Teän Roberts

( Whileaway Essay by Teän Roberts, 2021 )

"There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women" - Joanna Russ, 1970.

“Whileaway” is the name of a planet imagined by feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ. It is similar to Earth except that all the men died in a plague, leaving a planet populated only by women. Russ described Whileaway thirteen generations since the last man died, where women had been living ever since, reproducing with the aid of science rather than sperm. When reading about Whileaway I wondered: what would happen to the canon of the art nude on a planet like this where there was no longer any male gaze?

In an introduction to Russ’s novel about Whileaway, The Female Man (1975), fellow sci-fi author Gwyneth Jones writes that, as women, we “hunger for a world where female human beings could be the measure of reality.”1 Together with a friend as a willing model, I set out to discover that distant world via photographs.

In this I was not dissimilar to the adolescents of Whilewaway. In When it Changed (1972) Russ’s protagonist watches her sleeping daughter: “dreaming twelve-year-old dreams of love and war: running away to sea, hunting in the North, dreams of strangely beautiful people in strangely beautiful places... Some day soon, like all of them, she will disappear for weeks on end to come back grimy and proud, having knifed her first cougar or shot her first bear, dragging some abominably dangerous dead beastie behind her which I will never forgive for what it might have done to my daughter.”2

However, lacking access to a spaceship, my friends and I were confined to Earth and on this planet threats come in other forms. Two women, alone in unfamiliar territory, I became conscious of that internal voice of warning. The same voice that says: “don’t walk alone at night, don’t show too much skin” was making us feel as if taking our clothes off on the side of a mountain is an act dogged by jeopardy. And though we told ourselves that this was an unfounded fear and we were perfectly safe, we still went running to hide behind the nearest rock at the first jingle of an approaching goat’s bell.

We were very aware of the ever-present threat - real or imaginary - of the unknown men that earthling women are taught to fear. We internalise the belief that we are unsafe and must always keep our bodies guarded incase of attack. We police our behaviour accordingly, to a greater or lesser extent, all the time. Only usually we do this in such a subtle, unconscious way that we aren’t even aware we feel any danger.

Despite our fears we came out from behind our rock, and continued down to the clay pits, gorges and shorelines - looking for places that, in the right light, could seem to be an alien world. And then something unexpected happened: we reached Whileaway.

In her forward to Charlotte Jansen’s book Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, Zing Tsjeng writes that: “A woman taking a photograph of a woman isn’t just performing a political act; it is also a powerful act of imagination... each picture taken creates an image of a new reality.”3 In our case this act of grasping for another reality caused the membrane between the planets to thin. A portal opened allowing some of the essence of Whileaway to seep through, where it hung in the air like a plexiglass dome and protected us. The figures of people - glimpsed as specks in the distance - miraculously never came any closer. We had what women dream of having in public spaces - we were left alone.

Under this dome we were safe to play, experiencing what it was like to be the default voice of humanity. What would that feel like? Would the women of Whileaway be mistrustful to see a camera? Maybe photography was not so ubiquitous there any longer? Or maybe - thirteen generations ahead - cameras were obsolete? Would they meet my gaze? Or ignore me entirely and instead watch the sky for incoming spacecraft?

They would - we hoped - have a less anthropocentric outlook, so we treated the frogs and wild tortoises and mushrooms we encountered with the same attention as the humanoids, respecting a connection with place, rock, swamp, clay.

One thing we felt sure about: the women of Whileaway would be comfortable in their own skin. This presented us with the biggest challenge for, as Jansen notes, (on Earth) “women are... susceptible... to feel unconfident about their body and unhappy with their self image,”4 and the act of baring flesh in front of a camera comes with its own set of perceived dangers. But, naked in a quarry in the drizzle, and simultaneously safe in our pocket of Whileaway, the act of shedding clothes was liberating, exhilarating and transgressive. In spite of our conditioning we had dared. And in the act of daring we had been transformed. We had opened the portal and experienced that “thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognise at the time; I mean joy.”5

We had photographic proof that we had visited a not-so-distant planet, free from all those fears that made the act of taking our clothes off in an open space feel like such a perilous activity.

But on returning to Earth there was a disconnect. We fall prey to earthbound laws and earthly projections.

Many men who viewed the images assumed that the pictures were created for their consumption and were an invitation for their sexual attention.

This, while uncomfortable, was hardly surprising. Particularly in a science fiction setting where, despite two movies playing a formidable leader of the Rebel Alliance, Princess Leia (played by feminist icon Carrie Fisher), is eventually reduced to an enslaved mute in a gold bikini in the third film, and displayed as a sexualised spectacle for the male gaze via the tenuous conduit of a giant lascivious slug.6 When this has become one of the most dominant images of woman in the whole of SF, perhaps it is to be expected that these men may not understand the nuance that the nude women in my pictures were not performing for their gaze.

