For one of my graduate seminars a few years ago, I presented a paper on images of women’s non-violent power in feminist science fiction. This presentation originally included examples of violent characters but, after being inundated with post 9-11 media images that unquestioningly glorified violence and reinforced a "might makes right" ideology, I felt I had to focus my energies on non- violent examples. It was very disheartening when, after I presented in my class, my classmates kept suggesting that I talk about Buffy, Xena, and Storm from X-Men. When I reminded my classmates that my focus was specifically on women’s non-violent power they responded with "well, Storm doesn’t use a gun." Apparently, Storm using lightning to "splat" someone isn’t considered violent so long as she’s not holding a howitzer. This got me thinking about how we define violence, and also how we define power; if every suggested example of a powerful female character in mainstream entertainment media is a violent woman, then there must be some connection to how society views violence as power.

In this essay, I will discuss this equation of power with violence and the implications on women of violence being gendered as masculine. This discussion is set within the specific theoritizations of "tough women" in media and will explain why many theories which classify tough women as "symbolically male" are inadequate models for studying women’s power. After a brief examination of various constraints and/or possibilities visual media have versus literature, I will then offer alternative definitions of power that do not rely on violence and illustrate those non-violent examples of power through various feminist science fiction (FSF) texts. I focus mainly on The Handmaid’s Tale (both the novel and the film) due to its uncanny appropriateness given the new security policies and laws surrounding women’s rights in the United States, and on one television episode of Enterprise which, while not necessarily a work of feminist science fiction, certainly lends itself to a feminist analysis. I also analyze such works of literature as Egalia’s Daughters, Herland, and the Native Tongue trilogy. These SF and FSF texts both provide the necessary distance from our culture to examine its constructions of power, critique the policies that such systems of power have encouraged, and also privilege such modes of non-violent empowerment as invisibility, ecofeminism, and story telling.

Before I discuss examples and the necessity of non-violent images of powerful women, it is necessary to situate those examples in the larger context of images of women in media. Much of the scholarship on this topic comes out of film studies. This may be due to the visual spectacle and objectification of women’s bodies, the concomitant rise of film as both a popular culture medium and an academic arena of study, and also to the opportunities visual media offer for showing female characters as active, strong, and tough. (I will discuss more of the differences between visual media and literature in a later section.) I use the term "tough women" throughout this section to distinguish characters who are physically and mentally strong in addition to being the active leading character since there have been active but not necessarily tough women since the early days of cinema. I also see tough women as not necessarily violent, although that is usually the case. Tough women are powerful in many ways, partly due to their violence, but also including their determination, their drive for independence, and their sense of self-identity. Powerful women can include these violent and/or tough women, but also women whose power doesn’t come from violence or their physical strength; these are the characters that the last sections of this essay will discuss. Since society’s stereotyped definition of powerful women appears (at least in mainstream media) to include only those violent women, it is necessary to analyze those images of powerful women to understand where we can place non-violent characters in the spectrum of "powerful women."

How "Tough Women" in Visual Media Have Been Theorized

"Tough women" have been extensively discussed in feminist and/or media scholarship. The tough women such as Ripley in the Alien films (1979, ’86, ’92, ’97), Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 (1991), Samantha/ Charly in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Jordan in G.I. Jane (1997), the title characters in Thelma and Louise (1991), Trinity from The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) plus TV’s Buffy and Xena (among others) have received incredible amounts of attention from critics and scholars all commenting on the spectacle of women being violent. These women, whom Yvonne Tasker calls "Rambolinas," (15) may be tough, they may be powerful, but they may or may not "be women" for, as some people might think, if "woman"= feminine and the definition of feminine is the opposite of tough and powerful, how can tough women be women in our culture’s limiting, dichotomous understanding? These tough women are often theorized as being symbolically male, especially if, as with Ripley, Sarah, and Charly, their bodies are also muscular and if other gender signifiers (such as how they dress, how they act, how they talk, how they wear their hair) suggest that they are masculine or, according to Tasker, "musculine" (3).

There is nothing inherently wrong with these "kick-butt" characters or images. Rather, I see dangerous implications tied to the system of images these characters may create, mainly this notion that power comes from violence, but also to mainstream media’s lack of diversity-lack of diversity in how we present images of powerful women, but also lack of diversity in ethnicity, sexuality, body shape/size and physical ability in who is shown and who is not shown in these (or any) powerful positions. By mainstream media showing only these violent women as having power, and then only within patriarchal systems of power, this still sets up a binary of "masculine = powerful / feminine = powerless" so that a few masculine women may gain the appearance of some power, but not women in general; also, other qualities of the "feminine" are still devalued whether men or women display them. It is these devalued feminine traits, especially notions of invisibility, ecofeminism, and story telling, that the latter part of this article will problematize and re-value. First, I will briefly trace the evolution of gender and "tough women" theories.

Most of the articles I will be discussing in this section do not speak specifically to science fiction films; many of the images analyzed come from action adventure and horror films, yet the theories apply to science fiction especially given the hybridization of science fiction with other genres. These articles speak to how women are conceptualized in general, how filmic conventions contribute to / reinforce these cultural conceptions, how previous (mostly Freudian / psychoanalysis) theories are no longer adequate, and how changes in academic theory both reflect and create cultural adaptations in how women-real and fictional-are viewed.

Early theories on women in film relied heavily on psychoanalysis. Within this framework, sex and gender are defined in binaristic terms of man = active, woman = passive. Women are defined by their "lack"-their lack of a penis, lack of the phallus (cultural power granted to men), lack of ability to enter the Symbolic Order (the realm of reason and intelligence rather than emotion). Within psychoanalytic theories, women lack subjectivity; they are the objects of men’s desires; within psychoanalytic media theory women do not further the narrative of the story, they actually stop it while the men pause to stare at them.

The implications of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis are obvious in the theories of Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," 1975), which deals with both the image of women on screen and the audience’s identification (or lack) with the characters. Mulvey argues that the women of early cinema are not active themselves; rather, they are there to give the male characters something to react to. The main quality of women in early cinema, Mulvey contends, is their "to-be-looked-at-ness" (63); women don’t do much but show up, look pretty, and become objects of the male gaze. There are notable exceptions such as the femme fatales of film noir who are very active, intelligent, and cunning, but they are still there to provoke action from the male characters and they are usually punished in the end.

Women are still being punished for being too active in the action films and television of the 1980s and ’90s. For example, I’ve lost count of how many scenes in Alias show Sydney being tortured, often in a very sexualized scene. Samantha/Charly in The Long Kiss Goodnight is not only repeatedly tortured, but is also split into two distinct personalities that collide when her amnesia begins to fade. In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor is severely beaten by the psychiatric ward guards for using her bed frame as a chin-up bar and, later, she has an emotional breakdown when she can’t finish the job of killing the scientist responsible for creating the terminator technology.

We see this punishment in real life, too. Women who are conside\red "too tough" are often called butch, femi-Nazi, man- hater, or are accused of "trying to be a man." (There’s an interesting juxtaposition between those last two termswomen are accused of hating men, yet of trying to be men.) These terms, what Suzanne Pharr calls "lesbian baiting," (75) are very effective in keeping women in line, meaning keeping them in their so-called "proper" (meaning passive, fragile, and essentially powerless) gender role. All of these characters may be images of strong, independent women who blur gender boundaries, but they can also be read as warnings of what cultural punishments may be inflicted on any woman who crosses the gender line.

Even though Freudian psychoanalysis fell out of favor in the medical and psychological communities, aspects of psychoanalytic media theory carry on much longer and can be seen in the work of Carol Clover. Clover’s work Men, Women, and Chainsaws examines the fluidity of gender roles and gender identification in horror and slasher films. The type of tough woman character which Clover calls the "Final Girl" (since she is the final character left alive) is a gender transgressor in that she is active, she is smart and aware of what is going on, she is curious and is a looker (as opposed to just being looked at), she is what most people would call a tomboy, she is not sexually active (this is considered gender transgressing since she isn’t actively trying to "snare" a man), and she even has a masculine name (Ripley, Stretch, Charly, etc.). Early examples of the Final Girl show her fighting the killer but needing to be rescued by a man in the end, whereas later configurations have the Final Girl killing the killer with no help.

Clover recognizes the fluidity of gender-that women can be masculinized by becoming active, fighting back, and using phallic weapons and that male villains can be feminized by being penetrated / killed. As she writes in her conclusion, "[the Final Girl] is a physical female and a characterological androgyne: like her name, not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous" (63). Within Clover’s discussion of fluidity, however, there still exist some of the binaristic framework for gender. The Final Girl achieves "symbolic phallicization" (60) and becomes a "transformed boy" (55).

While Clover’s main argument may be to point out the activeness of female characters in horror films and the willingness of spectators to identify with characters of the opposite sex as an example of breaking down the rigid binaries of gender constructions, her privileging of the masculinity of women when she says that "The fact that masculine males. .. are regularly dismissed through ridicule or death or both would seem to suggest that it is not masculinity per so that is being privileged, but masculinity in conjunction with a female body" (63) seems to set these Final Girls (and the feminized villains) up as non-normative and still devalues the feminine, no matter which sex it may apply to. As Jeffrey A. Brown argues in his article "Gender and the Action Heroine" (to be discussed shortly), this suggests that male spectators are "not willing to cheer on women as women" (58). Clover’s Final Girl as transformed boy still reads too close to the stereotype that tough women are "trying to be [like] a man" and still doesn’t truly value the Final Girl as a woman. It is this "tough women as symbolically male" rhetoric that has persisted in the literature even when other elements of psychoanalysis have faded away.

Another key work, which examines gender and tough women in films is Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (1993). While not focusing exclusively on images of women in action films, Tasker’s work is key in understanding the spectacle of both male and female bodies in action films. In her work, male and female characters negotiate their identities as both feminine and masculine. The feminization of male bodies can occur when they are wounded and thus penetrated, or when there is any hint of homoeroticism in buddy movies; the role of women in male-centered films is often to re-establish the characters’ heterosexuality. Masculinization of a female character can occur through a female character becoming active; by utilizing technology or weaponry; or by making their physical bodies strong, hard, and (supposedly) impenetrable, a concept Tasker refers to as "musculinity" (3). While Tasker and other theorists of this period no longer assign each sex to a gender, they do still demonstrate how the masculine qualities are valued over the feminine qualities. Women may no longer be assigned to femininity, but if culture continues to associate women (and culturally undesired men) with femininity and to value femininity less than masculinity, have these theories really worked towards breaking down sex/gender binaries, or only towards explaining why there are some exceptions?

Jeffrey A. Brown goes beyond questioning the "phallic woman" stereotype and declares that violent women are not symbolically male, gender transvestites, or cognitive doubles for the opposite sex. Instead, Brown employs Judith Butler’s ideas of gender performativity as discussed in her Gender Trouble (1990). If all gender is performance, construction, and / or masquerade, then there can be true gender fluidity since no gender is assigned to either sex. Brown insists that "the masculinized woman reveals the arbitrariness of gender" (56) and that "the action heroine is an obvious contradiction to the woman-as-image theory typified by Laura Mulvey" (56). When we label a strong, active, violent woman as masculine rather than just a woman who happens to be strong, active, and violent, then "women are systematically denied as a gender capable of behaving in any way other than passive" (63).

