When I read Joanna Russ’s The Female Man , the feeling that I felt most was confusion. There was a lot of jumping around and new characters being introduced all the time, so I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand the plot of the book, so all that I was left with was the ideas that were raised A problem I had with this book was that Janet does initiate a sexual relationship with a teenage girl. There’s something to be said about how portraying gay relationships in fiction as unhealthy and inherently predatory is a damaging idea that’s led to a lot of harmful stereotypes. The language of The Female Man was fascinating to me. It was really interesting to see the way that women could explore the ideas of feminism before there was a real vocabulary for that sort of thing. Even the very title of the book brings up the very modern distinction between sex and gender. But it was interesting to me that the actual symbol of power, the ideal form of womankind in The Female Man, if they were t...
On The Subject of Justine Moritz There are very few notable characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Charitably, there are four. Two are silent characters with varying levels of importance to the story (Victor’s mother, and the unborn female counterpart to Frankenstein’s monster) and two are speaking characters (Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz). All end the story dead, or in the case of the female Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed further. The female characters in Frankenstein seem to exist as ornaments, either used to highlight Victor’s torment, or to demonstrate the horror of the monster. A microcosm of Shelley’s portrayal of female characters is Justine Moritz. Though her appearance in the story was brief, it was enough to make her my favorite character in the book. Shelley portrays Justine Moritz as a tragic, angelic figure. Justine’s first appearance in chapter six details her home life and backstory, she was despised by her mother, and blamed for the deaths of her sibli...
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was an extremely funny, extremely british part of my late middle/early high school experience. It was the first science fiction book I’d ever read that was actually funny, but it never felt condescending or rude. It celebrated the tropes and norms of science fiction. It was laughing with science fiction fans instead of at them. Later in high school I’d discovered the magic of podcasts and audio dramas. It was nice to have some way to access stories without having to be focused with my eyes, it left me time to do things like cooking, exercise, or laundry while still enjoying excellent storytelling. As a fan of both podcasts and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , learning that there was an audio drama version of it was a wonderful revelation, and listening to it was like experiencing it for the first time all over again. When I listened to it, I set the playback speed to 2x speed. Most of the dialogue played out like a fu...
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