okay i mentioned this when i was yelling about art and math brains, and also in the last post that I was hollering about this fuckin’ book on, but Ursula K Le Guin was fucking rightinThe Left Hand of Darkness, because when you get down to it, actually, yeah:
sexism, and bigotry towards what a society sees as “sexual perversions”, and nationalism, and us-versus-them mindsets as justification for violence, and aaaall of that is basically the same shit
and it’s usually intertwined, and when you start deconstructing one part of it (like sexism) another part (like gender or patriotism) tends to be easier to peel away, or even just floats off naturally.
And I can’t stop thinking about how fucking right she was, because like yeah, of course things start going to shit when you start viewing this pine tree as being inherently different from that pine tree just because some dude drew a border separating them and now they exist in different countries, and shouldn’t we be more in love with the trees we like for the tree’s sake, not because of who owns it or what land it exists on, but because we love the tree itself?
Or the hillsides?
Or the sunsets?
Maybe that doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t read the book, but shouldn’t we??
And then shouldn’t we love the features and behaviors we see in people, not because we see them as symptomatic of some ephemeral, loosely defined matrix of gender or sex or personality type, but because we love the features, regardless of who they’re on, and because we love the behaviors, regardless of who’s behind them?
Which doesn’t mean that you can’t only get turned on by only women or men or nonbinary folks, because yeah as far as i’m concerned, being attracted to only one portion of the population due to characteristics beyond that person’s control is just a Thing for some people, even if it’s not one that I fully get. Nor does it mean that you can’t hate a politician for their actions and therefore feel suspicious of their fellow political leaders, or anything else that’s a function of our crazy pattern matching brains and it’s instinct to keep us alive.
But like….at some point, you have to step back and realize that you’ve lost the original thread while creating this pattern. You’ve lost sight of the behavior/feature/hillside that you love and mistaken it for this larger whole that we created, this conceptualizationof sex and gender and sexuality and acceptability and patriotism and personhood.
I think that’s rotten, because a whole lot of us are wasting our time turning our backs on hillsides or albums or books or people or jobs because at some point, we got told or taught to view them as existing in a box that we, for some reason, feel like we can’t touch anymore.
there has to be at least one mountain goats song about the left hand of darkness. i know john darnielle is a le guin fan. jd where are the therem harth rem ir estraven jams you can’t tell me you haven’t written any. john.
Sex and Gender in Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
Sex and Gender in Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
The Left Hand of Darkness is a thought experiment by Ursula K Le Guin exploring what happens when a society is essentially genderless. Would interpersonal relationships change? How would society be different? Chuck Palahniuk has said, “No two people walk into the same room.” The same goes for the reading experience. It is up to the reader to decide if Le Guin was successful in her experiment.…
Great news! Estraven is fine and got together with Genly and they’re doing holidays with Ashe’s family this year.
(Siblings yeeting each other is from “Coming of Age in Karhide” but it’s also from real life, probably. My brother and I got told off for playing stairwell tobbogan when we were 4 and 8, so…that checks out.)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely “taken off” the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite “he,” which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns.”
I tell you this only because the phrase “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns” is one I think about a lot.
I will say there are absolutely a lot of valid critiques there, but I think there is also something to be said for the left hand of darkness as an exercise (particularly to the modern reader) in pronouns not matching gender in a tidy way & the idea that the innate self isn’t necessarily tied to presentation. it is interesting to me how many people I come across saying they were unable to read the gethenians as genderfluid purely because they used he/him pronouns, which I think sort of falls into the same sort of trap that the book is pushing back against, where you have to overcome your own assumptions about how behaviors and presentations are gendered in order to come to a true understanding of the person. which is not to say there aren’t very real reasons for discomfort (particularly with regards to the choice of he/him in the 60s), just that maybe some discomforts deserve to be examined, particularly if you as a reader can only believe or understand genderfluidity if it’s presented through a set of pronouns you find comfortable
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely “taken off” the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite “he,” which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns.”
I tell you this only because the phrase “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns” is one I think about a lot.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely “taken off” the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite “he,” which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns.”
I tell you this only because the phrase “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns” is one I think about a lot.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely “taken off” the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite “he,” which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns.”
I tell you this only because the phrase “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns” is one I think about a lot.
A lotta people in the notes have pointed out that it is consistent with the novel’s internal logic, given that the point-of-view character is an idiot from another planet who struggles to understand Gethenian society. & as a person with blue hair and pronouns in real life, I mostly agree with that interpretation (and it holds up incredibly well for a novel written in fucking 1969) but honestly one of LHoD’s biggest weaknesses in my opinion is that Genly comes across as such a gigantic asshole that he can be kinda hard to read about
