The Female Man is a classic feminist science fiction novel by American writer Joanna Russ, published in 1975. Four women, Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael, live in four different and parallel worlds. Joanna lives in a world similar to 1970s Earth. Jeannine lives in a world where the Great Depression did not end, WW2 never happened, and Japan is still an imperial power. Janet lives in Whileaway, a Utopian society in the far future where men have long since died out in a gender-specific plague. Jael lives in a dystopia where men and women are fighting an enduring and literal battle of the sexes, where women trade children for resources and young boys have cosmetic surgery to resemble women. As the women are transported into these other worlds and meet one another, their perspectives on gender, identity and the societies in which they each live are radically altered. The Female Man won a Retrospective Tiptree Award in 1996.
The Female Man is a founding text of lesbian feminist science fiction. Joanna Russ wrote it in 1971, but it did not find a publisher until Bantam issued it in 1975, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it as the book in which feminist fiction came of age in American genre science fiction. Its four protagonists are versions of one woman living in parallel worlds, among them Janet, a visitor from Whileaway, a world without men where women love and partner one another.
The novel was a Nebula Award finalist in 1976. In 1996 it received one of three Retrospective James Tiptree Jr. Awards, alongside Russ's story "When It Changed," and in 2002 it was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame. Commentators on queer science fiction stress that both works are explicitly lesbian stories, about women desiring and loving women, published at a time when that was rare in the field. Russ was openly lesbian when very few women writers in science fiction were.
Russ received the Pilgrim Award for science fiction scholarship in 1988 and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013. The Female Man has stayed in print, joined Gollancz's SF Masterworks series in 2019, and remains a fixture on university reading lists.
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The Female Man is a founding text of lesbian feminist science fiction. Joanna Russ wrote it in 1971, but it did not find a publisher until Bantam issued it in 1975, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it as the book in which feminist fiction came of age in American genre science fiction. Its four protagonists are versions of one woman living in parallel worlds, among them Janet, a visitor from Whileaway, a world without men where women love and partner one another.
The novel was a Nebula Award finalist in 1976. In 1996 it received one of three Retrospective James Tiptree Jr. Awards, alongside Russ's story "When It Changed," and in 2002 it was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame. Commentators on queer science fiction stress that both works are explicitly lesbian stories, about women desiring and loving women, published at a time when that was rare in the field. Russ was openly lesbian when very few women writers in science fiction were.
Russ received the Pilgrim Award for science fiction scholarship in 1988 and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013. The Female Man has stayed in print, joined Gollancz's SF Masterworks series in 2019, and remains a fixture on university reading lists.