1

Maria Osborne

English 496 B

Professor Kate Cummings

June 1st 2017

Close Encounters: Bodily Politics of the Dissolving Human

Subject in James Tiptree, Jr.s Slow Music and The Only Neat Thing to Do

LOCATING TIPTREE IN FEMINIST AND POSTHUMANIST SCIENCE FICTION

The author who was James Tiptree, Jr., (or perhaps more appropriately, Alice James

Racoona Bradley Sheldon Tiptree, Jr), gained recognition in the latter part of the New Wave

science fiction (SF) movement of the 1960s and 1970s and into the early years of the

cyberpunk era. Long of interest to feminist scholars for her portrayal of sexuality, patriarchy, and

relationships between men and woman, Tiptrees themes of culture at war with innate biological

drives has led to a debate over whether she presents violence (especially gendered and sexualized

violence and rape) as an inevitable consequence of nature and sexual difference or as a

consequence of believing in the inevitability of nature. The biologically determinist reading is

certainly the more obvious one, and was spotlighted by some earlier Tiptree critics (e.g.,

Heldreth 1982). Essentialist interpretations have not died out, especially among more casual

readers; writer Michael Swanwick (2004) describes the motif of inevitable death as the distilled

essence of Tiptrees darkest pessimism, drawn from a sense of individual futility in the face of

biological determinism to its logical extreme (Swanwick x). However, scholarly readings

quickly moved away from the conclusion of body-as-destiny to emphasize culture, agency, or

futurity over biology, finality, fate, and death (e.g., Evans 2015, Genova 1994, Seal 1990). These

nurture-over-nature readings have succeeded in shedding a more nuanced light onto Tiptrees
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body of work, and I agree that social context is key to understanding it. The alternative, after all,

is to accept a dark view of the world where women are forever and hopelessly oppressed.

However, I also concur with scholars including Lewis Call (2007, 2012) in that these

interpretations tend to drastically understate the role of biology in Tiptrees stories, and I find the

commonly-invoked theme of bodily entrapment to be central to her fictions pathos. One could

speculate that this is a result of Tiptrees personal life (she described having a kind of

confinement in her own body that has led contemporary reviewers to suggest that she

experienced gender dysphoria, though this is not a term Tiptree herself used). The fascination

with the dramatic personal life of Sheldon/Tiptree both in life and death has indeed often led

critics to consider the relationship between her work and her life, which sometimes results in an

inappropriate reliance on biography as a lens through which to interpret her texts. I therefore

identify two troubling trends in Tiptree scholarship: first is this frequent flirting with

biographical fallacy; second (and the issue that I wish to address more fully) is the tendency to

either see nothing but biological fatalism in her work, or alternatively to totally deny biological

themes within the text because they do not align with contemporary feminist politics that posit

patriarchy as constructed rather than innate.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of Tiptree scholarship has focused on her most popular and

award-winning stories from the 1970s, particularly The Screwfly Solution (1977), The Girl

Who Was Plugged In (1973), The Women Men Dont See (1973), and Houston, Houston,

So You Read? (1976). Less studied and generally regarded as less significant are her later

works, particularly the two novels from 1978 and 1985. My analyses will focus on the novellas

Slow Music (1980) and The Only Neat Thing to Do (1985). The former is one of Tiptrees

most philosophical and contemplative works, while the latter is a narrative of space exploration
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and first contact. Paramount in much of Tiptrees fiction are physical interactions between bodies

both human and alien, and these stories indeed preserve themes of the bodys relationship with

gender difference, sexuality, violence, and alien morphology. However, they also diverge from

her well-known works in their depiction of the erotic alongside the sexual (in Tiptree, sex is

rarely sexy), queer relationships and genderqueer characters, and bodily transcendence. On a

historical level, they are of interest because of their publication after the 1977 outing of James

Tiptree, Jr. as Alice Sheldon. But I also propose that their divergent elements merit their

inclusion in a metatextual discussion of Tiptrees body of work and her role in the feminist and

posthumanist development of SF. This is not to say that Tiptrees popular stories cannot be read

in a way that goes outside the biology/culture dichotomy, but these two novellas are helpful in

calling into question the ways that audiences have generalized her work: if Tiptrees stories are

tragedies of naturalized heterosexuality (Hollinger 1999), then The Only Neat Thing is a

tragedy of sexuality that is unclassifiable within a conventional sex/gender matrix. If her stories

are tragedies of physical entrapment, then Slow Music provides a view into what escape might

look likeand one that is, surprisingly, not an ode to freedom but an elegy to embodiment.

In the far-future-set Slow Music, a man named Jakko is one of the last people on Earth.

