R. Lyle Skains
Abstract
Seven Sisters Unmet is the author’s speculative hypertextual fiction that operates as both digital narrative and feminist research method. Framed through the concept of Hydraen narrative—an irrepressible, intersectional mode of storytelling that multiplies under suppression—it investigates how marginalised voices proliferate within, and against, dominant narrative forms. In parallel, the work engages with archontic sprawl: the messy, collaborative, transmedia architectures of participatory digital storytelling. Together, these frameworks articulate a feminist-first approach to interactive knowledge environments—accessible, affective, and polyvocal—eschewing XR and linear empiricism in favour of situated, recursive, reader-driven text. Delivered through Twine and ePub, Seven Sisters embodies an unruly poetics of storytelling that resists closure and reclaims the digital as a space of generative refusal.
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
—Hélène Cixous
Introduction
Hélène Cixous reclaims the monstrous figure of the Medusa in her quintessential text “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) for women, for women’s writing, establishing l’écriture feminine as a concept encapsulating the plural, subversive, resistant, and embodied narratives composed by those shut out of imperialist and patriarchal structures of writing and thus knowledge. Those forced to the margins, colonized, devalued, diminished, and ignored, find both escape and empowerment in the embrace of the monstrous, recasting themselves not as the dominant Western patriarchy would have them—ugly, evil, poisonous, and worthy of destruction for the mere crime of existing—but rather as voices and beings unfairly maligned by the colonizing victors who compose narratives of their own heroics. Cixous, and the feminist narrative scholars who similarly noted the subversive elements in women’s writing (largely, that of relatively wealthy white women, for their proximity to the dominant hegemony afforded them access to writing and publishing that others would only carve later) were careful not to define écriture feminine as a homogenous list of qualities, structures, or content, but rather as an effect of the writing itself: a sharing of knowledge through narrative, of experiences, inner lives, and being, from the outside of culture.
This paper arises from one such work of écriture feminine in electronic literature (elit) composed over the course of several years by the author: Seven Sisters Unmet (working title), a hypernovel using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and .epub to enact its interactive mechanics. Initially ideated as an exploration of publishing practice for elit, this practice-based (Skains 2018a) project ignited a deeper examination of identity; gendered practices in elit writing, publishing, and scholarship; and a reconception of knowledge both within and without the academic domain. Joanna Russ expresses the frustration of this process: “When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time” ([1983] 2018, 114). Indeed, I had no existing framework for theorizing and processing the ideas and emotions emerging from the collision of my creative practice and life and world events that affected me during its construction. The theorization and understandings presented here are thus the result of reconciling a belated exploration of relevant literature with my initial, raw understandings of how my essential self is split into many heads, and how endangered they all are by the swords of “heroes”.
Narrative is perhaps the most effective expressions of knowledge and power, the pen conquering the sword, as it were, a “source of cultural memory” (Homans 1994, 8). Most of this power for most of human history has been hoarded by those who dominate culture: by and large men across all cultures, specifically wealthy, able-bodied cis-het men of European descent in Western, English-speaking cultures (Meskimmon 2003, 71). The narratives of the “other”, the marginalized, colonized, and excluded, formed and spread in an underworld: stories told around weaving looms and in quilting circles, folktales and songs shared to bolster the oppressed, manifestos and parodies composed to shape resistance. Even as narrative practice formalized and fixed itself in written form into the novel, cultural attention was pushed to focus on that of the “default”, the “natural”, the “universal” patriarchal figure, a cycle that repeats itself through each new technological and poetic innovation and iteration. This cycle continually re-defines what is “worthy” of cultural memory and what is not, and consistently devalues variations from the dominant socio-cultural center; work from women, people of color, non-dominant religions, LGBTQIA+, and particularly those that fall into intersections of these “others” is repressed, ignored, diminished, labeled, and even actively opposed (Buscatto 2014; Bassett et al. 2020; Russ [1983] 2018; Nochlin 1971; Rossiter 1993) until it is forgotten, erased until a new generation, community, or practice rises to challenge the strength of such cultural Hercules.
It is this very resilience, the capacity of marginalized voices to regenerate again and again, that inspires the monstrous metaphor behind this paper: the Hydra as a renewed conception of Cixous’s laughing Medusa. If Medusa represents the monstrous feminine, then the Hydra represents the multiplicative, intersectional, monstrous others, including women but not excluding other marginalized voices. Hydraen narrative, and by extension Hydraen knowledge, expresses the indefinable, irrepressible, and indeed undefeatable power of the very “multitudes” Francis Bacon identified a many-headed monster in need of destruction (Linebaugh and Rediker 2003): stories told and wisdom conveyed through methods foreign to the dominant cultural mode, yet innate to those expressing their truths from outside the hegemony. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these stories were the polyvocal novels resistant to closure that white women were able to push through into cultural awareness (Showalter 2009); in the twentieth century these narratives progressed through Virginia Woolf’s Modernism and Doris Lessing’s postmodernism; Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler’s social solutions through science fiction; and eventually to the technological elit frontiers of Judy Malloy and Shelley Jackson. As we round the corner into the twenty-first century, new and multitudinous heads spawn in elit, fanfiction, collaborative and social storytelling, “own voices”, Afrofuturism, solarpunk, queer and indigenous futurisms. All express not only perspectives and identities that have previously been ignored, but also knowledge that has been historically colonized, degraded, appropriated, and subjugated. The future of text lies not in any specific technology or narrative tradition; the future of text lies in the power digital media have afforded to those voices who have previously been silenced.
The Once and Future Text: Hydraen Narrative
Hydraen narrative, like all that is human, arises from the bosom of the female, just as the Hydra is borne of Echidna, a feminine serpent framed as monstrous. This origin is not without bias: my primary marginalization characteristic is that of womanhood, rather than race, religion, or nation of origin. As a cis, Anglo-American white woman, and educated entirely in Anglo-American institutions, my understanding of my identity is shaped by the narratives and knowledge dictated to and/or made available to me. Much of the discourse around the monstrous, otherness, and marginalization in my immediate environment is thus based in feminism; were my personal background different, I might have approached this concept more firmly in other characteristics. What I have attempted to do is to use a symbol that is well-known in the wider cultures in which I practice (drawn from Greek mythology) that has parallels in other cultures (snakes and serpents), and that can be interpreted in as many practices as the Hydra has potential heads.
Origins in “Feminist” Writing
I hesitate to even use this heading, because its effect is to immediately other writing by women (and by extension, all other so-called “identity” writing, such as queer writing, post-colonial writing, diaspora writing, and so forth), cubby-holing it as non-mainstream, and thus only of interest to those who share those self-same identities. It also, as Marsha Meskimmon notes, casts “women’s writing” as singular, leading it to suffer “from the occlusion of difference” (2003, 132); there is no one feminist aesthetic any more than there is any one identifiable notion of “woman”. Nonetheless, various phrases such as “women’s texts”, “feminist narrative”, “female plots” have been in use for quite some time, from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous, Susan Lanser, and Gloria Anzaldúa. What most of this discourse boils down to is: women’s writing is unique, complex, nearly impossible to define or categorize neatly, but nonetheless it is a thing, and it is worth more than a cubbyhole just for women.
Elit practitioners and scholars will find affinity with many of the qualities these theorists ascribe to feminist narrative: polyphonic, embodied, nonlinear, repetitive, and resistant to closure (Greene 1990; Cixous 1976; Kristeva 1981; Lanser 1986; Page 2003; Meskimmon 2003); full of parody, whimsy, and exaggeration (Showalter 2009); metaleptic by nature as public and private personas and storyworlds diverge (Lanser 1986); and often “plotless” (ibid.) or with low narrativity (Page 2003). A key space in which narratology and elit overlap is in the use and study of “unnatural” narratives and narrative structures: physically and logically impossible representations, scenarios, and/or events, such as polyvocality, anti-mimetic perspectives, impossible spaces, ontological metalepsis, denarration, unreliability, and reversed causal progressions (Richardson 2006; Alber et al. 2010; 2012; Bell and Alber 2012). These elements are present in what elit scholars often call elit-antecedents, or ergodic literature (Skains 2022, 124; cf. Aarseth 1997), including Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (ca 1008), Eliot and Woolf’s polyvocality, artists’ books and gamebooks, and multimedia books like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). The propensity for women and marginalized writers to integrate unnatural techniques (Peel 2016, 82) is a result of attempting to “translate the contents of their unconscious into recognizable symbols and myths” (Pratt 1981, 138) when what is recognizable has always excluded them. They are, as those outside a dominant hegemony always must, “making do” with the materials they are given, subverting them to express their perspectives and experiences: piecing bits of stories together like patchwork quilts, weaving events into networks and lattices, and collaborating as community (Peel 2016, 104).
Hayles’s analysis of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) offers a wealth of insight as to how the digital composition and reading space lends itself to these same “unnatural” tricks (though as we see them become more and more prominent as creators once excluded find themselves with greater share of attention, normalizing and naturalizing what was once so experimental) (2005). She dissects the multiple subjectivities, the assemblage of story, its duality in originality while also being “intensely parasitic on its print predecessors” (ibid., 143). Embodiment is at the core of Patchwork Girl, a body inscribed in digital text and mapped out in dotted patches for the reader to slice apart, linking writing, sewing and the feminine textiles to flesh and the partitioned, piecemeal experiences of women existing in multiple ontologies in various worlds. “Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine” (Jackson 1998, n.p.): feminine, monstrous, metaleptic, original, derivative, polyvocal, repetitive, embodied, lacking in closure, networked, and unnatural.
Not all women’s writing includes all (or even many) of these characteristics, and certainly some men’s writing does. In addition, any sort of described feminine aesthetic is complicated by the socio-cultural aspects of each author and era, understanding that “the novel is a social construct and that women authors internalize gender norms from birth” (Pratt 1981, 11); differences in texts by and for women may also be deliberate and performative. These discussions of what constitutes feminist narrative are primarily generalized observations, initially drawn from eighteenth century novels and fiction (in Showalter’s first studies), moving forward through the bloom of feminist writing in English through the suffrage movement and again in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The 1970s and ’80s established “women’s studies” and women’s writing as scholarly spheres, but even Elaine Showalter notes that the field seems to stall as “each generation of women writers has found itself… forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex” (2009, 10). The discourse around women’s work is as feminized (read: devalued) as women’s work itself: bound to its cubbyhole of “by women, for women”, occluded by primary discourse and doomed to endlessly renew itself.
Yet renew itself it does, and recent years have seen a transition to more inclusive discourse; much like the women’s suffrage movement, most feminist narrative, in practice and in study, has focused on that of privileged, cis-het white women. These women enjoy(ed) a liminal socio-cultural space, in that they benefit from their proximity to the dominant hegemony (relatively wealthy cis-het white men of European descent), while still suffering as othered outsiders. They are thus able to wedge a toe into the door, occasionally squeezing through to pursue more “masculine” endeavors such as mathematics, science, and writing, resulting in more of their work being available and observable for recognition and study. As culture has progressed, and various civil rights advances have given more marginalized communities voices and access, the need for a more inclusive and intersectional approach to narrative and narrative studies has arisen.
To address that need in my own discourse, I step forward from Hélène Cixous’s reclaiming of the Medusa, made monstrous by tales of men seeking to diminish her power, as a beautiful and laughing symbol of feminine intellect and writing. Just as definitions of “women’s writing” or “queer writing” or “post-colonial writing” exclude groups, individuals, and works even as they strive to raise them up, Medusa as metaphor offers little capacity for inclusivity and intersectionality. Instead, I embrace her cousin, a truly unknowable and indefinable “they”, in the form of the many-headed Hydra.
Defining Hydraen Narrative
I don’t stray too far from Cixous’s reclaimed Medusa in reclaiming her kinswoman Hydra for my monstrous narrative metaphor: like Medusa, the Hydra is deeply connected with serpents, the monstrous, the feminine, and the underworld (Deacy 2024; Linebaugh and Rediker 2003). In and of themselves, across many different cultures, religions, languages, and narrative traditions, snakes are claimed by the feminine as world-bringers, mothers, and healers, often associated with life-enabling waterways, from Hydra’s locale in the liminal, porous, water-shaped and underworld-adjacent region of Lerna, to Mesopotamia’s creator sea-dragon Tiamet and Australia’s Rainbow Serpent. As one of Hercules/Heracles’s twelve tasks, the Hydra is well-known and oft-used in Western poetics and discourse to refer to “any persistent, complicated problem that cannot be easily solved” (Deacy 2024, 138). This connotation makes her an incredibly apt symbol for the body of narrative work challenging the normative, mainstream hegemony and yet defying categorization.
Cixous’s Medusa was only made monstrous through superstition, through her opposition to male heroes and her ability to enact consequences upon them (1976; Showalter 2009, 273); such monstrousness has been reconceived as desirable in feminist discourse as women claim power through equality. Likewise the Hydra has been framed as the pinnacle of monstrousness, her many serpent heads not only immortal, but doubling with each that are hewn off. Of all Heracles’s challenges, the Hydra is perhaps the only one he failed, in that he needed his nephew’s help to cauterize each head as he cut it off, and in the end could not kill her, only immobilize and bury her—and her poisonous blood, left on his blade, is what eventually kills Heracles himself. It is this very irrepressible quality that suits the Hydra for use in the framing of intersectional, inclusive narrative that challenges the dominance of hegemonic literature: there are many heads, many identities, many genres and styles and voices forming the Hydra, and while one may be dispatched, more will rise in its place. The Hydra is a multiplicative, irrepressible, polyvocal, regenerative, cthonic, queer, and chaotic symbol that even the hero of all male heroes could not silence or kill. Rather than monstrous, they are botanical, responding to violence as a tree does to being coppiced: healing, regenerating, and multiplying (Deacy 2024, 141). Hydraen narrative can thus serve as an inclusive way to reference narratives and/or creative forces that have been undervalued and underrecognized in the patriarchal white supremacy of Western hegemonic culture.
I define Hydraen narrative as:
narratives or creative forces that are plural, regenerative, chthonic, and irrepressible. Hydraen works multiply, weaving connections and proliferating under suppression, reclaiming forms of knowledge and expression historically demonised as monstrous, feminine, queer, or chaotic.
Hydraen doesn’t have to mean all marginalised voices, but specifically those that proliferate under suppression and reclaim demonised creative excess. It is a way of discussing narrative without using either exclusive terminology (feminist, queer, colonial) or by defining these voices by what they aren’t (non-cis-het white men of European descent) or by what has been done to them (marginalized, silenced, underserved). Hydraen narratives, like those who create them, are, as Meskimmon describes in discussing feminist narrative, “subjects inscribed in and through difference… not universal or transcendent… described as ‘decentred’, hybrid or nomadic, yet they can be empowered, articulate agents in the world” (2003, 74). Their sheer excess provides resistance aganst the hegemonic colonization of innovations created through necessity on the margins—by outsiders—of culture, that regular and ritual slaying by patriarchal heroes working to silence their generative forces and claim their power. They are the unkillable tricksters that subvert this world in order to create new ones, in stories and in reality.
As following sections of this paper discuss, I am not only concerned with Hydraen creativity as it pertains to narrative, but also as it pertains to the formation and communication of knowledge (albeit largely through narrative). In this sphere, too, the Hydra is a remarkably apt symbol, as the progenitor of Western imperialist empiricism specifically used the many-headed monster to refer to “‘multitudes’ that deserved destruction”, both culturally and literally: colonized indigenous peoples, political dissidents, heretics, provocateurs, criminals, and women (strong women or “Amazons”) (Linebaugh and Rediker 2003, 6). In opposition to such monstrous hordes, Francis Bacon likened men to Hercules, man’s mind and intellect placing him as the “centre of the world” (ibid., 4). For Bacon, his empirical observations as an Englishman of status, education, and wealth meant that the superior being was… an Englishman of status, education, and wealth. All others were “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, nameless worker drones not worth noting or remembering despite their roles as constructors of civilization (ibid., 9). Interestingly, the Hydra is also associated with (female) water carriers, as their homescape of Lerna is associated with Danaids, young women fetching water in Hades for eternity (Deacy 2024, 139).
That Lernaean homescape is also described as a vast warren of water-carved caves, caverns, and holes creating an architectural maze leading to the underworld: an archontic space that fits neatly with the notion of Hydraen narrative. No description of writing against the dominant hegemony is complete without inclusion of archontic narrative (Skains 2022, 169; Derecho 2006): community-driven, collaborative, ad hoc architectural narratives exemplified by role-playing games, wiki-type storyworlds, and fanfiction. Fanfic, as the oldest of these pratices (Derecho and others trace it back at least four hundred years), is also the most undervalued-slash-feminized as derivative, unprofessional, and even outright unethical copyright theft. Yet intertextual works, adaptations, speculative scripts, sequels, and reimaginings all have a prominent role in “high” literature, from the epic poets’ transcribing and monumentalizing oral myth in the technology of writing, to retellings of Arthurian romances, to poetic Biblical fanfiction, all the way to modern film adaptations and breaking into TV writing through unauthorized spec scripts. The key distinction is who is doing the writing: cultural insiders, or those still knocking on the door hoping to be let in. The more a practice is seen to be performed by women, the more likely it is to be devalued; these communities so internalize this valuation that they often develop complex subculture norms and mores to establish their own barricades to mainstream cultural entry. Eighteenth (and nineteenth, and twentieth…) century women writers were often the harshest critics of feminine narrative as they competed for the scraps at the men’s table (Showalter 2009, 37); likewise, fanfic communities’ policies decry any action that allows a fanfic writer to benefit from their practice as copyright theft, though very little fanfic approaches the unethical, much less the illegal (Derecho 2006).
Fanfiction, and other collaborative forms of online narrative from wiki storyworlds to net-based folktales or “creepypastas”, create open-ended, participatory storyworlds in which readers can immerse themselves ostensibly in perpetuity, particularly as archontic narratives are some of the most resistant to online obsequity, churn, and obsolescence (Skains 2022, 185). Their communal nature not only aids in their longevity, but also in connecting disparate writers, readers, and collaborators into a networked community as they jointly explore the wealth of narrative potentiality afforded in these environments (Derecho 2006, 73), an aspect Ellen Peel notes as particularly unnatural in narrative (2016, 88). Community is key, something present for early women writers only in letters and circulating libraries for sharing texts and ideas (Showalter 2009, 83), and amplifies the inherent resistance to archontic narratives, as those participating in these communities come to value cultural exchange for content rather than currency and eschew hierarchies in favor of variance and difference (Derecho 2006, 77). Archontic narratives are thus a prime example of creative practice developed, embraced, and perpetuated outside the dominant hegemony of culture, presenting many different heads of the wondrous narrative Hydra.
The danger of defining Hydraen narrative becomes apparent: given the breadth of narrative work and identities it can refer to, it may be simpler to define it by what it isn’t than what it is. Yet that is somewhat my purpose. Literary studies, narratology, epistemology—every key sphere of interpretation, criticism, and knowledge in our Western world has been described and constructed by the dominant hegemony, which is an extremely small and rigidly defined minority community. Everything else has been deliberately placed outside this gated community in a concerted effort to maintain the existing power imbalance. The everything else, once afforded entrance, will overwhelm the gatekeepers immediately, as the Hydra does Heracles until he enlists help. Until the patriarchy is dismantled and the power spread more evenly amongst the various voices, we can frame the chaotic and cacophonous chorus of other in the many-headed challenger of the Hydra.
Seven Sisters Unmet, a hypernovel
My creative hypernovel, working title Seven Sisters Unmet, was borne in 2016 not in the interests of exploring feminist narrative and knowledge, but from a professional creative desire to experiment with publication methods for electronic literature. I piloted two short stories, “The Futographer” (Skains 2016) and “The Pyxis Memo” (Skains 2017), as testers for what I call “hyperbooks”, creating them specifically to be published using commercially available platforms for ebooks (which, at the time was .mobi for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing [KDP], and .epub for everything else; now, it is all .epub). Ebooks, constructed using XML, have the same linking capabilities as documents constructed in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), though more structure and rigidity is applied to XML documents. Few commercial publication platforms exist for electronic literature, and as indie publishing through means such as Amazon KDP became ubiquitous, I wanted to explore pathways to reaching mainstream audiences through mainstream means.
The story formed around a central premise: a central character who would be defined in seven different alternative storyworlds, or parallel worlds (in both a physics sense and a narrative sense (Bell 2010)); the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has driven a great deal of my fiction writing (most of the novel was developed before I even heard of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man). For 7 Sisters, I envisioned seven parallel universes, six diverging from our own “actual” universe through key changes to twentieth century historical events. These seven versions of a parallel character would have different lives, different environments, but their stories would mirror one another, and thus could be overlaid like various layers of cloth. Hyperlinks offered at particularly resonant moments in the parallel stories would pin these layers together and provide metaleptic connection for readers to pick and choose their way through the novel as a whole. Each of the seven characters developed in response to her divergent storyworld: in a more advanced, peace-dominant timeline of benevolent scientific and technological advancement, she became a geneticist working to resurrect extinct species. In a post-world-war landscape ravaged by mutually assured destruction through infectious biological agents rather than nuclear annihilation, she became a curandera protecting a small, isolated, return-to-basics community. In each story, she became a singular, unique character in her own right, though in all iterations she has a connection to the natural world in some way, as a geneticist, a meteorologist, a biologist, a botanist, a healer, an apiarist, and a community-connecting trader.
Two factors that arose as I created these stories that pulled me ever more deeply into the realms of Hydraen narrative and knowledge: 1) I experienced various events, some positive, some negative, some deeply personal and some reverberating on the world stage, that inspired me to engage more than ever before in topics related to equality, and 2) more specific to the practice, I identified a need for a framing narrative for 7 Sisters, as their stories had grown so distinct from one another that the central premise of alternative realities had faded. My first attempt at a framing story could be labeled as “a goddess child playing marbles with the universe”, envisioning the universe as a marble-sized toy amongst many such (echoes of Men in Black and Stephen King’s The Dome — novel version, not TV series). Drafts toward that end, however, felt shallow, flippant, their mythical quality ill-suited to a novel rooted in theoretical physics.
In the midst of writing a book on how to do practice-based research, I found myself composing a chapter about the kind of knowledge such research leads to. Certainly not the imperialistic “there is but one truth” approach of Francis Bacon’s empiricism and Auguste Comte’s positivism. Creative knowledge, narrative knowledge, is more organic, more natural to humanity, necessarily subjective, based in discourse and difference and celebrations of variation as much as recognition of similarities. I came to view practice-related knowledge as fundamentally feminine in the many different ways the term can be applied: devalued, open, natural, subjective, collaborative, intersectional, interdependent, experiential, hidden, polyvocal, subversive, and resistant. Diving deeper and deeper into writings on research methods, indigenous knowledge, feminist communication, and writing from the margins, I found my (woefully delayed) enlightenment preceded by that of many delightful writers and philosophers: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Hélène Cixous, N. Katherine Hayles, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Sara Ahmed, Julia Kristeva, Susan S. Lanser, Judi Malloy, María Mencía, Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesenbrink, Ruth Page, Elaine Showalter, Sadie Plant, Robyn R. Warhol, Patricia Waugh, Gayle Green… and so many more that I had more than one descent into grief and rage that these had not been my required readings throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Encountering sentiments from both Showalter and Russ that this is the fate of all of us—for our knowledge to be silenced and buried like the (not-quite) defeated Hydra until discovered anew—offered some comfort, and a framework from which to build.
Thus, the next draft of my framing story (abridged here) began with:
Atoms have memory. It’s a simple thing to say and even a simple thing to observe, but not an easy thing to understand. We’ve observed this memory for a very long time without knowing that’s what was behind the strange behavior of these tiny units of the universe.
I like to blame classism — the notion that one realm of research, often science, is somehow better or more worthy of exploration than another, usually the soft humanities. But look what we create when we focus on science and forget about humanity: nuclear bombs, prison experiments, pain experiments, Jurassic Park. We get so excited that we can, we never stop to think about whether we should. So it took us far too long to understand the unifying theory of the universe: that the universe remembers.
The observations recorded here are the result of one researcher’s life’s work. The primary method employed is raveling, the technique developed by Satine Mbenga when she established the model of known particles across multiple world iterations (i.e., “Mbenga’s traces”). The experimental purpose: observe the behavioral effects of atoms across parallel universes, with particular attention to recurring patterns despite cumulative variances and continued divergence. Simply put, I wanted to see how atomic memory plays out across the universes it shares, and how this affects the universes in turn.
The weft of the universal fabric was unraveled at six keystones diverging from the base universe: the somewhat farcical assassination of Franz Ferdinand that led to first global war; the Japanese attack on the USA’s military base that prompted that country’s entry into the second global war; the introduction of the HIV virus into the USA; Chinese domination of oil reserves; the development of weapons of mass destruction; and the Russian–Ukrainian exchange of the Crimean Peninsula in the Khrushchev era.
The atomic signature tract was selected based on my personal and emotional reaction to it in the early phases of base-universe observation. Justification for this approach has several aspects, but the leading concern was that I recognized early on that this project would carry across my lifetime, and perhaps the lifetimes of one or more generations of protégés. I wanted a subject I was interested in, connected to, even invested in. There is no notion of objectivity here. It was in the very century that physicists theorized observation and measurement affect the same systems being observed and measured. We cannot separate ourselves from our experiments. A fully realized study embraces the intrinsic subjectivity and involvement of its researcher.
What follows is a rereading of the outcomes, contextualized with my observations, translated into written text as closely as I could align a linguistic semiotic system with the fully immersive diverged universes that resulted from the unraveling. I chose a purely text-based medium for the communication of outcomes, as opposed to the more widely used memory download, because the art of creation enables a deeper, more complete connection to the subject matter, and a novel seemed in keeping with the era examined.
