WEBVTT 00:00:05.840 --> 00:00:11.840 This week on The Ansible, Jodi talks to Marissa Brandt about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. 00:00:14.640 --> 00:00:22.800 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. 00:00:23.120 --> 00:00:26.720 I'm Jody Coulter, the Life Sciences Librarian at Michigan State University. 00:00:27.040 --> 00:00:28.080 Today I'm talking with Dr. 00:00:28.160 --> 00:00:36.080 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. 00:00:36.400 --> 00:00:41.120 We are going to be talking about the book Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. 00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:46.480 Before we begin, Marissa, please tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do here. 00:00:46.800 --> 00:00:48.880 Hi, yeah, thanks for having me, Jodi. 00:00:49.120 --> 00:00:59.760 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. 00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:09.200 of Lyman Briggs is to help science students put the sciences in a broader context. 00:01:09.520 --> 00:01:20.960 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. 00:01:21.280 --> 00:01:38.000 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. 00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:48.480 I'm really interested in, as Donna Haraway, one of my intellectual influences, says, stories basically make the world. 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:57.120 We live in a world of storytelling and we know science through the stories that it tells about the world that we live in. 00:01:57.440 --> 00:01:59.840 That's often what I'm doing with my students. 00:02:00.320 --> 00:02:03.760 thinking about the stories that we tell about science. 00:02:04.080 --> 00:02:38.480 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. 00:02:38.800 --> 00:02:39.680 Yeah, absolutely. 00:02:39.840 --> 00:02:43.280 I'm so thrilled to have you here because that's kind of the point of this podcast. 00:02:43.520 --> 00:02:44.800 We are reading science fiction. 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:50.240 We're trying to figure out where is that crossroad between that fiction and the nonfiction in science fiction. 00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:51.440 I'm thrilled to have you here. 00:02:51.600 --> 00:02:52.800 Thank you so very much. 00:02:53.120 --> 00:02:57.120 As I mentioned today, we are talking about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. 00:02:57.520 --> 00:02:59.840 And this novel follows the story of Connie Rain. 00:03:00.880 --> 00:03:07.440 A woman held against her will in a mental hospital, where she is chosen to take part in a terrifying neuroelectric experiment. 00:03:07.680 --> 00:03:12.800 It's actually really quite graphic, the detail that goes into that. 00:03:13.360 --> 00:03:19.760 But Connie is also in touch with people from the future and can travel to the future to learn from these people. 00:03:20.080 --> 00:03:25.120 And they help her sort of fight against this imprisonment and fight for the future that they inhabit. 00:03:25.360 --> 00:03:28.400 So making sure that their future is the one that comes to pass. 00:03:29.040 --> 00:03:32.960 I want to begin because this book is very dense. 00:03:33.280 --> 00:03:37.680 It's like every page has so much to unpack. 00:03:37.920 --> 00:03:44.160 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. 00:03:44.480 --> 00:03:46.400 And it's very clearly a feminist text. 00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:52.320 It's very clearly like set in that sort of feminist framework and it leans heavily on philosophy and theory personally. 00:03:52.880 --> 00:03:57.280 You use this book to teach a class and with lots of other reading. 00:03:57.360 --> 00:03:59.600 There's you have lots of other reading in it. 00:04:00.240 --> 00:04:01.280 Why this book? 00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:04.800 What is it about this book that draws you back to it again and again? 00:04:05.440 --> 00:04:06.640 Yeah, great question. 00:04:07.200 --> 00:04:15.600 So, as you mentioned, the story takes place in two primary timeframes, right? 00:04:15.840 --> 00:04:20.240 Connie's present in New York, presumably 1976, right? 00:04:20.400 --> 00:04:30.320 The time the novel was published, and also in the future, 2146, I think, is the future that she goes to. 00:04:30.960 --> 00:04:47.760 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. 00:04:48.080 --> 00:04:58.400 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. 00:04:58.720 --> 00:04:59.600 I'd say about 80%. 00:05:00.160 --> 00:05:04.480 of Leibniz students in my experience come in pre-health sciences. 00:05:04.800 --> 00:05:18.640 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. 00:05:18.960 --> 00:05:25.520 She's really a case study in the loss of autonomy, right? 00:05:25.760 --> 00:05:38.560 So thinking of her through a bioethical and biopolitical lens, we really see how institutions can dehumanize people. 00:05:39.120 --> 00:05:47.440 And I want my students to have a sense of that history and that risk of dehumanization. 00:05:47.760 --> 00:05:52.000 And that's something that comes up again and again in Connie's experience. 00:05:52.320 --> 00:05:59.840 You know, what the doctors really want to do is insert a chip into her brain to control her behavior. 00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:04.560 You know, something that my students now, you know, see as Neuralink. 00:06:05.200 --> 00:06:34.400 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? 00:06:34.560 --> 00:06:41.440 Who were seen as inherently criminal, violent, ill, socially malcontent. 00:06:41.680 --> 00:06:59.600 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. 