A Cultural History of a Biblical StoryAuthor: Colleen M. ConwayPublisher: Oxford University PressISBN:Category: ReligionPage: 288View: 397In the Hebrew Bible, Judges 4-5 tells the lurid story of the heroic figure of Jael, the formidable woman who saves Israel from the Canaanite army by seducing their general, Sisera, and then nailing his head to the ground with a tent-peg. Once separated from its original theological context, the Jael and Sisera tradition transforms into a story about gender identity and conflict between the sexes. This gruesome tale has long intrigued scholars and artists alike, repeatedly and creatively building on its gendered themes. In Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael, Colleen Conway offers the first sustained look at how this biblical tradition has been used artistically to articulate and inform cultural debates about gender.

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She traces the cultural retellings of this story in poems, prints, paintings, plays, and narratives across centuries. Conway examines the ways in which Jael has been reimagined by turns as a wily seductress, passionate lover, frustrated and bored mother, peace-bringing earth goddess, and deadly cyborg assassin. Meanwhile, Sisera variously plays the enemy general, the seduced lover, the noble but tragically duped victim, and the violent male chauvinist. Ultimately, Conway's analyses demonstrate how cultural productions of this ancient text intersect with broader conversations about the often conflicted, and sometimes violent, relationship between the sexes. Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science FictionAuthor: Jeanne CortielPublisher: Liverpool University PressISBN:Category: FictionPage: 254View: 301In this major study of the work of Joanna Russ, Jeanne Cortiel gives a clear introduction to the major feminist issues relevant to Russ's work and assesses its development. The book will be especially valuable for students of SF and feminist SF, especially in its concern with the function of woman-based intertextuality. Although Cortiel deals principally with Russ's novels, she also examines her short stories, and the focus on critically neglected texts is a particularly valuable feature of the study.

'I recommend this book to any reader interested in Russ's fiction, or in women's science fiction generally.' —Science Fiction Studies.

Author: Joanna RussPublisher: Open Road MediaISBN:Category: FictionPage: 221View: 213Four alternate selves from radically different realities come together in this “dazzling” and “trailblazing work” (The Washington Post). Widely acknowledged as Joanna Russ’s masterpiece, The Female Man is the suspenseful, surprising, darkly witty, and boldly subversive chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael—all living in parallel worlds—meet.

Librarian Jeannine is waiting for marriage in a past where the Depression never ended, Janet lives on a utopian Earth with an all-female population, Joanna is a feminist in the 1970s, and Jael is a warrior with claws and teeth on an Earth where male and female societies are at war with each other. When the four women begin traveling to one another’s worlds, their preconceptions on gender and identity are forever challenged. With “palpable anger. Leavened by wit and humor” (The New York Times), Russ both employs and upends genre conventions to deliver a wickedly satiric and exhilarating version of when worlds collide and women get woke. This ebook includes the Nebula Award–winning bonus short story “When It Changed,” set in the world of The Female Man.

We Who Are About To Joanna Russ Pdf Converter

“This is the underside of my world.Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! You only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. “Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, 'Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun.'

'I know,' I said. 'I don't either.' People think you decide to be a 'radical,' for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler.

You 'make up your mind,' you 'commit yourself' (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?).I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand:WE WUZ PUSHED.”―Joanna Russ. “There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.”―Joanna Russ. “This book is written in blood.Is it written entirely in blood?No, some of it is written in tears.Are the blood and tears all mine?Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different matter.As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e.

Her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.”―Joanna Russ. “Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgement for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. 'I never had a thought that wasn't yours.' Whenever I act like a human being, they say, 'What are you getting upset about?' They say: of course you'll get married.

They say: of course you're brilliant. They say: of course you'll get a PhD and then sacrifice it to have babies.

They say: if you don't, you're the one who'll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you're exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don't make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk?”―Joanna Russ. “The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I'm never impressed - no woman ever is - it's just a cue that you like me and I'm supposed to like that.

If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm dying and disappearing!SHE: Isn't it just a game?HE: Yes, of course.SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn't it?HE: Of course.SHE: Then if it's just a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop.HE: No.SHE: Then I won't play.HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I'll show you.

(He plays harder)SHE: All right. I'm impressed.HE: You really are sweet and responsive after all.

You've kept your femininity. You're not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You're a woman.SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)”―Joanna Russ. “I think,' said my neighbour, her chin very high in the air (and still spiffed, I am glad to say) 'that women who've never married and never had children have missed out on the central experiences of life. They are emotionally crippled.'

Now what am I supposed to say to that? That women who've never won the Nobel Peace Prize have also experienced a serious deprivation? It's like taking candy from a baby; the poor thing isn't allowed to get angry, only catty. I said, 'That's rude, and silly,' and helped her to mashed potatoes. 'You can't catch a man.' 'That's why I'll never be abandoned,' said I. Fortunately she did not hear me.

Did I say taking candy from babies? Rather, eating babies, killing babies, abandoning babies.

So sad, so easy.”―Joanna Russ. “Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape-I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done.

Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance- which was not chance-had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:She was Cunt.She had 'lost' something.Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick-but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had 'gotten away with' something (possibly what she had 'lost').And there I was at eleven years of age:She was out late at night.She was in the wrong part of town.Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.I understood this perfectly.

(I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane-or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.I was dirty.I was crying.I demanded comfort.I was being inconvenient.I did not disappear into thin air.”―Joanna Russ. “Alas, it was never meant for us to hear. It was never meant for us to know. We ought never be taught to read. We fight through the constant male refractoriness of our surroundings; our souls are torn out of us with such shock that there isn't even any blood. Remember: I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.”―Joanna Russ.

“(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air -(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God -(The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional 'act of faith')) but in the present. After all.(Courage is willful hope.)”―Joanna Russ. “If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called 're-vision', i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as 'the real world' or 'the way it is' is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. Has a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it,' There's less there than meets the eye'. Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyses reality by changing it.”―Joanna Russ.