Episode 1 - Marisa Brandt

This week on The Ansible, Jodi talks to Marissa Brandt about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.

Hi, you're listening to The Ansible Explorations in Sci-Fi, a discovery podcast where we review and reflect on the crossroads of science fiction and science.

I'm Jody Coulter, the Life Sciences Librarian at Michigan State University.

Today I'm talking with Dr.

Marissa Brandt, a teaching professor in science and society in Lyman-Briggs College and a core faculty in the Center for Gender in Global Context.

We are going to be talking about the book Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.

Before we begin, Marissa, please tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do here.

Hi, yeah, thanks for having me, Jodi.

So, as you mentioned, I'm teaching faculty in Lyman-Briggs College, which is a residential college, one of three we have here at Michigan State, and the folks.

of Lyman Briggs is to help science students put the sciences in a broader context.

So we like to say that we're helping students think about the human, social, and global dimensions of science and that's really what I'm up to with my teaching.

I was trained in communication and science studies at UCSD and as I tell my students, I'm really interested in the stories that we tell about science, technology, and medicine, both historically, in the present and in the future.

I'm really interested in, as Donna Haraway, one of my intellectual influences, says, stories basically make the world.

We live in a world of storytelling and we know science through the stories that it tells about the world that we live in.

That's often what I'm doing with my students.

thinking about the stories that we tell about science.

I do that both using social science methods, thinking about, you know, kind of everyday storytelling from the kinds of ways that scientists might talk about their discoveries to how technologists talk about the way that technological innovations will change the world to thinking about how you know speculative fiction authors like Marge Piercy tell stories about the potential worlds that we might be making as we create science and technology right and integrate them into our everyday lives.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm so thrilled to have you here because that's kind of the point of this podcast.

We are reading science fiction.

We're trying to figure out where is that crossroad between that fiction and the nonfiction in science fiction.

I'm thrilled to have you here.

Thank you so very much.

As I mentioned today, we are talking about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.

And this novel follows the story of Connie Rain.

A woman held against her will in a mental hospital, where she is chosen to take part in a terrifying neuroelectric experiment.

It's actually really quite graphic, the detail that goes into that.

But Connie is also in touch with people from the future and can travel to the future to learn from these people.

And they help her sort of fight against this imprisonment and fight for the future that they inhabit.

So making sure that their future is the one that comes to pass.

I want to begin because this book is very dense.

It's like every page has so much to unpack.

There's themes that run throughout the book that pop up here and then like maybe disappear for a while and then pop back up.

And it's very clearly a feminist text.

It's very clearly like set in that sort of feminist framework and it leans heavily on philosophy and theory personally.

You use this book to teach a class and with lots of other reading.

There's you have lots of other reading in it.

Why this book?

What is it about this book that draws you back to it again and again?

Yeah, great question.

So, as you mentioned, the story takes place in two primary timeframes, right?

Connie's present in New York, presumably 1976, right?

The time the novel was published, and also in the future, 2146, I think, is the future that she goes to.

And for my students, I think both of these timeframes offer really interesting stories to think through with the ethical challenges and questions that Piercy is trying to illustrate.

So, in Connie's present, you know, she's institutionalized against her will, like you were saying, and many of my students want to go into medical professions.

I'd say about 80%.

of Leibniz students in my experience come in pre-health sciences.

And so I think it's so important to explore this story of this woman who is poor, Chicana, not taken seriously by the medical profession.

She's really a case study in the loss of autonomy, right?

So thinking of her through a bioethical and biopolitical lens, we really see how institutions can dehumanize people.

And I want my students to have a sense of that history and that risk of dehumanization.

And that's something that comes up again and again in Connie's experience.

You know, what the doctors really want to do is insert a chip into her brain to control her behavior.

You know, something that my students now, you know, see as Neuralink.

But, you know, in 1976, when folks like Jose Delgado and early neuroscientists were already starting to explore this idea, but often explicitly with the idea of offering social control against a way of socially controlling through neural interfaces, you know, people who were seen as being not trustworthy to control their own behavior, right?

Who were seen as inherently criminal, violent, ill, socially malcontent.

And so I think really thinking through how the novel tries to humanize Connie by showing her perspective and helping to explain how some of the incidents that she's gotten into where she's gotten in trouble.

Been institutionalized are very much the conditions of her environment, right?

And not to say that you know they were always good choices to make.

Like before the time of the novel starts, you know, she had hit her daughter during a very, very low period when she was grieving her boyfriend and didn't have any food to feed her, and the daughter had destroyed the only pairs of shoes she'd gotten her, right?