00:07:00.160 --> 00:07:06.240 Been institutionalized are very much the conditions of her environment, right? 00:07:06.560 --> 00:07:10.080 And not to say that you know they were always good choices to make. 00:07:10.240 --> 00:07:26.320 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? 00:07:26.640 --> 00:07:30.480 But it's you can tell she was just having a very, very, very bad day. 00:07:31.120 --> 00:07:41.120 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. 00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:48.560 But, you know, the hospital only takes the pimp story seriously as a comment on patriarchal power, right? 00:07:48.880 --> 00:07:51.600 So she's disenfranchised in all of these different ways. 00:07:51.840 --> 00:07:59.520 And I want my students to kind of empathize that, you know, the people that we sometimes as society 00:08:00.400 --> 00:08:04.480 treat as not having agency or not having control, right? 00:08:04.800 --> 00:08:07.600 They still have stories that are worth listening to. 00:08:07.920 --> 00:08:18.960 And that doesn't mean that we have a license to further take away their agency, especially in medical contexts. 00:08:19.040 --> 00:08:23.280 Because again and again, Connie says she does not want this neural implant. 00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:25.440 She'll be good, right? 00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:27.680 And people disregard her. 00:08:27.840 --> 00:08:35.360 They say, well, but if you want to ever get out of here, right, they use all these coercive methods. 00:08:35.680 --> 00:08:42.240 And I just think that's so important and powerful to tell someone's story from that perspective and really listen. 00:08:42.560 --> 00:08:50.720 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. 00:08:50.960 --> 00:08:51.280 Yeah. 00:08:51.520 --> 00:08:57.040 And then the future that she goes to, right, is very philosophical. 00:08:57.120 --> 00:08:59.760 So kind of in the mode of classic YouTube. 00:09:00.640 --> 00:09:01.200 Fiction. 00:09:01.520 --> 00:09:17.200 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. 00:09:17.520 --> 00:09:38.320 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. 00:09:38.640 --> 00:09:47.680 And so there are really interesting things, again, that I think are useful to think about for medical students or really anybody. 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:59.760 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. 00:10:00.240 --> 00:10:20.320 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. 00:10:20.640 --> 00:10:29.520 So it's really a radically democratic and thoughtful vision of what the future can be. 00:10:29.840 --> 00:10:35.920 And I want my students to think about that as a possibility, right? 00:10:36.080 --> 00:10:43.040 To think about a world that is created first and foremost by people out of their values. 00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:44.640 Absolutely. 00:10:44.880 --> 00:10:53.440 One of the things that you mentioned was sort of like this democratic view of life, essentially, like everybody participating. 00:10:53.760 --> 00:10:59.600 One of my favorite themes in this book, I like went wild over when I started to read it. 00:11:00.240 --> 00:11:59.760 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 00:12:00.480 --> 00:12:04.080 On the whole yin and yin of it, that we could foresee our guests. 00:12:04.320 --> 00:12:06.080 It's one of my favorite passages. 00:12:06.240 --> 00:12:07.680 It's like so profound. 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:14.720 And I love this because it puts agency of science in the hands of people, everyday people, all of the people. 00:12:15.040 --> 00:12:16.800 And I think that's like a very important message. 00:12:17.040 --> 00:12:19.120 Do you see this type of science happening today? 00:12:19.440 --> 00:12:22.000 Have you seen this, this sort of democracy? 00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:24.560 What would it take to have this exist in our time? 00:12:24.880 --> 00:12:26.240 That's a great question. 00:12:26.560 --> 00:12:33.440 So there have been some experimental efforts various places around the world. 00:12:33.760 --> 00:12:41.680 I want to say Denmark, for example, is a place that ran these like, I'm drawing a blank on what they're called. 00:12:42.160 --> 00:12:52.160 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. 00:12:52.480 --> 00:12:56.880 But it wasn't always clear how that actually played out, right? 00:12:57.120 --> 00:12:59.760 That it was an effort to invite. 00:13:00.480 --> 00:13:07.920 The public, but at the end of the day, there's not a vote, right, about what's actually gonna get done. 00:13:08.480 --> 00:13:36.880 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? 00:13:37.120 --> 00:13:54.800 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. 00:13:55.440 --> 00:13:59.840 And so I don't think we really have anything about it. 00:14:00.160 --> 00:14:18.960 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? 00:14:19.040 --> 00:14:25.760 Like, or within corporations deciding the direction that they want science to go. 00:14:26.080 --> 00:14:30.080 And Piercy even says another quote, I think, from the same section, right? 00:14:30.320 --> 00:14:31.360 Connie resists that. 00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:35.920 She's like, who am I to say what direction, you know, science could go? 00:14:36.160 --> 00:14:40.320 And I think a lot of us share that view that she's expressing. 00:14:40.560 --> 00:14:59.760 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. 00:15:00.320 --> 00:15:05.040 To vote on new laws or regulations, right? 00:15:05.200 --> 00:15:08.960 So, because ultimately it's about values in the world we want to live in. 00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:20.240 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? 