Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction

"Oh fuck sex!" replied celebrated science-fiction novelist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) when Jill Benton, one of her biographers, asked for her views on the topic during the 1980s. [1] Despite Mitichison's attempts to move the discussion of her body of work from the salacious, it is the frank and open inclusion of sexuality that continues to intrigue her critics and reviewers. Racy, heated passages of Mitchison's historical novels inspired comment from poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s. [2] And, a reviewer of her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), expressed distaste for "an attention to physical details often eyebrow-raising to a mere male." [3] Benton, Mitchison's biographer, interprets the author's dismissive response as a mischievous provocation. I intend to demonstrate that the ribald sexuality of Mitchison's work registers as more than merely provocative. Sexual encounters between female characters and aliens, as well as those between women, threaten an imperialising capitalism that dictates who may be loved in a gendered, racialised order. Given the constraints of capitalist socialisation, sex must either be marginalised as a private leisure activity or function as a commodified industry. Interspecies, or monstrous, sex in Mitchison's science fiction connects a woman's scientific work and public identity with satisfying sexuality over a period of months in a deviant erotic that cannot be separated from life.

Mitchison, as Donna Haraway emphasises, came from the world that produced the Darwins and the Huxleys: a world of "sexual experimentation; political radicalism; unimpeded scientific literacy; literary self-confidence; a grand view of the universe from a rich, imperialist, intellectual culture—these were Mitchison's birthright." [4] (1995, 88). Mitchison's continued focus upon the sexual, particularly female sexuality, grounds this investigation because she illustrates how women's sexual pleasure both reflects and produces the political. While we credit the feminist movement of the 1970s with birthing the influential mantra "the personal is political," Mitchison's science fiction demonstrates a much earlier engagement with precisely that relationship. Additionally, Mitchison during her sixties to her eighties, during the years of her life when we assume in this culture that members of society somehow lose interest in sex and sexuality, still published subversive, progressive and provocative science fiction. While I focus upon the 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman in this essay, Mitchison's other late novels, such as Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983), share a similar preoccupation with female sexuality. These subversive revisions of female sexuality are still relevant in the new millennium. As science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a commendation of Solution Three, it "could have been written yesterday, and will certainly be read tomorrow." [5] Because of attention to female sexuality in Mitchison's science fiction, her work has been read as an exception to the "viciously militaristic...and deeply misogynistic and patriarchal" rule of the genre during the 1960s. [6] Yet rather than feminist writers of science fiction such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the US or Katharine Burdekin and Charlotte Haldane, her own sister-in-law, in the UK, Mitchison understood moralists and prophets including William Morris, HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon as her precursors. Despite the arguably masculinist tradition of thought to which Mitchison credits her intellectual instruction, she always positioned feminist concerns within her conversation. For example, with Stapledon, during the 1930s, she had "discussed everything from growing potatoes to world politics and back again, but mostly science fiction." [7] She cautioned him against presenting ideas which would further patriarchal ideology. [8]

This kind of critical engagement makes Mitchison a foremother within the feminist movement. However, I want to focus upon a set of specific contributions that Mitchison makes to the discussion of female sexuality: her ability to connect in prism-like fashion interracial sexual relations, mother-child intimacy, and female autoeroticism through the lens of female eroticism. Female sexuality not oriented toward men's pleasure persists as an aberration in our social fabric (what Mitchison represents as monstrous) to the point where touch and affection between women in public may provoke verbal or physical abuse. While adult women's sexuality is celebrated in magazines that discuss how to look sexy (by buying the right clothes and cosmetics), how to please yourself (by shopping for the right dildo or anal beads, or the right book), and how to give perfect head or achieve perfect penetration, "for many women the erotic is not an integral part of who they experience themselves to be but an attribute they can create in the right circumstances." [9] And it is this crucial distinction between sexuality and the erotic that distinguishes Mitchison's work. Whereas women's sexuality merely responds, the erotic initiates or constitutes women's position within society. Were the erotic to pervade our lives at a deep level, were we to become sexual beings in any circumstances rather than only "the right circumstances," then who knows what the consequences might be? In a 1980 interview, Audre Lorde insists "it is in the interest of a capitalist profit system for us to privatize much of our experience," but "the erotic weaves throughout our lives, and integrity is a basic condition that we aspire to...I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living." [10] As a Black [11] lesbian feminist, Lorde knows how women's sexuality has been defined as monstrous and worthy of eradication because of racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia. [12] I argue that what Mitchison's represents as monstrous sexual relations in her science fiction is the erotic. Furthermore, it is the erotic that appears as deviant within the dominant social register.

Lorde's forceful and provocative essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," addresses how women relate to their bodies, and the social proscriptions placed upon this relationship. According to Lorde, "the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling." [13] Lorde's essay, first delivered as a conference paper in 1978, initiates a feminist tradition that distinguishes between pornography, which emphasises sensation but denies feeling, and eroticism, which affirms the (con)sensual as necessary for sociopolitical engagement. [14] Sensuality, love, spirituality and politics unite in the erotic. Deep feelings must be recognised and shared in order to avoid denial and objectification:

Women empowered by deep feeling in all areas of our lives are dangerous to a system that defines good in terms of profit, explains Lorde. She emphasises that sharing physical, emotional and psychic joy in dance, creativity, love or practical projects can form the basis of understanding against differences established in "racist, patriarchal and anti-erotic society."

