Season of the Witch

I just finished reading Jean Marie (Hank) Stine's Season of the Witch (Stine was male when the novel was written, but has since undergone a sex change). It is a piece of erotic science fiction that was originally published by Essex House, which published literary erotica in the mid-to-late 1960s.


The basic plot is that the protagonist Andre rapes and kills a woman while high, and his punishment is to have his brain transplanted into her body. The majority of the book is devoted to his struggle to come to terms with his new femininity and a description of the ways women are mistreated by men. Its depiction of women ranges from horribly stereotypical to incisive (and somewhat feminist) back to stereotypical as Andre learns to accept his prescribed gender role as a giving woman whose primary concern is the happiness of others. He/she even gets happily pregnant at the end.


The reprint includes an afterword by Stine in which she admits to the retrograde nature of some of the book's ideas. What is especially disturbing to me about the book is that it is just another example of a trend in the depiction of transsexuals in literature (which takes place almost exclusively in science fiction to the best of my knowledge): it is always a male-to-female transition, and it is enacted as either a form of punishment or masochism, for instance, in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve or Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton. Perhaps Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness or Joanna Russ's The Female Man could be considered exceptions, though they are more about intersex characters rather than transsexuals. The overarching problem is that there is too little transsexual fiction, and what does exist is not well-known, so it is difficult to find positive portrayals of transsexuals. It's the old Well of Loneliness problem all over again--the only portrayals available require the death of the subversive character, or something akin to it.