Similar to Brown’s ideas, Elizabeth Hills suggests in "From ’figurative males’ to action heroines" (1999) that we view heroines as "transformative, transgressive and alternative women" (49, italics in the original). She argues that one of the qualities female heroes such as Ripley from the Alien films often exhibit that should be recognized more is their ability to adapt to change, to transform themselves. This fits with gender fluidity since these transformations often require the heroines to go from followers to leaders, from passive to active, but it’s more than that. These heroines aren’t women trying to be men, they aren’t androgynous; these are women who "derive their power from their ability to think and live creatively, their physical courage and their strategic uses of technology" (39). Hills suggests that feminist media theorists take a hint from these adaptable heroines and learn to adapt our theories of analyzing them:

Like Ripley we have to invent a set of strategies or theories that are not only specific to the ongoing changes in our contexts, but which will "call into being new, alternative ways of constructing te female subject." This new mode of appreciating heroic female characters such as Ripley might then resonate with the feminist desire for personal and social change, and enable us to transform how we conceptualize and experience female subjectivity in the cinema and other cultural sites. (50, quoting Braidotti, 208).

Brown’s and Hills’s theories of tough women lead to where I am trying to position my own work: not denying the potential empowerment that images of violent women may offer to viewers, but equally valuing alternative images of powerful women where their power doesn’t come solely from their violence, physical strength or use of weapons. If we truly are to value women as women and to welcome diversity, then we need to value all aspects of women’s power. Sometimes that power may arise out of their violence, but we can’t forget that sometimes there are things that are mightier than the sword, flame thrower, or howitzer.

"Can’t We Just Watch The Movie Instead?"

Film Vs. Literature

The previous section specifically focused on theories of tough (usually violent) women in film. This focus will shift to literature as I offer examples of nonviolent images of women’s power. In part, this is due sheer lack of good examples of FSF film and the large number of examples in literature. It is also due to the quality of the examples; television (especially the various Star Trek series) may have instances where a woman becomes invisible, for example, but this is often just an interesting plot device with little cultural critique. It would be unfair to compare how feminist FSF literature is to how feminist mainstream visual media is; each industry has its own agendas and feminism isn’t usually at the top of most mainstream blockbuster films or network television. The difference isn’t limited to feminist vs. non-feminist works, either. As Brooks Landon suggests, regarding the differences between science fiction literature and science fiction film: "science-fiction literature has also pursued several teleological agendas hidden within its ostensible goal of interrogating and/or advocating change and the impact of science and technology on humanity; science-fiction film does not seem to have shared these ’hidden’ agendas" (35).

Aside from ideological differences between the mediums, there are also structural, technological, and economic differences between visual media and literature. Novels and short stories are usually the product of an individual, whereas films and television shows are the work of teams of people, each working on an aspect of the final product. Connected with this is the economic investments required for each medium-the amount of money, if any, advanced to an individual writer is much less than the tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars required to produce a block-buster, effects- driven film; with that much money invested, film production companies need to aim for the large, often young-to-middle aged male, audiences-n\ot the small niche audiences that many feminist presses cater to. Also, when thinking of the foreign market, the films with the biggest overseas profits tend to be the blockbuster films that don’t lose much meaning in the translation since, for action adventure and effects-driven SF films, there isn’t much intricate dialogue that might be misinterpreted. If FSF literature is narrative driven and centers on cultural critique, translating concerns arise not only from the literal word-to-word translation, but also the cultural elements that might get lost in translation.

Visual media, especially film, rely heavily on the spectacle of violence and special effects. Because they are visual, film and television have a greater potential for sexualizing and objectifying women characters, even ones who are supposed to be strong characters. General science fiction literature has a long history of misogyny, racism, and of objectifying women; FSF literature, however, focuses on the cultural critique of such objectification and inequality. As such, most FSF novels would probably make for poor films since cultural critique doesn’t often imply lots of explosions, couldn’t be done well in under two hours, and doesn’t come across as "entertainment."

The most well-known example of a feminist science fiction novel turned into a mainstream film may be the 1990 production of The Handmaid’s Tale. This film exemplifies several of the distinctions between SF film and literature, and proves how difficult, if not impossible, it is to successfully translate FSF literature onto the big screen. The novel (and to a lesser degree, also the film) tells the story of how pollution (and thus involuntary sterilization of most people) combined with a radical backlash against women’s rights have led to the formation of "The Republic of Gilead," an ultra- conservative, misogynist culture that has taken away all women’s rights to read, work, have money, and make their own choices about family and reproduction. Religion is used as justification for a system of handmaids. Married men who cannot have children (although their sterility is always blamed on their wives) and who rank high enough are given handmaids-women who are there only in order to get pregnant-and then that child belongs to the man and his wife, not the woman who gave birth.

Viewers unfamiliar with the novel might never realize that the Republic of Gilead is specifically only the United States (there was only a vague mention of the fruit shipment from Florida being held up by the fighting), and they definitely have no way of learning that the Republic was instigated by the President of the U.S. getting shot and all members of Congress and other key government offices being bombed, necessitating the military’s take-over of the country. These acts of terrorism, it is assumed, were committed by Islamic terrorists, but we learn at the end of the novel that is was actually committed by members of the U.S. military eager to gain control over the country and put themselves in the highest seats of power and privilege.

Film viewers may not be privy to the military’s means of take- over, but they are subjected to various explosion scenes that do not take place in the novel other than on TV in areas far away from where the immediate story takes place. This is an obvious tactic of adding in visual spectacle and outward, visceral representations of the horror, fear, and futility that the women, especially the handmaids, must have been feeling in lieu of the inner thoughts and emotions expressed in the novel. As Barry Keith Grant suggests in "’Sensuous Elaboration,’" in science fiction film we need to see the outward symbols of terror and fear rather than rely on the characters’ inward expressions of that fear as in literature (18).

Another visual spectacle added specifically for the film was Offred’s murder of the Commander. The film version climaxes in a scene where Offred brutally slices the Commander’s neck with a knife and the camera lingers on the fallen Commander and his growing pool of blood. We see Offred being taken to safety, and we see her at the end, very pregnant, living in a trailer and talking of how she still keeps in touch with Nick, the baby’s father. The novel is much less kind in its final moments: Offred’s narration ends when she is taken out of the house by the Guardians, but Nick has told her it is safe to go with them, so we have some glimmer of hope. Hundreds of years later, a historian presents a conference paper and tells his audience how he came to find audio tapes, made by Offred, hidden away in a footlocker in a family’s house that is presumed to have helped women escape the country. Readers know that Offred made it as far as Maine, but we have no way of knowing if she found freedom, was captured and sent back, or was killed; because of the naming system where the women took the name of the Commander they were stationed with at the time, there is no way of tracking down the narrator, known only as Offred since she was the handmaid of Fred.