Lorde's insistence on the integration and sharing of deep feelings as a way to transform racist and misogynist society—her iteration of the interconnectedness of categories of race and gender—are pertinent to an interpretation of monstrous sex in Mitchison's science fiction. Her emphasis on the body and sensuality united with the intellectual and spiritual remains particularly relevant to a reading of the strange corporeality in Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman with its eyebrow-raising "attention to physical detail." Writing about married love in a collection of essays entitled The Home, Mitchison connects sexual frustration to capitalism and patriarchy by relating antagonism between men and women to fear and resentment of their social and economic possession of one another. In this cross-cultural history of home life, she suggests that the "well-known phenomenon of the difference of timing in women, especially conscious women...is probably due to the same complex, the same holding back from being owned." [16] Use of the adjective "conscious" proposes either that thoughtful, self-aware women are slower to sexual arousal and satisfaction than those who think less, or that there lurks an ocean, a conflagration of rapidly-aroused and easily-satisfied libido in women which has been repressed into the unconscious.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman champions the erotic at a time when female sexuality as desire and active physicality was attacked for its monstrosity in the 1960s. [17] Mitchison confronts this conception head-on by using precisely that imagery used to criticize it. Ellen Datlow, while compiling a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, "realised that what the material was really about was the relationship between the human sexes and how male and female humans so often see each other as 'alien'." [18] It is not only men and women who see each other as alien. A history of European imperialism consolidated a division into separate races divided by imaginary differences in blood. I argue that the woman-Martian coupling in Memoirs of a Spacewoman is manifold in its cultural registers. It comments upon a particularly British history of interracial sex where the woman-graft intimacy reiterates communication across boundaries of culture, doubles the relationship between mother and foetus (or mother and infant), and figures auto-eroticism, as well as referring to relations between females and males. I shall also reflect on the notion of a residue of monstrousness inexplicable in terms of the already-known. As Pauline Morgan asks in an essay which compares the dream of a completely different way of being to the normalisation of "woman" into mundane systems of thought, "why must a monstrous, a non-identifiable, status be necessarily disruptive for how women think [ourselves]?" [19]

Xenobiology (aka Xenophobia)

Unlike the Martians in HG Wells' War of the Worlds, who "were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men," [20] Martians in Memoirs of a Spacewoman are androgynous: "they are all two-sexed; they only take on mono-sexual characteristics at certain specific times." [21] Wells' Martians as "heads, merely heads," which may have evolved "from beings not unlike ourselves." [22] They are distinct from Englishmen, whom the collapse of civilisation returns to conflict, sexuality, anger and fear depicted as primal; the space creatures appear to exist without any feelings at all, let alone deep feelings. These intellectual tripods use their mental and technological superiority to treat humans as Europeans have treated animals and "inferior races" by massacring and eradicating Tasmanians and bison. But this analogy between aliens and European imperialists is complicated by other signifiers that connote a gendering and racialising discourse with respect to the aliens: a mouth that drops saliva inspires comparisons with female sexuality, they have "oily brown skin" that evokes "disgust and dread," and a human character refers to the aliens as "those brown creepers." [23] These descriptions resonate with the language used to describe European colonial anxieties.

In comparison to Wells' Martians, those imagined by Mitchison are not only sexual, androgynous beings, they are also relatively benevolent—less monstrous. Their androgyny anticipates that of the inhabitants of Winter in Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969. [24] Le Guin's novel was published seven years after Mitchison's, but it's doubtful that the more famous, US writer had read the work of the older British author at that time; her essays on fantasy and science fiction make no reference to Mitchison. While the envoy and the Karhidish in The Left Hand of Darkness are all human beings, Mitchison's Martians are not human; they have tough and spongy shells which they can remove in order to communicate fine shades of meaning with their sexual organs. "Normally Martians find Terrans rather repulsive;" they don't wish to communicate with humans, who are too big, curiously monosexual, and obscenely covered up with clothes. It is Martian rather than human disgust that is at issue, unlike in Wells. The male protagonist/narrator of Left Hand of Darkness comes to love an androgynous, alien being, formerly seen as an enemy; the female protagonist/narrator of Memoirs of a Spacewoman gives birth to a baby after intercourse with a Martian attempting to reassure her after a debilitating injury. Androgyny in both novels calls into question sharp divisions between gender categories, but to be two-sexed is, finally, more alien in Mitchison's fiction than in Le Guin's.

Indicators of race in Left Hand of Darkness and Memoirs of a Spacewoman explicitly contravene within earlier European colonial discourse which rigidly separated and excluded people categorised as non-White from central and normal subject positions. Genly Ai, the protagonist of Le Guin's novel, is Black. The protagonist of Mitchison's, Mary, is of European extraction in a future in which no colour line is envisaged; a famous female scientist is unremarkably Black and Mary loves a man of African descent. Yet racial markers nonetheless indicate characters who do not belong to a normative and invisible Whiteness. The three fathers chosen by Mary for her children, for example, are described as a distinguished explorer who remains nameless, a mathematician who leads an expedition and whose attractions increase after Mary spends a month or two with him, called Peder Pedersen, and "an outstandingly beautiful person" with "the delicious springy hair of his father's ethnic group" and fingers "the colour of a well-cooked crisp biscuit," T'o M'Kasi. [25] (emphasis added) This emphasis on physical rather than character-related attractions, ethnicity, metaphorical association with items for consumption, and skin colour serves to differentiate T'o from the other fathers, although all the children borne by Mary to the three human fathers are seen as "normal."

Application to a history of race relations in Britain during the 1960s will demonstrate that it is only in science fiction or fantasy that the birth of a daughter to those who would have been categorised as a White mother and a Coloured father could be described as normal. Beryl Gilroy relates how the children of Black fathers and White mothers in 1950s Britain "were tucked away in private homes and nurseries" or relegated to Dr. Barnardo's homes. [26] Paul Gilroy notes that in the racial discourse of the 1950s and early 1960s miscegenation "emerged ahead of crime as a theme in the popular politics of immigration control." [27] In Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners set in the 1950s, the fear and aggression of a White English couple towards their daughter's brown-skin boyfriend divide along gendered lines. While the mother receives him in a friendly manner, despite her misgivings, "the father want to throw Bart out of the house, because he don't want no curly-hair children in the family." [28] Echoing Gilroy's assessment of mainstream sentiments toward any kind of interracial coupling, the father believes this date can only lead to the miscegenated children. Such ideologies and behaviour racialise people of African descent as alien, if not monstrous.

Miscegenation Blues, a collection of writing by more than forty women of mixed racial heritage, some of whom were born in the early 1960s, explores issues of identity, loyalty and belonging within cultures divided by histories of racialised domination. Divergent and often painful accounts from the melting pot problematise celebrations of hybridity in which racial mixing is envisaged as the normal state and desirable future of humanity. Editor Carol Camper sees such a goal as naïve, since it "leaves the race work up to the mixed people and it means the annihilation of existing racial groups and our entire histories and cultures as though we are obsolete." [29] A history of European invasion and domination of what are now Africa, the Americas, Australia and parts of Asia makes these objections readily comprehensible. Views of the hegemony of US culture dominated by values inherited from the European tradition, appropriation of ethnic or cultural differences in the service of commerce, and assertions of the dependency of the First World [30] on over-developed countries make them prudent.

It is instructive to ask how we have been mixing our races ever since the notion of race was consolidated somewhere around the sixteenth century and to recall the history of rapes, lynchings, illegalities and minute categorisations of admixtures of wrong-coloured blood (as if blood is Black or White) involved in these combinations. Racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, health care and legal systems still weighs heavily on those labelled Black and other, as Jayne O Ifekwunigwe emphasises in her examination of manufactured identities and social inequality. Ifekwunigwe concludes that it is, "the persistence of this same bi-racialised hatred that gives salience and lends credence to Black as a political affiliation for métis(se) people." [31] Yet arguments that races and cultures should not mix but remain distinct only reinforce systems of racialised economic domination. Hazel Carby, who argues that structures of dominance form everyone as a racialised subject and that we should always recognise the normative category of Whiteness which forms and excludes racialised others, also emphasises cultural complexity rather than purity and calls for desegregation of apartheid systems of housing and education. [32]

The genre of science fiction, in which not only technological but also social norms are transgressed as a matter of course, allows Mitchison to make the relationship between Mary and T'o, and the birth of their "curly, coffee-coloured daughter," explicitly unremarkable. After a childhood during which she accepted her mother's "great worship of the British Empire," Mitchison learned to question the racism that partly formed her. [33] Travelling in the USA in 1935, with Zita Baker, she met Black and White people working together in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in Memphis. [34] She thought about colonialism and racism, and reviewed novels such as George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin. [35] In 1956 she visited Egypt and in 1957 West Africa, where she heard Kwame Nkrumah speak in Ghana. In 1960, at her home in Carradale, Scotland, she met Linchwe, Paramount Chief designate of the Bakgatla, an ethnic group of present-day Botswana. Invited by him to the tribal village of Mochudi, she was acknowledged in 1963 as a "mother of the tribe." Her enthusiasm for Black Africa resulted in her being banned from the Republic of South Africa under apartheid. The future imagined in Memoirs of a Spacewoman displays Mitchison's desire for the eradication of racial discrimination.

Mitchison, writing a future in which racialised oppositions have disappeared, nevertheless foregrounds the problem of imperialism, as Haraway notes in her meditation on xenobiology as otherworldly conversation. The rule of non-interference with alien cultures is impossible to obey: "communication, even with ourselves, is xenobiology: otherworldly conversation, terran topics, local terms, situated knowledges." [36] The narrator of Memoirs of a Spacewoman displaces anxieties and conflicts about intercourse across divisions of race onto human relations with alien species. Martians do not find Terrans attractive, but rather feel an "instinctive repulsion" against them: "the mere fact that we looked something like them, but were really alien, was against us." [37] Mary's first child, the one who is not normal, is a haploid daughter produced from the accidental activation of one of her ova by Vly, a normally two-sexed Martian. [38] Vly, the other communications expert on an expedition to Jones 97 and thus a colleague of Mary's, wants to transmit affection and reassurance to Mary after she's been injured in a blast. He begins "communicating all over with his tongue, fingers, toes and sexual organs." [39] This story of prejudice between species overcome by communication and intimacy replicates stories of prejudice among humans being dispelled by closer knowledge. Yet there is no one-to-one correlation of names and characteristics in a straightforward allegory to insist on a single interpretation of a tale that can never be read as naturalistic or literal.

