Where is Winter?

The Left Hand of Darkness seems to me to be particularly interested in the act of naming. In the first few pages of the novel I noticed LeGuin’s adoption of the sci-fi trope of giving seemingly everything a strange, unpronounceable name. The talk of Gossiwors and kyorremmy reminds me of a particular criticism of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: the book was replete with silly “sci-fi” names that were meant to make the world seem alien, but they only really served to distract the reader, rather than immerse him. While this is a stylistic tic that I do personally find somewhat frustrating in sci-fi, its use does not seem too egregious to me in The Left Hand of Darkness.

It is less the strange, invented alien words that struck me, but the ambiguities that were given to names. At the end of his conversation with Estrevan, they come to the name of the planet. Estrevan asks Ai “what do you call it, this world, in your language?” At first, Ai answers with Gethen, the technical name of the planet. Then, upon further provocation, he reveals what he has called it several times in his interior monologue: Winter. Up until that point, I was not even sure whether Gethen and Winter were interchangeable, and not in fact different places. This seems to be a simple analogue for the ambiguous sexuality of the Gethens, where their gender truly is only what an outsider decides to call it, which they inevitably only do so based on their outside appearance, but it seems to me that the naming of Winter resonates more on its proof that this dilemma of the naming of things occurs on every scale in the story. Not only does the gender of a man/woman rely on semantics, but an entire planet can chameleonically change aspects with a single turn of phrase.

To return to the alien words, in terms of ambiguity they do serve an important purpose in science fiction in general. One could argue that these ambiguities are a literalization of the primary appeal of sci fi . A common tactic of immersion is to throw the reader into the setting, to make them experience a narrative without understanding it. Nonsense words are an instantaneous way to achieve the confusion and intrigue required for this form of immersion. Then, the revelation of their meaning parallels an equal understanding of the narrative, characters and background for the story. The appearance of this trope, an apparent sci-fi “shortcut,” makes me wonder what other people think about the phenomena. Do you find the fanciful, invented terminology to be successful immersively, or just annoying, or both? For me, I feel that it can’t help but succeed in immersion, with the unbeatable “throw the baby in the pool” approach, but I also find it to be a consistently annoying tic that, if not erased completely, I wish would be toned down in some cases.

The Gender of War

As someone who approached The Left Hand of Darkness expecting it to be, fundamentally, a gender-focused text, I was surprised at how much of the novel seemed either a) totally unrelated to the issue of gender or b) applicable only by forced contortions of analysis that I’m not entirely confident making. While the Gethenians’ ambisexuality is arguably their most famous trait, it was their total lack of war that inspired their creation. In a telephone interview I found online, LeGuin is quoted as claiming the following concerning her writing process:

It all started when I began to imagine a society without war, a people that does not think in terms of war. They have murders and forays but never wars. What kind of people would they be? I thought. Obviously, they'd be different from us. But in what way? That's how I came to the idea of an androgynous society. As one character says in the book, war is a displaced male-generalized activity, something that men do and women don't.

The mental leap from (relative) pacifism to androgyny is not one that strikes me as particularly natural. While the traditional stereotypes are there (men as aggressive and independent, women as passive and communal), I don’t think the lack of a wholly male presence is enough to explain this implied link between bisexuality and war. After all, despite its uniformity of gender, Gethen is a world rife with tension and dualism, the most dramatic being the competitive political divide between Karhide and Orgoreyn.

A more likely explanation (although one that, too me, seems even less understandable) is the connection that LeGuin draws between women and anarchy. In her essay, “Is Gender Necessary? (Redux)”, she claims that:

The ‘female principle’ has historically been anarchic; that is, anarchy has historically been identified as female. The domain allotted to women—‘the family’, for example—is the area of order without coercion, rule by custom not force. Men have reserved the structures of social power to themselves… (11-12).

According to this analysis, the “feminine” Karhide exists under a system of authority “without appeal to patriarchal ideals of divine right, patriotic duty, etc.” In this way, Tibe’s attempt to draw Karhide into a war as a quick and dirty way of mobilizing the land into a true “nation” by unifying the disparate “hearths” represents a shift from the feminine (or at least, balance) to the masculine.