In the novel, we have no final glimpse of a happy ending to give us a sigh of relief; this, I believe, is one of the key disservices the film does to the storyit doesn’t keep viewers uncomfortable and scared to the point that we are determined to never let this happen to us; instead, this happy visual ending lets viewers relax, safe in the knowledge that this was just a simple science fiction story, not a story of social commentary that hits, for many people, too close to home. The film version also portrays Offred’s power as coming from her violent murder of the Commander, not from her activism, her ability to retain her identity as an individual, and her bravery in telling her story for others to learn from. This film’s dismal profits and reviews may, in part, explain why there aren’t more attempts to translate FSF literature into mainstream films, but it also illustrates how the current mode of filmmaking isn’t compatible with this level of social commentary. Instead of giving up on FSF literature as a source for film stories, shouldn’t we also (or instead) consider how this example illustrates how modes of film making need to be altered to accommodate stories low on visual spectacle and high on narrative, character development, and social commentary?

The film version, as is necessary to any film adaptation, deletes many key scenes and themes from the novel; unfortunately, the themes it overlooks tend to be the center of the novel: how the Republic of Gilead and its total oppression of women came to be and, thus, how close the contemporary U.S. society is to (re)turning to those oppressive ideologies. Even though the novel was written in 1985 and reflected the cultural/political climate of that time, many points in the novel are just as, if not even more, applicable to the current climate, especially since 9-11. A few examples include the Patriot Act and its various ways of reducing privacy, the racial/ ethnic profiling and the surveillance on various "threatening" groups; and also the "return to ’family values’" rhetoric that seeks to more narrowly define what constitutes a family (as in 11 states approving constitutional antisame-sex marriage amendments in the latest national election) and proper morals regarding women’s bodies and reproductive issues as exemplified in President George W. Bush’s ban on "partial birth" abortions. In a political climate that is actually taking away personal freedoms and rights, it is obvious to see that we have a "top-down" system of power that truly needs to be analyzed from below.

Rethinking Power

Before I analyze specific FSF texts and non-violent images of power, I will briefly set out why such a focus on non-violent images is necessary. If, at least in mainstream media, power is linked to violence, violence is linked to masculinity, and masculinity to men, then what is implied about women’s power (or power for anyone not associated with masculinity)? If power is only associated with men,2 there are several possible implications, including: 1) women are thus regarded as powerless; 2) we justify and reinforce a "might makes right" ideology; 3) power is viewed as being with those "on top" and there is no sense of power from below; and 4) if this "haves vs. have-nots" power hierarchy is seen as determined by biology (that men have it because they are men and women don’t have it because they are women) and if it is seen as fixed and unchanging, then the situation for the have-nots is seen as hopeless. Once a situation is deemed hopeless, then there seems to be no reason to even try to change things.

This last point seems the most dangerous. Hegemony works best when we don’t even know to ask questions or to consider that things might not have to be this way. Internalized oppression, as Gloria Yamato writes, occurs when a group begins to believe that they don’t deserve any better than their oppressed state (86, 87). There’s no easier way to control a group than to get them to believe that they can’t do any better and that there is no reason for them to question, much less try to change, their situation.

I hope to redeem my topic of powerful, non-violent women in science fiction by deconstructing commonly-held beliefs that power only comes from violence, and by offering alternative definitions of power. Questioning the ideologies surrounding cultural power is necessary in order to empower those people who are in the margins- in this case, women. Women do not/should not have to appropriate violent masculinity in order to become powerful; instead, society needs to revise its definitions and ideologies surrounding power to recognize how powerful women are already. After discussing alternate definitions/ideologies of power, I will examine feminist science fiction examples (within film, television, and especially literature) of empowered non-violent women characters wh\o work toward large-scale social change. Often, these women’s empowerment comes through such strategies as invisibility, ecofeminism (connection with / protection of the environment), and telling their stories. Each of these modes of empowerment are often coded as "feminine" and, thus, weak. My use of the word "feminine" problematizes the notion that all women and only women can be feminine and that any quality stereotypically associated with women is inferior to those qualities associated with men / masculinity. I will discuss how works of feminist science fiction, however, privilege these feminine strategies and portray them as sources of power.

It is not my intention to simply reverse the gender/power dichotomy-any reductive "men are evil and women should rule the world" argument is both simplistic and non-productive. By re- valuing feminine notions of power, I hope to show how any definition of power is culturally constructed and hegemonically reinforced. As long as any inequality exists in society, it affects us all. By looking at how redefinitions of power can empower one group-in this paper, women-we will have better strategies for empowering all oppressed groups, be they defined by race, gender, class or sexual orientation. This is not to emphasize gender oppression over all other forms. Oppression must be understood as a complex system that interweaves all components of a person’s or group’s identity. I focus on gender oppression since power-through-violence seems most clearly designated along gender lines (for example: though African American women have historically been coded as much more violent than white women, debates over whether women should be allowed in military combat don’t distinguish any other identity category than sex / gender) and, as Lorraine Code says in What Can She Know, "Gender is always a determining ingredient in the way lines of power and privilege are drawn, and it is always asymmetrically determinant for women and for men" (176).

In order to deconstruct and redefine definitions of power, I will employ some of Foucault’s theories of power as interpreted by such feminist scholars as Susan Bordo and Margaret A. Mclaren. They use Foucault’s ideas of power as hegemonically reinforced to favor only the few to show that definitions of power are culturally constructed and can be re-constructed. For example, Susan Bordo says that we must think "of the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination within a particular domain," and we also "need an analysis of power ’from below’" (Bordo 15).

These remarks from Bordo’s "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity" establish how this essay will re-define cultural understandings of power. First, we have to understand that definitions of power are culturally constructed, not biologically determined. As Bordo (using Foucault) suggests, power is defined in such a way so that its hegemonic control of "practices, institutions, and technologies" and how they disperse privilege goes unquestioned. This oppression is institutional and structural (as opposed to individual), and is often internalized. To "analyze power from below," we need a radical approach that recognizes the biases of the very systems that, supposedly, guarantee equality. One approach is to use feminist science fiction.

Reversals and Herstory

Science fiction, especially feminist science fiction, is a useful tool within cultural studies and gender studies because it takes us out of our all-too-familiar, hegemonic world and ideologies and gives us the positionality to look at our society from the outside, what Darko Suvin calls "cognitive estrangement" (41). Some FSF authors in the 1970s and ’80s such as Sheri S. Tepper, Marge Piercy, and Gerd Brantenberg knew that before we could acknowledge powerful women, we had to examine the very notions of power and also how, within mainstream ideologies, power was directly linked to masculinity within false theories of biological determinism. Lorraine Code adds that:

The structures of power-knowledge in western societies, within which women must claim their identity and power, are historically rooted in an ancient, taken-for-granted biological determinism... With reference to the human soul, Aristotle observes that "the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature." (181)

Here we see how devalued women’s power is since it is essentially put on the same level as that of a child, and this view goes unquestioned when gender roles are biologically assigned rather than understood as culturally constructed. FSF works of literature such as Gerd Brantenberg’s novel Egalia ’s Daughters (1986) reverse the power binaries, and just about everything else, in order to show how socially constructed and hegemonic our gender roles, language, and even concepts of "his"story are, all which play into notions of cultural power.

While women (called "wim" in the novel) in Egalia’s "reversed" society retain our generally understood notions of women’s biological anatomy and still give birth, the men (called "menwim") are the primary care givers to their children (even though the wim breast feed the children, it is the menwim’s job to bring the baby to her at work, or to hold the baby in place to breastfeed at night so the mother never wakes up; after children are weaned, the wim have next to no day-to-day contact with them). It is just assumed in Egalian society that wim are more intelligent, stronger, and more capable of having all the "important" jobs and positions of political power. When a masculinist movement starts up, the characters (and the readers) are introduced to alternative theories about strength and power. Wim in Egalian society are assumed to be biologically stronger than men; however, the masculinists argue that biology plays only a small role compared to gender discrimination that encourages wim to be active and athletic while forcing the menwim to hardly move so that they will remain weak. The tight skirts, ropes tied around their knees, and uncomfortable shoes menwim are culturally forced to wear also limit the extent of menwim’s physical activity. Physical strength is so linked to cultural power that menwim’s "natural" weakness in this society is used to justify wim’s domination, and menwim’s penises, which must be worn through a slit in their skirts and inside a decorative box called a peho and secured with a complicated system of straps, become a source of cultural disempowerment since it makes the menwim so literally and metaphorically exposed and vulnerable.

This reversal world not only takes us out of our own societies and ideologies, but also encourages us to think about what other elements of our culture that are coded as feminine and thus devalued aren’t weak at all, but rather can be sources of great strength and power. One possible danger of using science fiction reversals is that it needs interpretation by the reader/viewer; while the irony of this novel and its goal of dismantling all forms of dualistic, hierarchal power structures may be obvious to some readers, another interpretation might be that the author is advocating a simple reversal of the power hierarchy. This, however, just adds to the complexity of decoding any text-there are favored meanings encoded into texts, but there is always the possibility for transgressive decoding, just as some sections of this essay might use in order to show women’s possible empowerment through de-valued traits. It is these often de-valued modes of empowerment, specifically ecofeminism, invisibility, and storytelling that the rest of this essay will analyze by employing various FSF texts.

Invisibility as Potential Empowerment

I preface this section by acknowledging that invisibility can be a very oppressive issue. Women of color have perhaps published the largest amount of scholarship on women’s invisibility, but I would add that it can be oppressive to many groups including queer women and women who don’t fit the "beauty norm" such as fat women and women with physical challenges. I do not mean to deny or silence any of these women’s voices speaking against cultural invisibility, but I believe that invisibility can possibly be used toward empowerment, whether (literal) invisibility is seen as a means of escape or (metaphorical) invisibility is used strategically, such as slaves and servants overhearing key information since their masters forget they are in the room.

One of the most recent examples of women’s potential empowerment through invisibility is from a recent episode of the latest Star Trek series, Enterprise. This episode, "Vanishing Point," explores one woman’s literal erasure which, ironically, in some ways contributes to her empowerment. There have been several episodes in the various Star Trek series that deal with various forms of invisibility; I focus solely on this particular episode not only because it is the most recent, but also because it is the only one that shows additional components of women’s (especially women of color’s) metaphorical invisibility along with the "literal" invisibility of the character. Ensign Hoshi Soto (Linda Park), the only AsianAmerican character and one of only two women lead characters aboard the star ship, is often portrayed as a whining, cowardly, insecure communications officer. Asian-American women, as with any women of color, often face double-erasure in society, particularly in media; thus the literal disappearance of this character is particularly interesting.3 The only other lead female character is T’ Pol (Jolene Blalock), a Vulcan; thus among the women characters on this show, one is a literal alien, and one is metaphorical. As Debra Benita Shaw says in Women, Science, and Fiction, it’s easy to see why women’s issues of alienation are so often played out in SF’sconventions of women-as-aliens: She says: "It is my belief that the appeal of Science Fiction for women has always been that it allows opportunities both to express and explore alienation as well as to offer a fictional description of the kind of world that a gender-free or differently gendered [and, I would add, racialized] science might produce"(6).