Another episode of interspecies intimacy and sensuality, between the Terran narrator and an extraterrestrial being, might again be read as a narrative of communication across boundaries of culture and bi-racialisation. On Terra, experimentation with alien grafts onto animal hosts piques Mary's intellectual curiosity. Specifically, the experiments involve grafting an unintelligent alien life form, to which scientists give the generic name "graft," onto various hosts including dogs, pigs, jackals and Martian znydgi. Eventually, Mary offers herself as a human host. Grafts, somewhat shapeless, fairly repulsive at first sight, without bone structure and able to harden their soft outer layer at will and to extrude pseudopodia, can ingest macerated food and writhe or roll towards or away from perceived stimuli. A graft, surgically attached to Mary's thigh, grows over the course of four months to nearly a metre long (adult size), before separating from her. After a week it deliquesces, leaving Mary with feelings of loss and grief. The image of grafts in Mitchison's novel differ from a majority of grafts in both earlier and recent science fiction in that they are alien (monstrous), rather than human limbs or organs attached as ability-enhancing prostheses or remedial medical treatment. This difference is critical to my later reading of grafts-human relations as both sexual and liberating. [40]

Grafts in their home world attach themselves to an egg-laying dinosaur life-form, which is almost always female: "If the accidentally chosen host was a male, the graft did not arouse 'maternal' feelings, was looked on as a nuisance, and was, sooner or later, rubbed off." [41] While supposedly without biological specificity, grafts in the novel do reproduce through the fertilisation and reproduction of the Diners. It is this mingling and conjoining with the host's body that produces behavioural and emotional changes for the host. Grafts brought from the home world in later experiments produce fierce protective instincts in the bodies to which they are attached, deviance from social or scientific norms in their hosts, and a forceful need to mate and bathe. Mary, reflecting on her experiences during the later experiment, realises that "I had been somebody else. Somebody, from a scientific point of view, delinquent." [42] Both Mary's deep feelings towards her grafts and the delinquency instigated by the physical union recall Lorde's characterisations of the erotic according to depth of feeling and threats to the patriarchal, racist system.

Mary's temporary symbioses with grafts repeat her intimacy with the Martian Vly in that no lasting synthesis with the inhuman is imagined. However, in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis science fiction trilogy, alien Oankali who wander the universe to seed barren planets or combine with other life forms, trading and collecting life, mate with humans in a conflict-ridden synergy to produce beings with distinctly Oankali and human characteristics. Additionally, these "miscegenated" beings also have characteristics (ability, meaning, potential) only produced through Oankali-human couplings. [43] Both Mitchison's novel and Butler's describe racialised differences among humans as superseded by those between humans and space creatures. But, the baby borne by Mary from an egg activated by a Martian is entirely Terran, and her connection with the graft is confined to the public sphere of work, as a temporary alliance without a future; the assimilation of humans into Oankali families in Butler's novels is far more permanent. In Xenogenesis, reproduction on Earth is of constructs which need five parents: a human mother and father, an alien Oankali mother and father, and an asexual ooloi. For Mitchison's Mary, revulsion and awkwardness are barriers to communication which can be overcome, while Butler's Lilith, in Imago: Xenogenesis III, comes to understand that assimilation, for the human race, means annihilation of the entire planet as if it is obsolete. [44]

If I continue a reading which interprets interspecies relations as displacements of, or metaphors for, interracial connections, then those written by Mitchison, a White British woman who during the 1960s became a full member of the Bakgatla tribe and formed identifications with Black Africa, are less permanent and have less radical implications for her protagonist than those written by Butler, who describes herself on end-pages of her paperback science fiction as a writer always, a feminist, a Black, who lives in Los Angeles. Mitchison, considering past imperialism and future independence in subjugated African nations, surmises that "active good will and undemanding love...from the old Imperial powers," together with the positive example set by already-independent countries, may overcome hatred and resentment. [45] Such an outlook, expressed during the same period as that in which Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), appears naïvely optimistic. Butler's novels, on the other hand, were published after Angela Davis had theorised relations in Women, Race and Class, a cogent Marxist, historical analysis of interracial relations in the US. [46] Paula Giddings offers an appropriate mapping of the US political landscape at the beginning of the 1980s:

The Reagan administration tempered the optimism of the 1960s, as gains made in previous decades were eroded. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Mitchison wrote Memoirs of a Spacewoman, several African colonies formed independent nations, and European radicalism was growing. Her naïve optimism is understandable. However, given the headiness of those times, I must address her choice to end the novel with the recuperation of all that seems rejected. Mitchison's protagonist, Mary, although deeply affected by connections with other species, is planning a return to heteronormativity and racial separation at the end of the novel: she sets out in partnership with an older, male, Scandinavian explorer for a destination in Norway. The novel's resolution ultimately confirms heterosexual and European affiliations. Perhaps, as Giddings, Lorde and other theorists of a Black feminism argue, only Black women can provide the means for their liberation:

Butler's protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, a woman of African descent, standing in for a full humanity in the Xenogenesis series, faces the same challenging situation as African-American women in the 1980s. As Lorde wrote in a journal entry in 1976, "although there are 21 million Black Americans, I feel like we're an endangered species too, and how sad for our cultures to die." [49] Yet, Mitchison's abandonement of a revolutionary future has to be lamented.

