The Feminine Hungers of Asja Bakić’s ​Mars

Eleonor Botoman Rose Red Planet May 14, 2019 The Feminine Hungers of Asja Bakić’s ​Mars "Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility." – Donna Haraway,​ A Cyborg Manifesto​, 1984 “I once made my mouth a technology of softness. I listened carefully as I drank.” – Franny Choi, ‘A Brief History of Cyborgs,’​ Death by Sex Machine​, 2017 The pages of Asja Bakić’s 2019 short story collection, ​Mars​, are populated by women. They are children, adults, wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends. They are fearful victims or monstrous attackers. Sometimes both. Some are named—a couple even after the author herself—while others are rendered nameless. A handful may not be entirely human. A handful are writers. An outspoken Bosnian feminist, Bakić acknowledges that women “lust for knowledge, and explicit literature”—a hunger for a realistic representation of female sexuality that wrestles with “everyday life, complicated emotions, pain, when it subverts traditional family values” without patriarchal filters brought on by male authors.​1​ Although only one of the stories that will be discussed deals with the subject of sex in explicit detail, it’s clear that Bakić, on a broader scale of gender norms as well as sexual behavior, is working to actively undermine the limited perspectives and representations of women that are prevalent in the male-dominated genre of science fiction. Soviet historian Alexey Golubev notes that SF from that period, which was restricted in its erotic detail by censors, essentialized the female gender to two types: one “imagined as having lost its gender specificity by amalgamating with machine,” characterized by androgynous cosmonauts, or “the displacement of female sexuality from the domain of the 1 Lindsay Semel. "An Interview with Asja Bakić," ​Asymptote Journal​, February 6, 2019, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2019/02/06/an-interview-with-asja-bakic/​. cultural norm led Soviet authors to represent women as the imaginary Other of the human race," through feminized representations of aliens.​2​ Bakić’s female characters are a product of her contemporary post-Soviet conditions, responding to decades of misogynistic representation and patriarchal oppression. They exist, subversively, within and outside of the gray areas of the Soviet SF gender binary Golubev outlines. Many of these women even trouble the very biological and psychological divisions between ‘non’ and ‘human.’ This is all to say that it’s worth looking at how Bakić frames her female characters as beings whose bodies are subjugated by male-identifying individuals and masculine-coded social forces. Bakić employs bodily language of hunger, lust, consumption to describe women’s pursuit of knowledge and pleasure whether it be data, technology, culture, or fellow humans. By looking at the abused and amnesiac Abby who is continuously force-fed by her husband and kept from accessing technology, Asja 5.0’s position as a suicidal clone made from a woman responsible for producing pornography for her male captor, and the unnamed narrator from ‘The Underworld’ who craves literature in her exile on Mars and encounters a substance that will be exploited as a natural resource, one can see how these women are not only feminine objects being consumed, but how they learn, through science-fictional means, to weaponize their own hunger to reclaim personal agency in subjugated social positions meant to strip them of selfhood. ‘Abby’ begins with the titular character at the dinner table, repulsed by shellfish under her nose. Her husband responds that it used to be one of her favorite meals. Disoriented and unable to remember her favorite meals, the vulnerable Abby is first presented as highly suggestible to her husband’s claims about her personality: “Only then did I look: I’d pushed ​Alexey Golubev. "Affective Machines Or the Inner Self? Drawing the Boundaries of the Female Body in the Socialist Romantic Imagination." Canadian Slavonic Papers 58, no. 2 (06, 2016): 141-159. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.1080/00085006.2016.1165425. http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/1856837310?accounti d=10226​. 2 away a plate of mussels. My mouth began to water”​3​ Abby is a blank state, shaped only the information her husband provides (which is very little and possibly untrue) due to an alleged car accident that causes her to lose her memory every five minutes.​4​ During their second and third meal, John makes the mussels again. Mussels are known as a culinary aphrodisiac and sometimes perceived as erotically feminine due to their vaginal shape. Although feminist critical theorist Carol Adams writes about meat, her observation that “women may feel like pieces of meat, be treated like pieces of meat—emotionally butchered and physically battered” applies to Abby’s present condition within the home, the way that she resembles the mussels served for each meal.​5​ Adams notes that “meat is a masculine food and meat eating a male activity”​6 Indeed, Bakić’s antagonist keeps “the refrigerator full of delicacies…constantly devouring enormous amounts of food” while Abby “ate only the mussels he gave me…food gave me no pleasure, I ate because John ate.”