Violence against Women in Science: The Future of Gender and Science in Gwyneth Jones’s Life

ABSTRACT

Violence manifests itself in a multitude of forms leaving survivors with psychological damage. Gwyneth Jones’s Life (2004) portrays myriad acts of violence against women in science with a specific critique of patriarchy that devalues women’s place in science as the “second sex.” The novel depicts “genderization of science,” questioning whether there are essential biological sexual differences through the psychology of a haunted woman bioscientist who discovers the Transferred Y chromosome that will change the future of gender with the death of male chromosome and birth of many diverse sexes. This article discusses how gender becomes a visible barrier to advancement in almost any field, but most importantly in the sciences due to gender stereotypes and gendered professional culture. This is achieved by exploring the threshold of madness the woman scientist is driven to as a response to the strain of ongoing patriarchal violence, in addition to the consequences of her psychological dilemma of balancing her multiple roles in professional career and personal life.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jones is one of the most important British SF authors and feminist sf critics but a neglected figure who should be discussed more in contemporary sf. There are very few works about her last award winner novel Life (Philip K. Dick award winner and shortlisted for James Tiptree, Jr Award in 2004). See Mark Bould’s “Gwyneth Jones: An Introduction” for detailed biography about Jones.

2. See also Mark Bould (Science Fiction 51) for more details about women scientists in the lab.

3. See Jane Donawert’s “Utopian Science” (537). See also Joanna Russ’s The Image of Women in Science Fiction (1973), Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (1975), Robin Robert’s A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (1993), Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002) and Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006), Brian Attebery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), Lisa Yazsek’s Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008), Robin Anne Reid’s Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (2009), Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (2010), and Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine (2012).

4. See Donawert’s “Utopian Science” (538) and Frankenstein’s Daughters (5–7) for more examples. Sea also Merrick’s “Gender Bias in Science” (2012).

5. See online sources for women scientists in fiction in general: https://www.zotero.org/groups/45709/women_scientists_in_fiction/items/BWFRTEII/item-details; SF author Alison Sinclair’s http://www.alisonsinclair.ca/reading-writing/women-scientists-in-fiction/and real women scientists in literature at lablit site http://www.lablit.com/the_list by Jennifer Rohn. See also Gwyneth Jones’s “Feminist SF” (485–488).

6. See also Bevery Friend, Mary Kenny Bademi, Carolyn Wendell; Hollinger, Robin Roberts for their essays on women in science fiction.

7. Some works weaving female madness are Charlotte Perkins’s Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow (1930), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934). Some others after the WW II are Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass (1954), Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998), Bebe Moore Campbell’s 72 Hour Hold (2005).

8. The lines from Seneca are in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn (99).

9. See Bleier; Jan Harding.

10. A PCR machine is a Life Science laboratory apparatus known as a thermal cycler or DNA amplifier.

11. For more details about her Ann Halam novels, see Butler interview with Jones.

12. Most female ghostwriters, as Kumbet touches upon, “reflect their disillusionment and dissatisfaction with patriarchy and its controlling and stifling imposition on women, who are defined by rigid social and religious doctrines of gender” (81).

13. The rest cure is well established in a feminist literary tradition in relation to these works of arts. Both Gillman and Woolf were the patients of American physician Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who considered the father of medical neurology with his discoveries of the rest cure. Mitchell’s rest cure consists of a treatment of bed rest along with isolation from the society, seclusion, overfeeding (mostly milk), and massage/electricity (57–115). Both Gillman and Woolf satire and criticize this rest cure in their work of arts: the former in her The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and the latter in her Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

14. See Karen F. Stein for detailed criticism about changing female gothic in contemporary literature.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) under Grant [2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship] Program for the grant awarded research project titled “Violence Against Women in British Science Fiction” to be performed at the University of California Riverside under the supervision of Sherryl Vint to whom I express my sincere appreciation and gratitude for helping me to get started on this project and for her valuable suggestions and comments on this paper.

Notes on contributors

Sumeyra Buran

Sumeyra Buran is a full-time assistant professor of English at Istanbul Medeniyet University (IMU). Since she was awarded a research grant by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in 2018, she has been working as a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of California Riverside on her project under the supervision of Prof. Sherryl Vint with whom she will become co-editor of a collection book Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction to be published by Palgrave. She is the editor of the Journal of Posthumanism and a book series collection on Posthuman Studies by Transnational Press London. . Her teaching and research areas are women in science, women writers, science fiction, speculative fiction, technofeminism, technoculture, cyber and cyborg studies, human-animal studies, Anthropocene, posthumanism, ecofeminism, women and gender studies, femicide, violence against women, fantasy and gothic, and sf film. She is a commission member of the Unit of Women Studies in Academia at the Council of Higher Education in Turkey, a scientific coordination committee member of the European Observatory on Femicide, and the founder of the Center for Human Rights at Istanbul Medeniyet University and the Turkish Observatory on Femicide.