Similarly, the concept of patriotism is a puzzle that haunts Ai and Estraven (and, by extension, the reader) throughout the text. Although Ai initially views it as a positive attribute (which seems fitting, as it is “male” according to LeGuin’s classifications, and Ai is the only truly male character), he comes to understand Estraven’s definition of patriotism as “the fear of the other” (19) and potentially “hate of one’s uncountry” (212). Taking the novel’s apparent endorsement of cooperation and interdependency into account, this seems to be a condemnation. By the end, Ai acknowledges, not precisely the evils of patriotism, but rather its potential for corruption. He notes: “And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?” (280)

To sum up, LeGuin seems to imply that patriotism, as a divisive force, is both “masculine” and tied to war in such a way that, without men, there is no patriotism, and without patriotism, there is no war. While I still don’t entirely agree with this (I don’t think that concepts like “patriotism” can be assigned a gender), it’s a philosophy that seems consistent throughout the novel.

Interview source: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/gaybooks/lefthandofdarkness.html#interview

Compulsory Heterosexuality Reinforces Gender Dualism

Ursula K. Le Guin begins The Left Hand of Darkness with a defensive introduction: “I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing” (xv). She labels the novel as a “thought experiment.” At certain moments, Le Guin asserts, we can see that people are already androgynous. But (and I think that Jasmine’s post on this is completely on point) Le Guin's thought problem does not present true “androgyny” or create a full spectrum of gender expression; in creating a balance of “yin and yang,” “masculine and feminine,” Le Guin only reinforces and exaggerates gender duality without questioning it.

Genly Ai identifies the difference in biological sex and the dualism it creates as “the heaviest single factor in one’s life” (234). And when that “divisive” factor is removed, Le Guin still only writes about Gethenians’ heterosexual kemmer encounters. When she wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, Le Guin was certainly “aware” of same sex encounters; Genly claims that “perverts” in Gethenian society (people who have hormonal imblances that make them more “male” or more “female”) “are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies. The Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads” (63). “Bisexual,” in this context, means “heterosexual” rather than what we think of as “bisexual” today. It fascinates me that Le Guin would explore a world of “ambisexual” beings as necessarily heterosexual, even as she explores polyamorous (“promiscuous”) kemmerhouses. That, to me, emphasizes one of the main ways in which Le Guin does not make it beyond the gender binary or the concept that biological sex dictates gender expression.

Le Guin notices this in her 1987 of “Is Gender Necessary?” (I’m also quite surprised that this didn’t occur to her in the 1976 edition.) Not only does she finally figure out how to refer to the Gethenians without gendered pronouns (there are some “they” revisions), she also chides herself for “unnecessarily lock[ing] the Gethenians into heterosexuality…. In any kemmer-house homosexual practice would, of course, be possible and acceptable and welcomed - but I never thought to explore this option; and the omission, alas, implies that sexuality is heterosexuality” (14). STILL, even decades later, Le Guin assumes that homosexuality only occurs in kemmerhouses- the sites of indiscriminate, “promiscuous” sexual encounters. Did it occur to her that when Gethenians vowed kemmering, at some point in their many kemmering cycles together, both of them might develop the same sexual organs?

I tried to make sense of this compulsory heterosexuality by placing it within Le Guin’s thought problem - if the only point of kemmer is to reproduce, then perhaps there is no evolutionary “need” for same sex encounters. This doesn’t work, though, because Le Guin describes kemmer as a sexual compulsion - the Gethenians feel the need to have sexual encounters even if they use contraceptives. It could be argued that any given Gethenian can develop either male or female sex organs during kemmer, so they all have bisexual or “ambisexual” sexual experiences - but I’m interested in the fact that Le Guin writes that someone who becomes “male” after kemmer must find “female” sexual partners, or that she labels them as "male" and "female" after these sexual organs develop (was that necessary?). Because she is locked into these concepts of sexual interdependence, balance, dualism, she falls into traps of sexual essentialism - “male” means “masculine” means “seeks female”; “female” means “feminine” means “seeks male” - which, in turn, produces some disturbing false dichotomies* throughout the novel, which Le Guin seems to unquestioningly support in “Is Gender Necessary?” I love that the novel aims to praise gender interdependence and equality of the sexes (especially during a time where an increasingly radical feminist movement often advocated for sexual difference and separatism), but she unnecessarily approaches that goal by assuming that there are only two biological sexes, only two genders to blend equally rather than a spectrum of gender expression, and that only heterosexual encounters are key to this interdependency.