But it's you can tell she was just having a very, very, very bad day.

And then similarly, when she gets reinstitutionalized, right, in the first chapter of the novel, she's trying to defend her niece from her pimp.

But, you know, the hospital only takes the pimp story seriously as a comment on patriarchal power, right?

So she's disenfranchised in all of these different ways.

And I want my students to kind of empathize that, you know, the people that we sometimes as society

treat as not having agency or not having control, right?

They still have stories that are worth listening to.

And that doesn't mean that we have a license to further take away their agency, especially in medical contexts.

Because again and again, Connie says she does not want this neural implant.

She'll be good, right?

And people disregard her.

They say, well, but if you want to ever get out of here, right, they use all these coercive methods.

And I just think that's so important and powerful to tell someone's story from that perspective and really listen.

Yeah, convey that message to doctors in training, people who are going to be in those positions of power and might need to have a little bit of empathy.

Yeah.

And then the future that she goes to, right, is very philosophical.

So kind of in the mode of classic YouTube.

Fiction.

It takes this dialogical model where Connie becomes the visitor to this world Metapoiset, which is actually a real place in Cape Cod, but almost 200 years in the future in the realm of the novel.

And what I love there is the matter-of-fact way in which Luciente and the other people who live in this community, who in many ways parallel people from Connie's own life, talk to her about the rationale for the way that they live.

And so there are really interesting things, again, that I think are useful to think about for medical students or really anybody.

How they govern themselves, how they treat the environment, how they deal with death, how they reproduce and form families, what their education system looks like.

Like even there's several points in the story where they talk about the decision whether or not to use things like genetic engineering or geoengineering because they can control the weather, but in many cases they choose not to because their decision would affect so many people.

So it's really a radically democratic and thoughtful vision of what the future can be.

And I want my students to think about that as a possibility, right?

To think about a world that is created first and foremost by people out of their values.

Absolutely.

One of the things that you mentioned was sort of like this democratic view of life, essentially, like everybody participating.

One of my favorite themes in this book, I like went wild over when I started to read it.

came sort of at the end of the book but it was one where like science is a democracy and I love that thought and there's a passage it's a little bit longer but I'm gonna go ahead and read it why is life short Connie asked your old people are healthy sure they live with everybody else but they age and they die not much later than we do why not live longer we decided not to try who's we the councils the town meetings that's how general questions of direction of science get decided you mean by people like me how could i decide if they should build an atom bomb or something of course you could decide it affects you how not a rep from the base talks on the local level for a small proj but if it's a major proj such as a research on prolonging life would be then everybody decides what it would cost to begin what would use up in the way of resources and labor all that would be set out what would be the consequences

On the whole yin and yin of it, that we could foresee our guests.

It's one of my favorite passages.

It's like so profound.

And I love this because it puts agency of science in the hands of people, everyday people, all of the people.

And I think that's like a very important message.

Do you see this type of science happening today?

Have you seen this, this sort of democracy?

What would it take to have this exist in our time?

That's a great question.

So there have been some experimental efforts various places around the world.

I want to say Denmark, for example, is a place that ran these like, I'm drawing a blank on what they're called.

It's not science cafes, but it's something like that where they would bring in members of the community to talk about and deliberate about science.

But it wasn't always clear how that actually played out, right?

That it was an effort to invite.

The public, but at the end of the day, there's not a vote, right, about what's actually gonna get done.

And a number of folks in science and technology studies who've looked at these quote-unquote democratic efforts to include ethics in science and technological innovation have often found that in practice, often what's happening with, say, like ethics committees and things like that is much more about coercion, right?

It's about trying to convince people that what they're doing is ethical or find a way to frame what's being done as ethical by focusing on this application but not that application.

And so I don't think we really have anything about it.

Approaching what Piercy is talking about, you know, to the extent we still have scientific grants, but even when we did more regularly, that's foundations, that's government program officers, you know, the NSF, and in many cases, DARPA, right?

Like, or within corporations deciding the direction that they want science to go.

And Piercy even says another quote, I think, from the same section, right?

Connie resists that.

She's like, who am I to say what direction, you know, science could go?

And I think a lot of us share that view that she's expressing.

You know, that's kind of how technocracy often works is to frame the public as just, if you don't have the technical knowledge, you can't weigh in to the problem, which is obviously absurd because you don't need to know the ins and outs of the legal process.

To vote on new laws or regulations, right?

So, because ultimately it's about values in the world we want to live in.