Mother-Love and Grafts

My earlier reading of grafts in Mitchison's novel sought to disrupt an overly utopic reading of the novel. However, alien-human relations envisioned as graft-host relations do provide socially incisive speculations about the erotic. Grafts in science fiction before Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman appear to be mainly skin, tissue, organ or limb grafts that signify technological control over human life, possibilities for regeneration, or danger from mingling identities. This last theme was reiterated in the Austrian film The Hands of Orlac (1924, directed by Robert Wiene, famous for his Cabinet of Dr Caligari) and various remakes, including the US Mad Love (1935), The Hands of Orlac (1960) and Hands of a Stranger (1963). A concert pianist whose mangled hands have been replaced with those of an executed murderer has to struggle against the increasing dominance of the dead man. The threat to identity surfaces to a certain extent in Mitchison's novel, not because the alien life-form known as 'grafts' has any menacing or evil characteristics but because the nurture of these grafts induces delinquency, or transgression of normal professional or socialised behaviour.

The most significant intertext for Memoirs of a Spacewoman is probably Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius, even though the narrative contains no grafts at all. Sirius, a dog born with the brain capacity of a human being, is the result of experiments with hormone injections into the bloodstream of pregnant bitches and puppies. Mary's intimacy with alien species, including grafts, echoes the human girl Plaxy's union with Sirius, her adopted brother; the spacewoman's temporary delinquency resonates with Plaxy's fear "that in this strange symbiosis with an alien creature she might be losing her very humanity itself." [50] The extent of the young woman's intimacy with the dog becomes scandalous, although 'consideration for her feelings and respect for the conventions of contemporary society impose the narrator's reticence. The inevitable tragedy of the man-dog's fate anticipates, to some extent, the sad end of the grafts in Mitchison, the first of which deliquesce while the second batch are removed from their hosts and stay no more living than a severed leg. But while Stapledon's tale concentrates above all on the aspirations, loneliness and confusion of the male, part-savage, part-human dog, Mitchison brings the feelings of a woman, both as scientist and as nurturer, into sharp focus.

Mary's close relationships with her grafts could be understood as rewriting a cathexis between mother and infant, which were preferred to active female sexual desire in European productions of sexuality during the first half of the twentieth century. [51] When Mary offers herself as a human host in immunological experiments, certain phrases offer themselves to a reading of the nurturing relationship between Mary and the graft as a mother-fetal relationship. Attachment of a graft is analogous to pregnancy in that it prevents ovulation, induces maternal feelings in females, slows Mary down and causes her to need extra food and drink, and makes her breasts swell slightly and the nipples darken. Terran immunologists discover that the grafts' tissue is so alien to the mammalian host that it will not call up antibodies. In recent, non-fiction immunological discourse, the sustenance of a graft is again analogous to pregnancy: "it is strange to consider the foetus as a 'graft' but it does contain paternal antigens that are foreign to the mother." [52] Although maternal blood lymphocytes (cells of the mother's immune system) circulate in intimate contact with the placenta, the foetus, unlike a transplant, is not rejected. Little evidence exists to suggest that such maternal tolerance is specific to paternal antigens in the foetus, and while a case has been made for the functioning of a generalised suppression of immunity during pregnancy, this is debatable: "maternal responses to infection are, in most cases, adequate in pregnancy." [53] Pregnancy is indeed an exciting and novel piece of research when professors of immunology admit ignorance as to why the mother-as-body does not reject her foetus. [54]

If nurture of a graft can be read as pregnancy, then what does Mary's gratification mean when she responds to her second graft's rhythmic movements with kisses 'and even licking and gently biting my graft'?

The grafts' insertion of a pseudopodium between Mary's lips invariably evokes Luce Irigaray's two lips which figure both women's speech and women's sexuality. Irigaray's exposition of the irreducible multiplicity of female sexuality and language in This Sex which is Not One allows these lips to be read as "genitals formed of two lips in continuous contact," or as two lips that "cannot separate to let just one word pass," [56] The lips may be interpreted as the most visible part of a woman's sex, or as the folds which hold the gap between outside and inside, the spaces between words, differences among women. Irigaray's "two lips kissing two lips" are the lips of women who love women: as lovers, sisters, daughters, friends, or as our selves. [57] Her insistence on contiguity between language and body, on "an end to silence concerning the exploitation experienced by women" and on love between women repeats Lorde's emphasis on recognition of a shared erotic charge imbuing life, without acknowledging that it is not only capitalist patriarchy that exploits and oppresses but pervasive and dominant racism. Mary's graft as a provider of erotic satisfaction is interesting in that it is simultaneously an alien being and a part of the woman's own body; Mary's deep feeling for her graft writes connection with the monstrously other at the same time that it imagines self-love.