​7​ He devours this fishy, feminine flesh with greed bordering on erotic in its voracity,​ ​indicative of broader patriarchal systems of socioeconomic dominance that keep Abby’s body in a domestic and caloric prison. Abby responds with her own type of hunger. After Abby dials ‘95’ on the telephone and hears a woman’s voice telling her that “you were a slave then, and you’re a slave now,” she is able to remember information for longer stretches of time.​8​ ​By connecting with another woman through this device, Abby snaps out of John’s abusive state of lies, restricted movement, and mysterious injuries.​9​ ​What would be an otherwise conventional, ​Yellow Wallpaper​-style story of a woman attempting to escape the insanity-inducing confines of the home is further complicated by the fact that Abby finds out that Asja Bakić. ​Mars: Stories​, trans. Jennifer Zoble, (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2019), 45. Ibid, 46. 5 Carol J. Adams. ​Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory​, (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). ProQuest Ebook Central, 73. 6 Ibid, 48. 7 Bakić, 57. 8 Ibid, 46. 9 Although she doesn’t specifically talk about domestic abuse, Bakić, in her ​Asymptote Journal ​interview, does underscore the importance of female local and international networks for escape and liberation: “Girls need to stay curious, search the internet on their own—be adventurous online.” 3 4 she is, in fact, not human. Once Abby opens John’s safe, which she believes contains her means of escape, she finds “no money or weapons--just one USB stick, a sheet of paper, and a photo of me…There I read: Serial number: 295-005, Model: Abby…On the paper were printed instructions. I realized the charger I'd seen in the drawer wasn't for a phone but for me."​10​ The sequence of numbers John mumbled in his sleep, that haunted the edges of her memory, were her ‘true name,’ her serial number. Carol Adams writes that “to remove meat is to threaten the structure of the larger patriarchal structure.”​11​ This revelation that she is metal, not meat, pushes her off the plate and out of the house, undoing John’s prolonged control of food and access to the outside.​ ​Abby recognizes how her body has been instrumentalized for his sexual and domestic pleasure and chooses to embrace her non-humanity—her meatlessness—instead. Abby says, “295005 is an excellent name, I thought, wiping off the blood. It's sonorous and easy to remember. I tossed the USB on the ground and stomped on it. I resolved that no one would stick anything into me anymore.”​12​ Abby rejects non-consensual penetration both of body and mind, refuses suggestions about the false image she’s supposed to embody. By ‘feeding’ less on food and listening to her own cravings for freedom through numbers and data, Abby can destroy the patriarchal mechanics restricting her and achieves cyborgian self-liberation. In ‘Asja 5.0,’ Asja finds her body and mind used for a similar purpose of male pleasure. Specifically, she’s subjected to groping and later tasked with writing first-person pornography for Kreanga, a wealthy man who wants to be first to achieve an erection after lab-based procreation eliminated all sexual desire.​13​ Again, his sexual appetite is voracious and the descriptive language Bakić uses suggests an entanglement between bodily lust and actual hunger, 10 Bakić, 58. Adams, 62. 12 Bakić, 59. 13 The name ‘Kreanga’ is quite peculiar. The Romanian spelling ‘​Creangă’ means tree branch, limb. It’s unclear where Bakić got this last name from, but perhaps there’s a connection there between the nature of genealogical trees, the different ‘branches’ of Asja he creates through cloning, and Kreanga’s tentacular surveillance over his clones. 11 and the gendered disparity between the two.​14​ Asja recalls how she arrives to his castle to escape famine and is told he will “‘lick you from head to toe.’ It’s hard to believe what those who weren’t hungry in those days gave themselves license to do.”​15​ Kreanga is a monstrous eater, feasting on porno while the rest of the population starves. In his analysis of eaters in SF, literary theorist George Slusser notes that “the solitary eater offers an oral version of Descartes’s proposition: I eat, therefore I am” and that “more than gluttons, we are, in the act of eating, cannibals of ourselves.”​16​ The type of porn Kreanga consumes is rich with sensory images of female bodies, “the fetid sweat of a woman’s shaved armpit…saturated with pungent odors, liters and liters of saliva and mucus,” in attempts to reassert his masculine sexual power.​17​ Like butchering an animal, Asja fragments the bodies to make them digestible—a direct commentary on the exploitative male gaze most pornography caters to. The denial of arousal through touch shows a loss of humanity, with bodies reduced to lab-grown products for social uses. Yet, Kreanga’s desperation for sex also perpetuates these exploitative cycles. Adams writes that “consumption is the fulfillment of oppression, the annihilation of the will, of separate identity.”​18 By writing this porn, Asja is complacent in her own objectification for patriarchal satisfaction. Yet her escape raises new questions about her bodily autonomy. Kreanga’s non-consensual touching reaches beyond her skin down to the smallest cellular level. Asja recalls, “If I hadn’t let Kreanga take a sample of [my blood], I wouldn’t be here now.”​19​ She is cloned four times. It’s unclear which Asja is the first. She asks, “But how do you know who is the copy? Who is the original anymore? Human beings surely aren’t.”