A third technology of transformation is entrainment-based medicine, or resonance healing, with which the women have replaced the medical knowledge that the men have taken from them through the restrictive move of masculinist professionalization. The men’s strategy of restrictive professionalization, first seen in the realm of medicine, is something that the women expect them to repeat in their response to audiosynthesis. As Willow explains to Delina:
Think … what happened with medical care. It wasn’t because people couldn’t learn to do it themselves that men made it a crime to practice medicine “without a license,” and set the cost of the license so high that most people couldn’t even dream about getting one. And made it impossible to order medicines without a medsammy’s permission. And sent women to prison for tending other women in childbed. (60–61)
To the male medical professionals, resonance healing lacks proper professional authorization. It is transmitted not through approved textbooks but through “poems and cute little stories,” taught not through proper professional education, but through the Linguist women’s network of the music schools (97). But to the women of the Church of Our Lady of the StarTangle, who live as missionaries on distant asteroids or struggle to build a way of life not reliant on Alien and machine technologies, resonance healing offers a crucial—if for a long time unvoiced—alternative to the dwindling pool of bedside healthies or working medpods: “Nobody suggested that the women of the Lines would have to take over with resonance medicine; nobody suggested that they would have to open medschools and train people in that skill. Just thinking about it was overwhelming; they were determined not to think about it” (105).
These technologies of transformation rely on another theme of the novel, indeed of the entire trilogy: connectivity. The things that work, here, all presume and rely on connections between humans. Delina’s vision quest assumed a connection between life and death, the living and the dead. The intermarriage of the women of the Lines and the men of the PICOTA formalized a connection between similar worldviews. And finally, the technique of resonance medicine and entrainment, the production of resonant vibrations in another object or being, demonstrates the inherent connection that can be produced between two people. Strategies that do not depend on connectivity, figured in the novel as various kinds of violence, ultimately fail by making the problem worse. The clear implication is that successful change and response require networks of people used effectively.
Earthsong, then, is a map for change, a demonstration of the principle, if not the actualities, of transformation from violence to sustainability. The tools of this change are connectivity, language, and faith, tools every woman, and every revolutionary, has at her or his disposal. Made possible by the feminist commitment to linguistic and social transformation, these movements for effective change and revolution are not, Elgin suggests, large-scale events, but a series of small alterations, seemingly unrelated, that combine to shift human relationships into a new space and a new understanding.
Teaching Revolution
The Native Tongue trilogy offers many areas of exploration to the contemporary classroom. As Elgin herself notes, the novels could be used in a linguistics class to introduce basic principles of the field. The trilogy might also be used in a political science class with emphasis on political change, utopias, dystopias, or revolutions. Any class in literature and medicine would find the entire trilogy valuable for its examination of the social treatment of aging, the role of physicians, the effects of medical technology on the doctor-patient relationship, and the relationship between medicine and spirituality. Classes in feminist science fiction would find Elgin’s trilogy a good choice to pair with Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, as well as Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and Modest_Witness@ Second_MillenniumFemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. Such a course could explore the variety of boundary relations mapped in these different science fictions: human/alien, human/animal; fiction/theory; female/male; black/white; third world/first world. Elgin’s fiction, like Atwood’s and Russ’s, articulates second wave feminist thinking, while Butler’s work, like Haraway’s, articulates the perspectives of postmodern feminisms. There are crucial theoretical and practical reasons to teach second and third wave feminist histories together: the resulting juxtaposition of feminist visions both enriches and challenges us.
Overall, the Native Tongue trilogy will be most useful and engaging in a class exploring feminism, whether a literature course, a women’s studies course, or a theory course (or some combination thereof). The trilogy demonstrates and explores many of the questions that are basic to a feminist perspective of the world through both its thematics and its unusual and increasingly nonlinear structure: What is patriarchy? How does language participate in women’s oppression? How can we simultaneously engage women’s equality and difference? Is there an essential female connection we can draw on to intervene in patriarchy, or should we seek a feminist connection not necessarily entrenched in biological difference? How can we intervene in patriarchy when patriarchy is all we have? While these questions can be difficult for undergraduate students to grapple with, the novels can provide both an unfamiliar and fascinating example to work through and enough parallels with our society for students to draw connections.
More advanced students can use the novels to explore the ways both feminism(s) and US society have changed over the last few decades. The dichotomized gender roles of the novels are not as convincing today as they might have been at publication, and the assumptions about women’s inherent connection made explicit in the earlier novels and questioned somewhat in Earthsong are now much more problematic. By demonstrating these changes in feminist perspective and feminist theorizing, we can encourage our students to articulate and continue the struggle to address the problems within feminism today. Moreover, we can use the novels in the classroom to encourage our students to produce change locally and consciously, in the service of making the world safe for people of all kinds.
Susan M. Squier and Julie Vedder
May 2002
Notes
1. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.
2. Suzette Haden Elgin, personal communication, 20 January 2002.
3. Darko Suvin offers a critique of the novum, a distinguishing feature of science fiction, arguing that it is “obviously predicated on the importance and potentially the beneficence of novelty and change, linked to science and progress,” in his essay “Novum Is as Novum Does,” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 69 (Spring 1997): 26–43, 36–37. While we grant the point of Suvin’s remarkable self-critique, we would argue that his point still stands if we take the term in the broader sense—as the “machine for thinking” through innovations of all kinds, including the feminist innovations central to Suvin’s own critique—that science fiction offers to society (Suvin, 34–35).
4. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act 1, sc. 1.
Work Cited
Elgin, Suzette Haden. 1999. “Waterships All the Way Down: Using Science Fiction to Teach Linguistics.” In Language Alive in the Classroom, edited by Rebecca S. Wheeler, 157–66. Westport, CT: Praeger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUZETTE HADEN ELGIN (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was a linguist and writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin also published nonfiction, including the best-selling The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
Native Tongue
By Suzette Haden Elgin
Volume 1 of the Native Tongue Trilogy.
An instant classic upon its publication in 1984, this dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women’s collective action—in a new edition reissued for a new generation of readers.
In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment h
as long been repealed. Men hold absolute power, and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth’s economy depends on an insular group of linguists who “breed” women to become perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible for all. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom.
The Judas Rose
By Suzette Haden Elgin
Volume 2 of the Native Tongue Trilogy.
In the second volume of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside.
Mars: Stories
By Asja Bakic
Mars showcases a series of unique and twisted universes, where every character is tasked with making sense of their strange reality. One woman will be freed from purgatory once she writes the perfect book; another abides in a world devoid of physical contact. With wry prose and skewed humor, an emerging feminist writer explores twenty-first century promises of knowledge, freedom, and power.
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