Hoshi, already coded as an outsider due to her gender and her ethnicity, is convinced that her first trip through the transporter didn’t put her molecules back together right and that she is literally disappearing. Hoshi watches her image fade in her mirror, and then watches water run right through her hands while she takes a shower. Her medical complaints are ignored by her captain, crewmates, and doctor; her worries are dismissed as being only in her head and she is repeatedly told she just needs to "get a good night’s sleep." This dismissiveness of women by men-especially male doctors-has historical background since women with any baffling medical or psychological complaints were often labeled "hysterical" and were supposedly suffering from wandering wombs. (Apparently, the sexism and racism of our current health care system still haven’t been solved even in a fictional Utopian future.)

Viewers are lead to believe that Hoshi’s fears are imagined when we see that her crewmates, mostly white men, have the ability to see her; they merely choose to ignore her. When she approaches the mess hall table where three of her (male) crewmates are sitting, she asks if she may join them; the men don’t even pause their conversation, so she has to ask again if she may sit down. Hoshi looks completely humiliated when the captain assigns two of these men to go back to the surface of the planet since, the captain assumes, Hoshi is too shaken up to go back to the planet herself. The three men (even the one not going on the mission) immediately get up from the table and leave Hoshi sitting alone; the camera lingers on the lonely Hoshi as she mumbles to herself "see you later."

Soon, though, we see that Hoshi is, indeed, disappearing. After complaining to the doctor that a birthmark was put back in the wrong place (and was then told "well, it looks very nice where it is") and being dismissed again, Hoshi goes to the gym. After Trip leaves her with another "just get some sleep" remark, Hoshi realizes that her body slips right through some solid matter and can’t make the door open (why she can’t just walk through the door is never addressed, nor is how she can later manipulate some types of matter). She then stands in front of a large mirror and we watch as she sees her own image completely disappear from the mirror (but we can still see her even though her crewmates cannot). Hoshi spends the next several minutes trying to get someone to see her, but fails. Eventually her crewmates go looking for her, and after Trip (who transported right before Hoshi did) finds what he thinks is her "cellular residue," Hoshi listens as he blames her for getting herself killed by not listening to him when he told her to transport first.

The story turns abruptly when Hoshi finds alien terrorists trying to blow up the ship. Since the aliens cannot see her, she tries to diffuse their bombs right in front of them. When the aliens escape on their own transporter device, Hoshi follows them through their transporter, only to rematerialize in the uniform she was wearing in the beginning of the episode. It takes her crewmates a while to explain to her (and to the audience) that Hoshi had been stuck in the buffer for several seconds and that none of her adventure had actually happened.

So, the one episode where Hoshi plays hero turns out to be a dream. This episode leaves us with a very ambiguous ending. Does this dream negate her empowerment since it didn’t actually happen, or, as the captain says, is she still a hero since she pictured herself as one in her dream? Just because the dream is over, though, will anything change with her crewmates, or will they still choose to not see her? By including Hoshi’s literal and metaphorical invisibility, this episode further problematizes the question of who has and does not have power, for "Visibility and invisibility are crucially bound; invisibility polices visibility and in this specific sense functions as the ascendant term in the binary. Gaining visibility for the politically under-represented without scrutinizing the power of who is required to display what to whom is an impoverished political agenda" (Phelan 26).

Even though the ending of the episode reestablishes the status quo of Hoshi’s outsider position on the ship, it also explores her potential empowerment through her invisibleness. For one thing, she proves (within the dream’s story line) to all the men that she is not crazy or hysterical. Also, this plot device allows Hoshi one of her most active roles and gives her the opportunity to prove to herself that she can overcome her fears and be a hero; this may even be the beginning of a less-timid character for the rest of the series.4 Ecofeminism as Activism

Another common SF device besides reversals and futuristic settings is to set the story in an alternate world or an alternate history or future of our world, often ones where we see the repercussions of humanity’s relationships with the environment. Ecofeminist themes are very popular in FSF literature whether the stories praise a culture’s harmony with nature, or condemn a society which let greed and technology overwhelm the environment and essentially doom the people. The Handmaid’s Tale is one such story of condemnation. It is unfortunate that the film version did not include many of the ecofeminist elements and social commentary. The social commentary of the The Handmaid’s Tale (I am specifically referring to only the novel in the remainder of the essay) isn’t limited to issues of national security or family values; it and other stories such as Herland and Joanna Russ’s "Whileaway" stories also teach us the need for ecofeminism by showing what the United States could very easily look like if current environmental policies and decisions regarding women’s rights continue unchallenged.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the stupidity and greed of humans hurt the environment and, in turn, the people. The radiation from the atomic power plants has rendered almost everyone in the U.S. sterile, cutting off population growth and creating the need for surrogate mothers-the handmaids. The Unwomen-mostly lesbians and poor women who cannot or will not be surrogate mothers-are sent to clean up the toxic messes (for the short time they can survive there). Technology got so out of control that, instead of freeing women from domestic tasks, as the popular mantra used to support "modernization" in the 1950s promised, it took away women’s freedom. Computerized banking took away women’s money ih a few short mouse clicks; radiation made so many people sterile that handmaids were forced into essentialist roles of being vessels for bearing children.

Donna Haraway, in "Cyborg Manifesto," talks about how it is the technology (and its effects) that we can’t see-that which, like radiation, seems so "clean"-that we have to worry about because we forget it’s there until it is too late and its disastrous effects cannot be changed:

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.... The diseases evoked by these clean machines are "no more" than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, "no more" than the experience of stress. (153-154)

It is within these "clean" technologies that we again see the multiple oppressions of women of color, poor women, Third World Women, and other groups since it is they who are the most likely to be working in hazardous conditions with little safety gear, it is they who will most likely have to live in an area saturated with radiation or pesticide poisoning, it is they who have higher levels of pollutants in their own breast milk to feed to their babies who have higher risks of being born with serious medical problems, and it is they who cannot afford the medical benefits that this "clean" technology has created, or even the computer whose silicon chips they assembled.5

