On my reading, the exact same thing would have happened - because even as female the astronauts would still have been a product of an unequal society.
I think that's exactly right - had the astronauts been female and the clones men, the denouement would have been identical. Absolutely - this is what I'm trying to get at, because it's what lends the lie to Niall's straight gender reading. I think he's right that Tiptree often didn't agree with her own stories, and as such I don't want to take the narrator's 'there's no place for me here' at face value. I think, as you point out, that there's no place for anyone from his world - male, female, dog or cat - in the world he has wound up in.
I'd take your analysis a step further, though, and suggest that the real heart of this story is that a totally equal society is undesirable, because it would result in precisely the cold stagnation we see in Houston, Houston. Im this story, an equal society necessarily means a less diverse society, both in terms of gender and individuals, and from her other stories it rather seems to me that Tiptree was in love with this diversity, however painful and problematic it often is. I think that this is the real, disquieting heart of the story, rather than any soft-headed proclamations about 'gender types'.
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Date: 2005-12-09 04:22 pm (UTC)I think that's exactly right - had the astronauts been female and the clones men, the denouement would have been identical. Absolutely - this is what I'm trying to get at, because it's what lends the lie to Niall's straight gender reading. I think he's right that Tiptree often didn't agree with her own stories, and as such I don't want to take the narrator's 'there's no place for me here' at face value. I think, as you point out, that there's no place for anyone from his world - male, female, dog or cat - in the world he has wound up in.
I'd take your analysis a step further, though, and suggest that the real heart of this story is that a totally equal society is undesirable, because it would result in precisely the cold stagnation we see in Houston, Houston. Im this story, an equal society necessarily means a less diverse society, both in terms of gender and individuals, and from her other stories it rather seems to me that Tiptree was in love with this diversity, however painful and problematic it often is. I think that this is the real, disquieting heart of the story, rather than any soft-headed proclamations about 'gender types'.