Centuries of patriarchal culture have taught the masculine that he, as identified with “the male protagonist, is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action”7 or, as Ursula K Le Guin put it: “the story isn’t good if he isn’t in it”8 - so ‘naturally’9 a man, seeing a planet where there are no men, would likely interpret Whileaway as a male fantasy for him to penetrate.

In Girls! Girls! Girls! In Contemporary Art, Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman describe how “the potential for female agency is often held in tension with the commodification of the female body.”10 It is this historical commodification that means that these images of Whileaway - created by acts of collaboration, exploration and thrilling rebellion - might be read as a male fantasy. But these tensions also extend further and in more subtle ways.

The most unexpected and persistent critique these images have received, which has come largely from other women in the art and sci-fi communities, has been: “Why are all the women young and conventionally attractive?”

I had wanted to discuss the portal opening, the transcendence of fear and the blurring of the worlds, but these points were not the ones up for debate: as young women, somehow our bodies had got in the way.

The female SF reader felt betrayed. There was no place for bodies like ours in the speculative feminist vision of the future, I was told. Feminism and speculative fiction were not about beauty. If we were going to imagine other worlds they shouldn’t look like that.

I was also critiqued that my images lacked diversity. This is a fair and justified evaluation, but one that deserves a whole other discussion around ethics, tokenism and the dominating history of the camera in the hands of a white person as a tool for imperialistic control, racism, othering and subjugation, particularly in the context of ‘exploring new worlds’. While that discourse is important and valuable, here I will address the criticism my images received for what they did do, rather than the ethical implications of what creating an alternative could have looked like, had I shot them differently. I will say that of course there would be a varied and diverse picture of womanhood on Whileaway spanning all ages, races, abilities, cis and trans women - and they would all be beautiful.

The reason there wasn’t much variety of bodies in these images was because the women I photographed are close friends of mine. They are all in their late twenties and early thirties because that’s the age I am. They’re a fair representation of my friendship group and - while they are beautiful - I didn’t select them for their particular beauty decreed by some omnipresent societal mode, and in so doing reject all other iterations of womanhood as lesser. I selected them because they were willing collaborators, who trusted me enough to travel to weird destinations with me and take their clothes off.

Yet as we had not been, in our space exploration, all things to all women, our utopian experiment was deemed to have failed.

Jensen observed that, “in recent years a persistent question asked of female photographers who photograph women is whether the women who are photographed are a fair representation of women in general. Of course they cannot be. Yet female photographers who make pictures of female subjects have been required to address this issue very directly. We seem to expect women artists to provide diverse, well-rounded images of all women, or of certain groups of women. Men, meanwhile, have been free to create unrealistic images of women since the camera was invented.”11

But when my images were critiqued as playing up to the male gaze - I considered whether I had done this? Is the male gaze so ubiquitous that it had crawled into my eyeballs and made me objectify my friends?

I had consciously tried to make them look as beautiful as possible, because for me beauty is celebratory. I am unapologetic about that as I don’t believe that beauty is somehow bad or unimportant. I’ve long considered the seductive power of beauty and colour as a kind of visual Trojan horse: a vehicle to slip subversive ideas into people’s field of awareness undetected.

In her seminal work on the weaponisation of female beauty - The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf echos the importance beauty does still have in imaging new paradigms: “Many writers have tried to deal with the problems of fantasy, pleasure, and “glamour” by evicting them from the female Utopia. But “glamour” is merely a demonstration of the human capacity for being enchanted, and is not in itself destructive. We need it, but redefined... We are trying to make new meanings for beauty in an environment that doesn’t want us to get away with it.”12

I also don’t think you can make people look beautiful in images unless you feel they are beautiful. It had been my projection of love onto my friends that had created the depth of beauty in these images. Wolf also asserts that, “a woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.”13

Russ too speaks of recognising another woman’s beauty as a vehicle for self-love. In The Female Man she says: “There is this buisness of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self.”14 This had been the reality of the experience of photographing these women who I love and find beautiful.

However, Peio Aguirre said that “the political function of science fiction is not merely to forecast the day after tomorrow, but to make us aware about the problems we may have imagining it.”15 So I must consider, when I was attempting to show a tenderly subversive female future-myth, why were viewers struggling to see past the glossy surface?

The accusations against my pictures was that they weren’t ‘art’ and would be more interesting if the women pictures weren’t young, conventionally attractive, beautiful women. So this raises the question: does beauty negate interestingness? And if so, why does it?

Scratch this surface a little deeper and we unearthed a profound contempt for youth and beauty because they are the yardsticks usually used to measure the feminine and femininity. In her later polemic How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Russ herself states: “Many feminists argue that the automatic devaluation of women’s experience and consequent attitudes, values and judgements, springs from an automatic devaluation of women per se.”16 The low buzzing disrespect for women in society means that even the signifiers used to give them value (youth and beauty) are themselves devalued as frivolous and unimportant. Jansen affirms, “we see photographs women take - even of other women - as narcissistic, shallow, easy.”17

But these measures for the feminine were not created by the feminine for herself. They were created by the dominant hetero-patriarchal culture.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “the mainstream strain of science fiction,” which Walidah Imarisha asserts “most often reinforces dominant narratives of power.18” Because SF has long been the domain for masculine writers, the only way women were granted a seat on the spaceship was via the fantasies of male gatekeepers. In SF women are valued for their beauty, pliability and youth, and above all the role they play in the development of male protagonists. In We Were Feminists Once Andi Zeisler states that even today, “female characters in big-budget action franchises... are often presented initially as strong, smart and steady - that is, until they’re called into service as catalysts for the male hero’s journey, at which point they’re likely to be kidnapped, terrified, chained to a bomb, or whatever.”19

The critique of my photographs suggested that - as young women photographed beautifully - we were too close to this prevailing ideal to be valuable. Women who looked like us were already represented in SF, therefore our proximity to the masculine-sanctioned ideal ostracises us from the speculative feminist future.

But while the images of women who are allowed in SF are typically young and beautiful (Altaira in Forbidden Planet20, Barbarella in Barbarella21, Leeloo in The Fifth Element22), they are also reductive and two-dimensional. So, while bodies like ours had been granted passage into space, they had remained just that. Just bodies. Shallow vessels to convey masculine ideas. Laura Mulvey summed this up perfectly in her classic 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: “what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”23 This is the “dark side of being treated like a beautiful object”24 - you’re still an object.

These attitudes have dangerous repercussions in real life. You only have to look at the recent revelations of rampant abuse of women in the film and modelling industries to see that while being young and beautiful might buy you access to the higher echelons of patriarchy - while you are there, you can still expect abuse. For too long this has been the price women are expected to pay for being deemed beautiful. Chanel designer, Karl Lagerfeld’s response to the Me Too movement - “if you don't want your pants pulled about, don't become a model - join a nunnery!” - shows that even the women who are deemed the most ‘acceptable’ by these standards can still expect to have their bodily autonomy violated. If you win the rat race you are still a rat. Even if you are a very pretty rat.

Wolf tells us that “it is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the [beauty] myth, one woman’s body is used to hurt another... This constant comparison, in which one woman’s worth fluctuates through the presence of another, divides and conquers.”25 By only permitting beautiful women to go into space via the phallic rocket- ship of the male imagination, and leaving those women who didn’t match the fantasy ideal behind on Earth, SF further exploits this division.

Wolf also said that, “as women demanded access to power, power structures used the beauty myth materially to undermine women’s advancement.” We see this in action in the critique of the Whileaway images. Even though we had gone to distant lands and scaled mountains and grazed our knees and emerged victorious from the swamp - our images of a new paradigm weren’t seen as viable because we had used our bodies to make them. These bodies - too similar to those historically used by society to shame other women - appear to be so thoroughly stripped of their agency that anything we wanted to say with them is immediately overpowered. Crushed to dust under the pressure of the whole history of images of women made for the pleasure of men. As Mulvey noted, the “image of woman [is] still tied to her place of bearer of meaning, not maker or meaning.”26

This homogenous viewpoint for reading images of young women’s bodies, no matter the intentions or context of their creation, has been gestating for a long time. Other ways of reading women’s bodies have been pushed to the margins by the weight of the dominant culture. So too have women’s attempts to decide how their own bodies are represented in art.

Until the late 1800s women were banned from attending life drawing classes with the excuse that the sight of naked flesh - even of female sitters - would ‘corrupt’ them. Today the same attempts to exclude women from determining the depiction of their own bodies is achieved by Instagram’s deliberately vague ‘community guidelines’ which police the female form in a shady, ambiguous way. The app allows underwear brands, fitness models and accounts like Playboy to post provocatively nude images with slight blurs over nipples and vulva, while deleting similar images from other accounts where bodies don’t conform to the thin, white, cisgendered ideals, deemed permissible under white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.27

These attempts to reduce diverse representation and censor women’s portrayal of their own bodies conflate “traditional behaviour as if it were actively moral behaviour.”28 Censors appear as if they are acting from a place of moral fortitude, when in fact they are operating from a desire to maintain established systems of dominance and control. The images of and by women that endure are those that have passed the test of being acceptable to the over-culture. And as this is perpetuated - largely unchallenged - as a ubiquitous, neutral, morally sanctioned viewpoint, it becomes hard for us to disentangle ourselves from this default way of looking at women.

