Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchinson’s Science Fiction
Michigan Feminist Studies
Volume 16 (2002): Deviance
Sarah Shaw
“Oh fuck sex!” replied celebrated science-fiction novelist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) when Jill Benton, one of her biographers, asked for her views on the topic during the 1980s. Despite Mitichison’s attempts to move the discussion of her body of work from the salacious, it is the frank and open inclusion of sexuality that continues to intrigue her critics and reviewers. Racy, heated passages of Mitchison’s historical novels inspired comment from poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s. And, a reviewer of her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), expressed distaste for “an attention to physical details often eyebrow-raising to a mere male.” Benton, Mitchison’s biographer, interprets the author’s dismissive response as a mischievous provocation. I intend to demonstrate that the ribald sexuality of Mitchison’s work registers as more than merely provocative. Sexual encounters between female characters and aliens, as well as those between women, threaten an imperialising capitalism that dictates who may be loved in a gendered, racialised order. Given the constraints of capitalist socialisation, sex must either be marginalised as a private leisure activity or function as a commodified industry. Interspecies, or monstrous, sex in Mitchison’s science fiction connects a woman’s scientific work and public identity with satisfying sexuality over a period of months in a deviant erotic that cannot be separated from life.
Mitchison, as Donna Haraway emphasises, came from the world that produced the Darwins and the Huxleys: a world of “sexual experimentation; political radicalism; unimpeded scientific literacy; literary self-confidence; a grand view of the universe from a rich, imperialist, intellectual culture—these were Mitchison’s birthright.” (1995, 88). Mitchison’s continued focus upon the sexual, particularly female sexuality, grounds this investigation because she illustrates how women’s sexual pleasure both reflects and produces the political. While we credit the feminist movement of the 1970s with birthing the influential mantra “the personal is political,” Mitchison’s science fiction demonstrates a much earlier engagement with precisely that relationship. Additionally, Mitchison during her sixties to her eighties, during the years of her life when we assume in this culture that members of society somehow lose interest in sex and sexuality, still published subversive, progressive and provocative science fiction. While I focus upon the 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman in this essay, Mitchison’s other late novels, such as Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983), share a similar preoccupation with female sexuality. These subversive revisions of female sexuality are still relevant in the new millennium. As science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a commendation of Solution Three, it “could have been written yesterday, and will certainly be read tomorrow.” Because of attention to female sexuality in Mitchison’s science fiction, her work has been read as an exception to the “viciously militaristic…and deeply misogynistic and patriarchal” rule of the genre during the 1960s. Yet rather than feminist writers of science fiction such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the US or Katharine Burdekin and Charlotte Haldane, her own sister-in-law, in the UK, Mitchison understood moralists and prophets including William Morris, HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon as her precursors. Despite the arguably masculinist tradition of thought to which Mitchison credits her intellectual instruction, she always positioned feminist concerns within her conversation. For example, with Stapledon, during the 1930s, she had “discussed everything from growing potatoes to world politics and back again, but mostly science fiction.” She cautioned him against presenting ideas which would further patriarchal ideology.
This kind of critical engagement makes Mitchison a foremother within the feminist movement. However, I want to focus upon a set of specific contributions that Mitchison makes to the discussion of female sexuality: her ability to connect in prism-like fashion interracial sexual relations, mother-child intimacy, and female autoeroticism through the lens of female eroticism. Female sexuality not oriented toward men’s pleasure persists as an aberration in our social fabric (what Mitchison represents as monstrous) to the point where touch and affection between women in public may provoke verbal or physical abuse. While adult women’s sexuality is celebrated in magazines that discuss how to look sexy (by buying the right clothes and cosmetics), how to please yourself (by shopping for the right dildo or anal beads, or the right book), and how to give perfect head or achieve perfect penetration, “for many women the erotic is not an integral part of who they experience themselves to be but an attribute they can create in the right circumstances.” And it is this crucial distinction between sexuality and the erotic that distinguishes Mitchison’s work. Whereas women’s sexuality merely responds, the erotic initiates or constitutes women’s position within society. Were the erotic to pervade our lives at a deep level, were we to become sexual beings in any circumstances rather than only “the right circumstances,” then who knows what the consequences might be? In a 1980 interview, Audre Lorde insists “it is in the interest of a capitalist profit system for us to privatize much of our experience,” but “the erotic weaves throughout our lives, and integrity is a basic condition that we aspire to…I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living.” As a Black lesbian feminist, Lorde knows how women’s sexuality has been defined as monstrous and worthy of eradication because of racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia. I argue that what Mitchison’s represents as monstrous sexual relations in her science fiction is the erotic. Furthermore, it is the erotic that appears as deviant within the dominant social register…
…Miscegenation Blues, a collection of writing by more than forty women of mixed racial heritage, some of whom were born in the early 1960s, explores issues of identity, loyalty and belonging within cultures divided by histories of racialised domination. Divergent and often painful accounts from the melting pot problematise celebrations of hybridity in which racial mixing is envisaged as the normal state and desirable future of humanity. Editor Carol Camper sees such a goal as naïve, since it “leaves the race work up to the mixed people and it means the annihilation of existing racial groups and our entire histories and cultures as though we are obsolete.” A history of European invasion and domination of what are now Africa, the Americas, Australia and parts of Asia makes these objections readily comprehensible. Views of the hegemony of US culture dominated by values inherited from the European tradition, appropriation of ethnic or cultural differences in the service of commerce, and assertions of the dependency of the First World on over-developed countries make them prudent.
It is instructive to ask how we have been mixing our races ever since the notion of race was consolidated somewhere around the sixteenth century and to recall the history of rapes, lynchings, illegalities and minute categorisations of admixtures of wrong-coloured blood (as if blood is Black or White) involved in these combinations. Racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, health care and legal systems still weighs heavily on those labelled Black and other, as Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe emphasises in her examination of manufactured identities and social inequality. Ifekwunigwe concludes that it is, “the persistence of this same bi-racialised hatred that gives salience and lends credence to Black as a political affiliation for métis(se) people.” Yet arguments that races and cultures should not mix but remain distinct only reinforce systems of racialised economic domination. Hazel Carby, who argues that structures of dominance form everyone as a racialised subject and that we should always recognise the normative category of Whiteness which forms and excludes racialised others, also emphasises cultural complexity rather than purity and calls for desegregation of apartheid systems of housing and education.
The genre of science fiction, in which not only technological but also social norms are transgressed as a matter of course, allows Mitchison to make the relationship between Mary and T’o, and the birth of their “curly, coffee-coloured daughter,” explicitly unremarkable. After a childhood during which she accepted her mother’s “great worship of the British Empire,” Mitchison learned to question the racism that partly formed her. Travelling in the USA in 1935, with Zita Baker, she met Black and White people working together in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Memphis.She thought about colonialism and racism, and reviewed novels such as George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin. In 1956 she visited Egypt and in 1957 West Africa, where she heard Kwame Nkrumah speak in Ghana. In 1960, at her home in Carradale, Scotland, she met Linchwe, Paramount Chief designate of the Bakgatla, an ethnic group of present-day Botswana. Invited by him to the tribal village of Mochudi, she was acknowledged in 1963 as a “mother of the tribe.” Her enthusiasm for Black Africa resulted in her being banned from the Republic of South Africa under apartheid. The future imagined in Memoirs of a Spacewoman displays Mitchison’s desire for the eradication of racial discrimination…
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