00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:28.560 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. 00:15:28.880 --> 00:15:32.640 Don't you think that that had an effect on what people worked on? 00:15:32.960 --> 00:15:34.400 Sweet petunias. 00:15:34.960 --> 00:15:38.880 And what and what we do comes down on everybody. 00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:43.600 We use up a confounded lot of resources, scarce materials, energy. 00:15:43.760 --> 00:15:44.720 We have to account. 00:15:45.040 --> 00:15:47.600 There's only one pool of air to breathe. 00:15:47.920 --> 00:15:51.920 And I wish we did think a little bit more like that. 00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:53.040 I agree. 00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:54.720 That's a very profound sentiment. 00:15:54.880 --> 00:15:59.760 I mean, it's like it reminds me sometimes of NASA's constantly trying to. 00:16:00.560 --> 00:16:03.680 explain how their science is helping people every day. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:08.880 How does studying a star light years away help us? 00:16:09.520 --> 00:16:15.520 And if they're trying to describe that to us, then obviously it has some kind of impact on our life. 00:16:15.760 --> 00:16:18.640 Like obviously it's going to affect us in some way. 00:16:18.960 --> 00:16:22.320 And so I think this actually brings it home even closer, even more. 00:16:22.880 --> 00:16:28.640 Yeah, we can study, you know, aging if we want to, but what resources is that going to take away? 00:16:28.800 --> 00:16:30.000 What are we going to gain from that? 00:16:30.160 --> 00:16:31.600 And ultimately, they decide against it. 00:16:31.680 --> 00:16:33.600 And I think that's a very, very profound statement. 00:16:33.920 --> 00:16:46.960 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. 00:16:47.040 --> 00:16:48.320 Science is a human invention. 00:16:48.640 --> 00:16:52.800 I'm very curious to know: why is it so hard to see this myth? 00:16:53.040 --> 00:16:56.400 Why can't we see corporations and the government running our science? 00:16:56.560 --> 00:16:58.240 Why does that seem objective to us? 00:16:58.640 --> 00:16:59.760 That's a really interesting question. 00:17:00.400 --> 00:17:07.760 I suspect that it has something to do with the way that K-12 education is organized. 00:17:08.080 --> 00:17:26.080 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. 00:17:26.400 --> 00:17:37.920 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. 00:17:38.240 --> 00:17:47.520 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. 00:17:47.680 --> 00:17:50.240 Science is a collection of facts. 00:17:50.560 --> 00:17:59.680 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 00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:04.640 The historical context that led to them. 00:18:04.960 --> 00:18:27.360 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. 00:18:27.680 --> 00:18:37.760 But to understand that every innovation came from some context that paid for it, right? 00:18:38.160 --> 00:18:48.160 That that's not a story that students are likely to hear or that any of us are likely to hear until maybe college. 00:18:48.400 --> 00:18:59.680 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 00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:00.960 Culture, right? 00:19:01.120 --> 00:19:21.760 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. 00:19:22.480 --> 00:19:30.960 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. 00:19:31.280 --> 00:19:49.200 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. 00:19:49.520 --> 00:19:51.280 I mean, it's very interesting, right? 00:19:51.440 --> 00:19:56.000 That so I didn't, I didn't do speculative fiction work in my graduate program. 00:19:56.160 --> 00:19:59.760 My graduate program, I was actually really interested. 00:20:00.240 --> 00:20:03.120 Interested in technological innovation. 00:20:03.280 --> 00:20:10.480 And the technology that I got really excited about was using virtual reality as a therapeutic tool. 00:20:10.800 --> 00:20:21.440 And at the time that I started doing this work in the like 2006, there was very, very little VR going on, period, right? 00:20:21.600 --> 00:20:24.960 So 2013 is when Facebook bought Oculus. 00:20:25.280 --> 00:20:29.040 So that was when the rest of the world started paying attention. 00:20:29.360 --> 00:20:37.600 But prior to that, right, no one had really paid much attention to VR since the early 90s, you know, like Lawn Mower Man. 00:20:39.440 --> 00:20:42.320 But VR has been around for a really long time, right? 00:20:42.480 --> 00:20:59.680 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. 00:21:00.560 --> 00:21:05.360 for flight simulators, for all of these kinds of things. 00:21:05.680 --> 00:21:16.320 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. 00:21:16.640 --> 00:21:18.880 by the government, by the military. 00:21:19.200 --> 00:21:34.720 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? 00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:47.520 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? 00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:59.360 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. 00:22:00.320 --> 00:22:22.960 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. 00:22:23.280 --> 00:22:25.440 And it's really interesting to me that. 00:22:25.840 --> 00:22:44.640 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. 00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:47.760 You know, Connie's being studied. 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:55.760 Her boyfriend, who dies, you know, before the start of the novel died during like prison experimentation. 