We struggle to imagine a way of seeing that is framed outside the hetero-patriarchal experience, even when we try our best to envision something else: Le Guin’s groundbreaking 1969 book The Left Hand of Darkness depicts a planet populated by only one gender, but the pronouns she chose for everyone who lived on it were still ‘he/him/ his.’

This is why it is imperative to examine and dismantle the subtle yet pervasive structures that have reduced my camera to little more than the patriarchy’s phallic extension. Mulvey says that “while still caught within the language of the patriarchy... there is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides”29 - photography is one of these tools. So too is questioning our reactions to the photography we encounter. Jansen writes that, “a photograph is an impulse - and a challenge - to enquire, not a representation of truth. More often than not, I find that the photographs of women by women I see point me back to my own prejudice and misconceptions.”30

If, as Jensen asserts, “the aim is to come to photographs of women neutrally,”31 then the misogynistic impulse internalised within all of us needs to be excavated. If the message of my images - created joyfully in an attempt by young women to make ourselves up for ourselves, in a new world, with a loving gaze - are dismissed as superficial because the vehicle I am using to convey this vision is the female body, then we need to think about why that is.

So, to bring this back to my original question: ‘What would happen to the art nude on a planet like Whileaway’ is not really determined by how the image is shot, the difference lies in how it would be read.

To understand the difference between how a whileawayan might differ from an earthling in the reading of an art nude, we must reexamine what we bring with us when we look at women’s art and images of nude women, how much of that is valuable and how much we want to discard. Wolf gave us a method for doing this: “We have to separate from the myth what it has surrounded and held hostage: female sexuality, bonding among women, visual enjoyment, sensual pleasure... female fun, clean and dirty. We can dissolve the myth and survive it with sex, love, attraction and style not only intact, but flourishing more vibrantly than before.”32

What Wolf asks for is a portrayal of female beauty that doesn’t negate her humanity. Le Guin described this feeling best when discussing her attempts to fit her own experience into the prevailing cultural narrative: “What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective.”33 Nevertheless, Le Guin, Russ, and so many other women and non-binary people across space and time, have continued to create stories that allow us to imagine a different reality.

Le Guin continued: “science fiction properly conceived... is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.”34 Once we have investigated the unconscious biases that cause us to dismiss and belittle feminine stories and women’s bodies, perhaps we can redirect the narrative to consider what women actually do and feel as dynamic, three-dimensional beings. Maybe then women will - at last - have a chance at being fully human.

1 Joanna Russ, The Female Man, London, Gateway, 2010 (1975)
2 Joanna Russ, When it Changed, in Again, Dangerous Visions, New York, Doubleday, 1972
3 Zing Tsjeng in Charlotte Jansen’s Girl on Girl, Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, London, Laurence King, 2017 4 Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl, Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, London, Laurence King, 2017
5 Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, New York, Ace Books, 1969
6 Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Episode VI), directed by Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm Ltd, USA, 1983
7 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975
8 Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Women of Vision, St Martins Press, 1988
9 “If nature is unjust, change nature!” - Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, London, Verso, 2018
10 Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman Girls! Girls! Girls! In Contemporary Art, Bristol, Intellect, 2011
11 Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl, Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, London, Laurence King, 2017
12 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, London, Vintage, 1990
13 Ibid
14 Joanna Russ, The Female Man, London, Gateway, 2010 (1975)
15 Peio Aguirre, Semiotic Ghosts: Science Fiction and Historicism, Science Fiction, London, Whitechapel, 2011
16 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983
17 Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl, Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, London, Laurence King, 2017
18 Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Oakland, AK Press, 2015
19 Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, New York, Public Affairs, 2016
20 Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred M. Wilcox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA, 1956
21 Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1968
22 The Fifth Element, directed by Luc Besson, Gaumont, France, 1997
23 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975
24 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, London, Vintage, 1990
25 Ibid
26 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975
27 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, London, Pluto Press, 2000 (1984)
28 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983
29 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975
30 Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl, Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, London, Laurence King, 2017
31 Ibid
32 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, London, Vintage, 1990
33 Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Women of Vision, St Martins Press, 1988
34 Ibid