Us, Now: How Fictional Gender and Technology Relate to the Present

Gender and Technology

Laura Blankenship and Anne Dalke

April 3, 2009

Us, Now

How Fictional Gender and Technology Relate to the Present

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of [science] fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you are like — what’s going on — what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen.

Science fiction is not predicted, it is descriptive.

– Quotations from Ursula K. Leguin’s Introduction to her book, The Left Hand of Darkness.

We’re all kind of egotists. What I mean is we’re all pretty interested in our own place, our own current time. Maybe we’re interested in history, though often this is in relation to and for instruction on, our present situation. Perhaps Indian dancing and silk from China, English teatime and African deserts – other cultures, lands, and peoples– fascinate and excite us. However, even to those focused on other cultures and those interested in socializing with and empathetic to the struggles and triumphs of others, the present, current situation holds great importance. And that is why just about everything we read about refers to ourselves; and if it was not intended to refer to us, for instance, being written by an author from the past, we will apply it by analogy to our current situation, if for no other reason then that is what we know best, our most expansive reservoir of analogies. I study this perspective of the present, applying it mainly to the cinematic reproduction of The Handmaid’s Tale[1] directed by Volker Schlondorff, and also look at its relation to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. I find that the world of Gilead in both film and novel and the site depicted in Watchmen all portray the technology of our own society and the gender representations therein. They describe other worlds but are inextricably related to the world that has produced them; that is: us, now.

Imagine this: Gilead ^-1, Gilead inverse. Men are the handservants; women have designed a society where men act as indentured servants, doing household tasks. Women are married to one man, but have ritual sex with their handservant. The male handservants must go out and do the shopping. They must sit around by their bed for hours, waiting to be summoned. They must eat their smooth white eggs and orange juices in their rooms. This all sounds ridiculous, insane. The novel appears to be portraying a queer cast, as Nat mentioned in class with reference to a Watchwomen re-rendering of Watchmen where all gender roles have switched. At the very least, this seems a bizarre and foreign culture like the Mususo matriarchy.

I entreat you to a scene from “The Male Handservant’s Tale” which describes the ceremony by which the handservant provides sex for the female head of household, whom I call the headmistress: “Below [my waist] the headmistress is fucking. What she is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what she’s doing” (94, all gender references have been reversed). Again, this sounds odd. The headmistress, the woman of power, sounds perhaps like a prostitute. Changing the roles unsettles us, which further shows how we are conditioned to the technology of gender roles.

It should, however, be noted that this is not always the case. “Switching up the roles” in the Like a Boy music video that Baibh brought to us and AH and Mista Jay (and myself) posted responses to, provides an alternate and interesting imagined representation of women within the context of cinematic technology. It shows Ciara, dressed like a male rapper, singing about a hypothetical swapping of male/female roles, as perhaps a refreshing change of scenery. It may seem odd but is not particularly unsettling nor does Ciara appear stereotypically homosexual. In the context of the song, her change is fun and new. In some ways, Ciara remains clearly female, continuing to wear hoop earrings and bracelets. However, the video does not side-step the major gender transition as often is done when girls supposedly dress up as boys but more accurately dress up as girls dressing up as boys. She manages to still appear man-like because of her now typically male bodily gestures. While this scene works more fluently than the above one (for instance, the viewer does not feel that Ciara seems like a prostitute in any sense), both show some degree of oddness in changing the stable gender roles we have created.

In Watchmen, too, we have references to our current situation. Moore pronounces as Dr. Manhattan, “Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect” (ch. 4, Watchmen). This is not unfamiliar, as we in the United States love to proclaim peacefulness and an end to nuclear proliferation while continuing to hold ourselves many nuclear bombs.

There are so many references to our present situation within the context of a technology for gender. One of the more interesting ones is the mechanical rumblings and drumbeatings at the start of The Handmaid’s Tale film, when the women are being shuttled into cars and into the institution where they will be indoctrinated with the new society’s values. In this holocaust-like scene, women are being processed. They are part of a technology, a system, a new structured reality that is highly ordered. Just as in Metropolis, where we see humans as physically entwined with and part of the machine that controls the city, here the people, and especially the women, are (as we discussed in class) part of the Gilead system and part of the highly structured society. We can see this structuring, this ordering, clearly at the beginning of the film when women are carted off in trucks labeled with neat writing of the female symbol followed by the truck number. Similarly the women themselves are numbered, given bracelets with their identification tracking number on them, upon entry into the institution. This number system orders the women, and so is a technology both in its creation of the bracelet crafts just as it is a technology in its larger ideological (re)-construction of society. Interestingly, while this ordering can be seen as a technology inflicted upon women (as well as men, to some extent), in the term ordering we see classification, sorting, just as in the meaning of the word gender.  See the summary of some of my ideas in Figure 1.

Hence we have come full circle and the technology of ordering upon women relates to the daily reality that women and men are ordered by society – and the construction/technology of this very society. Further, these ideas are not simply random notes on an odd society named Gilead, but directly relate to the reality of separation and ordering of women and men in our current society – the same female sign we see on the holocaust truck in the movie, we see in bathrooms segregating and ordering men and women. Also, we can see through our reaction to songs – which are themselves stories and imaginative realities – such as the one by Ciara discussed earlier, as well in our response to the imagined Gilead and our own imagined representation of Gilead inverse (on top of Atwood’s imaginative representation of Gilead), that men and women have gender roles in our society that are ingrained in our thoughts and perceptions in the present day: here and now.