In her historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen, published over thirty years earlier, Mitchison writes tenderly and with elaborate physical detail of one of her protagonists nursing an infant son, while descriptions of adult sex (whether ritual, public sex, married sex or orgiastic, extra-marital sex) are brief, symbolic or euphemistic. [58] Both unacceptable elements which are selected by publishers for erasure from manuscripts and those which are rejected as distasteful by reviewers have constrained formations of female sexuality in writing. Yet it was neither simply stipulations about publishing descriptions of female desire and sexual activity nor critical reviews alone which might have produced detailed tenderness in a depiction of intimacy between mother and son which was impossible between adult lovers. Sigmund Freud averred in his 1933 lecture on "Femininity" that a mother preferred a son to a daughter because intimacy with an infant with a penis was the only relationship which brought her unlimited satisfaction, and was in fact the most perfect of human relationships. "A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over of her masculinity complex." [59] This must be one of the passages in Freud's writings where the social and historical contingency of his theories is most glaringly apparent; although time does not pass in the unconscious, its operation and sedimentation form in unavoidable response to the psyche's need to defer gratification or to repress what's so unpleasant as to be unacceptable in interpersonal, social, economic and historical modes of being.

Irigaray, who insists on the necessity for investigating historical determinants of destiny, questions the historical invisibility or absence in the form of a "hole" of women's sex, and interrogates woman's production in the sexual imaginary as nothing but a prop to man's desire. She reads the perfection of the mother-son relationship as compensation for the lack of contact when fathers' and mothers' sexual desires and social roles have been polarised:

Irigaray's playful, allusive mimicry and undermining of the observations of the fathers of psychoanalysis appears extremely relevant to the spacewoman's pleasure in that attachment to her body which is easily read as baby-penis-clitoris. During the first half of the twentieth century, the taboo of an obsessive civilisation against touching attempted to forbid the writing of adults' organs and secretions, except within compartmentalised discourses which supported the social order (reports on pathologies and perversions to be read only by medical gentlemen and ladies, illicitly-circulated pornography for gentlemen). So, in The Corn King and the Spring Queen, the female protagonist's appetite for touch had free rein only with her child. Adult heterosexuality within the symbolic order of society allowed only the briefest possible penetration of the (archaic) woman as furrow by the man as plough (with the signifier of his desire named as godhead) to be visible in the sexual arena, while the fondling of mother and child could be detailed at leisure. [61] Mitchison's imagination reflects these same sentiments toward the future, perhaps indicative of the 1960s: to abbreviate contact between adults in favour of a deepening contact with the child. It is only with the metaphorical child that details of organ and orifice, sensation and movement can be detailed. Though thinly disguised as maternal nurturing, the explicit language speaks to Mitchison's concern with female sexuality.

Mitchison's novels offer a plethora of images of female characters experiencing an unadulterated pleasure in sex. In Solution Three, two pregnant characters, in front of an observer no less, engage in "pretty play." Jussie, a member of the global Council ), watches two of the Clone Mums in the gardens:

Narration focalised through an older woman who is missing her lover, in a world in which homosexuality (inculcated by hormones and propaganda) is the norm, emphasises the curves of pregnant bellies, buttocks and breasts. Irrespective of age or physical state, Mitchison argues for women's sexuality and pleasure derived from sexual experiences as integral to women's subjectivity. Whether it be a depiction of a mother tenderly nursing an infant, or the physical detail of an extraterrestrial's organs or pseudopodia penetrating a woman to give reassurance or satisfaction, or of the delicious possibilities between "quite ordinary" young, pregnant women, Mitchison always places women's pleasure at the fore of her projections of the future. This might be the truly revolutionary future needed as we enter the new millennium.

The Erotic

While it is encouraging that Mitchison's protagonists do not suffer heteronormative obsessions, like so many romantic heroines, I still wonder why she does not imagine a future in which women feel the bliss of satisfied desire with men? Susie Orbach, in the course of her clinic work, wonders if the absence of erotic feelings between women and men, or women and women as well, stems from a lack of comprehension of sexuality in its totality. Orbach argues that sexuality it deeply erotic, and not just the biological marker of gender or just the means to propagate the species through reproduction. She understands the conundrum of women's sexuality as connected to problems in sustaining a sense of self, of subjectivity, especially for a mother:

Orbach sees the erotic as hard to sustain within a lasting, committed relationship because the deep intimacy of such a relationship invokes closeness with a mother who could not be a sexual being, or provokes fears and tensions about maintaining individuality.

Orbach understands the body, just as much as the mind, as formed in culture and in relationships. Her focus on the erotic and on corporeality as productive directions for psychoanalytic inquiry return us to Lorde's discussion of the erotic as a source of power which informs every aspect of life, not just sexuality. Lorde returns again and again, against charges of childishness, partiality or sensuality, to a recognition of our inner feelings as necessary in order to change sterile, oppressive European norms that have privileged intellect over emotion and elevated thought as the prerequisite of existence:

Female characters in Mitchison's science fiction, particularly Memoirs of a Spacewoman, plunge into life as experience and interaction, transgressing strident norms that categorise exactly which gender, racialised group or species may be interacted with and which may not. Feelings of humiliation, love, loss, sadness and excitement eventually empower the spacewoman, and other characters, rather than reducing them to subjugation.

There remains an insistent question concerning the suppression of the erotic in women. If there is some female erotic (erotic as libido, life-instinct), or some female sexuality (erotic as sexuality, desire, libido) that can be understood as more authentic than the postures of conventional femininity, and that has been suppressed so that we cannot refer to a body of work which describes and analyses it, or even to experience unless we have begun to live in a different way, then what would this female erotic be like? I shall attempt the light-hearted experiment of characterising a female sexual erotic according to Mitchison's writing of monstrous sex and maternal dalliance.

First of all, this female sex would last longer than "the odd half hour." [65] Mary in Memoirs of a Spacewoman spends months in contact with her grafts kissing and even licking and biting them while they ripple and wriggle against her and explore her with their pseudopodia. If we return to the well-known phenomenon of the difference of timing in women, on which Mitchison commented in her cultural study of The Home, then rather than wondering whether women's response-time might alter in different circumstances we might begin to wonder whether women's sexual partners might have to change in order to produce complete satisfaction.

Next, communication would be an integral part of this female erotic. Essential to communication would be the kind of affection and reassurance the Martian Vly gives while penetrating Mary's body and activating one of her ovaries. We would be like Mary herself, who, wanting urgently to transmit to Vly her elation when she discovers her pregnancy, "reached for his sexual organ and began to communicate on that." [66] Divisions between language/intellect and feeling/body are undermined when communication includes touch as well as speech and dialogue. Descriptions of female sex in Memoirs of a Spacewoman include touching and being touched all over with tongue, fingers, toes, and sexual organs. Any part of the body can be activated through the erotic. A female erotic as sexuality would not be limited by boundaries of race, gender or species. Communication and desire would reach across any such barriers without humiliation, particularly for women. Just as touch and communication produce feelings of love between Mary and Vly, the same could be true for all of us.

Female sexual desire and practice would include both love of and pleasure with women, and also the alien, the seemingly radical other. Sex would be a game between people, as it is for Allie and Burd, who do not have to be secretive. Young women could get carried away caressing each other in a beautiful garden while someone, with more rank, watches indulgently, feeling entitled neither to exploit the young women's sexuality nor to reprove its shared expression. The people who would enjoy this hitherto suppressed female sex would not be "on the whole, fairly well-off people," but "quite ordinary young women." [67] Female sex would be both active and receptive as it is in the The Corn King and the Spring Queen, when the mother feeds her infant son. It would involve eagerness, desire and laughter.

This hypothetical, monstrous, female sexuality, extrapolated from passages in Mitchison's writings, deviates from a stereotype of women's sexual passivity and frigidity, which persisted in a variety of forms throughout the twentieth century, and to this day as well. It also contradicts the belief that sexuality, the erotic, deep feeling, can be or should be confined to a single close, personal relationship. Lorde in her exegesis of the erotic cannot separate writing or political action from sexual love or practical tasks. Just as the sexuality, which I have examined in this article, is writing and pleasure, so for Lorde we connect poetry with sensuality and joy not in order to maximise the body's potentialities as a desire-and-satisfaction machine but rather to reach the dark places of possibility within ourselves. As Lorde contends, "Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." [68] Such erotic power may only be able to surface as monstrous within a system of racist, patriarchal capitalism, but it still has immense potential for transformation.

University of Essex

Essex, England

The United Kingdom

* Heartfelt thanks are due to LaTissia Mitchell at Michigan Feminist Studies, whose editing and constructive suggestions have improved this article beyond recognition

1. Jill Benton, Naomi Mitchison: A Biography (London: Pandora, 1992), 164 .

2. "Some of the scenes in the Prawn King and the String Queen were hotter than anything I've read. My dear, how do you get away with it?" Postcard from WH Auden, responding to The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), transcribed in Naomi Mitchison You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940 (London: Flamingo, 1986 [1979]), 121.

3. Leslie Flood, Book Review in New Worlds: Science Fiction Vol. 42 no. 124 (1962), 126.

4. Donna Haraway, "Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms" in Biopolitics, eds. V. Shiva and I. Moser (London: Zed Books, 1995), 88.

5. See Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (New York: Feminist Press, 1995 [1975]).

6. Roz Kaveney, in a short history of women's science fiction, characterises science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s as misogynist in "The Science Fictiveness of Women's Science Fiction" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi, ed. H. Carr (London: Pandora, 1989), 78. Maroula Joannou, in a study of contemporary women's writing, mentions Memoirs of a Spacewoman as an exception to this rule in Contemporary Women's Writing: From The Golden Notebook to The Color Purple (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 126.

7. Mitchison, "The Profession of Science Fiction: Wonderful, Deathless Ditties" in Foundation 21, 1981: 27.

8. "The difficulty is that God has got such frightful connotations — he is an old man with a beard, he's patriarchal anyhow, and you of all people mustn't encourage the idea of the patriarchy" (undated letter [1933 or 34?] from Perthshire to Stapledon in the Stapledon Collection, Science Fiction Foundation, Sydney Jones Library, Liverpool).

9. Susie Orbach, The Impossibility of Sex (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 203.

10. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" in The Audre Lorde Compendium (London: Pandora, 1996 [1978]), 243-5.

11. Since "Black" and "White" are political rather than descriptive terms when applied to human beings, I shall use capitals.

12. See, for example, The Audre Lorde Compendium, 99-105.

13. Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," 106.