So, why would we assume if you don't have technical knowledge, you shouldn't be able to make some sort of statement about the values that you see being expressed in the technologies and the knowledge that's being brought into the world?

But one of the members of the community responds to Connie, you know, but Connie, in your day, huge corporations in the Pentagon had money enough to pay for the big science.

Don't you think that that had an effect on what people worked on?

Sweet petunias.

And what and what we do comes down on everybody.

We use up a confounded lot of resources, scarce materials, energy.

We have to account.

There's only one pool of air to breathe.

And I wish we did think a little bit more like that.

I agree.

That's a very profound sentiment.

I mean, it's like it reminds me sometimes of NASA's constantly trying to.

explain how their science is helping people every day.

How does studying a star light years away help us?

And if they're trying to describe that to us, then obviously it has some kind of impact on our life.

Like obviously it's going to affect us in some way.

And so I think this actually brings it home even closer, even more.

Yeah, we can study, you know, aging if we want to, but what resources is that going to take away?

What are we going to gain from that?

And ultimately, they decide against it.

And I think that's a very, very profound statement.

I'm really glad you brought up that passage too about the giant corporations because I think it's one of those myths about objectivity in science: that science is an objective thing, which is impossible because we are, of course, all human.

Science is a human invention.

I'm very curious to know: why is it so hard to see this myth?

Why can't we see corporations and the government running our science?

Why does that seem objective to us?

That's a really interesting question.

I suspect that it has something to do with the way that K-12 education is organized.

We have history class over here, we have English class over here, and those tend to focus on American history, government, right, but from the perspective of wars and settlements and interactions with people.

And if you get a little bit of, well, in this group was using this technology or this innovation, it's kind of a secondary character in the story, maybe.

And then in science class, unless it's in a little call-out in the corner of the textbook, you don't usually get hardly any of the context of science.

Science is a collection of facts.

It's things that are true, and maybe we hear about the experiments that led to them, but we don't hear very often about

The historical context that led to them.

I mean, maybe the atom bomb, right, or the nuclear energy and World War II, but I think for most people, you know, the movie Oppenheimer was a revelation to really understand the political machinations that went on behind the scenes to make, you know, that area of science possible.

But to understand that every innovation came from some context that paid for it, right?

That that's not a story that students are likely to hear or that any of us are likely to hear until maybe college.

Maybe if you take something like a science and society class or a history of science class, it's just not part of the way we really talk about science and technology in our

Culture, right?

It's maybe we hear about some great inventors like Edison or something like that, or we hear about Newton or Einstein, but even them, they're almost like these independent actors, and even their accomplishments are not really put in their social-political context.

The great scientist myth, somebody came out of nowhere, created something when really it was just a long series of small invasions that somebody capitalized on in the end.

Totally, and that somebody capitalized on, and that, you know, somebody else saw potential in to invest and to make, you know, to further want to create that innovation, to create those generations of innovators and product development.

I mean, it's very interesting, right?

That so I didn't, I didn't do speculative fiction work in my graduate program.

My graduate program, I was actually really interested.

Interested in technological innovation.

And the technology that I got really excited about was using virtual reality as a therapeutic tool.

And at the time that I started doing this work in the like 2006, there was very, very little VR going on, period, right?

So 2013 is when Facebook bought Oculus.

So that was when the rest of the world started paying attention.

But prior to that, right, no one had really paid much attention to VR since the early 90s, you know, like Lawn Mower Man.

But VR has been around for a really long time, right?

And like that story is a story of like technologists working in various labs around the country and then getting funding from the military, right, to create these technologies for training purposes.

for flight simulators, for all of these kinds of things.

And so it was really surprising to me when I started looking at these applications to realize how much technology is being funded sort of out of the public eye.

by the government, by the military.

And then there's a book, I forget the name of it, but man, Richard Satava, who's one of the major technoevangelists, so advocates of using technology in medicine, he talked about like this idea of crossing the chasm, right?

So when I interviewed him, the idea that our government funds all of these innovations sort of behind the scenes, and then the dream is that industry will pick it up at some point, right?

So what I really got the sense from him is that there's so much of this work happening behind the scenes that has no democratic input.

And it's only after sometimes decades of work when something is product ready that then you see, yeah, a company like Facebook buy the products of what may have been 70 years of investment, taxpayer dollars, right, becoming, you know, something that now we see as like a cool new innovation.

And it's really interesting to me that.