Most of humanity has either died out due to disease-ridden Poison Centuries, and those left

have given up their embodied existence for immortality in what is referred to as the River, an

immaterial stream of sidereal sentience that had embraced Earth (Tiptree 1980, 500). Jakko

happens to find another person alive, the woman Peachthief, who suggests he impregnate her so

that she can continue the human race. While Jakko is attracted to the prospect of peaceful

disembodiment, Peachthief resists its pull until at the end of the story when she inadvertently

chases one of her domestic animals into the River, with Jakko following her. The Only Neat
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Thing to Do has an extraterrestrial setting, and follows the sixteen-year-old Coati Cass, who

lives in a galactic society where the human-run Federation colonizes alien species and planets.

While exploring the Federation Frontier, Coati contacts an alien species called the Eea,

infinitesimally small beings so tiny that they exist in inter-molecular, maybe inter-atomic

spaces and live in the brains of host animals (called dron; the Eea become Eeadron when

they occupy a host) (Tiptree 1985, 23). An Eea named Syllobene (nicknamed Syl) takes up

residence in Coatis brain, operating Coatis voice mechanism to communicate with her resulting

in the two developing a close relationship. Ultimately, Syl is overtaken by the urge to reproduce,

which threatens to end Coatis life when Syls spores start to eat their way out of Coatis body.

Coati makes the decision to kill both herself and Syl by flying her ship into a sun, thus

preventing other humans becoming contaminated with the Eea spores in her corpse.

Both these works present modalities of embodiment that are alien (in all senses of the

word) to the recognizably human. In examining their presentation of estranging embodied

existences, I seek to add to the debate over biological essentialism that surrounds many of

Tiptrees narratives. Despite the emphasis on biology and determinism in her works, they do

nonetheless resist the construction of essential person-ness as existing entirely outside of culture.

I examine motifs of invasion, contamination, and appropriation of the body, particularly those

with sexual undercurrents, as literally and metaphorically undermining the human as an

independent, self-determined social agent, instead representing a postmodern view of fragmented

subjectivity where identity is constructed by external, social influences. However, this bodily

metaphor is one that casts such external influences as physical and internal; it conflates the

cultural with the biological. I therefore suggest that reading Tiptree through a posthumanist lens

works to reframe the debate between nature and nurture by breaking down a clear dualism
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between the natural and artificial. Like alien-contact narratives are wont to do, these two stories

relativize human consciousness and morphology against wildly unfamiliar ontologiesstrange

sentiences, to borrow a term from Slow Music (Tiptree 1980, 470). This potentially allows a

definition of humanity to exist in contrast with those deemed inhuman, but I suggest that the

body actually breaks down as a signifier of subjectivity and otherness, resisting human categories

of sex and gender as well as failing to distinguish the general category of human from the

nonhuman (including the alien and animal) in a meaningful way. I borrow from the ideas

of Donna Haraways essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1984) to make this point. Tiptree does not

give us any literal cyborgs, androids, or metal men in these stories, but her characters do become

cyborgs in Haraways sense of blending the animal, human, and machine. They are chimeras that

deconstruct the dualisms of male/female, mind/body, self/other, agent/patient,

natural/constructed, etc.

In consistently locating the body as a site of social significance/power and defining

sexuality as a force that undermines clear distinctions between the human and the non-human

animal, Tiptrees work enters the realm of the posthuman. I must be careful here to differentiate

between the many facets of posthumanism: the two most important to my purposes are first

antihumanism as a critique of liberal humanism and its emphasis on the dualistic, rational, self-

determining human subject; the second is the transhumanist spirit that pervades SF of the 1970s

and beyond. It is in the latter where motifs of combining the mechanical with the organic

(cyborgs, uploaded minds) rose to popularity along with advances in computer technology.

Transhumanist SF is not necessarily antihumanist, as critics such as N. Katherine Hayles (1999)

and Sherryl Vint (2007) have pointed out. (Transhumanism is posthuman in its rejection of the

idea of the natural body, but tends to reproduce humanist assumptions of the separable,
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dualistic mind and body.) It is with these contradictions in mind that I carefully place Tiptree

within posthumanist tradition. The cyborg in Tiptrees 1973 novella The Girl Who Was

Plugged In has made that narrative the most studied through an explicitly posthuman lens, but it

is Slow Music that is perhaps the best example of antihumanism in Tiptrees work, and the

poignant portrayals of loss and transcendence that are present in both it and The Only Neat

Thing add a more nuanced understanding of the posthuman spirit in Tiptrees works. The

juxtaposition of these two works has the potential both to clarify and confuse the idea of the

human as describable by anything stable or universal. I therefore suggest that while Tiptree

places significant emphasis on the organic body as necessary to humanity, she ultimately fails to

define the human either by morphology or by a particular mode of consciousness.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: CONTAMINATING AND CONSUMING THE SUBJECT

