Gendering “Otherspace”

This essay analyzes an sf text that challenges stereotypes about women and language transmission through its experiments with stylistic features of the book form—not only narrative conventions, but also rules of typography, margins, and page layouts. The text is Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography, a 1992 collaboration by book artists Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman. The presentation of different verbal and visual passages on its page spreads is examined, with an eye to the gender politics of the authors’ revisions of the story of Hélène Smith, a nineteenth-century medium. I note parallels between Otherspace’s experimental pages and the cyborg narrative that Donna Haraway calls for in “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

Art · Art history · Astrobiology · Mars Exploration Program · Martian · Physics · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Travel Writing and Literature · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction