“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
March 10, 2022 7:57 AM Subscribe
"When I first read The Left Hand of Darkness, it struck me as a guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but had never known how to reach. This novel showed me a reality where storytelling could help me question the ideas about gender and sexuality that had been handed down to all of us, take-it-or-leave-it style, from childhood. But also, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel felt like an invitation to a different kind of storytelling, one based on understanding the inner workings of societies as well as individual people." From 2019, Charlie Jane Anders writes about the classic.
It has been so long since I read this, but this discussion brought me right back into it. There were definitely aspects that I didn't clue into at the time, but were well explained here!
posted by Acari at 9:13 AM on March 10, 2022
posted by Acari at 9:13 AM on March 10, 2022
I've only read The Dispossessed and Lathe of Heaven. It's far past time for me to read the rest of her works.
posted by evilDoug at 9:41 AM on March 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by evilDoug at 9:41 AM on March 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't love The Lathe of Heaven! I feel like it's tonally so different from her other work. evilDoug, I envy you the chance to have unread LeGuin to look forward to...
posted by Lawn Beaver at 9:43 AM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Lawn Beaver at 9:43 AM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
I can only imagine what it was like to read this story at the time, especially bits like Genly's misogyny that would, at first blush, not be all that different from a lot of the male-dominated sci-fi of the day. I guess that's a recurring theme in popular media, isn't it? The "you missed the point by idolizing them" meme.
I'm probably just underestimating SF/F readers of the time, inappropriately comparing with some of the recent garbage. Hard to imagine that something as revolutionary today would win both Hugo and Nebula awards.
posted by supercres at 10:19 AM on March 10, 2022
I'm probably just underestimating SF/F readers of the time, inappropriately comparing with some of the recent garbage. Hard to imagine that something as revolutionary today would win both Hugo and Nebula awards.
posted by supercres at 10:19 AM on March 10, 2022
I remember reading Left Hand of Darkness for the first time after having read so much commentary about it's OMG treatment of gender etc and thinking "how was *that* the main thing you got from this book??". The book is so much more. What about perseverance? or empathy? or struggling with isolation? Focusing so much on gender (as so many have) always felt like cherry picking what you want to see out of a much richer tapestry. (it's like saying OMG, the Kzin are orange! Yes, but I think you're missing the point a little....)
posted by cfraenkel at 10:32 AM on March 10, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by cfraenkel at 10:32 AM on March 10, 2022 [13 favorites]
It gives instructions that imagination is truth. That it is the truth of gender, sexuality and story. It gets to a critical scene of the story that can clearly be imagined several different ways than it is written on the page. It becomes a Rashomon where the reader is one of the observers.
posted by bdc34 at 10:41 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by bdc34 at 10:41 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
I should reread this. I read it young enough that I don't think I was developed enough as a reader to get all of it, and it's been long enough that although I remember bits and pieces, a lot will be fresh.
(I remember really loving it but not finding it revelatory, and it would be neat to see what else I find it in now that I'm older.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:06 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
(I remember really loving it but not finding it revelatory, and it would be neat to see what else I find it in now that I'm older.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:06 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
There's a fascinating error in this article, and I'm surprised that it hasn't been caught within three years. It's in this sentence: "Edward Sapir, who helped develop that theory, worked with Le Guin’s father, the anthropologist Theodora Kroeber, and also helped translate for Ishi, the lone survivor of the Yahi tribe whom Kroeber befriended and studied."
Theodora Kroeber--whose name is correct--is Le Guin's MOTHER, as well as a prominent anthropological writer, whose best-known work is about Ishi. However, Le Guin's father, Alfred Kroeber, was also an anthropologist, and he did work with Ishi and the Yahi tribe (and, based on references, with Edward Sapir). As I look deeper into this, I think that probably Anders read about both Kroebers and got confused about who did what, since their work was closely aligned. But in an article about a book that radically explores gender roles and a character who is identified as a misogynist, this mistake stands out with an odd significance.
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:39 AM on March 10, 2022 [16 favorites]
Theodora Kroeber--whose name is correct--is Le Guin's MOTHER, as well as a prominent anthropological writer, whose best-known work is about Ishi. However, Le Guin's father, Alfred Kroeber, was also an anthropologist, and he did work with Ishi and the Yahi tribe (and, based on references, with Edward Sapir). As I look deeper into this, I think that probably Anders read about both Kroebers and got confused about who did what, since their work was closely aligned. But in an article about a book that radically explores gender roles and a character who is identified as a misogynist, this mistake stands out with an odd significance.