Contamination in its many formsillness, pandemic, possession, etc.has long held an

important place in SF, especially in subgenres of horror, dystopia, and utopia. As Haraway and

others like Laurel Bollinger (2009) have argued, contamination provides a ready metaphor for

postmodern subjectivity. Scientific discourses that define body as an ecosystem, inevitably

infected with both symbiotic and destructive microbes, deconstructs the body as a boundary of

self-contained individuation. It reasserts the importance of embodied experience, for to reject

ourselves as connected to infection is to reject ourselves as bodies altogetherto re-enact the

discredited Cartesian dualism that seeks disembodied selfhood rather than the complex, multiple

selfhood that more accurate explains our identities (Bollinger 379). Such arguments compare

the unavoidability of bodily contamination with postmodern and anti-humanist ideas of

subjectivity where the individual is necessarily defined by their interactions with external and
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environmental factors. The fact that it is a culture-as-nature metaphor necessarily confuses the

two, suggesting a less easily definable separation between nature and nurture, or between the

internal and external, than is typically understood. This may lead to a deterministic view of

culture, but if one camp of Tiptree scholarship reads her work in biologically deterministic terms

and the opposite camp emphasizes its constructive aspects, then it also provides a way to

understand the blurriness of the natural/artificial boundary in Tiptree. To borrow a phrase from

Samuel R. Delaneys Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand, the subject is innocent by

contamination; innocent not by purity or unity of the self, but where having an existence

corrupted by a multitude of other forces becomes itself natural (Delaney 81).

Of the two stories I consider, The Only Neat Thing plays closest to this narrative of

infection, examining contamination of the human body on an individual level rather than the

broader, post-plague scenario in Slow Music. The Eea(dron) modality of existence emphasizes

the role of the body as ecosystem, relying on symbiotic relationships with other animals to

sustain both their own and other species. The Eea(dron) present an estranging mode of

embodiment in that it is inherently pluralistic. On their world it is the Eea (or other species,

including the En) that develop the brains of their hostsin fact, the Eea are their hosts brains.

Syl is amazed that the human brain is fully functioning without the necessary intervention of a

brain-animal. Having a body fundamentally changes the nature of an Eeas existence, from

Eea to Eeadron, for an Eea by itself is almost nothing (Tiptree 1985, 28). Without a host

body, Eea have no ability to think or any sense of interiority, relying only on primitive

tropisms for survival until they encounter a living body to instinctually enter and take up

residence in. Possessing a longer lifespan than the Dron they inhabit, multiplicity of form is a
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necessary state for the Eea, and their selfhood is not defined by the boundaries of a single

physical body.

Syllobene can have no consciousness without a body, but sharing a humans brain and

body does not make the Eea itself human. It at once reinforces a severability of the mind from

the meat of the body, while also emphasizing that the outward appearance of Coati as a unitary

and self-contained human body is a lieshe is home to a plurality of consciousnesss, the

boundaries between which are not definable physically or otherwise. Coati is a self whose

integrity has been compromised, whose physical boundaries, like the Eea/dron, are no longer

sufficient in signifying a singular human self. In Syllobenes reliance on Coati not for food or

sustenance, but rather to enable Syllobenes own consciousness, Coati and Syllobenes beings

are integrated far more than a simply parasitic relationship. For instance, the Eea literalize the

integration of physical and mental affect, producing bodily sensations in their hosts that

correspond to certain emotions. One of Syls first interactions with Coati is to induce in her a

feeling of mild arousal, which Coati interprets as happiness. Syllobenes partial control of

Coatis emotional state reframes emotions as chemical, physical substances, and therefore as

inherently of the body. The Only Neat Thing is one of Tiptrees most sentimental stories, and

it is also one that presents affect as neurochemical: sentiment is not separate from the body, but

inherently biological.

But more so than infection or contagion models, the character of the bodily invasions and

appropriations that occur in these two fictions can be understood through the imagery of eating

and being eaten. Consumption (both sexual and otherwise, both externally and internally

initiated), besides being linguistically associated with disease state, is a force that consistently

violates the integrity the human body and human subjectivity. If that is less explicitly
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emphasized in The Only Neat Thing, it is put in far more visceral terms in Slow Music. In a

sexual encounter between Jakko and Peachthief, Jakko [asserts] life upon the body of the

woman (Tiptree 1980, 495). This diction holds two key connotations, the first being that

asserting life is a metaphor for impregnation, the goal of their copulation. However, as this is

the scene where Jakko realizes that sexuality can have ends other than reproduction, the second

and perhaps more important suggestion is that the Peachthief must have her own being (life)

placed on her by an external (male) force. An active male/passive female relationship then

constructs the woman as object and the man as subject. Yet in this narrative, the language of co-

opting anothers body and life is not a one-sided conversation, but a dialogue. Jakko finds

Peachthiefs body violently alive; she is half-fighting him, half-devouring him (Tiptree

1980, 496). The language of consumption frames this literal invasion of the female body by the

male not as violating, but as consensual. The woman becomes an active agent, and the

unidirectionality of sexual penetration as bodily invasion is countered by an equally violent

metaphor of subsumption, one that casts feminine sexual power as both positive and destructive.

In this sense, sexuality becomes the locus of intersecting dynamics that encompass and confuse

both nature and culture. This interplay of power, pain and pleasure suggests a relationship to sex

not dissimilar to that of BDSM, and indeed Lewis Call (2007) has suggested that this is an

appropriate frame of reference for Tiptrees work. Seeking to read her though the lens of what he

calls power-conscious feminism, Calls takes the Foucauldian perspective of the inseparability

of power dynamics and erotic relations.

This reading accepts conflict and power struggles as in some way inevitable and

inescapable, and a sense of fatalism that intertwines destruction with desire is prominent in both

narratives. Tiptree frequently juxtaposes sexuality with death in her stories, and Slow Music is
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no exception; this most erotic scene in the narrative is also the most morbid, as Peachthief and

Jakkos coupling occurs in the same room as a corpse. Syl at once encompasses both penetration

and consumption imagery, and it is that eroticized diction that seals Coatis fate. By the end of

the story, Syl and Coati are incapable of separation because, as Syl explains, the strands of my

physical being have been penetrating so very deeply into Coatis brain whenever I succeed in

freeing one part, I find that the part I freed before has been rejoined (Tiptree 1985, 50). So

when Coati tells Syllobene that a violent sexual encounter they witness between two other men

who had been hosting their own Eea is ugly and not the way Humans really mate, it is

almost laughably navet in the context of Slow Music and virtually all of Tiptrees narratives

(Tiptree 1985, 42). With an element of the grotesque is perhaps the only way that humans mate,

at least in Tiptrees universes. To borrow the diction from Slow Music, it is fair to say that

what Coati fails to understand is that being alive necessarily means being violently alive.

Paradoxically, the only tenuous definitions of humanity rest on violent struggle and resulting

death. And the great irony of this is that it is a non-human force that illuminates this central

tenant of human behavior to Coati. This presents the larger difficultly in locating the posthuman

in Tiptree: it is perhaps possible to generalize some characteristics of humanity, but not in a way

that manages to meaningfully distinguish the human from either animality or alien sentience.

In other hands, Syl and Coatis story might be played only for horror but, as is usual in

her stories, Tiptree takes a well-known SF trope and gives it a more thoughtful twist. To a human

audience, Syl is a monstrous being, and Coati initially understands Syl as such: Youre a brain

parasite, Coati accuses Syl, using my eyes to see with and my ears to hear with, and talking

through my mouth as if I were a zombie (Tiptree 1985, 25, emphasis in the original). But Coati

both gives Syl explicit consent to remain in her body when Syl offers to leave, and then develops
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an intimate emotional relationship with Syl. In their inability to understand the ontology of the

Eea, the other humans of the story continue to refer to Syl as a brain parasite. But while these

secondary characters can only construct Syl as Other, Syls presence in Coatis brain catalyzes a

process whereby it is Coati that is herself othered. Coati dehumanizes her own body to

understand her relationship with Syl, initially with the zombie analogy and later by comparing

herself to a ventriloquists dummy. (Tiptree 1985, 25, 27). The former metaphor invokes the

undead, one of the hardest entities to categorize as being human or nonhuman (MacCormack

2008), and the latter, which places Coati as both a speaker and a dummy, deliberately marks a

confusion of subject and object. In objectifying her own body, Coati goes through a process

where through infection and transformation, humanity becomes other to itself (Thomas 157).

ESTRANGING GENDER AND SEXUALITY: THE BODY AS A FAILED SIGN

The erotic dimension to Syl and Coatis relationship illuminates further dissolutions of

the boundaries of humanity, including those of gender and resultantly, norms surrounding

sexuality based on attraction to gendered bodies. While Coati thinks of Syl in a considerably

more favorable way than do the other characters, Coati is not immune from conceptualizing Syl

in accordance with human norms. Coati does not fall into anthropocentric constructions of Syl as

a monster, but she does humanize Syl in other ways that include her assignment of a

recognizably human gender to Syl, who in actuality is both sexless and hermaphroditic:

Funny how firmly shes taken to thinking of Syllobene as a she, Coati muses. Is that

just sheer projection? Orafter all, theyre in pretty intimate contactis this some deep

instinctive perception, like one of Syls primitive tropisms? Whatever, when they get it

unscrambled, itll be a bit of a shock if Syls a young he or, gods forbid, an it or a

them. What was that Boney had said about the Dron, that some of them had two sets of
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private parts? Thatd be his modest term for sex organs; he must have meant they were

like hermaphrodites. (Tiptree 1985, 33-34)

As genderless hermaphrodites, capable of reproducing both on their own and by mating with

others of their species, the Eea are entirely outside any human notions of a sex/gender matrix,

and the possibility of not being able to describe them with he or she is distinctly

uncomfortable to Coati. Such gendering is paramount to constructing humanity, and that

Syllobene remains an it to other humans is tied to their relegation of Syllobene to the realm of

destructive, monstrous others. While Coatis gendering of the Eea is perhaps inappropriately

humanizing, it also constructs her as worthy of sympathy. On one level, Coati understands that

sympathetic relationship with Syl as being one of genuine friendship, yet she also warns

herself not to get too romantically fixated on the idea that theyre two girls together (Tiptree

1985, 37, 34). Coati quickly falls into a pattern of calling Syl by pet names more akin to those

used by lovers than between platonic friends. Though Syls technical lack of a gender and

separate body makes their relationship impossible to describe with the language of sexual

identity, the queer subtext of it should not be ignored. Whether Syl is genderless or female, the

romantic and erotic dynamic between Syl and Coati defies heteronormativity. It is therefore

insufficient to read Coatis gendering of Syl as feminine as simply a projecting of her own

anatomy onto Syl. Rather, Syl is constructed as an object of desire; the projection then becomes

as much about how Coati relates to others as how she understands her own self. Syl is

constructed as female in part because of Coatis sexualityand consistently, sexuality and

sexual encounters in Tiptrees works become places of praxis for literalizing postmodern ideas of

fragmented subjectivity. The biological reading of Tiptrees stories is one where the internal and

uncontrollable forces of DNA and neurochemistry are the catalysts of being. But this aspect of
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how Coati reads and relates to Syl emphasizes the construction of identity (gender identity, in

this case) by external forces.

Slow Music also includes similar themes of external constructions of gender. The most

interesting figure in the narrative is a nameless secondary character whom Peachthief and Jakko

meet, an old person who likes to quote Romantic poetry and berate Jakko for wanting to go to

the River. Jakko and Peachthief take this character to be a male but, after their death, discover

that they possesses anatomy that typically indicates femaleness. I will refer to this character as

the man-woman, as it is the language used by the narrator, or by gender neutral they/them

pronouns, as it seems inappropriate to do otherwise. Despite Peachthiefs and Jakkos

conclusions, Jakkos declaration that hes a woman ambiguously keeps the gender in the plural

(Tiptree 1980, 494, emphasis added). Peachthief and Jakko recognize the female as true,

privileging the bodily form as markers of actual gender. But if the body wins out over identity,

as it is wont to do in Tiptrees stories, it is because the man-woman is too dead to have a voice in

categorizing their own identity. The man-woman then exemplifies how gender is constructed in

both performative and embodied ways. As Judith Butler (1999) has argued of drag, this reveal

of the man-womans body that appears to contradict their gender presentation fully subverts the

distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive

model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity (137). Amanda Thibodeau (2012) has

noted the tendency in SF, including Tiptrees novella With Delicate Mad Hands, to use the

alien body to estrange gender and heteronormativity, but in Slow Music the human body

suffices to confuse such ideas. Michael Swanwick, the writer of the introduction to the 2004

edition of the Tiptree omnibus Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, suggests (not unfairly) that this

character may be read as an author surrogate, but the man-woman points to a complex thematic
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ambiguity within the text as well as outside it. The body both lies and tells the truth; it is both

natural and rhetorical. Like in The Only Neat Thing to Do, the misgendering of characters

holds essential clues to (de)construction of gender and sexuality categories within the

(de)construction of humanness itself. If it is typical for gendering and humanizing to accompany

each other, the man-woman represents the possibility of de-gendering the human, and Syl the

possibility of overly-gendering the nonhuman.

The man-womans namelessness represents a further estrangement from any recognizable

gendered paradigms, but the names of the other main characters indicate a kind of ambiguity as

well: it does not escape the man-womans notice that Peachthiefs name is drawn from an

obscure William Blake poem, I asked a thief to steal me a peach Peachthiefs name

therefore immediately associates her with the themes of desire present in that poem, as well as

the feminine, yonic imagery of the fruit itself. Again, however, the physical symbolism both

reflects the true nature of the characters gender, but it is also misleading: the thief in Blakes

original poem is in fact a man. The man-woman additionally quotes (or rather, slightly

misquotes) Blakes Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop and Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn.

The story includes an epigraph of four lines from W.B. Yeatss The Hosting of the Sidhe.

Beginning with this use of poetry to invoke 19th century romanticism, it is here where Tiptree

directly invokes and takes on the humanist rhetoric of reason. The disembodiment of the River is

indeed the ultimate humanist utopia, and Jakko is deeply attracted to its offer of transcendent

existence. While Tiptree draws on conventional enlightenment views of gender by emphasizing

the importance of embodiment to the female character and human reason to the male character, it

is precisely Jakkos desire for the gentle rationality of the River that belies his failure to live as

a rational being. He is as inescapably embodied as Peachthief is. The only way to be a purely
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rational being is to become something entire Other to humanity itself. (At least, this vision of

escape into rationality is how Jakko perceives the River. In fact, the River offers a version of

sentience that is totally incomprehensible to the storys human characters. The narrative ends

when Peachthief and Jakko go to the River; Tiptree does not even attempt to narrate such a

completely unknowable and alien ontology.) The man-woman is the narratives mouthpiece for

criticizing the Cartesian dualism that the River would typically imply in uploaded-mind

narratives when they incredulously responds to Jakkos desire to go to river with the rhetorical

query, You think youre going to remain yourselves, dont you? (Tiptree 1980, 492). Therefore

Slow Music as a narrative does validate the concept of uploading consciousness found so

frequent in cyberpunk SF, but modifies its dualistic assumptions. Consciousness (phrased here as

Earthly essence) and body are separable, though to escape the body is not to discard the mere

vessel of the mind, but to fundamentally alter the composition of the self (Tiptree 1980, 503).

