Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison

While we credit the feminist movement of the 1970s with birthing the influential mantra 'the personal is political,' Mitchison's science fiction demonstrates a much earlier engagement with precisely that relationship.

Mitchison's continued focus upon the sexual, particularly female sexuality, grounds this investigation because she illustrates how women's sexual pleasure both reflects and produces the political. Mitchison, as Donna Haraway emphasises, came from the world that produced the Darwins and the Huxleys: a world of 'sexual experimentation political radicalism unimpeded scientific literacy literary self-confidence a grand view of the universe from a rich, imperialist, intellectual culture-these were Mitchison's birthright.' (1995, 88). Interspecies, or monstrous, sex in Mitchison's science fiction connects a woman's scientific work and public identity with satisfying sexuality over a period of months in a deviant erotic that cannot be separated from life. Given the constraints of capitalist socialisation, sex must either be marginalised as a private leisure activity or function as a commodified industry. Sexual encounters between female characters and aliens, as well as those between women, threaten an imperialising capitalism that dictates who may be loved in a gendered, racialised order. I intend to demonstrate that the ribald sexuality of Mitchison's work registers as more than merely provocative.

And, a reviewer of her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), expressed distaste for 'an attention to physical details often eyebrow-raising to a mere male.' Benton, Mitchison's biographer, interprets the author's dismissive response as a mischievous provocation. Racy, heated passages of Mitchison's historical novels inspired comment from poet W.H.

Despite Mitichison's attempts to move the discussion of her body of work from the salacious, it is the frank and open inclusion of sexuality that continues to intrigue her critics and reviewers.

'Oh fuck sex!' replied celebrated science-fiction novelist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) when Jill Benton, one of her biographers, asked for her views on the topic during the 1980s. Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction

Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison