Presenter: Daisy Ahlstone
Faculty Mentor: Carole Stabile, John Baumann
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Social Science
Major: Folklore, Minor in WGS, and Film Studies
James Tiptree, Jr. was an award winning feminist science fiction author of the 1960’s and 70’s. When suspicion began to arise about the author’s identity, Alice Sheldon was forced to reveal herself as the woman behind the male pseudonym. However, before she was pressured into revealing her identity, Sheldon, as James Tiptree, Jr., was able to develop close relationships with many members of the science fiction community, particularly Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ. Their relationships, mostly contrived through epistolary communication, were incredibly flirtatious, intimate, and based heavily on the notion that James Tiptree, Jr. was a heterosexual man. How was Sheldon able to convince her friends of her male persona’s validity for so long, despite the intimacy of their letters? Looking at the Tiptree Papers collection in the Special Collections and University Archives to unpack the language Sheldon used with Le Guin and Russ to “prove” that she was in fact a man, Ahlstone found little, if any, of a stereotypically masculine voice, but rather that it was the traditionally male-gendered name, James Tiptree, Jr., as well as brief moments of physical description, that was the main factor contributing to the success of Sheldon’s persona.