Without delving too far into an analysis of the poetic references in this story, it is fair to

say that the poems alluded to in the narrative have some general connection to the celebration of

the body or sexuality. And here it must be noted that in Tiptrees work, sexuality is rarely

reproductive in nature. Violent sex and rape, at least as men perpetrate it, are motivated far more

by the desire to dominate than to procreate. Slow Music and The Only Neat Thing are thus

somewhat unusual in their focus on procreation, as well as the way that they explore how desire

is felt by female characters rather than (or in addition to) male characters. These two facets of

sexuality are very much codependent: when Tiptree puts womens sexuality in the spotlight, it is

much more likely to revolve around womens desire for reproduction, whereas this is rarely a

motivating factor in Tiptrees male characters sexuality apart from Jakko. And it is true that

Tiptree relies on gender stereotypes in constructing this difference; Peachthief says, for example,
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that men build monuments, women build nests (Tiptree 1980, 478). Other sexist details that

the narrative brings up include female pleasure as being inessential to reproduction and the male

parent as being inessential to child-rearing. At some level, however, this all comes off as tonally

ironic; that male abandonment of children is perhaps not a biological given, for example, but a

commonality arising from social structures that prescribe different roles to men and woman.

The narrative itself then seems to parody, rather than endorse, the idea that male and

female reproductive roles are entirely distinct, and it redefines womens connection to the body

and reproduction as essentially human rather than something that distinguishes them from

rational male subjects. As Peachthief puts it: I am going to stay on this Earth and do human

things. Im going to make young ones to carry on the race. (Tiptree 1980, 469-470). The denial

of Jakkos rationality in favor of his sexuality and potential fathering role throws out reason as a

universal human trait and instead centralizes bodily experience as explored through sexuality and

reproduction. The traditional idea of women as being of-the-body is applied across sexes and

genders. For Peachthief then, reproduction is intrinsically tied to both naturalness and

humanness. Yet the setting of Slow Music problematizes even this: Jakko and Peachthief are

two of the last people left on Earth; in the wake of population chemicals it is necessarily that

they take pills in order to procreate (though whether this is to aid libido or fertility is unclear).

Peachthief desires to live naturally, but in this and other ways she finds the influence of the

unnatural difficult to avoid. Ultimately, when sex and reproductionor indeed the extension of

life itself; the man-woman is alive because of heart medicationare necessitated by chemical

aids, they can no longer be called essentially human where humanness is predicated on a notion

of bodily purity. Motherhood is destabilized as a marker of womanhood in opposition to

manhood, and fertility breaks down as a marker of personhood in general. This emphasizes the
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paradox at the center of Tiptrees posthumanism: an organic body is essential to the category of

human, yet how natural that body is, or therefore what it should look like or do to constitute

humanness cannot be universalized.

Besides upsetting natural/artificial boundaries, these medicinal aids complicate the notion

of a civilized/primitive dualism. They are a form of technology, but Jakko, the voice of the

failure of humanism, considers the pills dehumanizing in that they trigger a regression to an

animal, instinctual state (Tiptree 1980, 491). As is common in many of Tiptrees texts, sexuality

is deliberately associated with animal nature. Desire is a form of half-enjoyable animality; it is

the way that the ancients lived whirled by violent passions, indecent, uncaring (Tiptree

1980, 483, 482). Syls feelings on the uncontrollable force that is her mating drive utilizes

similar diction, though of course it does not fit into the concept of dehumanization in the same

way. The Eea reproduction drive is described as a primitive tropism; Syl frets that she is

becoming a wild beast (Tiptree 1985, 51). Unusual to Slow Music, however, is that not only

are humans given animalistic traits, but also that non-human animals are given surprising human

traits: non-human animals, in this story, have the ability to speak. If there is an explanation to

this it is never elucidated, but it provides an additional estranging norm that complicates the

ability to define the human in clear opposition to the nonhuman.