Yeah, we don't have anything approaching what they talk about in Matapoisea and that, you know, like in Connie's world, you know, a lot of testing of technologies also happens behind the scene on vulnerable populations in places that are out of sight, out of mind.

You know, Connie's being studied.

Her boyfriend, who dies, you know, before the start of the novel died during like prison experimentation.

So I think there's a lot of interesting things.

To you know that this novel is trying to get us to think about the world of technological and scientific development that we have created and ask us to think how ethical is that situation, even for Connie, right?

Absolutely.

And I want to go back to something that you mentioned because you sort of talked a little bit about like the siloing in like pre-K education and how that can kind of contribute.

I think that one of the more fascinating approaches taken in this book is like in Connie's time, science is kind of evil.

It's like it's very independent, it's very, it's this thing that people do for their entire lives.

That's all they do is just science.

And in Luciente's time, science is part of everyday lives.

It's that democratic process.

It's literally ingrained in everything they do.

They grow their food, they eat their food, they have their art, they have their science.

It's like all part of everybody's lives.

There's a passage, your scientists were so.

childish.

Carefully brought up through a course of study to enter on early, never to ask consequences, never to consider a broad range of effects, never to ask on whose behalf.

And it's very powerful.

As you mentioned, you know, both Connie and her boyfriend have been severely affected by this.

I'm curious, obviously this book has a lot of science, you read a lot of other science.

Immediately this made me think of Frankenstein, you know, like the ties there.

Do you draw parallels between your texts in your classroom?

Are you constantly pulling out these threads from each of the things that you have your students read?

Yeah, we do.

So Frankenstein is actually the first novel that we read together as a class and we read it through a feminist lens.

So we start by talking about the fact that Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft and she was very much raised in her mother's sort of honor, I guess, by her father, Charles.

Godwin and we read the novel as the story of a scientist Victor who wants to create life without a female partner right and then decides that what he's created is ugly and does not want to care for it so it's not just about scientific hubris it's also about a kind of reproductive responsibility or lack of reproductive responsibility.

Absolutely, yeah.

But that's that's the setup there, right?

And then obviously, you know, Frankenstein, the middle part of the book is told from the monster's perspective.

And we read a piece by Marcia Bundy Seberg, The Monsters We Create, Women on the Edge of Time and Frankenstein, which was a 2001 piece that she did in Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction that explicitly draws the parallels.

The parallels that she's focusing on are about the creature as not having agency and feeling like it hasn't been cared for, it hasn't been loved, it is just the object of an experimentation that is abandoned.

Connie is not abandoned, but similarly she is also an object of experimentation, who is also not seen as having agency or really being worthy of care, and certainly not care in a ongoing loving way.

So in a way, she is kind of abandoned.

She's abandoned by the only family that she has left, her niece Dolly, who goes along with the pimp institutionalizing Connie, who doesn't speak up on her behalf and tell the story that Connie was just defending her.

And her brother.

Who co-signs on the institutionalization.

So, yeah, I guess they are kind of, yeah, she is abandoned.

The creature never really makes friends, right?

He goes and he watches the family, Felix and Saffy, and but he goes and like watches the family and kind of gets like an outsider perspective on what is normal.

I feel like Connie never gets that, right?

She only gets her co-institutionalized friends.

So, in a way, she has a bit more family or has a little bit more capacity to try to make connections in a way that the creature doesn't in Frankenstein.

But they both share a dehumanization.

And I think one of the interesting ways that we talk about the creature is nature and nurture, right?

The creature is never cared for, so we have no capacity to know what the creature could have become.

Had they been cared for.

And I think that's actually the creature's monologue at the end of the novel is all about berating Frankenstein when he actually tracks him down to say, I was born with beauty in my heart and I could have been something beautiful and you abandoned me.

You made me feel hatred.

And now I'm an enemy of humanity.

And I think Connie has also been let down by everybody in her life and these doctors who don't see her as a person, just see her as an opportunity to run an experiment and gather data.

And she could fall victim to the same hatred, but what I think is so powerful about what Piercy's doing is that whether she's actually time traveling or whether time traveling is a metaphor for her imagination, she's interfacing with the possibility.

Possibility of a better world that allows her to at least imagine getting to a better future for, if not herself, her daughter, and other generations.

And that's a real contrast with the creature.

The creature has no future.

Victor won't make a bride for him famously.

But Connie does dream of a better future.

But similarly, too, you know, another similarity is that they both rebel against their oppressors violently.

At the end, I was kind of a little startled, actually, by that ending.

I was like, oh.

It is a startling ending.

Yeah.

I'm going to pivot a little bit away from the science.

Not much, but just a little bit.

Sort of talk a little bit about the grappling with the definition of man and woman in this, because I think that's a very important thing that comes up almost from the beginning of the book.

It's something that Connie is faced with on one of her very first trips forward in time.

what it means to be a mother.

So Connie really struggles with this concept of being a mother and there's one passage that I want to point to specifically and it says, it was part of women's long revolution when we were breaking all the old hierarchies.

Finally there was that one thing we had to give up to, the only power we ever had in return for no more power for anyone.

The original production, the power to give birth.

Because as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal and males never would be humanized to be loving and tender.

So we all became mothers.

Every child has three to break the nuclear bonding.

There's so much going on in this just like one little passage and it was one of the most powerful passages for me.

It was very bold.

There was again a lot to break down here.

It did remind me a lot of Bell Hook's The Feminism is for Everyone.

She has a chapter that sort of talks a little bit about this.

And later on, I think in the story, Connie sees a man breast.

Feeding, so it's like very much like the lines between men and women are very gray.

I'm curious: is this sort of a common or modern viewpoint, feminist perspective, that the biological realities of giving birth, the physical energy that it takes to give birth, creates a hierarchy in society between men and women?

Is that something that's still held by feminism today?

That's a very big question.

I mean, I have the historical answer.

I don't know about the contemporary answer.

So, I think, I mean, this is really a question that I think comes up a lot more in trans communities now, right?

Because there's the question of, you know, like we've been seeing language change from, you know, mother to like gestating parent and things like that in recognition of.

Trans men carrying babies.

And I think that, you know, I think what's happening more in feminism now is trying to, you know, just acknowledge the diversity of experiences that might lead somebody to, yeah, to be a gestating parent and have openness about what kind of gender role that parent may or may not have in the life of a child after that it doesn't have to be you know the gestating parent does not have to be mommy right the gestating parent could be could be daddy and that's for families to work out themselves and so in that regard the way that the novel

Is trying to open up this possibility that the role of caretaker can belong to anyone, regardless of their biology.

So, the technology that Piercy has described in the novel is called a brooder, right?

It's like an ectogenesis machine.

My understanding, I don't remember where I read this, but I hope it's not apocryphal, is that she was responding to a reading of Brave New World, right?

So, like, the hatcheries in Brave New World, right, are these efforts to design certain kinds of children and that are basically mass-produced, right, under our Ford for a specific role in society.

And mother is a dirty word.

So, by imagining this brooder system and imagining

that anyone could become a parent and that it's not the technology that is dehumanizing this process.

It's the whole social apparatus around it.

And I think that Piercy was responding to the work at the time of Shulamith Firestone, who was a radical feminist who had published a book in 1970 called The Dialectic of Sex that did specifically argue, as you mentioned before, that biology was the basis for the hierarchy between men and women, that ultimately, as long as women's bodies were going to bear the burden of reproduction, then there would never truly be equality.

And so I think the whole idea of the brooder, the idea that there are three co-mothers who sign up to parent this child together.

And making this about a collective consensual decision to create a family that is going to be, provide a loving relationship for this child to grow up in that is independent of biology is, I don't know, very optimistic for its time, right?

And I think it also humanizes other things like adoption and chosen family and all of these ways that family might come about by saying it doesn't have to just be this natural process.

So I think especially with this example, Piercy is not anti-technology, right, or anti-science, but she wants these things to be created in a world that is inherently loving and democratic and consensual.

and values-driven.

Absolutely, yeah.

There's one part in this book, and I'm very curious to see what you think about this, where Connie, she actually becomes physically ill while looking at the gestation chamber.

It was like she gets so ill that she gets thrown out of the future.

And part of that is related to her strong emotions from losing her daughter, but it also feels like something else is going on there.

Why do you think she becomes so drastically ill at seeing the gestation chamber?

I think because it is strange and unnatural situation, and I think that that's one part of it, right?

That it's just a very eerie thing to look at that we don't normally get to see.

And I can't remember if in 1976 we had started doing that kind of, there's like some very famous series of photography of like gestating fetuses and things like that.

And I don't think that that was circulating at the time yet.

So this also would have kind of been a little bit body horror, right?

You never would see a fetus unless it was, you know, unfortunately not living, right?

So I think there's something disturbing about that idea.

And then there's also this part of the reaction that has to do with meaning making, right?

She has lost so much in her life, right?

She had to drop out of school because she, I think, had to get an abortion, right?