00:22:56.320 --> 00:22:59.760 So I think there's a lot of interesting things. 00:23:00.480 --> 00:23:15.200 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? 00:23:15.520 --> 00:23:15.920 Absolutely. 00:23:16.080 --> 00:23:24.320 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. 00:23:24.640 --> 00:23:32.800 I think that one of the more fascinating approaches taken in this book is like in Connie's time, science is kind of evil. 00:23:33.280 --> 00:23:39.520 It's like it's very independent, it's very, it's this thing that people do for their entire lives. 00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:41.840 That's all they do is just science. 00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:47.200 And in Luciente's time, science is part of everyday lives. 00:23:47.280 --> 00:23:48.560 It's that democratic process. 00:23:48.800 --> 00:23:51.440 It's literally ingrained in everything they do. 00:23:51.760 --> 00:23:55.440 They grow their food, they eat their food, they have their art, they have their science. 00:23:55.600 --> 00:23:57.920 It's like all part of everybody's lives. 00:23:58.240 --> 00:23:59.760 There's a passage, your scientists were so. 00:24:00.320 --> 00:24:01.120 childish. 00:24:01.440 --> 00:24:10.560 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. 00:24:10.880 --> 00:24:11.760 And it's very powerful. 00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:16.880 As you mentioned, you know, both Connie and her boyfriend have been severely affected by this. 00:24:17.200 --> 00:24:21.760 I'm curious, obviously this book has a lot of science, you read a lot of other science. 00:24:22.080 --> 00:24:26.960 Immediately this made me think of Frankenstein, you know, like the ties there. 00:24:27.280 --> 00:24:30.640 Do you draw parallels between your texts in your classroom? 00:24:30.960 --> 00:24:35.920 Are you constantly pulling out these threads from each of the things that you have your students read? 00:24:36.400 --> 00:24:37.600 Yeah, we do. 00:24:37.840 --> 00:24:47.280 So Frankenstein is actually the first novel that we read together as a class and we read it through a feminist lens. 00:24:47.600 --> 00:24:59.760 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. 00:25:00.160 --> 00:25:32.080 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. 00:25:32.400 --> 00:25:33.120 Absolutely, yeah. 00:25:33.440 --> 00:25:36.240 But that's that's the setup there, right? 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:42.800 And then obviously, you know, Frankenstein, the middle part of the book is told from the monster's perspective. 00:25:43.360 --> 00:25:59.440 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. 00:26:00.320 --> 00:26:21.440 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. 00:26:21.760 --> 00:26:40.000 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. 00:26:40.320 --> 00:26:42.160 So in a way, she is kind of abandoned. 00:26:42.320 --> 00:26:58.960 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. 00:26:59.280 --> 00:26:59.760 And her brother. 00:27:00.800 --> 00:27:04.560 Who co-signs on the institutionalization. 00:27:05.200 --> 00:27:09.680 So, yeah, I guess they are kind of, yeah, she is abandoned. 00:27:10.720 --> 00:27:13.920 The creature never really makes friends, right? 00:27:14.160 --> 00:27:24.080 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. 00:27:24.480 --> 00:27:26.160 I feel like Connie never gets that, right? 00:27:26.240 --> 00:27:29.920 She only gets her co-institutionalized friends. 00:27:30.080 --> 00:27:40.160 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. 00:27:40.320 --> 00:27:43.760 But they both share a dehumanization. 00:27:44.080 --> 00:27:51.120 And I think one of the interesting ways that we talk about the creature is nature and nurture, right? 00:27:51.280 --> 00:27:59.760 The creature is never cared for, so we have no capacity to know what the creature could have become. 00:28:00.320 --> 00:28:01.200 Had they been cared for. 00:28:01.280 --> 00:28:18.320 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. 00:28:18.640 --> 00:28:20.720 You made me feel hatred. 00:28:21.280 --> 00:28:24.080 And now I'm an enemy of humanity. 00:28:24.400 --> 00:28:40.080 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. 00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:59.760 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. 00:29:00.160 --> 00:29:13.360 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. 00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:16.000 And that's a real contrast with the creature. 00:29:16.160 --> 00:29:18.400 The creature has no future. 00:29:18.640 --> 00:29:23.360 Victor won't make a bride for him famously. 00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:28.240 But Connie does dream of a better future. 00:29:28.880 --> 00:29:35.280 But similarly, too, you know, another similarity is that they both rebel against their oppressors violently. 00:29:35.520 --> 00:29:38.400 At the end, I was kind of a little startled, actually, by that ending. 00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:39.200 I was like, oh. 00:29:40.160 --> 00:29:41.360 It is a startling ending. 00:29:41.520 --> 00:29:41.680 Yeah. 00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:43.920 I'm going to pivot a little bit away from the science. 00:29:44.080 --> 00:29:45.760 Not much, but just a little bit. 00:29:46.000 --> 00:29:53.600 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. 00:29:53.840 --> 00:29:59.120 It's something that Connie is faced with on one of her very first trips forward in time. 00:30:00.240 --> 00:30:01.440 what it means to be a mother. 00:30:01.680 --> 00:30:14.560 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. 