The Female Man Themes

The Female Man talks a lot about what proper girls and women are supposed to feel and do. Topping the list are activities like being attractive, being pleasant, and being attentive (especially to...

Masculinity in The Female Man goes hand-in-hand with patriarchal power. The most conventionally masculine men in this novel are also the most dangerous, and the book suggests that that's not a coin...

It can be difficult to separate questions concerning sexuality and sexuality identity from the act of sex itself in The Female Man, because so often the characters' sexual encounters are staged to...

There are many different kinds of feminism, and The Female Man speaks to, well, a lot of them. However, its strongest affinities are clearly with the socialist feminist or radical feminist position...

Second wave feminism in the USA learned a lot from the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Rallying cries like Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Freedom Now," Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power," and th...

The Female Man may be set in four different versions of Earth, but by comparing and contrasting them, we wind up with a captivating portrait of America as Joanna Russ saw it in the early 1970s, al...

Foreignness and "the Other" is basically the science fiction theme, and so it's no surprise that The Female Man is all over it. Given its four protagonists and its reality-shifting structure, the n...

The Female Man isn't just a feminist novel, it's a novel about feminism—one that dramatizes some of the classic arguments for and against women's resistance to patriarchy. Most importantly, the n...