And her professor was sexually exploiting her and she's had a really difficult time keeping jobs.

She's been abused by some of her boyfriends.

The one boyfriend who was nice to her gets killed in jail.

And the one thing that she's really proud of that she did was have her daughter, even though she's the daughter was taken away and she feels

really conflicted about that.

She still has a sense of identity and pride that this was something that she created that was beautiful and good.

And I think she sees the brooder as a potential loss.

But Luciente says to her, it was part of women's long revolution when we were breaking the old hierarchies.

Like you said, finally, that was the one thing we had to give up to, the only power we had, we ever had in return for no more power than anyone else.

The original production, the power to give birth.

So I think it's interesting to think of that as a form of power, especially in the patriarchal context that Connie lives in.

It's this almost ironic power because it's a site of exploitation, but it's also something that she has created.

I like that thought of the ironic power because even though it is like a powerful thing,

to give birth, even though like gesting a baby is very powerful, if you don't have control over that power, it's also very destructive.

It can really come back to haunt you.

The power to reproduce.

It's a very sort of a double-edged sword, which is awful to think of.

That's a really good point.

I think it's so counter to everything that Connie has been socialized in her life that this is what women do and even if men are terrible to you, you still have your child, your children, and that can be your comfort.

You know, her name is Consuelo is her full name, right?

Consolation and I think that's kind of what she's sort of thinking about motherhood in some way, right, as this consolation for everything else that she has gone through.

And it's a really radical, different way to imagine.

even right what a relationship is like this idea of like co-mothering that you would come together potentially with people who are biologically male but also female and all have an equal relationship to the child together right none of you has a priority over any of the others with regard to the child that again she seems to see that as something that's potentially being taken away from women.

But also, you know, it's interesting that in the novel that co-mothers are also rarely sexual partners as well, right?

She says that that messes things.

Luciente explains something like, oh, it's very messy to try to raise children with someone you're having sex with, which is, I mean, wow.

You know, it's a very strong passage.

It was like, whoa, right?

Like, nothing could be more antithetical to.

The current taken-for-granted ideas about what family is supposed to be than that.

So, yeah, what a radical idea.

Yeah, once you start to disarticulate those things and once you allow yourself to think, like, yeah, it is kind of difficult to put those things together.

Like, oh, yeah, what if you never ended up in a situation where your partner was jealous of your child because you're trying to divide your attention and these things?

It just kind of opens up a whole new world.

And, like, I think it also gives a lot of space for men to take more pleasure and more pride in raising children.

There's this passage, Connie says, but a good man, for instance, a man is supposed to be strong, hold his liquor, attractive to women, able to beat out other men, lucky, hard, tough, macho, we call it, muyambre.

Not to be a fool, not to get too involved, to look out for number one, to make good money.

Well, to get ahead, you step on people like my brother Louis.

You knuckle under to the big guys and you walk over the people underneath.

I think it's so grim.

You know, like you have to be able to beat other men.

There's going to be somebody at the bottom then.

And like there's nothing in there about like the loving relationships that you see in Luciente's time at all.

Yeah.

Well, you mentioned Belle Hooks too, right?

And this is also how she talks about patriarchy, though lots of people talk about patriarchy this way, that patriarchy is not just about men over women.

It's about men over other men.

It's about creating a pyramid hierarchy at which is the top is, you know, the king or the ruler or, you know, the grand patriarch and maybe above him, the will of God.

And everyone else is to fall in line.

And that the definition of masculinity under this, you know, Western concept of patriarchy is to, you know, try to try to get up the pyramid in some way.

To dominate.

Other men by whatever means you can attain it.

And I think to illustrate that is in this way to make it grim, right?

Is to try to draw attention to everything that is denied men when their identity is tied to the domination of others.

And I think we see that in the novel through Louise, who not only has agency over Connie, right, but he has this like series of progressively whiter wives who runs a greenhouse, which I think is, or a nursery, which is really telling, right?

That where he uses pesticides and poisons, dominating nature in this very toxic kind of way.

So he's like this emblem of how a Chicano man in this novel aspires to whiteness and wealth as a means to get up the hierarchy that's been presented to him.

By patriarchy in his time.

But I think we also see it with the doctors at the hospital, right?

Dr.

Redding, et cetera, who similarly are overseeing the junior doctors, they're overseeing the nurses, they're overseeing the patients.

And everything that they're doing is for their own ambition to make a name for themselves as these scientific innovators.

But they don't really care about care, right?

They're really doing it for themselves.