*(example of a false gender dichotomy: Woman who investigated Gethenian sexual practices - “did [the Hainish who she believes genetically engineered the ambisexual Gethenians] consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped?” (96) - in a 100% heterosexual society, perhaps it would be true that masculinity/male rapes and femininity/female is raped)

"Shadows to Walk" and the difficulty of deconstructing dualisms

Marcellino’s analysis of feminist science fiction utopia, “Shadows to Walk”, focuses, in particular, on her attempts to undermine the dualism of classification in traditional feminist SF narratives. Rather than utilizing themes of separation (where “women can get away from men and experience female singularity” (203) or countercolonization (which “hinges on a reversal of dominant male power with dominant female power”), “The Left Hand of Darkness” offers a third approach; “by privileging neither female nor male norms, by diagramming in her narrative different but interdependent female and male strengths, and by criticizing and praising (nuanced criticism) both female and male political approaches” (204), Le Guin has, in Marcellino’s eyes, produced a new, non-hierarchical, non-dual paradigm for feminist science fiction. I was also intrigued by the creation of ambisexuality, and the implications that changed physicality has for social organization; however, I remained troubled by the ways in which “The Left Hand of Darkness” might continue to enforce gender binaries and the association of gender with sex.

The title of the novel itself stems from a fragment of Gethen mythology, which states that “light is the left hand of darkness/and darkness the right hand of light./Two are one, life and death, lying/together like lovers in kemmer,/like hands joined together, like the end and the way” (LHoD 233). Within the Gethen mythos, light and dark are identified with gender, with ‘light’ representing masculinity and ‘dark’ representing femininity; in Marcellino’s words, “ just as we need light and dark to see, each gender needs the other to function.”(206) This is a worthy statement, in an era where gender is still hierarchical, and where reimagining of gender often preserves inequality; however, privileging this statement means also accepting a series of assumptions about male and female. The first assumption is that concepts of male and female NEED to exist, as cultural constructs as well as biological entities; that there are concepts that can be usefully pinned down as ‘male’ or ‘female’; that there can be only two genders that work in concert.

As an example of gender interdependence within the text, Marcellino analyzes a scene from the crossing of the Gobrin Ice Sheet; Genly Ai’s Gethen guide (named Estraven) goes into kemmer, and her newly manifested femininity becomes crucial to the survival of both individuals. Because Estraven now identifies as female, she divides up food in a way that favors Genly; her selflessness enables Genly to preserve his physical strength, which he then uses to protect her from the harsh climactic conditions of the ice sheet. Marcellino characterizes this scenario as a “scene of personal gender interdependence”; but his analysis identifies female biological sex as always leading to a set of feminine personality traits; are women always inherently self-sacrificing and physically weaker? (This scenario reminds me of the work of Carol Adams, a feminist and vegetarian who writes extensively on the politics of gender; she constantly debunks the assertion that physically stronger men automatically need or deserve more food than women as a mechanism which is used to justify the exploitation of both women and animals) Is this scenario actually a lesson in gender, or is it a more general point about the necessity of interdependence?

Within “Is Gender Necessary: Redux”, Le Guin points out that “our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance.” (16) The preservation of gender binaries and gender roles means that the Gethenians represent an incomplete departure from dualism and gender hierarchy; Le Guin’s novel is certainly feminist, and was very successful in getting its readers to think about alternatives to gender and sex as we currently experience them; however, I’m not sure if it can be posited as an entirely unprecedented form of feminist utopian SF narrative.