14. See also Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (London: Women's Press, 1981).

15. Lorde, 111.

16. Mitchison, The Home: And a Changing Civilisation (London, Bodley Head, 1934), 142.

17. As Nicola Beauman observes, many European women writers rebel against the Victorian ethic of sexual purity. See Beauman A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 (London: Virago, 1983). Because of a repressive Victorian ethic, a description of sexual consummation between women in Radclyffe Hall's banned Well of Loneliness was restricted to "that night they were not divided" in Hall The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1991 [1927]), 316. For more on women's sexuality as transgressive see also Bryony Hoskins "Young Women's Sexuality: All Bad News?" in Feminist Review no. 66 (2000).

18. Ellen Datlow, ed., Alien Sex (New York: Penguin, 1992), 18.

19. Pauline Morgan, "Something about Woman and Monsters and a Bit of a Dance," Postgraduate English. n.d. <http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dng0zz5/morgan.htm>.

20. HG Wells, The Time Machine & The War of the Worlds (London, Millennium, 1999 [c. 1898]), 220.

21. Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (London, Women's Press, 1985 [1962]), 60.

22. Wells, 219 and 221.

23. Ibid, 113-4, 250.

24. Ursula Le Guin, The Left hand of Darkness (London: Virago, 1997 [1969]).

25. Mitchison, Memoirs, 21.

26. Beryl Gilroy, in Leaves in the Wind: Collected Writings, ed. Joan Anim-Addo (London: Mango, 1998), 210.

27. Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1992 [1987]), 80.

28. Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Essex: Longman, 1999 [1956]), 65.

29. Carol Camper, ed., Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1994), xxii.

30. June Jordan, among others, calls the majority peoples of the earth the "First World." See, for example, June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989), 151. I see no reason for continuing to assume that Europe and North America are the centre of the world and automatically take precedence.

31. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of "Race," Nation and Gender (London: Routledge, 1999), 195.

32. See, for example, Hazel Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 242-3, 256-62.

33. Mitchison, Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (London: Bodley Head, 1973), 84.

34. See Benton, 103-4.

35. "The Burden of Being Black," review in London Forward, 18.7.1953, in Acc. 8503/6, Naomi Mitchison Collection, National Library of Scotland.

36. Haraway, 88.

37. Memoirs, 60.

38. Haploid, in this case, means having only one set of chromosomes (the mother's), doubled; the daughter inherits only from the Terran mother, and not at all from the Martian parent.

39. Memoirs, 58.

40. During the 1950s, when middle-class women were entreated to resume domesticated gender roles to make room for servicemen returning to civilian populations after WWII, sexologists fiercely debated phallic and patriarchal models of heterosexual intercourse, with claims that up to 90% of women were frigid. However, more women-centred paradigms, which emphasised attention to the labia and clitoris, reported far less frigidity among women. See, for example, Beatrix Campbell, "A Feminist Sexual Politics: Now You See It, Now You Don't" in Sexuality: A Reader ed. Feminist Review (London: Virago, 1987), 29-31. When Mary in Memoirs of a Spacewoman has sexual intercourse with a Martian or feels hidden but complete satisfaction from the penetration of an extraterrestrial graft's pseudopodia between her lips, it is this woman-centred conception of sexual satisfaction

41. Memoirs, 134.

42. Ibid., 159.

43. For an insightful reading of reproduction in Butler see Rebecca Holden, "The High Costs of Cyborg Survival: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy" in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction no. 72 (Spring. 1998).

44. Octavia Butler, Imago: Xenogenesis III (London: Gollancz, 1990).

45. You May Well Ask, 111.

46. Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (London: Women's Press, 1982).

47. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (London: Bantam Books, 1988 [1984]), 349

48. Ibid.

49. Lorde, 92.

50. Olaf Stapledon, Sirius (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964 [1944]), 167.

51. My interpretations are influenced by Michel Foucault's thesis that sexuality, far from being repressed or denied during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was everywhere deployed and produced. See The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmonsworth, England: Pelican, 1981).

52. Norman Staines, A, Jonathan Brostoff and Keith James, eds., Introducing Immunology (St. Louis: Mosby Press, 1993), 123.

53. Henry N. Claman, The Immunology of Human Pregnancy (New Jersey: Humana Press, 1993), 98.

54. Even the possibility of immunological privilege of the decidual environment (as distinct from the non-decidual uterus) was still undecided in the early 1990s. See, for example, Claman, 98 and Staines et al.

55. Memoirs, 148.

56. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993 [1977]), 24 and 208.

57. Ibid., 210.

58. See, for example, Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1990 [1931]), 214-5, 270-1, 529.

59. Sigmund Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 431.

60. Irigaray, 27-8.

61. See Irigaray, 214-5.

62. Solution Three, 26-7.

63. Orbach, 203.

64. Lorde, 96.

65. Mitchison (playfully) describes sex as a "pleasing way to pass the odd half-hour when nothing more important is happening" in her memoir You May Well Ask, 76.

66. Memoirs, 65.

67. In a controversial study of birth control, Comments on Birth Control (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), Mitchison, while hastening to deny that sensitivity and intelligence are the prerogatives of middle and upper-class women, states that she wants to give most consideration to those who can afford to reflect on their feelings and ideas about the issue: "on the whole, fairly well-off people," 10.

68. Lorde, 95.