And in Madapoisette, I think it's very easy to lose track of what biological sex any of the characters even are supposed to be because they don't even use gendered pronouns, right?

I really like they use per in person.

Yep, that's great.

I always hope that my students will take up saying per in person, just like in the context of our class.

I try to do it when I'm talking about the novel, but they'll kind of revert to just gendering the characters like Luciente is she.

But whatever.

You know, there's no gendered names, there's no gendered roles.

When Connie first meets Luciente, right, she thinks that person is a man.

And then when they're meeting Bea and Jackrabbit, some of the other male characters in Matta Poissett, they are loving and kind.

And I think Barbarossa is breastfeeding at some point.

And there's like a party, and they get all dressed up and are wearing these like flowy clothes.

And you think about how, you know, men in our culture, with the exception of queer men, don't get a lot of opportunity for dress up or self-expression.

You know, if they take too much interest in children, they get a side eye, right?

So there's all these ways that we still, I think, deny men parts of the pleasure of things that we call.

feminine.

We call things feminine almost as a way to make them not available to men.

I was thinking, I heard somewhere, most men never receive flowers in their life.

Yeah.

Until they die.

Which is just heartbreaking.

Everyone deserves flowers.

Absolutely, yeah.

I love this.

I'm going to come back to something that you said because you know you're talking about Louise getting progressively whiter wives.

Race comes up actually kind of a lot in this book.

Class comes up a lot in this book.

Disability rights come up a lot.

I mean, there's just like a whole gambit of things that are brought up in this book.

Connie herself is Chicana, but the future seems to sort of divorce color from culture.

It happens very early on.

And Connie kind of struggles with this.

She struggles with this throughout the book.

She sees black and brown people, but she struggles to understand their experience in the future.

She constantly is thinking back to Claude, who is her boyfriend who dies, and how

Important his experiences were as a blind black man, and then she liked sees these people that remind her of Claude in the future.

I think B is the main person that she sees, and she doesn't understand how he's not angry, he's not mad, he doesn't feel the same things that Claude does.

I'm curious what your thoughts are here.

What is at stake divorcing sort of the phenotype variation, color from culture?

Yeah, I think this is one of the really controversial thought experiments that Piercy is running.

Especially, you know, she is a white passing author, she's Jewish, but she herself is not a Chicana or black or any of these other experiences she describes.

But she talks about how in The Brooders, Luciente explains that they still create phenotypical.

Variation.

In fact, they have usually maybe even a disproportionate number of highly melanated folks among the babies that get born just to kind of make sure that there is going to always be this diversity of humans.

And I think it's, yeah, I think it's a really interesting thought experiment to run.

I mean, on the one hand, I worry that this vision becomes sort of the, maybe this reference won't hit now, but sort of the United Colors of Benetton early 2000s, sort of, you know, racial difference is just aesthetic difference and we can all be dancing in the Kmart commercial or whatever.

You know what I mean?

Like, oh, it's all harmony.

It's all just like different, you know.

But I think that what is different.

between that sort of corporate multiculturalism, or not even multiculturalism, the corporate racial diversity, which is really about anyone can be a consumer of our products.

This is not a product we're marketing to white people or to black people or whatever.

It's about like just a lifestyle that we want to treat as being attainable to anybody.

Is that in Mattapoisette, they still have culture.

They are still very values oriented.

They talk about how they've modeled their culture on past communities that valued conflict resolution and ecology and communitarian values.

And so they won, they have culture, right?

But they don't see the culture as being tied to some phenotype.

So there's something interesting in that idea that they can never have this experience.

of racialized discourses now, like with white supremacy, like, oh, the white people are the heirs to Western culture.

There's no capacity to connect a certain way of life to a kind of people or create those hierarchies, which are rarely just treated in discourse as being about biology, but are often also seen as providing the basis for some culture.

You know, we are the most rational people, and so we have the most rational culture, beautiful culture, whatever.

And so I think they're doing something interesting by having those values, by having the culture be something that anyone can participate in.

Absolutely.

And I think it's interesting too, because my first thought was, well, that's going to wash away history.

But the whole point of the book is that these people are going back in time to remember.

history kind of a thing.

Exactly.

So they say we know why we do this.

We know why we are designing our babies with this diversity.

It's because we know that in your time people would create these hierarchies and these differences and we don't ever want that to happen again.

And I think it is, I'm really glad you said that.

It's a decision that's very conscious, right?

And based out of a historical kind of literacy about what race can do when we assume that culture and biology are inherently connected.