Through this lens, Seven Sisters Unmet became a research experiment on multiple narrative and actual levels: my experiment in creativity, hypertext, and publishing; the “raveler” narrator’s experiment to study the (fictional) concept and effects of “atomic memory”; and the various experiments each character carries out as part of their everyday lives. I had thought I was working with only seven “alternative figurations” of women seeking knowledge, as Rosi Braidotti (2002) and Enza Gandolfo (2012, 62) refer to the multiplicity of cyborgian (Haraway 1991) constructions and masks that make up women (and other heads of the Hydra). What I was doing was entering naturally, naively even, into a rich tradition of Hydraen narrative, as I sought to become something other than the monstrous other after life and world events had cut off my head and let me grow new ones in its place: a search Gayle Green argues has led many of my Hydraen predecessors (Woolf, Lessing, Russ, Guin, Butler, Samuel Delany…) to science fiction (1990, 84). I feel, as they did, that “science fiction provides a mode for projecting better worlds while keeping sight of social reality, for postulating romantic lands of hearts’ desire while detailing the wastelands one must traverse to attain them” (Pratt 1981, 109).
Unintentionally, Seven Sisters also shares many other qualities noted about feminist writing: polyvocality, lack of closure, repetition, ontological metelepsis, many unnatural narrative techniques, embodiment, intra- and intertextuality, questions of family versus self, explorations of sexuality and gender. I find resonance in Sadie Plant’s treatise on digital women and technoculture: “These relations of entanglement exercise a kind of sympathetic magic, in which apparently distant particles are coextensive, mutually dependent, resonant, and interactive” (1998, 260). Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember, and Kate O’Riordan argue that, particularly in digital realms, “individual lives open up to multiple worlds” (2020, 28), that “an individual is always already plural” (ibid., 36); if we take quantum mechanics into account, this is a literal statement rather than metaphor. Our atomic particles are always multiplicative, already interactive elements, Hydraen from the most fundamental level of the universe to the conscious enactment of our (various) performed selves. Seven Sisters is my creative performance of my feminine self, my queer self, my daughter self, my wife self, my scholarly self, my creative self, my scientist self, my enraged self, my weeping self, my childless self, my mother self, and the fleeting masks and unexpressed potential selves that I could have been, might have been had I turned right at Albuquerque rather than left.
Knowledge as Hydraen
Seven Sisters is not only a Hydraen exploration of self, of the feminine, of the monstrous and the othered and the marginalized, it is a Hydraen presentation of empirical, experiential, research-based knowledge, again on multiple narrative levels. As a former professional documentation writer and copywriter, as a researcher in health and science communication, and as a citizen of a modern world more and more insidiously shaped by mis- and disinformation, I have grown deeply aware that “[i]nformation and knowledge are not the same. To have access to information about something is not necessarily to know about it” (Bassett et al. 2020, 33). We have the vast stores of human knowledge available at our fingertips at any moment (to most of the world that has a digital device and access to the internet), yet falsities, rumor, and emotion-driven speculation drive the beliefs and actions of many “educated” people. As 7 Sisters’ Raveler notes, it is thanks to our Westernized approach to knowledge that we have, rather ironically, drifted so far away from rational thought and mutual understandings. The imperialist, patriarchal, authoritarian concepts underlying research and education has so colonized human thinking that we refuse to entertain any other form—even within research circles we denigrate knowledge with feminized discourse such as “soft sciences”. It is no coincidence that the disciplines most likely to be practiced by women and people of color in Western contexts are those most likely to be seen as frivolous and without worth and application in the “real” world (Lott 1985).
This is the legacy of Francis Bacon and his empiricism in Anglo-American epistemology, and Idealism and a “universal truth” in wider Western European epistemology: a fundamentally imperialist, patriarchal perspective on knowledge acquisition and exchange (Macfarlane 2016, 77). Cognitive authority is centered in the dominant hegemony—wealthy cis-het men of Western European descent—and diminishes that of other races, classes, sexualities, cultures, ages, and genders (Alcoff and Potter 2013, 3). This “White Capitalist Patriarchy” primarily values what it can convert and appropriate for power (Haraway 1988, 592), while excluding the Hydraen attributes associated with the monstrous other: “emotion, connection, practicality, sensitivity, and idiosyncracy” (Code 2013, 21). Feminist, indigenous, and intersectional epistemologies challenge us to resist this violent mental colonization and develop a more holistic, natural plurality of knowledge generation and communication (Haraway 1988; Hoagland 2020; Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012).
