Gynocentric Mythmaking in Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen

Abstract

■ In her 1983 essay “Canopus in the Classroom.” Lee Cullen Khanna notes that in the past fifteen years a number of women writers of utopian and science fiction novels have presented in their works “an explicitly female vision of the ‘society’” ; as Khanna observes, such fictional communities usually are characterized by “genuine egalitarianism, fluid political structures, integration of individual and community development, harmony among various forms of life. and. perhaps most significant, respect for process.” 1 In her essay Khanna focuses on the articulation of this explicitly female or gynocentric vision in the recent “space fiction” of Doris Lessing: however, her generalizations apply equally to such works as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge o f Time, Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed.” Ursula K. Le G uins The Left Hand o f Darkness. and Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen. In each of these works, the author suggests that androcentric societies are violent and unjust because they consider men and so-called “masculine” character traits to be superior to women and supposedly “feminine” characteristics. For instance, in androcentric societies rationality and autonomy generally are valued more highly than are intuition and emotion, interdependence and collectivity. Moreover, each of these authors presents as a positive alternative to real and fictional patriarchies an imaginary gynocentric society. As Khanna suggests, these latter societies differ from androcentric ones not because they invert the existing hierarchy but because they are non-hierarchical. treating women and men with equal respect and reveling in the complexity and diversity of human beings. Of these writers— each of whom is making important contributions to feminist thought and to science fiction as a literary genre— Vinge has received the least attention from scholars. An accomplished science fiction writer who has won two Hugos and who is regularly represented in “Best of the Year” science fiction short story anthologies. Vinge draws upon a diverse body of literary and mythic material to present a unique vision of present-day ills and