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:39 AM on March 10, 2022 [16 favorites]
This is looking back across a canyon that spans a fair number of decades by now, but I remember it as being somewhat gender-essentialist by contemporary standards.
And keep in mind that Le Guin insisted that James Tiptree Jr. could not be a woman when that briefly became a hot issue back in the days that are no more.
posted by jamjam at 11:46 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
And keep in mind that Le Guin insisted that James Tiptree Jr. could not be a woman when that briefly became a hot issue back in the days that are no more.
posted by jamjam at 11:46 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hard to imagine that something as revolutionary today would win both Hugo and Nebula awards.
I would disagree with this! Just to name a couple of recent award-winners: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, both were quite revolutionary in their treatment of gender, identity, and oppression.
The Sad Puppies pretty much are no longer an issue and there is a great deal of creative and challenging SFF being written right now.
keep in mind that Le Guin insisted that James Tiptree Jr. could not be a woman
! Do you have a cite for this? I know that there are some writers who held that opinion, but I don't think I've ever heard that Le Guin was one of them...
posted by suelac at 12:32 PM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
I would disagree with this! Just to name a couple of recent award-winners: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, both were quite revolutionary in their treatment of gender, identity, and oppression.
The Sad Puppies pretty much are no longer an issue and there is a great deal of creative and challenging SFF being written right now.
keep in mind that Le Guin insisted that James Tiptree Jr. could not be a woman
! Do you have a cite for this? I know that there are some writers who held that opinion, but I don't think I've ever heard that Le Guin was one of them...
posted by suelac at 12:32 PM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Neither had I. Are you possibly thinking of Joanna Russ, jamjam? Per the Phillips biography, Russ said to Tiptree that they had ideas "no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to."
posted by tavella at 2:22 PM on March 10, 2022
posted by tavella at 2:22 PM on March 10, 2022
The Left Hand of Darkness was the first book by LeGuin I ever read back when it came out -- after reading reviews in Analog, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It blew me away. Rocannon's World was the second. They are both my sentimental favorites of her Hainish cycle.
posted by y2karl at 4:48 PM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by y2karl at 4:48 PM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
As far as I can tell Russ always wrote of herself as a woman, so that quote takes a subtler parsing than the obvious.
posted by clew at 5:31 PM on March 10, 2022
posted by clew at 5:31 PM on March 10, 2022
It's been years since I read The Left Hand of Darkness. What stuck in my memory, more than the topics of sex and gender was the trek across the ice. That I remember incredibly clearly. So yes, this is the book about perceptions of sex, that surpassed me when one of the "male" (as they were referred to as "he") characters took on female characteristics when in kemer, but in my memory it's an incredible story of a developing friendship during a period of desperation and uncertain survival. I'm sure there's more than that, but it's been over 20 years since I read it (before I was really aware of what gender is). But Anders' description of the visceral nature of the crossing of the ice is true for me, it's lasted longer in my memory than any other survival tale I've read.
posted by Hactar at 6:36 AM on March 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Hactar at 6:36 AM on March 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
Hactar, that's exactly what I mostly remember about this book too, that incredible trek across the glacier!
posted by of strange foe at 11:11 AM on March 11, 2022
posted by of strange foe at 11:11 AM on March 11, 2022
Me, too.
Both this and Dispossessed were very good books to read for teen me.
Per some of the above comments — like any art form, people are going to bring themselves to SF and, even if the ideas are challenging, confirmation bias will inform what they take from it.
For example, Heinlein gets — justifiably — panned a lot these days. But the thing is, if one is inclined to have one's regressive, creepy ideas validated by Heinlein, one surely will.
At the time, when I was a tween in 1975 or whenever, I was inclined to see Podkayne as a very smart person, in a well-rounded fashion — whereas her brother was really a kind of know-it-all jerk. I admired Podkayne. Okay, sure, this was easier to do in the 70s when gender norms were so regressive that Podkayne looked pretty good by comparison.
But, even so, if I'd been like the sad puppies who no doubt identified with her brother, the message I might have taken from that book was what they probably did and what it seems like to the modern reader thinks is Heinlein's: that even smart girls are pejoratively "girly" and frivolous and smart boys are, you know, the most important people in the world. And, I found recently when skimming the book, that's sure what it looks like to my modern eye! I cringed a lot. But, even so, 70s tween precocious boy me identified more with Podkayne than her brother and I took a very different and girl-positive message from the book. Is it what Heinlein intended? I don't know — Heinlein was born in, like, 1899, so I have no idea what that dude was really thinking. But, in some senses, that's beside the point, at least for my purposes here.
