The Wishing Hour

[rinue]

My short story "The Wishing Hour" is up at Stupefying Stories! It has pregnancy and a genie and skateboarding. It's funny, free, and short. What's not to like? Read it here.

I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, which is a fairly normal completion-to-publication timeline. There's submitting and then waiting for people to read it, and then probably getting rejected a few times, and then after acceptance, waiting for the issue to come out. Sometimes, it's faster. Sometimes it takes years longer. I mention this because this is the first of three (or possibly five, now that I think about it) pieces I have coming out in the next few months, and I didn't write any of them at remotely the same time. But it makes me look like I've suddenly been very productive. Coincidence.

In this case, the time-slip aspect of it is particularly pronounced, and so it feels as though past me, a different person, wrote this story which is now being read by present me. Present me feels completely understood and embraced by this other writer - that sense of recognition, of "hey, that's how I feel!"

Although "The Wishing Hour" is not remotely a polemic story and was not intended as such by the author (I am fairly confident of this as a critic), and is really more magic realism than science fiction, I realized after it came out that if I said "hey, everybody, read this sci-fi pregnancy tale!" a lot of people would probably assume it involved alien invasion/posession/parasitism, because this is a dominant SF trope.

I like that trope; I am a huge fan of Alien, for instance. (Less so the sequels, although I don't hate them. I hate Prometheus, but that's a prequel.) However, something I have noticed when talking to my male friends is, to put it gently, they don't seem to think of this trope as containing any irony. They really think it has to feel weird and alien and unnatural to be pregnant. (One would hope they are all therefore extraordinarily pro-choice, but as Prometheus would suggest, not necessarily.)

On the one hand, yes, sure. Yes. There is a foriegn body which has set up residence in a uterus. On the other hand, pregnancy is definitively not alien, by virtue of the fact that it is producing humans. It is also, not incidentally, something half of the human race can do with our bodies. It's not something we always do with our bodies, and it's not something all of us do with our bodies, but no, pregnancy and menstruation are automatically not alien or supernatural or weird.

So the SF tendency to treat it as weird and alien supports the dominant cultural narrative that women are deformed men. There are not a similar number of stories about how erections are alien parasites, which use chemical signals to take over your brain, suck the blood out of other parts of your body to feed themselves, and make part of you swell up to a totally wrong size that is horrifying. John Varley did write a penis-as-alien-parasite story, and it is excellent, and Tiptree did some work in this area although as far as I know not specifically penis-focused, but these stories are understood by readers to be symbolic, and to portray men in not the best light. Whereas alien pregnancy stories are just telling it like it is.

Or I would say isn't.

Comments

[rinue]

Probably not coincidentally, Varley and Tiptree are also much more comfortable with sex and sexuality than most SF authors working during the 1970s and early 80s, as pointed out in this entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

[adrian_turtle]

I have never been pregnant myself, and do not plan to have a child, so I hesitate to speak to this. But quite a few women I know spoke of their pregnancies as disturbing, even frightening--although they wanted the child at the end of the process, they found the months of transformation deeply unsettling. Obviously, not every pregnant woman feels this way, but dozens of them do (of the less than 100 pregnant women I've talked to.)

Whether a woman sees herself as transforming her body or having her body transformed by an outside force seems to be a different question than whether she wants the transformation to happen. A woman in my family (who had tried for years to become pregnant, because she so desperately wanted a baby) spoke in terms of blessings, of feeling like she was in G-d's hands in a direct and terrifying way because so much was changing and she felt off-balance and out of control. She had asked for it, but then it was out of her hands for 8 months.

I think the time-scale matters a lot, here. The transformations of pregnancy last months. Those of menstruation last days. Those of orgasm last minutes.

[rinue]

There are clearly a lot of different narratives of pregnancy, and different women experience pregnancy quite differently. For some, it is a happy time of anticipation, and for others, it's literally life-threatening. Some feel beautiful, some feel hideous, some feel anxious, some are exhausted, some are just trying not to throw up all the time, and some all at once. Some feel pretty much the same, other than needing different clothes for a bit. This is not surprising; there is a similar variation in how people feel about sex or about eating or puberty.

I'm not trying to say there is one true narrative, or that the feeling of invasion is not real for some women. As mentioned, I like body horror SF like Alien, which I think is thoroughly feminist, and I concede that there is an aspect of "whoa, my body's being taken over." What I'm pointing to is the ways in which SF tends to take a narrow view of certain experiences (such as being female, or being pregnant), and then point to the number of variations of this one view and call it diversity.

It's the flattening that's odd and marginalizing, not the extistence of the trope.

[rinue]

In essence, what I am pointing to is this:

Things that are normal bodily cycles of women are being treated as inhuman (whether alien or supernatural) in fiction dominantly written and published by men.

I would question the historical context in which we can consider pregnancy an unnatural or uncommon state and an unpregnant body to be a more authentic self. Although non-pregnancy is now undeniably the base state of most women, for much of history (prior to modern birth control) when average family size was much larger, many more women spent much more of their time pregnant.

I bring in menstruation partly because the average modern first-world woman cumulatively probably spends more days menstruating than she spends days pregnant. Obviously, a lot of women have a lot of complicated feelings about menstruating, and it's probably not central to most of our identities. However we might individually feel about it, we recognize it a bodily process, like breathing or digesting. But it shows up as a plot point in speculative fiction much more often than digesting does, or peeing, or sweating, usually as a sign that something is horrifying or magical.

This is not a scientist's way to look at a body, which is what I ask for from science fiction. And it's othering to do this to women's physical realities while not similarly exploiting uniquely male physical realities.

SF in general tends to have a revulsion for the body, a sense that our bodies are something we want to overcome - that we want to be immortal, free of sexual desire, able to make children outside our bodies, able to stretch beyond our senses, able to forego food and breathing. We want to be superhuman or posthuman. The body is a limit; bodily feelings are base drags on pure intellect.

This is not an invalid point of view, and when I say that a physical state is "natural" that doesn't mean I think it's better. There's a lot to be said in favor of transcending the physical self. But it's important to continue to examine the ideas we're repeating and advancing, and in this case to look at the ways it can reinforce the misogyny that continues to be endemic to some of our professional organizations.