Reviewed Work(s): Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation by Helen Birch: Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism by Jenny Wolmark: Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten
评论作品：Moving Targets：海伦-伯奇（Helen Birch）著：《女性、谋杀与代表性》（Women, Murder and Representation）：《外星人与其他人》（Aliens and Others：珍妮-沃尔马克（Jenny Wolmark）的《科幻小说、女权主义和后现代主义》（Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism）：乌托邦和女性科幻小说：Jane L. Donawerth 和 Carol A. Kolmerten 著：《不同的世界
Review by: Maureen T. Reddy
评论者Maureen T. Reddy
Source: Signs, Spring, 1996, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 782-785
《资料来源迹象》，1996 年春，第 21 卷第 3 期（1996 年春），第 782-785 页
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
出版商：芝加哥大学出版社芝加哥大学出版社
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book awards for southern studies, adds significantly to our understanding not only of Eudora Welty but of the female experience in Western narrative tradition.
该书不仅大大加深了我们对尤多拉-韦尔蒂的了解，也加深了我们对西方叙事传统中女性经历的了解。

Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
《女性乌托邦和科幻小说：不同的世界》。由 Jane L. Donawerth 和 Carol A. Kolmerten 编辑。Syracuse, N.Y.：Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994.

Maureen T. Reddy Rhode Island College
罗德岛学院 Maureen T. Reddy

IN THE SPACE of one week in the fall of 1994, Susan Smith went from small-town obscurity to national media icon, first as a suffering madonna pleading for the safe return of her two young children and then as a mad Medea who had admitted to their murders. At about the same time, a Rhode Island man, Richard Timothy Dunphy, was indicted for the murder of his two-year-old son, Eric. Dunphy-who allegedly beat Eric to death and then left the child’s body in a closet for several days-did not make the national news. Even locally, this deadly father was not demonized by the press; instead, Eric’s death set off public vilification of the state child welfare agency. Social workers (mostly women) were tried in the press for the boy’s murder, along with his mother, who had lost custody of Eric as a result of convictions for drug use and prostitution. Somehow, bad mothering-not murderous fathering-came to be the central theme of news stories about this case.
在 1994 年秋天的一周时间里，苏珊-史密斯从一个默默无闻的小镇变成了全国媒体的焦点人物，她先是以受难的圣母形象恳求两个年幼的孩子平安归来，然后又以疯狂的美狄亚形象承认谋杀了两个孩子。差不多在同一时间，罗德岛男子理查德-蒂莫西-邓菲（Richard Timothy Dunphy）因谋杀自己两岁的儿子埃里克（Eric）而被起诉。据称邓菲将埃里克殴打致死，然后将孩子的尸体丢在壁橱里好几天，但这并没有成为全国性的新闻。即使在当地，这位致命的父亲也没有被媒体妖魔化；相反，埃里克的死引发了公众对州儿童福利机构的诽谤。社工（大多是女性）和他的母亲一起被媒体审判，因为他们因吸毒和卖淫而失去了对埃里克的监护权。不知为何，糟糕的母亲--而不是凶残的父亲--成了有关此案的新闻报道的中心主题。

Most feminists probably find the divergent public narratives that unfolded in response to these two cases of filicide both unsurprising and illustrative: we already know that women and men figure differently in the media and in mass consciousness. We also know that motherhood continues to be a locus of powerful fantasies about women and therefore an important site of struggle-contested territory. I was reading the three books under review here as the Dunphy and Smith cases unfolded and found myself reading the news accounts through these books, which provide useful paradigms for understanding issues of gender, identity, and image. Although focused on different genres and grounded in different theoretical positions, all three explore representations of women and/or
大多数女权主义者可能会发现，针对这两起杀婴案所展开的不同的公共叙事既不足为奇，又能说明问题：我们已经知道，在媒体和大众意识中，女性和男性的形象是不同的。我们还知道，母性仍然是人们对女性产生强烈幻想的地方，因此也是一个重要的斗争场所--有争议的领域。邓菲案和史密斯案发生时，我正在阅读本文评述的三本书，我发现自己是通过这些书来阅读新闻报道的，它们为理解性别、身份和形象问题提供了有用的范式。虽然三本书侧重不同的体裁，立足于不同的理论立场，但它们都探讨了女性和/或男性的形象。
by women. While motherhood is not the central topic of any one of them, all three examine childbirth and mothering as elements of women’s social oppression and, simultaneously, as aspects of women’s self-definition.
由女性创作。虽然母性并不是其中任何一部作品的核心主题，但三部作品都将分娩和母性作为妇女遭受社会压迫的因素，同时也作为妇女自我定义的方面进行了研究。

Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, edited by Helen Birch, can help us better to understand disparate public response to, and media treatment of, women and men accused of identical crimes. In her introduction to the collection, Birch notes that interest in violent women, not the actual incidence of violence by women, has surged recently. A main purpose of this book is to explore representations of women as killers in order to understand what this interest might mean. The contribu-tors-criminologists, cultural critics, journalists, and literature profes-sors-focus on celebrated cases (the Papin sisters in 1933 France, Arlene Wuornos in 1992 Florida), obscure ones, defenses used by accused murderers (especially battering and premenstrual tension, the British version of premenstrual syndrome), and portrayals of women killers in Hollywood films. Together, the ten essays offer a powerful critique of representations of violent women as “moving targets,” caught only partially in the glare of the mainstream media, and thereby contribute to the larger feminist project of understanding, and deconstructing, the “limits of socially acceptable femininity,” in Birch’s words (6).
移动的目标：海伦-伯奇（Helen Birch）编著的《女性、谋杀与表述》可以帮助我们更好地理解公众对被指控犯有相同罪行的女性和男性的不同反应以及媒体对他们的不同待遇。伯奇在这本文集的导言中指出，近来人们对暴力女性（而非女性暴力的实际发生率）的兴趣激增。本书的一个主要目的是探讨女性杀手的形象，以了解这种兴趣可能意味着什么。本书的撰稿人包括犯罪学家、文化评论家、记者和文学教授，主要关注著名案件（1933 年法国的帕潘姐妹案、1992 年佛罗里达州的阿琳-乌奥诺斯案）、不为人知的案件、被指控的凶手所使用的辩护词（尤其是殴打和经前紧张症，即英国版的经前综合症），以及好莱坞电影中对女性杀手的描述。总之，这十篇文章对作为 "移动目标 "的暴力女性形象进行了有力的批判，她们只是部分地被主流媒体捕捉到了，从而为理解和解构伯奇所说的 "社会可接受的女性特质的局限性 "这一更大的女权主义项目做出了贡献（6）。

Two essays are especially intriguing: Briar Wood’s “The Trials of Motherhood: The Case of Azaria and Lindy Chamberlain” and Allison Morris and Ania Wilczynski’s “Rocking the Cradle: Mothers Who Kill Their Children.” Wood employs feminist psychoanalytic theory to make sense of the various news accounts, books, and film (A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep) about the case of Australian Lindy Chamberlain, which dragged on for ten years and put competing-albeit all patriar-chal-versions of motherhood on trial along with Chamberlain. Morris and Wilczynski, both associated with the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, focus on filicide, the only category of violent crime for which males and females are indicted in roughly equal numbers, in both Britain and the United States. The authors studied nearly 500 cases of child death in the United Kingdom (including murder, manslaughter, and infanticide), concluding that there are significant, gendered differences in the judicial and public responses to such cases. Most striking is that women accused in such cases were much more likely than their male counterparts to be pathologized and sentenced to treatment rather than prison. The criminal justice system collectively responds to child murder by mothers by deeming such women mad virtually by definition: “Such an act cannot be the act of a normal woman. She cannot have been fully responsible for her actions; she must need help or treatment” (206). Consequently, we know very little about why some mothers kill their children. As Morris and Wilczynski persuasively argue, all women pay a price for this crude
有两篇文章尤其引人入胜：Briar Wood 的 "The Trials of Motherhood：阿扎莉亚和琳迪-张伯伦的案例"，以及艾莉森-莫里斯和阿尼亚-威尔琴斯基的 "摇晃摇篮：杀害子女的母亲"。伍德运用女权主义精神分析理论，对有关澳大利亚人林迪-张伯伦案件的各种新闻报道、书籍和电影（梅丽尔-斯特里普主演的《黑暗中的呐喊》）进行了解读。莫里斯和威尔琴斯基都与剑桥犯罪学研究所有联系，他们的研究重点是杀婴案，在英国和美国，杀婴案是唯一一类男性和女性被起诉人数大致相同的暴力犯罪。作者研究了英国近 500 起儿童死亡案件（包括谋杀、过失杀人和杀婴），得出结论认为，司法和公众对此类案件的反应存在显著的性别差异。最令人震惊的是，在此类案件中，女性被告比男性被告更有可能被病理化，并被判处治疗而非监禁。刑事司法系统对母亲谋杀儿童案件的集体反应是，几乎从定义上就将这些妇女视为疯子："这种行为不可能是正常妇女所为。她不可能对自己的行为负全部责任；她一定需要帮助或治疗"（206）。因此，我们对一些母亲杀害子女的原因知之甚少。正如莫里斯和威尔琴斯基令人信服地指出的那样，所有妇女都为此付出了代价。
stereotyping, as it reinforces the dominant view that all women who fail to be “good” mothers are at least unnatural and most likely sick.
陈规定型观念，因为它强化了一种主流观点，即所有未能成为 "好 "母亲的女性至少是不自然的，而且很可能是有病的。