A Hydraen approach to knowledge presupposes “skepticism about the possibility of a general or universal account of the nature and limits of knowledge, an account that ignores the social context and status of knowers” (Alcoff and Potter 2013, 1). It accepts empirically-collected, “evidence-based” data as valid while acknowledging that objectivity is always uncertain, as Heisenberg’s principle reminds us (Code 2013, 36). It weaves such data with situated, subjective knowledge, de-centering an individual, hierarchical, “universal” truth in favor of a nuanced, multiplicative, communal understanding: a many-headed creature seeing through many different eyes. It understands that “values, politics, and knowledge are intrinsically connected” (Alcoff and Potter 2013, 3, emphasis original) and open to interpretation. It is conveyed through research paper, monograph, and textbook as equally and effectively as it is conveyed through narrative, science fiction, music, and performance. It is “a reinvented coyote discourse obligated to its sources in many heterogenous accounts of the world” (Haraway 1988, 594).
Refusal, Resistance, and Poetics
Annis Pratt calls the knowledge connection created through Hydraen narrative “a form of ‘unvention’”, where writer and reader meet in a realm of the imagination that is already familiar to both (1981, 178). Indeed, narrative is our most basic, fundamental mechanism of knowledge sharing (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012; Boyd 2009; Dautenhahn 1999), its efficacy boosted by millennia of evolution and socialization, but also by the mnemonic, emotional, and personal connections it is able to simultaneously forge to deepen the recipient’s alignment with and retention of the information (Singhal et al. 2003). Certainly, positivist knowledge generation and exchange, focused as it has on “universal truths” that have been constructed solely by a minority subset of “heroic” humanity, has neglected vast unearthed (cthonic?) knowledge because it is experienced, embodied, and shared by the “monstrous” global majority of women, people of color, lower class, othered religions, disabilities, and non-normative genders and sexualities: the Hydra. The many-layered knowing that is constructed from the body, from creativity, from subjectivity, is hidden from that dominant hegemony (though not very well; it’s available in every library, fanfic archive, blog network, social media platform…), a Lernaean network of underground streams and rivers and waterfalls that supply the many heads of the Hydra with self-sustaining connection and transformation. Hydraen narrative, connected more than ever through digital interfaces, galvanizes the dialectical, participatory relationship between creator and audience that leads to social change and restored (and restorative) power (Pratt 1981, 177).
Digital creativity, that practiced in elit, fanfiction, and even social media narrative, presents new opportunities for Hydraen voices to not only proliferate, but to actively build a tradition of archontic resistance that persists across generations. No longer doomed to “rediscover the past anew”, the underground caverns and holes of the digitally connected Lerna affords greater volume (in space and sound) for subversive narrative to emerge and persist: in the dissonant fabulations of reviews for sexist products (Skains 2018b), the socio-cultural “gap-filling” of media-based fanfiction (Pugh 2005), and the electronic literature frontiers that cannot be completely gate-kept by a still-dominant hegemony (Skains under review). Elit has long provided not just an escape from dominant narrative and publishing structures (Hayles 2017, xiii; Bassett et al. 2020, 74), but also a new creative realm from which those structures can be demolished and re-envisioned, reclaiming polyphonic voices to establish and maintain a “distinct ontology/cosmology/epistemology” (Hoagland 2020, 55). Indeed, the initial forays into these spheres were led by women, from the LiveJournalers to the Archive of Our Own founders (Heeg 2022), to the early hypertext authors and elit networks (Coverley 2017; Thomas 2017).
Seven Sisters is my resistant poetics in the intersection of many spheres: in elit, a field that pushed back against the notion of commercial digital literature—unless it was the dominant hegemony within the field buttressing existing patriarchal publishing and literary elitism with “serious hypertext” (Skains under review). It resists “natural” (read: masculine) narrative structures in its polyvocality, its lack of closure, its refusal to follow a linear storyline. It explores romance as dramatically—and comedically—as it does war and conflict. It establishes itself in the tradition of “women’s work”—textiles, healing, bearing children, social caring, community building—even as these women’s stories are translated into experiential, subjective knowledge through an intergalactic scientist. Perhaps the most poetic element of the work is found not in the words themselves, but in the slow inner revolution the hypernovel reveals: a head of the Hydra that was severed by patriarchal “heroics” and grew more in its place, serpentine sources of rage, resilience, and restitution.
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