00:30:14.880 --> 00:30:22.560 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. 00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.920 The original production, the power to give birth. 00:30:26.240 --> 00:30:32.560 Because as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal and males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. 00:30:32.800 --> 00:30:34.320 So we all became mothers. 00:30:34.480 --> 00:30:38.240 Every child has three to break the nuclear bonding. 00:30:38.800 --> 00:30:45.600 There's so much going on in this just like one little passage and it was one of the most powerful passages for me. 00:30:45.840 --> 00:30:46.800 It was very bold. 00:30:46.960 --> 00:30:49.280 There was again a lot to break down here. 00:30:49.600 --> 00:30:53.280 It did remind me a lot of Bell Hook's The Feminism is for Everyone. 00:30:53.360 --> 00:30:56.480 She has a chapter that sort of talks a little bit about this. 00:30:56.800 --> 00:30:59.760 And later on, I think in the story, Connie sees a man breast. 00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:05.520 Feeding, so it's like very much like the lines between men and women are very gray. 00:31:05.840 --> 00:31:18.960 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? 00:31:19.120 --> 00:31:22.640 Is that something that's still held by feminism today? 00:31:24.560 --> 00:31:26.240 That's a very big question. 00:31:27.360 --> 00:31:30.080 I mean, I have the historical answer. 00:31:30.240 --> 00:31:34.800 I don't know about the contemporary answer. 00:31:35.440 --> 00:31:45.680 So, I think, I mean, this is really a question that I think comes up a lot more in trans communities now, right? 00:31:46.000 --> 00:31:59.440 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. 00:32:00.160 --> 00:32:03.280 Trans men carrying babies. 00:32:04.240 --> 00:32:59.760 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 00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:13.200 Is trying to open up this possibility that the role of caretaker can belong to anyone, regardless of their biology. 00:33:13.520 --> 00:33:21.200 So, the technology that Piercy has described in the novel is called a brooder, right? 00:33:21.280 --> 00:33:23.840 It's like an ectogenesis machine. 00:33:24.160 --> 00:33:34.320 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? 00:33:34.880 --> 00:33:52.240 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. 00:33:52.480 --> 00:33:54.880 And mother is a dirty word. 00:33:55.440 --> 00:33:59.760 So, by imagining this brooder system and imagining 00:34:00.480 --> 00:34:10.080 that anyone could become a parent and that it's not the technology that is dehumanizing this process. 00:34:10.320 --> 00:34:14.000 It's the whole social apparatus around it. 00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:48.480 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. 00:34:48.800 --> 00:34:59.680 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. 00:35:00.320 --> 00:35:23.760 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? 00:35:24.880 --> 00:35:41.520 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. 00:35:41.840 --> 00:35:59.760 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. 00:36:00.880 --> 00:36:03.120 and values-driven. 00:36:04.000 --> 00:36:04.960 Absolutely, yeah. 00:36:05.200 --> 00:36:13.920 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. 00:36:14.160 --> 00:36:17.360 It was like she gets so ill that she gets thrown out of the future. 00:36:17.600 --> 00:36:25.280 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. 00:36:25.600 --> 00:36:30.560 Why do you think she becomes so drastically ill at seeing the gestation chamber? 00:36:30.880 --> 00:36:42.640 I think because it is strange and unnatural situation, and I think that that's one part of it, right? 00:36:42.800 --> 00:36:49.120 That it's just a very eerie thing to look at that we don't normally get to see. 00:36:49.280 --> 00:36:59.760 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. 00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:03.680 And I don't think that that was circulating at the time yet. 00:37:03.920 --> 00:37:07.920 So this also would have kind of been a little bit body horror, right? 00:37:08.000 --> 00:37:14.320 You never would see a fetus unless it was, you know, unfortunately not living, right? 00:37:14.640 --> 00:37:17.760 So I think there's something disturbing about that idea. 00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:24.240 And then there's also this part of the reaction that has to do with meaning making, right? 00:37:24.880 --> 00:37:28.560 She has lost so much in her life, right? 00:37:28.720 --> 00:37:34.400 She had to drop out of school because she, I think, had to get an abortion, right? 00:37:34.560 --> 00:37:43.280 And her professor was sexually exploiting her and she's had a really difficult time keeping jobs. 00:37:43.360 --> 00:37:46.080 She's been abused by some of her boyfriends. 00:37:46.240 --> 00:37:49.600 The one boyfriend who was nice to her gets killed in jail. 00:37:49.920 --> 00:37:59.680 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 00:38:00.240 --> 00:38:01.600 really conflicted about that. 00:38:01.920 --> 00:38:08.640 She still has a sense of identity and pride that this was something that she created that was beautiful and good. 00:38:08.960 --> 00:38:14.240 And I think she sees the brooder as a potential loss. 00:38:14.800 --> 00:38:21.440 But Luciente says to her, it was part of women's long revolution when we were breaking the old hierarchies. 00:38:21.520 --> 00:38:29.680 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. 00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:32.480 The original production, the power to give birth. 00:38:32.800 --> 00:38:43.440 So I think it's interesting to think of that as a form of power, especially in the patriarchal context that Connie lives in. 00:38:43.680 --> 00:38:54.080 It's this almost ironic power because it's a site of exploitation, but it's also something that she has created. 00:38:55.040 --> 00:38:59.760 I like that thought of the ironic power because even though it is like a powerful thing, 00:39:00.160 --> 00:39:07.600 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. 00:39:07.840 --> 00:39:09.920 It can really come back to haunt you. 00:39:10.080 --> 00:39:11.360 The power to reproduce. 00:39:13.280 --> 00:39:16.880 It's a very sort of a double-edged sword, which is awful to think of. 00:39:17.360 --> 00:39:18.480 That's a really good point. 00:39:18.800 --> 00:39:38.800 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. 00:39:39.040 --> 00:39:41.600 You know, her name is Consuelo is her full name, right? 00:39:41.760 --> 00:39:52.960 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. 00:39:53.280 --> 00:39:59.760 And it's a really radical, different way to imagine. 00:40:01.200 --> 00:40:31.600 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. 00:40:31.920 --> 00:40:38.880 But also, you know, it's interesting that in the novel that co-mothers are also rarely sexual partners as well, right? 00:40:39.120 --> 00:40:41.040 She says that that messes things. 00:40:41.360 --> 00:40:50.160 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. 00:40:50.480 --> 00:40:54.400 You know, it's a very strong passage. 00:40:54.480 --> 00:40:56.560 It was like, whoa, right? 00:40:56.800 --> 00:40:59.760 Like, nothing could be more antithetical to. 00:41:00.880 --> 00:41:06.960 The current taken-for-granted ideas about what family is supposed to be than that. 00:41:07.200 --> 00:41:09.280 So, yeah, what a radical idea. 00:41:09.600 --> 00:41:19.120 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. 00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:29.520 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? 00:41:31.360 --> 00:41:33.200 It just kind of opens up a whole new world. 00:41:33.360 --> 00:41:40.000 And, like, I think it also gives a lot of space for men to take more pleasure and more pride in raising children. 00:41:40.320 --> 00:41:54.160 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. 00:41:54.800 --> 00:41:59.520 Not to be a fool, not to get too involved, to look out for number one, to make good money. 00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:03.040 Well, to get ahead, you step on people like my brother Louis. 00:42:03.280 --> 00:42:06.640 You knuckle under to the big guys and you walk over the people underneath. 00:42:06.960 --> 00:42:09.040 I think it's so grim. 00:42:09.360 --> 00:42:11.520 You know, like you have to be able to beat other men. 00:42:11.600 --> 00:42:13.200 There's going to be somebody at the bottom then. 00:42:13.680 --> 00:42:20.080 And like there's nothing in there about like the loving relationships that you see in Luciente's time at all. 00:42:20.400 --> 00:42:20.560 Yeah. 00:42:20.720 --> 00:42:22.800 Well, you mentioned Belle Hooks too, right? 00:42:22.880 --> 00:42:31.440 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. 00:42:31.680 --> 00:42:33.600 It's about men over other men. 00:42:33.840 --> 00:42:45.360 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. 00:42:45.680 --> 00:42:48.160 And everyone else is to fall in line. 00:42:48.480 --> 00:42:59.200 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. 00:42:59.360 --> 00:42:59.760 To dominate. 00:43:00.400 --> 00:43:04.160 Other men by whatever means you can attain it. 00:43:04.480 --> 00:43:11.760 And I think to illustrate that is in this way to make it grim, right? 00:43:11.920 --> 00:43:21.520 Is to try to draw attention to everything that is denied men when their identity is tied to the domination of others. 00:43:21.760 --> 00:43:38.000 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? 00:43:38.320 --> 00:43:46.560 That where he uses pesticides and poisons, dominating nature in this very toxic kind of way. 00:43:47.040 --> 00:43:59.760 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. 00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:01.520 By patriarchy in his time. 00:44:01.760 --> 00:44:05.520 But I think we also see it with the doctors at the hospital, right? 00:44:05.600 --> 00:44:05.760 Dr. 00:44:05.840 --> 00:44:13.520 Redding, et cetera, who similarly are overseeing the junior doctors, they're overseeing the nurses, they're overseeing the patients. 00:44:13.840 --> 00:44:23.360 And everything that they're doing is for their own ambition to make a name for themselves as these scientific innovators. 00:44:23.680 --> 00:44:27.680 But they don't really care about care, right? 00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:31.440 They're really doing it for themselves. 00:44:31.760 --> 00:44:43.280 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? 00:44:43.440 --> 00:44:45.760 I really like they use per in person. 00:44:46.640 --> 00:44:47.920 Yep, that's great. 00:44:48.080 --> 00:44:53.280 I always hope that my students will take up saying per in person, just like in the context of our class. 00:44:53.440 --> 00:44:59.840 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. 00:45:00.320 --> 00:45:01.520 But whatever. 00:45:01.840 --> 00:45:06.560 You know, there's no gendered names, there's no gendered roles. 00:45:07.120 --> 00:45:12.480 When Connie first meets Luciente, right, she thinks that person is a man. 00:45:13.920 --> 00:45:24.720 And then when they're meeting Bea and Jackrabbit, some of the other male characters in Matta Poissett, they are loving and kind. 00:45:24.960 --> 00:45:29.120 And I think Barbarossa is breastfeeding at some point. 00:45:29.440 --> 00:45:35.840 And there's like a party, and they get all dressed up and are wearing these like flowy clothes. 00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:45.600 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. 00:45:45.920 --> 00:45:50.720 You know, if they take too much interest in children, they get a side eye, right? 00:45:50.800 --> 00:45:59.680 So there's all these ways that we still, I think, deny men parts of the pleasure of things that we call. 00:46:00.240 --> 00:46:00.560 feminine. 00:46:00.640 --> 00:46:05.040 We call things feminine almost as a way to make them not available to men. 00:46:05.360 --> 00:46:11.680 I was thinking, I heard somewhere, most men never receive flowers in their life. 00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:12.240 Yeah. 00:46:12.720 --> 00:46:14.320 Until they die. 00:46:14.880 --> 00:46:17.200 Which is just heartbreaking. 00:46:17.920 --> 00:46:19.360 Everyone deserves flowers. 00:46:19.680 --> 00:46:20.640 Absolutely, yeah. 00:46:21.200 --> 00:46:21.600 I love this. 00:46:21.760 --> 00:46:27.680 I'm going to come back to something that you said because you know you're talking about Louise getting progressively whiter wives. 00:46:27.920 --> 00:46:30.320 Race comes up actually kind of a lot in this book. 00:46:30.800 --> 00:46:32.560 Class comes up a lot in this book. 00:46:32.880 --> 00:46:34.240 Disability rights come up a lot. 00:46:34.560 --> 00:46:38.320 I mean, there's just like a whole gambit of things that are brought up in this book. 00:46:38.640 --> 00:46:44.640 Connie herself is Chicana, but the future seems to sort of divorce color from culture. 00:46:44.960 --> 00:46:46.800 It happens very early on. 00:46:47.120 --> 00:46:48.480 And Connie kind of struggles with this. 00:46:48.720 --> 00:46:50.320 She struggles with this throughout the book. 00:46:50.640 --> 00:46:54.880 She sees black and brown people, but she struggles to understand their experience in the future. 00:46:55.040 --> 00:46:59.680 She constantly is thinking back to Claude, who is her boyfriend who dies, and how 00:47:00.240 --> 00:47:07.520 Important his experiences were as a blind black man, and then she liked sees these people that remind her of Claude in the future. 00:47:07.760 --> 00:47:19.520 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. 00:47:19.840 --> 00:47:22.560 I'm curious what your thoughts are here. 00:47:22.880 --> 00:47:29.120 What is at stake divorcing sort of the phenotype variation, color from culture? 00:47:30.400 --> 00:47:39.520 Yeah, I think this is one of the really controversial thought experiments that Piercy is running. 00:47:39.840 --> 00:47:51.120 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. 00:47:51.440 --> 00:47:59.760 But she talks about how in The Brooders, Luciente explains that they still create phenotypical. 00:48:00.160 --> 00:48:00.640 Variation. 00:48:00.880 --> 00:48:18.800 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. 00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:27.280 And I think it's, yeah, I think it's a really interesting thought experiment to run. 00:48:28.080 --> 00:48:49.440 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. 00:48:50.960 --> 00:48:51.760 You know what I mean? 00:48:52.080 --> 00:48:54.000 Like, oh, it's all harmony. 00:48:54.080 --> 00:48:56.400 It's all just like different, you know. 00:48:56.720 --> 00:48:59.600 But I think that what is different. 00:49:00.640 --> 00:49:13.760 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. 00:49:14.320 --> 00:49:18.400 This is not a product we're marketing to white people or to black people or whatever. 00:49:18.560 --> 00:49:23.120 It's about like just a lifestyle that we want to treat as being attainable to anybody. 00:49:23.440 --> 00:49:27.600 Is that in Mattapoisette, they still have culture. 00:49:27.920 --> 00:49:31.520 They are still very values oriented. 00:49:31.760 --> 00:49:44.640 They talk about how they've modeled their culture on past communities that valued conflict resolution and ecology and communitarian values. 00:49:44.960 --> 00:49:47.440 And so they won, they have culture, right? 00:49:47.600 --> 00:49:53.360 But they don't see the culture as being tied to some phenotype. 00:49:53.600 --> 00:49:59.760 So there's something interesting in that idea that they can never have this experience. 00:50:00.480 --> 00:50:08.880 of racialized discourses now, like with white supremacy, like, oh, the white people are the heirs to Western culture. 00:50:09.200 --> 00:50:30.160 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. 00:50:30.400 --> 00:50:36.800 You know, we are the most rational people, and so we have the most rational culture, beautiful culture, whatever. 00:50:37.360 --> 00:50:49.120 And so I think they're doing something interesting by having those values, by having the culture be something that anyone can participate in. 00:50:49.440 --> 00:50:50.000 Absolutely. 00:50:50.320 --> 00:50:55.840 And I think it's interesting too, because my first thought was, well, that's going to wash away history. 00:50:56.000 --> 00:50:59.680 But the whole point of the book is that these people are going back in time to remember. 00:51:00.240 --> 00:51:01.280 history kind of a thing. 00:51:01.600 --> 00:51:02.080 Exactly. 00:51:02.400 --> 00:51:06.560 So they say we know why we do this. 00:51:06.880 --> 00:51:12.960 We know why we are designing our babies with this diversity. 00:51:13.280 --> 00:51:24.480 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. 00:51:25.120 --> 00:51:28.320 And I think it is, I'm really glad you said that. 00:51:28.960 --> 00:51:31.920 It's a decision that's very conscious, right? 00:51:32.160 --> 00:51:44.080 And based out of a historical kind of literacy about what race can do when we assume that culture and biology are inherently connected. 