FUTURITY AND THE DEATH OF HUMANITY: DEHUMANIZATION AS ECSTASY AND TRAGEDY

Sexuality confuses the distinctions between the animal and the human, the male and the

female, the primitive and the advanced. Ambiguities in the plot, like the unclear purpose of the

pills in Slow Music, also confuse the destructive and constructive urges within sexuality: the

desire to violently seek pleasure (e.g., to rape) exists in uncomfortable tension with the desire to

reproduce. This relationship between procreation, sexuality, violence, and death requires further
 18

examination, as the seemingly paradoxical way that they are intertwined generates many

potential contradictions. In The Only Neat Thing, the drive to create life ends in its opposite

it is Syls out-of-control mating drive that decides Coatis ultimate and tragic death. This is a plot

point that should not be ignored in an attempt to distance Tiptrees work from any suggestion of

biological essentialism. If Syl initially redefines what is stereotypically monstrous as friendly

and pleasurable, then Coatis gruesome end calls such a redefinition into question. Indeed, both

narratives end in death and loss, regardless of whether reproduction is successful or failed. The

man-woman themself also acts a microcosm of some of these contradictions. For a character who

destabilizes the very notions of gender, sex, and sexuality, they somewhat surprisingly

admonishes Jakko and Peachthief for going on the River to spend eternity together as energy

matrices or something equally impressive and sexless (Tiptree 1980, 490, emphasis added).

They further espouses a view of humanity that is defined by heterosexuality and

heteroproductivity. According to them, the character of humanity is defined by pain, despair, and

death, but above all, they copulated! Fornicated, fucked, made love! (Tiptree 1980, 492) To

them, did sex is synonymous with made children. (Tiptree 1980, 492) This general

conflation of sex and procreation makes defining embodied experience and the message of these

two stories difficult to delineate, so the meaning of pregnancy in the text should be considered

further (Tiptree 1980, Tiptree 1980, 492).

Returning to the idea of bodily contamination by pathogens that I introduced earlier,

Slow Music belongs to a different class of SF that uses pandemic as an agent of broader social

and biological change, in comparison to the way the The Only Neat Thing focuses on the

contamination of an individual. The idea of infection doesnt apply precisely in the same way,

then, but given that Tiptree gives such primacy to the ways that bodies physically interact, I have
 19

also repeatedly implied that these other modes of interaction also work as metaphors for

contaminated subjectivity. In particular, this applies to consumption of the bodywhether in the

form of the all-consuming River, Peachthiefs subsumptive eroticism, or the taking of Syl in

Coatis body and subsequent threat of Syls spores boring their way of it. One could go further,

however, to define pregnancy as the ultimate form of bodily invasion and contamination. Doing

so problematizes the feminist potential of Tiptrees work, by placing the burden of contamination

and embodiment onto (cisgender, fertile) women, that is, a group not afforded the title of Subject

within liberal humanism in the first place. The death of humanity, in this story, is directly

connected to failed reproduction, failed impregnation, and thus failed contamination. It defines

such bodily invasion as necessary to the fate of humanity, but in doing so endorses a version of

futurity that hinges on heteronormative modes of reproduction. Veronica Hollinger has described

Tiptrees stories as tragedies of naturalized heterosexuality, yet this particular narrative would

suggest more of a tragedy of queer sexuality. This is a queer apocalypticism, a steadfast refusal

to facilitate heternormativitys future in any way; a future configured through and proscribed by

the symbol of the Human/Child (Griffney 58). And yet, there is an obvious lambasting of this

idealization of the child as a symbol of futurity that comes again from the narratives

transgressive figure of the man-woman. Echoing Griffneys description of the Child as wish

fulfillment of desired immortality, the man-woman describes the desire for childbearing in

humanity as their only weapon, you see. To send something of themselves into the future

beyond their own deaths (Griffney 65; Tiptree 1980, 492). Reproduction is therefore equated

with the spiritual, akin to the religious myths that attempt to inject meaning into death and

envision life after death. This offers some resolution to the paradoxical juxtaposition of

procreation/sexuality/death: death was the engine of their lives, death fueled their sexuality,
 20

says the man-woman: death drove them at each others throats and into each others arms

(Tiptree 1980, 492).

The River becomes a wildly mixed bag of religious metaphors in the sarcastic mouth of

the man-woman, at once appropriating the Christian (wash all my sins away, they jokes), the

Hindu (casting the River as a cosmic sausage machine, continually consuming the essences of

living beings, mixing them together, and regurgitating them into new physical forms), and the

mythical (the Rivers association with death and crossing between worlds is both implicitly

Stygian and explicitly associated with the Celtic mythology invoked in the stanza borrowed from

Yeats). (Tiptree 1989, 490, 493). Where the narrator describes the River as rapturous, the man-

woman employs these significantly less reverent and more humorous versions of religiosity to

represent it. They spins the spiritual as mundane and the embodiment of reproduction as spiritual

(and therefore cultural). The effect of this is to call into question the idea that reproduction is a

natural phenomenon removed from power structures or social context. I have argued that

sexuality in Tiptree is a force of power and pleasure as well as procreation, but I dont mean to

imply that the power-centered/procreative facets of sexuality correspond to a constructed/natural

dichotomy. When Tiptree focalizes female sexuality through the lens of the reproductive drive,

she also frames pregnancy as an instrument of power. Jakko, like most male characters in her

stories, feels domineering desire towards the women around him, but Peachthief also commits a

form of sexual violence in that she gives Jakko fertility pills without his knowledge. (This is not

dissimilar from a plot point in another of Tiptrees fictions, The Women Men Dont See,

which features a male narrator who blatantly sexually objectifies his female companions,

unaware until the end of the story that one of them has been attempting to become pregnant by

him.) Continuing the connection between violence and sexuality, the enormity of her violation
 21

sends Jakko into a fit of rage, where he both physically strikes Peachthief and forcibly initiates

sexual intercourse with her. In Tiptrees stories, men violate sexual consent by way of rape;

while women violate consent by way of their reproductive capacities. One some level, this motif

relies on stereotypical gender attributes, constructing a modified version of the femme fatale

figure where womens power lies in playing off of their sexual desirability. But it also serves to

further deconstruct the boundaries of naturalness, and to emphasize consistent and reciprocal

violation of the self and body in human relations. Sexuality and reproduction become both

animal and spiritual, both of the body and of culture.

The ultimate effect of these two works can be assessed a few different ways. In the

context of genre, though Slow Music lacks any mention of cybernetics, its premise of the

River is similar to that of the cyberpunk trope of uploading the mind into a computer, and the

connections of this text to cyberpunk are obvious. Tiptree just slightly predates cyberpunk, with

The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973) considered an early prototypical work of the genre.

Nevertheless, Tiptree considers, and then deliberately subverts the humanist assumptions present

in cyberpunk of the mind as unchanged by its vessel and the insignificance of the body. The

cosmic sausage machine metaphor is indeed an oddly prescient (and grotesquely humorous)

angle on the body as meat trope that Neuromancer (1984) would come to exemplify as few

years after Slow Music was published. The Only Neat Thing is a throwback to older SF,

drawing from any number of first contact, space exploration, and pulp tropes, but also finds its

analog in hard SF. Tiptrees story of a teenage girl whose innocent mistake aboard a spacecraft

that leads to her violent and unavoidable end has clear parallels with Tom Godwins classic of

that genre, The Cold Equations (1954). Though again, it is not an exact equivalency. Tiptree

does not use physics to make a point about the exertion of objective, scientific, and uncaring
 22

natural forces on her characters as Godwin does, but the far more slippery science of biology.

This biological element has traditionally been associated with the doom of women in Tiptrees

writing. In its larger social context, whether or not Tiptree presents violence as natural or learned

has critical consequences in feminist praxis. To accept a deterministic reading of her work, argue

critics like Judith Genova (1994), is essentially to live in bad faith. But bad faith can imply not

only a mistaken belief that humans have no control over their biological urges, but in the belief

that biology creates hierarchies of difference in the first place. This latter alternative means that

the biological element is also the potential site of feminist liberation. We can look at the history

of evolutionary theory to understand why: where Darwinism was used by male scientists in the

19th century as a justification for the inferiority of woman (as well as the inferiority of non-

white, non-western peoples and races), feminist reworkings of evolutionary theory insist that

equality of the sexes can be found in geneticsnamely, the lack of significant genetic and

neurological difference between female and male bodies. The further one zooms in on DNA,

the less distinct sex difference becomes. If one only looks closely at the empirical and scientific

evidence, such a viewpoint states, social change will follow. While this breakdown of significant

difference on a genetic level is key, this view relies on the accessibility and objectivity of

empirical/scientific truth, and I have argued that reading biology (science) and society as

separable is not entirely appropriate in the context of Tiptree.

This, perhaps, leads into an overall skepticism towards articulating a universally human

embodied experience rather than any clear, meaningful definition of the human body or human

selfhood. There is a consistent failure to pin down where the body as a set of signifiers ends and

as a neurochemical entity begins. These stories are agonizing lament[s] for human life that try

desperately, but mainly fail, to define what it means to have a human life (Tiptree 1980, 504).
 23

But where the category of Human is undermined, so too is the idea of dehumanization as an

inherently negative force. Dehumanization can become a positive, liberating notion, dissolving

the hierarchies and boundaries of identity. An ethical obligation to those who could be

considered less-than human (ranging from those persons constructed as disabled to non-human

animals toin science fiction, at leastsentient alien races) emerges in the absence of a

universal definition of what constitutes humanness. As in the paradigms of cultural feminism,

woman as a stable category falls apart, as does the usefulness of identification and identity in

general. The unmarked identities of whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness, etc., lose their

centrality in defining the human. We are left with, in Haraways terms, cyborgs, made obvious in

the he/she/it/them figures of Syl and an enigmatic man-woman. But in their finality, it is not

liberation but tragedy that wins out in these narratives. There is no recourse from the uglier

aspects of existence here, only a River that destroys rather than saves the human race. Humanity

is the vulgarity of desire and death, the resignation to the heteroproductive. Its the necessity of

having a sexed body but having that body constantly misread. There is only life as occasionally

pleasurable, but overwhelmingly nasty, brutish, and short. We are left with nothing more than the

prospect of death as the quintessentially human quality, and thus a quintessentially human

quality that ironically connotes the ultimate failure to distinguish human life from any other kind

of life.
 24

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