​20​ These divisions between 14 In a study on the gendered politics of food, ecofeminist activist and scholar Vandana Shiva notes that food events like hunger disproportionately affect women and girls, who are forced to provide for a “food system shaped and controlled by capitalist patriarchy,” 25. h​ ttps://www.jstor.org/stable/43154554 15 Bakić, 63. 16 George Slusser. “The Solitary Eater in Science Fiction and Horror,” ​Foods of the Gods: Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction​ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 56-70 17 Bakić, 65. 18 Adams, 74. 19 Bakić, 64. 20 Ibid, 69. human and non-human are blurred. Unlike the others, this Asja contemplates suicide to escape both possible futures: either be found and returned to Kreanga or be forced to work herself to death with the other clones. She lines up a row of identical-looking pills each day. Only one, like the power the original Asja holds, has the potential for danger. Both the clones and pills are reflections on the toxicity of digital and IRL social systems that demand women appear as idealized images, conforming to homogenizing bodily norms to please male audiences with no ability to decide who they really are. Bakić collapses biological and technological markers of identity together into these replicated female bodies. A clone tells Asja that she has deleted her blog, her whole identity from the internet. In a time when the data a person consumes and interacts is a commodity companies use to study and exploit individuals. This act of digital self-annihilation becomes a radical act, a way of escaping patriarchal state surveillance. Then there is the sexual encounter between the two of the cloned women when the meet for the first time to plan the next step of their rebellion. In a way, Bakić is giving the reader the pornographic images Kreanga craves, yet this scene plays out with little decadence of flesh. Although erotic in nature, the Asjas’ groping does not cater to any kind of male gaze. Rather, these not-entirely-human beings become intertwined in each other: “I don’t know whose, hers or mine. It’s not scratching. It’s doing something completely different, something long forgotten.”​21​ At this uncanny site of encountering one’s artificial doppelganger, a new kind of female-oriented sexual pleasure is reawakened, one that reclaims bodily agency through a carnal reconnection with one’s self. In ‘The Underworld,’ literature is censored out of existence and Earth’s writers are rounded up to live on a half-built tourist colony on Mars. One of these authors is an unnamed human woman who wrestles with a cocktail of depression and insomnia as a result of her forced 21 Bakić, 73. exile (for the sake of clarity, she will be named The Author). Although the process of producing books is a more abstracted, cognitive cultural experience, Bakić roots this death of literature within the bodies of the Martian residents. Beyond the obvious physical effects of Mars’s thin atmosphere, high levels of radiation, different gravitational pressure on their muscles, and gravel-like hard water to bathe with, The Author and her fellow authors find themselves unable to produce literature in their melancholic isolation despite their escape from censorship. The Author notes that “Mars was full of bookstores, but people rarely visited them out of a desire to read.”​22​ While The Author expresses a distrust of her own body, partially due to her reliance on sleeping pills and frequent nightmares, the books act not only as black market currency, but are extensions of these exiled writers’ abandoned bodies, kept in dusty shelves due to their rejection from Earthly society. It’s worth noting that, unlike the other 3 stories, there is no explicit patriarchal authority figure. Men are affected by this censorship just as much as women, but Bakić connects this denial of literary consumption to the female the body in an unexpected way. The Author acknowledges that her present discomfort is due to a severed connection between her psychological state and the Moon: “I’d attached the entire weight of my humanity, my volatility and mutable nature, to its phases. But on Mars, I’d found only two tiny, incomprehensible moons that hardly compared to the one I’d known. I had nothing to rely on anymore, nothing to hold on to…Now, with no writing, no rest, and no moon on the horizon, I’d lost my identity.”​23​ There is a sense that she exists in a constant state of alien-ness, neither resilient and adaptable to Mars’s hostile environment nor capable of conforming, like some former authors who denied their craft, to fit into Earth’s new literature-free order. If we are to think of books as extensions of human beings, then The Author’s discovery of an indecipherable volume called ​Mars​ reignites her connection to the cosmos. Later, she learns that a second 22 23 Bakić, 145. Ibid, 160-161 volume exists on Earth and contains her natal chart in the back: “Mars was ascendant, where Soldo would never be—in first place, in my first house. Both of us could simultaneously conclude how the thing had found its human half, its shredded flesh.”​24​ This reconnection between The Author and the solar system is fueled by the presence of “smooth, curved metallic substance” that first appears in her dreams.​25​ The Author notes that “the thing would tight and release. It seemed to be gesticulating to me…When I approach the substance, it at first reflected my form, and then began to assume it. It eventually turned into me.”​26​ Bakić never specifies exactly what the substance is or how it came to exist on both Mars and Earth, but there’s a clear link between The Author’s human body and this organic entity. The curved substance has a multi-faceted meaning in this story of a Martian colony filled with writers. Like the book, it is an extension of The Author’s human emotions and attempts to shapeshift into her physical form. Yet, the substance has its own motivations, and the human governments on Earth likewise. Lev Soldo explains that “they directly linked the authorial imagination, the power of the written word, with the curved substance found on Mars. The author whose natal chart was printed in Mars was in fact an instrument that would help the excavated substance transform the Earth and surrounding planets.”​27​ Earth’s humanity believes that once they deciphered the substance’s prophetic text, they would be able to harness its destructive power to colonize the rest of space and had sent all the world’s writers to Mars to separate them from this powerful force and figure out the final step needed to begin excavation. On Earth, the substance is like pockets of oil or natural gas in that it’s currently found “at the North Pole, deep underwater. Far from human civilization.”​28​ Like the culture capital of literary consumption and subsequent censorship that devours what is left of the writers’ creative power, 24 Bakić, 161 Ibid, 154. 26 ​Ibid, 155. 27 Ibid, 159. 28 Ibid, 158. 25 the substance is a ‘natural’ resource wanted for colonial-capitalist, exploitative control. Adams tells us that gender-based violence exists in “a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption.”​29​ The writers are dehumanized, segregated from their societies, and ‘eaten’ into invisibility by the state through their forced relocation to Mars. The Earth governments have a similar plan for the substance: decode its message, isolate it, and safely extract it for socioeconomic gain. The substance, however, has an agenda of its own. Given its ability to cause large numbers of deaths when encountering its extractors, the substance can be interpreted stand-in for humanity’s destructive political and economic potential. Yet, it also represents disenfranchised people like The Author who have been denied their humanity through their consumption and production of literature. She notes that “what had made us human on Earth had quickly disappeared on Mars…The experience of isolation had changed the substance, as had people’s hostile intentions.”​30​ As the story progresses, The Author and the substance begin to closely resemble each other. The velvets she wears bear a similar imprint of her body; a glimpse in the mirror shows the curving bags under her eyes almost black as night under the exhaustive weight of the substance’s visions. Both The Author and the substance are looking for a way to reclaim control over their respective existences, to return freely to their own ‘homes.’ The substance makes its demand: the theft of the Moon to the Martian sky when it leaves the planet, resulting in the total annihilation of the Earth and its population. As nihilistic and anarchistic her choice is, The Author is responding to the forcibly suppressed hunger for culture by dismantling the entire systems that first established it. She embraces the substance’s desire to ‘eat’ Earth out of existence By becoming the substance’s thief, embodying its essence, The Author carves out a new home on Mars free of social subjugation and her actions mark a new chapter in humanity’s history. 29 30 Adams, 74. Bakić, 158. Bakić’s protagonists—Abby, Asja, and The Author—are each caught within restrictive patriarchal systems of sexual and cultural control. Their hunger for liberation demonstrates an assertion of their own humanity outside of masculine-coded power dynamics. They are consumed, yes, by individual men and governments, but they each learn how to weaponize their consumption. In her interview with ​Asymptote Journal​, Bakić remarks, “I felt hunger as a kid, and there aren't any books to help with that. But even in desperate times, you need literature to survive. You need culture, even when you are just a hungry child, because it helps you to think and live outside of your miserable condition."​31​ This language of hunger plays out across the consumption of technology, from mining alien materials and genetic data to USB drives and coded messages through banned books and phone numbers. These settings repeatedly rob these female characters of their bodily and psychological agency, objectifies and commodifies their appearances and behaviors. Their desire to turn from the consumed into the consumer not only shows an awareness of how their body is used as a tool by their patriarchal controls but offers up new pathways for resistance. Across each of these stories, Bakić collapses together biological and technological markers of identity. By presenting female characters that are not entirely human biologically human anymore, Bakić utilizes science fiction’s estranging potential to question how feminine bodies are exploited and rendered sexual objects, disrupt expectations to submit to masculine will, and scrutinize—even devour—the oppressive gazes they encounter. In a time when women’s autonomy over their bodies, their selfhoods, is constantly threatened by patriarchal social systems, the stories of Bakić’s hungry women feel more pertinent than ever. 31 ​Semel, "An Interview with Asja Bakić."