These are some of the very atrocities that FSF critiques. When the feminist utopianm societies face crisis, they work with the land to bring back the natural harmony. Many stories of Utopian societies, such as those in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s novel Herland (1979), and Joanna Russ’s stories "A Few Things I Know About Whileaway" and "When It Changed," focus on womenonly cultures that arose out of either war or disease killing all the men. After seeing technology’s destructive potential, these new societies choose to stay within their technological capacities and are content to remain largely preindustrial. The Herland natives cultivate the land to produce as much food in the smallest space, so they give up herding livestock. The Whileawians retain their technological knowledge, but choose to use their knowledge to preserve the environment rather than dominate it again, a very common FSF story line. As Debra Benita Shaw writes in Women, Science, and Fiction:

Destruction of the environment through depletion of resources and the indiscriminate use of machine technology is, in these [utopian] texts, identified with masculine power, and their most radical proposition is, as Dennis Livingston puts it, "that the best thing men can do at present is to get out of the way, as women on their own have the potential of creating a culture more ecologically sensitive and humanistic than men have been able to offer. (128)

These stories, and many others, show the benefits of less capitalistic and industrialized, yet more civilized, societies where everyone has an equal share of resources. O\ne has to wonder if the fascination with women-only societies reflects second wave feminists’ desires to prove that they are capable of doing any task or maybe of radical separatists’ desires for separate women’s communities; it is telling that Wonder Woman, the most popular amazon (who, incidentally, was created specifically as a non- violent comic book character) was chosen to grace the cover of the first issue of Ms. magazine in 1972. Several of the ecofeminist stories to be discussed below revolve around cultures where there are no men, yet rely on comments from male visitors to show how these matriarchal, eco-friendly cultures are so devauled within patriarchal ideologies.

When the three men in Herland search for the "strange and terrible Woman Land" (2) hidden away on Earth, they had many expectations. They thought a female culture would either always be cat fighting with each other or would be like a peaceful nunnery. In any case, they all assumed it would be quite primitive. The men were quite surprised at how well-planned and cared for the land in Herland was, exclaiming "Why, this is a civilized country! There must be men" (10). The three men carried an assumed androcenteredness about civilization, thinking that the men must be hidden away somewhere. This disbelief of a female civilized culture is also the theme of Joanna Russ’s "When It Changed" as well as her "A Few Things I Know About Whileaway." All of these female-only societies were seen by men as being only half a society and also unnatural. After the men who come to visit the women of Whileaway asked "where are all the people?" one of the women says that she "realized he didn’t mean people but men" ("When It Changed," 492). All of these stories show that these women-only societies not only survive, but also imply a different definition of a civilized society: one that is not necessarily industrialized, but one that can be sustained indefinitely by not taxing natural resources and one that applies the rights of health and happiness to everyone equally.

"I tell, therefore you are": Telling Our Stories

Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator and other handmaids struggle to retain their identities. They must whisper their real names to each other at night and communicate through stolen moments in the bathrooms or through secret messages like "don’t let the bastards get you down" scratched into the corner of the wardrobe. Women aren’t allowed to read, write, or even talk to men in this alternate future. Offred, the narrator, covets her Commander’s pen, saying "Pen Is Envy," (241) an obvious pun on "penis envy." In this patriarchal society where the women have no power, since Offred can never steal the real "source" of men’s power, she wants to steal the phallic symbol of it. In action-driven films, any woman’s attempt to "steal phallic power" would probably include grabbing a big gun or, as in G.I. Jane, telling the men to "suck my dick"; in this case, however, patriarchal power is linked to education and communication, especially in this comment by Offred: "The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. ... I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal" (241). Women’s voices, identities and lives have been stolen in this story, so it’s only fair that Offred would want to steal something back- something that would help her tell her story.

Storytelling is often regarded by some academicians as a lower form of communication; it’s seen, partly because of its non- objective qualities, as entertainment and as the opposite of logos (wisdom and reason) even though, as Em Griffin notes in A First Look at Communication Theory, "logos originally included story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought-all forms of human communication. Imagination and thought were not yet distinct" (325). Griffin, in his summary and analysis of Walter Fisher’s "narrative paradigm" (which states that humans are all essentially storytellers who ’"experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives’" [Griffin 322, quoting Fisher]) argues that Fisher’s approach to communications is "radically democratic" (322). He adds that "When communication is viewed as narrative, people don’t need specialized training to figure out whether a story holds together or has the ring of truth. Anyone with a little common sense is a competent rhetorical critic" (330). Even though this "anyone can understand it" quality is what might make some scholars dismiss storytelling as empowering, some feminist scholars may embrace the same quality. Storytelling is not limited to the "ivory tower" elite; anyone has the power to share their stories and have their voices heard. Storytelling is power; as Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Ceremony,

Another example of the power of language and of story telling comes from the Native Tongue trilogy (since the third novel almost completely drops the women’s language story line I’m mostly referring to the first two books). These novels set up an alternative future where women’s rights had been revoked world-wide in 1991. Women have the same status as children in that they are subject to their male guardian’s supervision, control, whims, and often their physical and/or emotional abuse; the women are not allowed to own property or, in the case of the few women who are allowed/forced to work, they are not allowed to keep their wages. Women do not have the right to vote, to sue, or to divorce their husbands.

Within this alternative society, a subculture of people called the Lines dedicate their entire lives to linguistics, specifically the learning of alien languages to that they may serve as interpreters in trade negotiations with hundreds of alien species now dealing with Earth and our colonies. Because linguists are so in demand and, because for reasons known only to the people of the Lines, only members of the Lines are capable of learning the alien languages with any fluency, women and even young children of the Lines are not only allowed to, but are forced to work as interpreters for the U.S. government.

This doesn’t mean that the women on the Lines aren’t oppressed in all other ways, however. The tribes of the Lines are already isolated (the general public so hates/fears/envies the talents of the Lines-people that the isolation was self-imposed and for their own safety); the women of the Lines are further segregated by being "banished" to the women-only houses unless and until their husbands demand their presence for sex or for a task. What the men don’t know is that the women not only enjoy their segregation, but that they schemed in order to convince the men to banish them to their own houses so that they may work, uninterrupted, on their secret and forbidden language, Laden.