Women authors of utopian and science fiction could be said to be involved in a project parallel to the one central to Moving Targets: mapping the boundaries of female possibility, in this case through imagining worlds in which gender roles, and gender inequality, are not necessarily naturalized. For example, one area that interests many women writers of these genres is the vexed nexus of biology, gender, and female possibility. Historically, the fact that women can bear children has meant that women must bear children, with caring for children a primary aspect of women’s social role. In creating new worlds, women writers often imagine new forms of childbirth and child care, freeing women both from biology and from conventional social interpretations of that biology. In that way, women’s utopian and science fiction tends to operate as a critique of actual social conditions. Both Jenny Wolmark, in Aliens and Others, and the thirteen contributors to Utopian and Science Fiction by Women analyze a wide range of texts, exploring the genre’s potential to challenge traditional definitions of womanhood, but that wide range is the sum total of the two books’ similarities.
乌托邦小说和科幻小说的女作家可以说参与了与《移动目标》的核心项目平行的项目：绘制女性可能性的边界，在这种情况下，通过想象性别角色和性别不平等并不一定自然化的世界。例如，许多此类体裁的女作家感兴趣的一个领域是生物学、性别和女性可能性之间令人困扰的关系。从历史上看，女性可以生育这一事实意味着女性必须生育，照顾孩子是女性社会角色的一个主要方面。在创造新世界的过程中，女作家通常会想象出新的生育和育儿方式，从而使女性从生物学和对生物学的传统社会解释中解放出来。因此，女性乌托邦小说和科幻小说往往是对现实社会状况的批判。珍妮-沃尔马克（Jenny Wolmark）在《外星人和其他人》一书中，以及《女性乌托邦和科幻小说》的 13 位撰稿人都分析了大量文本，探讨了这一体裁挑战传统女性定义的潜力，但这种广泛性正是两本书相似之处的总和。

Much feminist work has already been done on utopian and science fiction, but in their introduction to Utopian and Science Fiction by Women, Jane Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten argue that their volume’s key difference from earlier work on utopian and science fiction is that theirs is the first “to argue that these fictions historically speak to one another and together amount to a literary tradition of women’s writing about a better place” (1). They go on to make a case that a more helpful (and accurate) way to speak about these fictions is as “literatures of estrangement” (3), with shared features: “the imaginative freedom of alternate worlds, the crossing of generic boundaries, the didactic politics of the writing, and the overturning of gendered stereotypes in women’s use of the genres” (3-4).
关于乌托邦小说和科幻小说的女性主义研究成果已经很多，但简-多纳沃斯和卡罗尔-科尔默顿在《女性乌托邦小说和科幻小说》的序言中指出，她们的著作与之前关于乌托邦小说和科幻小说的研究成果的主要区别在于，她们的著作是第一部 "论证这些小说在历史上是相互关联的，共同构成了女性书写更美好世界的文学传统"（1）。她们继续论证说，将这些小说视为 "疏离文学"（3）更有帮助（也更准确），因为它们具有共同的特征：它们具有共同的特点："另类世界的想象自由、跨越一般界限、写作的说教政治以及女性在使用这些文体时对性别定型观念的颠覆"（3-4）。

To the extent that the eleven essays collected here support the claims of the introduction, this collection offers a potentially valuable context for reading one strain of women’s fiction. By the end of the volume, however, I remained skeptical that this literature constitutes a continuous tradition in women’s writing. One problem involves expanding genre boundaries so much that they effectively disappear. If Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford belongs in the tradition of women’s “literature of estrangement,” as contributor Rae Rosenthal argues, and so does Naomi Mitchison in Solution Three (the subject of an elegant essay by Sarah LeFanu), then is not this tradition elastic enough to be virtually indistinguishable from the whole of women’s writing in the West? Further, the places that
本文集收录的 11 篇文章支持导言中的观点，因此为阅读女性小说的一个流派提供了潜在的宝贵背景。然而，在这本文集结束时，我仍然怀疑这些文学作品是否构成了女性写作的连续传统。其中一个问题涉及到体裁界限的扩大，以至于它们实际上消失了。如果伊丽莎白-盖斯凯尔的《克兰福德》属于女性 "疏离文学 "的传统，正如撰稿人蕾-罗森塔尔（Rae Rosenthal）所认为的那样，《解决方案三》中的纳奥米-米奇森（Naomi Mitchison）也是如此（莎拉-勒法努（Sarah LeFanu）撰写了一篇优雅的论文），那么这一传统难道还不够有弹性，以至于几乎无法与整个西方女性写作区分开来吗？此外，这些地方
women writers of this literature of estrangement imagine are not always “better.”
这种疏离文学作品中的女作家并不总是 "更好"。