00:51:44.400 --> 00:51:44.880 Absolutely. 00:51:45.120 --> 00:51:46.560 Disability is a little bit similar. 00:51:46.720 --> 00:51:50.320 You know, disability rights do come into this quite a bit in various ways. 00:51:50.560 --> 00:51:52.160 Claude is blind, for example. 00:51:52.400 --> 00:51:58.000 That has a huge impact on the way that Connie sees different disabilities. 00:51:58.320 --> 00:51:59.680 It's interesting too, because like the mental 00:52:00.160 --> 00:52:59.680 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 00:53:00.240 --> 00:53:15.120 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. 00:53:15.440 --> 00:53:24.000 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? 00:53:24.160 --> 00:53:26.800 And so there's a debate in the future. 00:53:27.040 --> 00:53:33.600 You know, Matopoiset is just one of many communities that exist at this time that are all sort of self-governing. 00:53:33.680 --> 00:53:42.560 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. 00:53:42.720 --> 00:53:44.720 They want new capabilities. 00:53:45.040 --> 00:53:50.960 But in Matopoiset, they have decided we're just going to get rid of genetic diseases. 00:53:51.280 --> 00:53:58.800 And it's so tricky when you think about really, really devastating diseases. 00:53:59.040 --> 00:53:59.760 Like I was trying to think. 00:54:00.160 --> 00:54:05.440 of a list, you know, things like cystic fibrosis, which are just devastating on people. 00:54:05.760 --> 00:54:21.920 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? 00:54:22.000 --> 00:54:28.960 There are some genetic conditions that I think we do recognize are primarily a matter of suffering, right? 00:54:29.600 --> 00:54:37.680 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. 00:54:38.000 --> 00:54:44.000 Or maybe somebody who was deaf, somebody who had something that also carries culture with it. 00:54:44.320 --> 00:54:44.720 Yes. 00:54:45.200 --> 00:54:45.600 Right? 00:54:45.920 --> 00:54:59.760 So that we could have had this philosophical discussion about difference and culture without this sort of simplified conversation that is just 00:55:00.160 --> 00:55:07.280 about eliminating disease because I think as it's very apparent in her discussion of mental illness that it's subjective, right? 00:55:07.520 --> 00:55:10.000 What we consider to be mental illness. 00:55:10.320 --> 00:55:17.600 I wish that there was a little bit more of that discussion about what we consider to be a disability in the first place. 00:55:17.920 --> 00:55:25.280 I think you get the sense that there's a desire to adapt the world to the people. 00:55:25.600 --> 00:55:35.200 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. 00:55:35.520 --> 00:55:52.480 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. 00:55:52.800 --> 00:55:53.520 Absolutely, yeah. 00:55:53.840 --> 00:55:54.800 Beyond the aesthetic. 00:55:55.120 --> 00:55:56.640 Yeah, right, exactly. 00:55:56.960 --> 00:55:58.880 I think we're just about wrapped up here. 00:55:59.120 --> 00:55:59.760 We have talked about 00:56:00.960 --> 00:56:02.480 A lot of different things. 00:56:02.960 --> 00:56:04.080 This book is so dense. 00:56:04.400 --> 00:56:04.880 So dense. 00:56:05.280 --> 00:56:06.320 Read this book. 00:56:06.960 --> 00:56:08.800 It's a good one, but it is dense. 00:56:09.040 --> 00:56:15.760 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? 00:56:16.080 --> 00:56:22.720 I think going back to the ecofeminism, we often talk about the novel as an ecofeminist text. 00:56:22.880 --> 00:56:27.120 There's also a reading on my syllabus that we use. 00:56:27.440 --> 00:56:30.560 Becke, I think is the name of the author. 00:56:30.880 --> 00:56:53.600 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. 00:56:53.920 --> 00:56:59.760 Like there's a scene where Connie has escaped the institution. 00:57:00.640 --> 00:57:08.080 and Luciente shows up and is pointing out to her what plants are edible in her environment. 00:57:08.400 --> 00:57:27.280 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? 00:57:27.760 --> 00:57:37.040 It's so interesting going back to education, right, that American school children, right, can tell you the name of every dinosaur. 00:57:37.360 --> 00:57:47.280 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. 00:57:47.840 --> 00:57:59.760 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. 00:58:00.400 --> 00:58:15.040 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? 00:58:15.520 --> 00:58:18.640 I really appreciate that about the novel. 00:58:18.960 --> 00:58:19.920 Awesome. 00:58:20.480 --> 00:58:23.520 Well, Marissa, thank you so very much for joining us today. 00:58:23.680 --> 00:58:25.280 It was an absolutely wonderful conversation. 00:58:25.440 --> 00:58:27.840 I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed reading the book. 00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:30.640 So thank you for bringing that to my attention. 00:58:30.960 --> 00:58:32.880 And thank you, listener, for joining us today. 00:58:33.200 --> 00:58:37.200 I would like to thank Logic Moon for using his awesome song in our podcast. 00:58:37.360 --> 00:58:40.160 And if you can, send him a cup of coffee from the link on our page. 00:58:40.480 --> 00:58:44.560 Until next time, I'm sending my goodwill into the vast and awesome universe. 00:58:44.880 --> 00:58:50.480 Next time on The Ansible, Jodi will be talking to Zach Whitaker about Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. 00:58:51.040 --> 00:58:55.600 This podcast was recorded and edited in Michigan State University Library's G. 00:58:55.760 --> 00:58:57.840 Robert Vincent Voice Library. 00:58:59.120 --> 00:58:59.760 The views expressed 00:59:00.320 --> 00:59:06.800 On this podcast, do not reflect the views of Michigan State University Libraries or Michigan State University.