The new language "encodes," or creates a word to describe an idea, concept, experience or emotion that doesn’t have its own word. Laden is a "women’s language" in that, besides creating translations of existing words, it encodes things that are de-valued in patriarchal society (and, thus, don’t have their own words to describe them) but which are important to women’s lived experiences and it de-masculinizes language so that women, for example, aren’t erased from such words as "mankind." This secret language is seen by the men of the Lines as very dangerous. They, as the women, believe that language has the power to shape perception so a language that empowers women may be a serious threat to patriarchy/ oppression (depending which view point you’re taking). It’s also a threat to the extremely conservative religious ideologies since, according to the priests, the women’s translation of the King James Bible creates a goddess worship (when in fact it just takes out gendered language). To have a language that reflects what the women consider important not only points out how patriarchal and gendered our current language system is, but it also serves to empower women so that they may tell their own stories with their own words. Not only are they making their own tools, but they’re building their own house, too.

All of these stories are told so that the women may be known, heard, and seen. For many of the characters, telling their story is the one power they still possess. Offred from The Handmaid’s Tale explains her reason for sharing her story with us:

I keep going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. What they have in common is that they’re not here. By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. (344)

By believing in a reader’s existence, Offred can also believe in her own. For many women, sometimes just the act of telling their story makes it (and them) more Real. It is not just the characters who gain power through telling their stories. Through feminist science fiction, feminist writers can create other worlds and alternate histories in order to add their voices to this world and hope they are heard.

Conclusion

Dorothy Fadiman, a documentary filmmaker who used her own stories and stories from other women in her piece on women’s right to choose, Motherhood by Choice, Not Chance, said this when I asked her about the power of storytelling:

We have two parts to our brain: one that is about here (pointing to a spot on her forehead) and one that is somewhere between here and here (hands on her chest and abdomen). With stories, they hit us here (pointing to her heart), and when they penetrate, they open us up inside and we start thinking not just with the information th\at is in our heads but with the compassion from our hearts.

Have you ever heard the story of the wind and the sun betting who could get a man’s jacket off of him first? The wind blows and blows, but the man just clutches his jacket tighter to himself. Soon the wind gives up. When the sun takes its turn, at first it doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all; the sun just shines and waits. Soon, the man takes the coat off by himself.

A story isn’t a lecture; it doesn’t try to hit you over the head and tell you what to do or think. A story hits your heart and opens you up; it gets you to feel as well as think. It doesn’t tell you what to do, but gets you to do what you feel." (Presentation)

Like Dorothy Fadiman, I also believe in the power of storytelling; telling our stories is a way of communicating with and educating others as well as sharing something of ourselves. In a culture that has historically viewed women as passive, as lacking, as the Other and as inferior, it is no surprise that our media entertainment reflect these ideologies. We have seen a progression of women’s images in our entertainment from passive to active, from victim to hero, from powerless to powerful. What we have not seen much of is diversity in what makes someone powerful.

Feminist science fiction stories are a unique medium in which to educate people about many aspects of culture, including women’s power. They are an opportunity to go beyond lecturing and blaming media violence for society’s ails or complaining that women are shown as violent; instead, they show examples of women’s power that don’t come from violence and they can inspire people to see women’s power in new ways. As these types of power become more recognized and more a part of people’s lived reality, maybe there will be a place for those stories in our visual media and in our cultural understandings of women and power.

Notes

1. Additional key texts on images of tough women in media that weren’t specifically mentioned here include:

Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." Screen 27 (1986): 44-70.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator." Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Due Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 74-87.

Dole, Carol. "The Gun and the Badge." Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies. Ed. Martha McCaughey and Neal King. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 78-105.

Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

King, Neal and Martha McCaughey. "What’s a Mean Woman like You Doing in a Movie like This?" Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies. Ed. Martha McCaughey and Neal King. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 1-24.

Kuhn, Annette. Alien Zone II: the spaces of science fiction cinema. New York: Verso, 1999.

2. This argument is not meant to be essentialist. Not all men are violent just as not all women are non-violent, and men are not equally powerful (especially those who are deemed "feminine") just as all women are not equally disempowered. What I am suggesting is that if the only female characters in mainstream entertainment media who are seen as powerful are violent, then those kick-butt images are at the expense of other images of powerful women.

3. For more information on general film stereotypes of Asian and Asian-American women, see "Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck" (Hagedorn).

4. Unfortunately, Hoshi went back to her whining, cowardly self until the final two episodes of the third season. There, she resisted giving up crucial information to her torturers and even sabotaged their ship, playing a crucial role in saving Earth. Her character has been almost absent from the first two episodes of the current (fourth) season, and has played very minor roles in the remaining episodes.

5. This information was synthesized from several sources including Sub Rosa’s presentation at the "Bio-power and the Cultures of Technology" Colloquium; Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith on breast milk pollution; "Chapter 7: Environmental and Occupational Health" in Our Bodies, Ourselves and also "Where the Chips Fall: Environmental Health in the Semiconductor Industry" by Ron Chepesiuk which discusses women, especially women of color, who work in "toxic jobs."

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986.

Bordo, Susan R. ’The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault." In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. 13-33.

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, The. "Chapter 7: Environmental and Occupational Health." Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Touchstone, 1998. 131-157.

Brantenberg, Gerd. Egalia ’s Daughters. (Translater by Louis Mckay) Seattle: Seal Press, 1986.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Chepesiuk, Ron. "Where the Chips Fall: Environmental Health in the Semiconductor Industry." Environmental Health Perspectives. Vol. 107, No. 9, Sept. 1999.

Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Fadiman, Dorothy. Interview. Bowling Green State University’s Women’s Center. Sept. 15, 2004.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Grant, Barry Keith. ’"Sensuous Elaboration’: Reason and the Visible in the Science-Fiction Film." In Alien Zone II: the spaces of science fiction cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. New York: Verso, 1999. 16-30.

Griffin, Em. A First Look at Communication Theory. Third Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1997.

Haden Elgin, Suzette. T