Absolutely.

Disability is a little bit similar.

You know, disability rights do come into this quite a bit in various ways.

Claude is blind, for example.

That has a huge impact on the way that Connie sees different disabilities.

It's interesting too, because like the mental

ill for example they have a lot of capacity they're given a lot of agency in the book mostly in the entirely in the future i mean in the past they have like none i think that definitely there's something to be said about how they're breeding out disability what are your thoughts there so i think this is also a tricky piece of the novel and the thought experiment that piercy is running so when she was researching the novel i know that she did work with folks that were involved in the anti-psychiatry movement and working for justice for institutionalized folks so she obviously has a lot of compassion for neurodivergence and sees thinking differently not as a disability but as a different perspective and in matter

Poisit, folks who are experiencing psychological breakdown or distress, right, can go to the madhouses and it's a place to rest and recuperate and get in touch with yourself until you're ready to be with the rest of the world.

When they're talking about the brooders, there's this whole discourse about the extent to which they're going to use genetic engineering with the babies, right?

And so there's a debate in the future.

You know, Matopoiset is just one of many communities that exist at this time that are all sort of self-governing.

And there's a group called the Shapers who want to shape their future and be sort of pro-like we would call them transhumanists now.

They want new capabilities.

But in Matopoiset, they have decided we're just going to get rid of genetic diseases.

And it's so tricky when you think about really, really devastating diseases.

Like I was trying to think.

of a list, you know, things like cystic fibrosis, which are just devastating on people.

I think even today, you know, as much as we want to acknowledge the diversity of experience that comes through disability, I think there are some disabilities that themselves are, well, I don't even want to call them disabilities, right?

There are some genetic conditions that I think we do recognize are primarily a matter of suffering, right?

What I am curious about is like, I wish that she had had, say, a character who was like a little person or something like that.

Or maybe somebody who was deaf, somebody who had something that also carries culture with it.

Yes.

Right?

So that we could have had this philosophical discussion about difference and culture without this sort of simplified conversation that is just

about eliminating disease because I think as it's very apparent in her discussion of mental illness that it's subjective, right?

What we consider to be mental illness.

I wish that there was a little bit more of that discussion about what we consider to be a disability in the first place.

I think you get the sense that there's a desire to adapt the world to the people.

It's not Brave New World where they're trying to create specific people to fit a definition of society to make a cog in the machine.

But in that exploration of how people are sort of self-determining within the supportive structure of the community, I wish there had been a little bit more discussion of physiological difference.

Absolutely, yeah.

Beyond the aesthetic.

Yeah, right, exactly.

I think we're just about wrapped up here.

We have talked about

A lot of different things.

This book is so dense.

So dense.

Read this book.

It's a good one, but it is dense.

Is there anything that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you would really like to mention or that you would really like to highlight?

I think going back to the ecofeminism, we often talk about the novel as an ecofeminist text.

There's also a reading on my syllabus that we use.

Becke, I think is the name of the author.

That I really appreciate how Piercy is exploring relationships to nature and the idea of creating not just a more democratic world, but a more sustainable world and a world that honors diverse knowledges.

Like there's a scene where Connie has escaped the institution.

and Luciente shows up and is pointing out to her what plants are edible in her environment.

Thinking about subjugated knowledges, like the idea that indigenous knowledge, understandings of just what plants are in our environment, what they do, whether you can eat them, is something we don't talk about that much, right?

It's so interesting going back to education, right, that American school children, right, can tell you the name of every dinosaur.

They can tell you the name of all the animals in the Serengeti, but they can't tell you what the plants under their feet are or do.

And so I really love the way that the novel is bringing us, making us ask to be a little bit more attentive to the world immediately.

around us and to see that as a site of survival and kinship and a place that is just as valuable to know and understand as anything in the cosmos, right?

I really appreciate that about the novel.

Awesome.

Well, Marissa, thank you so very much for joining us today.

It was an absolutely wonderful conversation.

I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed reading the book.

So thank you for bringing that to my attention.

And thank you, listener, for joining us today.

I would like to thank Logic Moon for using his awesome song in our podcast.

And if you can, send him a cup of coffee from the link on our page.

Until next time, I'm sending my goodwill into the vast and awesome universe.

Next time on The Ansible, Jodi will be talking to Zach Whitaker about Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary.

This podcast was recorded and edited in Michigan State University Library's G.

Robert Vincent Voice Library.

The views expressed

On this podcast, do not reflect the views of Michigan State University Libraries or Michigan State University.