Published over ten years ago in it’s original language, Maul by Tricia Sullivan (2003) has finally arrived in Italy accompanied by the fantastic translation by Chiara Reali, coordinator of the project It Gets Better.
Maul is a brilliant story that combines feminism and gender inequality in one sweeping novel that captures the reader from the first page. And how could it not? How many books have you read that start with the stream of consciousness of a woman masturbating with a gun?
Talk about the “power of good opening words”.
There are two worlds, the stories that are alternately chapter after chapter, seemingly separate and in which they develop the characters stories (almost) all-female: in the first, a more similar to our world, we find gang of teenage girls that clash with firearms in a mall; in the second we instead catapulted into a laboratory for researchers who are pro-yielding to various experiments Meniscus, a cloned man to track down the cure that can eradicate the virus Y, the terrible plague that has killed almost all male men on the planet.
Sun Katz, leading the world in the mall, is an Asian teenager interested in shopping and weapons, become for her and her peers symbol of fashion at par of a shoe heel 12. Every girl carries a gun, and is therefore lawful to fire when two rival groups meet, for example, in a perfumery. With this first story – apparently disconnected from the second – very surreal and flavour typically gaming, Sullivan manages to recreate the Ballard theory of oppressive social structures that lead to foolish actions, in a world that is self-conducting to decline, entering deftly the issue of gender in a futuristic world yes, but very close to ours.
Not surprisingly, Sun is a strong woman and emancipated, but who lives her life in a vile and consumer society, and therefore is in the violence and weapons in a greater interest than anything else; is a girl who wants to move away from this reality, reconnect to nature and avoid the battles that the world imposes.
As mentioned above, the author describes Sun while masturbating with a gun: it is an image shocking, violent, who reveals in the reality of the protagonist – where the male is clearly present – you do not need a man to feel pleasure, and that consequently women de-holding power. The gun is described with adjectives typically associated with a foul, and Sun identifies the same object as a symbol of power and pleasure together, representation in turn of a patriarchal society in reverse, in which are the subject men and women to possess all the control.
If Maul had been written by a man, everything would have a flavour to say the least misogynistic, but actually one of the Sullivan objectives is to clearly show that women, as human beings, can have the fetish of arms fire and violence.
On the other side of the coin, the last men remained fertile after the spread of the virus are kept in Castellations, places initially unsure that give comfort to the survivors to show their courage and bravado (classically associated with male gender stereotypes), with additional risk of being exposed to air contaminated by the plague. These men are called “pigs” and are nothing more than sperm donors, in the service of the few women who can afford the male seed.
And ‘this second story that highlights the most interesting aspects related to such question. The almost total destruction of the male while it led to the benefits, it has also created many problems: that like it or not, despite the advanced cloning techniques that they use women in this dystopian future for children, there is still a need for men to procreate.
In a company formed exclusively by women it is inevitable that sexual relations are consumed with each other, that they are lesbians or not, doing it this way stand out in contrast to the world of Sun Katz, the need of the male phallus. Heterosexual women (but not only) they are driven by their own instincts looking for urgent attention to the disease that has killed men males.
Maul is an incredible sci-fi novel, wonderfully thought out and very well written, which destroys gender stereotypes and the classic male-female binary vision to which you are all too fond of. A highly recommended reading, whether or not you fond of science fiction, to understand that violence, discrimination and exploitation, are bad for all humanity, not for one sex only.
