Joanna Russ - Biography

Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.

Background

Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York City to Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, both teachers. She began creating works of fiction at a very early age. Over the following years she filled countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics and illustrations, often hand-binding the material with thread.

Russ graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. After teaching at several universities, including Cornell, she became a full professor at the University of Washington.

Science fiction and other writing

Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. At the time, SF was a field dominated by male authors, writing for a predominantly male audience, but women were starting to enter the field in larger numbers. Russ, who became openly lesbian later in life, was one of the most outspoken authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers. She was also one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously.

Along with her work as a writer of prose fiction, Russ was also a playwright, essayist, and author of nonfiction works, including the essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts; How to Suppress Womens' Writing; and the book-length study of modern feminism, What Are We Fighting For?. She was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party.

For nearly 15 years she was an influential (if intermittent) review columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Though by then she was no longer an active member of science fiction fandom, she was interviewed by phone during Wiscon (the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin) in 2006 by Samuel R. Delany.

Russ won a 1972 Nebula Award for her short story "When It Changed" and a 1983 Hugo Award for her novella "Souls." Her fiction has been nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards, and her genre-related scholarly work was recognized with a Pilgrim Award in 1988. Her story "The Autobiography of My Mother" was one of the 1977 O. Henry Prize stories.

Reputation and legacy

Her work is widely taught in courses on science fiction and feminism throughout the English speaking world. Russ is the subject of Farah Mendlesohn's book On Joanna Russ and Jeanne Cortiel's Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Russ and her work are prominently featured in Sarah LeFanu's Chinks in the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988).

Health problems

In her later life she published little, largely due to chronic back pain and chronic fatigue syndrome.

On April 27, 2011, it was reported that Russ had been admitted to a hospice after suffering a series of strokes. Samuel R. Delany was quoted as saying that Russ was “slipping away” and had long had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order on file. She died early in the morning on April 29, 2011.

Selected bibliography

Novels

• Picnic on Paradise (1968)
• And Chaos Died (1970)
• The Female Man (1975)
• We Who Are About To... (1977)
• The Two of Them (1978)
• On Strike Against God (1980) (novella)

Short fiction collections

• The Adventures of Alyx (1976) (includes Picnic on Paradise)
• The Zanzibar Cat (1983)
• (Extra)ordinary People (1985)
• The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987)

Children's fiction

• Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978)

Play

• "Window Dressing" in The New Women's Theatre edited by Honor Moore. New York, Random House (1977)

Nonfiction collections

• Speculations on the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction (1973)
• Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic (1973)
• How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)
• Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985)
• To Write Like a Woman (1995)
• What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997)
• The Country You Have Never Seen (2007)

Notes

Bibliography

• Bacon-Smith, Camille. Science Fiction Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ISBN 0-81221-530-3.
• Barr, Marleen S. et al., eds. "Determinate Politics of Indeterminacy: Reading Joanna Russ's Recent Work in Light of Her Early Short Fiction" in Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. pp. 219–36. ISBN 0-8476-9126-8.
• Cortiel, Jeanne. Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction. Science Fiction Texts and Studies. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-85323-614-3.
• Delany, Samuel R. "Orders of Chaos: The Science Fiction of Joanna Russ." Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Jane B. Weedman. Lubbock: Texas Tech P, 1985. 95-123.
• Delany, Samuel R. "Introduction." Joanna Russ. We Who Are About To. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. v-xv. ISBN 0-8195-6759-0.
• Griffin, Gabriele. Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay Writing. Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-41515-984-9.
• Hacker, Marilyn. "Science Fiction and Feminism: The Work of Joanna Russ." Chrysalis 4 (1977): 67-79.
• Holt, Marilyn J. "Joanna Russ, 1937." in Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Ed. Everett Franklin Bleiler. New York: Scribner's, 1982. 483-90.
• Law, Richard G. "Joanna Russ and The "Literature of Exhaustion"." Extrapolation 25 (1984): 146-56.
• Malmgren, Carl. "Meta-Sf: The Examples of Dick, Le Guin, and Russ." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43.1 (2002): 22.
• Mendlesohn, Farah. On Joanna Russ. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. ISBN 0-8195-6901-1.
• Russ, Joanna and Jessica Amanda Salmonson (ed). "The Dirty Little Girl" in What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction. Feminist Press, 1989. ISBN 1-55861-006-5.
• Scanlon, Jennifer. "Joanna Russ" in Significant Contemporary Feminists: A Biocritical Sourcebook. New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 1999. ISBN 0-31330-125-5.

External links

• Guide to the Joanna Russ papers at the University of Oregon
• Joanna Russ obituary at NY Times

Databases

• Joanna Russ , entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd edition (draft)
• NovelGuide.com Biography
• IMDB

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