the species and mediates sexual contact between male and female. Throughout the series, Lilith and her brood must struggle against holdout groups of patriarchal authority, often by defending against violence while at the same time navigating their subjugation...