Some of the most interesting essays in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women examine blind spots in purportedly feminist fiction, such as LeFanu’s reading of the compulsory homosexuality of Solution Three and Naomi Jacobs’s discussion, in “The Frozen Landscape in Women’s Utopian and Science Fiction,” of the racism of Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy.
女性乌托邦和科幻小说》中一些最有趣的文章探讨了号称女权主义小说中的盲点，如勒法努对《解决方案三》中强制同性恋的解读，以及娜奥米-雅各布斯在《女性乌托邦和科幻小说中的冰封景观》中对莱恩的《米佐拉》中的种族主义的讨论：预言》中的种族主义。

Jenny Wolmark’s Aliens and Others is all about blind spots, particularly in the work of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Brian McHale. In their theorizing about postmodernism and science fiction, Wolmark shows, these influential critics ignore feminist science fiction. Using feminist science fiction and feminist criticism to critique the limitations of postmodern theory, Wolmark, in her opening chapter, maps out various “intersections” that she argues “allow for movement between and across the boundaries of intersecting sites, creating a space within which genre, gender, and identity can be redefined” (26). Drawing frequently on Donna Haraway’s work, Wolmark in subsequent chapters focuses on science fiction texts by Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Gwyneth Jones, Margaret Atwood, Pat Cadigan, and Pamela Sargent, among others, revealing the ways in which destabilizing categories such as gender, race, and class allows writers to investigate subjectivity and identity while challenging ideas of “otherness.” In the final chapter, Wolmark concludes that, despite its roots in feminist science fiction, cyberpunk-the subject of much recent critical and popular attention-is less open to feminist intervention and to redefinitions of identity than are other forms of science fiction. Wolmark’s analyses of particular fictional texts are often trenchant, but the greatest strength of Aliens and Others is its sharp delineation of how much is ignored in nonfeminist theorizing about postmodernism and science fiction.
珍妮-沃尔马克（Jenny Wolmark）的《外星人与其他人》（Aliens and Others）一书讲述的是盲点，尤其是让-波德里亚（Jean Baudrillard）、弗雷德里克-詹姆逊（Fredric Jameson）和布莱恩-麦克黑尔（Brian McHale）作品中的盲点。沃尔马克指出，在他们关于后现代主义和科幻小说的理论研究中，这些颇具影响力的批评家忽视了女性主义科幻小说。沃尔马克利用女性主义科幻小说和女性主义批评来批判后现代理论的局限性，她在开篇描绘了各种 "交叉点"，她认为这些 "交叉点""允许在交叉点之间和交叉点的边界之间移动，创造了一个可以重新定义体裁、性别和身份的空间"（26）。沃尔马克经常借鉴唐娜-哈拉维的作品，在随后的章节中重点研究了玛吉-皮尔西、奥克塔维亚-巴特勒、格温妮丝-琼斯、玛格丽特-阿特伍德、帕特-卡迪根和帕梅拉-萨金特等人的科幻小说文本，揭示了性别、种族和阶级等范畴的不稳定性如何让作家在挑战 "异类 "观念的同时研究主体性和身份。在最后一章，沃尔马克总结道，尽管赛博朋克起源于女性主义科幻小说，但与其他形式的科幻小说相比，赛博朋克--最近备受批评界和大众关注的主题--对女性主义干预和身份重新定义的开放程度较低。沃尔马克对特定小说文本的分析往往十分尖锐，但《外星人与其他人》的最大优势在于它敏锐地勾勒出了非女权主义理论对后现代主义和科幻小说的忽视程度。

Reading these three books together and reflecting on the media frenzy over Susan Smith, I am reminded of why alternate worlds are so attractive to both women writers and readers. Exploring these alternate worlds from a feminist theoretical standpoint sharpens our understanding of the actual world, not often to pleasant, but certainly to invigorating, effect.
将这三本书放在一起阅读，并反思媒体对苏珊-史密斯的狂热报道，我想起了另类世界为何对女作家和女读者如此具有吸引力。从女权主义理论的角度来探索这些另类世界，可以使我们对现实世界的理解更加敏锐，虽然效果并不尽如人意，但肯定会让人精神振奋。