For me, fiction in general and science-fiction in particular were the primary impetus of my development of imaginative empathy. They were opportunities for me to meet people unlike myself, to imagine worlds different from the world I lived in and to therefore see the world I lived in through different eyes.
Fiction and science fiction challenged me and expanded my worldview because an openness to this — an eagerness for this — was something I brought with me.
The Left Hand of Darkness without a doubt prepared the ground for my meeting and close friendship with a radical feminist only a couple of years later and my subsequent embrace of feminism.
It's interesting to me and extremely relevant that Anders, as a trans woman, fondly remembers this book. I recall it as extremely formative of my second gen feminist thinking and I can see how many modern day TERFs might also remember it fondly. Above, jamjam thinks of this book as fairly gender essentialist. Would, then, so-called "gender critical" feminists like it, as I just supposed?
Well, I mean, speaking as a third or fourth wave feminist (or ally, as you prefer, as I'm a man) who began as a second-wave feminist and also as someone who very strongly opposes transphobia, I've kind of reached a point of exasperation about whatever is supposed to be the distinction between gender essentialism and "gender criticism". I think the nature/nurture argument in general — as an ideological paradigm — is not only absurdly reductive from a scientific and cultural standpoint, it's also never — as a framework — done anything other than much more harm than good. What I do know is that human dignity, lived experience, tolerance, and kindness are where the truly important ethical and political distinctions are found.
People often argue that science fiction, more than most other fiction, is a fiction of ideas. I've never disagreed with that, but I've always found this view of SF to be sadly incomplete. In fact, how I feel about science fiction is what I feel about all other literature and art "of ideas" (which often also means "political"). Which is this: if it's primarily or exclusively ideological but not humanistic, then it's impoverished. If it's ideological and not humanistic, it's likely violent in some sense. Furthermore, even if it has no pretense of "ideas" but is wholly humanistic, it's nevertheless deeply political. And if it's an art of ideas and humanistic, then doubly so is it political. This is, in fact, the heart of politics.
Science fiction's virtue is that it it can present otherwise difficult points of view of the familiar and express different ways of being. As narrative fiction, with a theory of mind, it can provide alternative structured ways of understanding the world with an anchor in empathy and tolerance. But, because of its nature, it can also easily reify the familiar and colonise the unfamiliar by pretending to do the opposite. There very much is authorial intent relevant to which kind of things a book is — but, perhaps more than that, it's what kind of person is the reader.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:52 PM on March 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
Both this and Dispossessed were very good books to read for teen me.
Per some of the above comments — like any art form, people are going to bring themselves to SF and, even if the ideas are challenging, confirmation bias will inform what they take from it.
For example, Heinlein gets — justifiably — panned a lot these days. But the thing is, if one is inclined to have one's regressive, creepy ideas validated by Heinlein, one surely will.
At the time, when I was a tween in 1975 or whenever, I was inclined to see Podkayne as a very smart person, in a well-rounded fashion — whereas her brother was really a kind of know-it-all jerk. I admired Podkayne. Okay, sure, this was easier to do in the 70s when gender norms were so regressive that Podkayne looked pretty good by comparison.
But, even so, if I'd been like the sad puppies who no doubt identified with her brother, the message I might have taken from that book was what they probably did and what it seems like to the modern reader thinks is Heinlein's: that even smart girls are pejoratively "girly" and frivolous and smart boys are, you know, the most important people in the world. And, I found recently when skimming the book, that's sure what it looks like to my modern eye! I cringed a lot. But, even so, 70s tween precocious boy me identified more with Podkayne than her brother and I took a very different and girl-positive message from the book. Is it what Heinlein intended? I don't know — Heinlein was born in, like, 1899, so I have no idea what that dude was really thinking. But, in some senses, that's beside the point, at least for my purposes here.
For me, fiction in general and science-fiction in particular were the primary impetus of my development of imaginative empathy. They were opportunities for me to meet people unlike myself, to imagine worlds different from the world I lived in and to therefore see the world I lived in through different eyes.
Fiction and science fiction challenged me and expanded my worldview because an openness to this — an eagerness for this — was something I brought with me.
The Left Hand of Darkness without a doubt prepared the ground for my meeting and close friendship with a radical feminist only a couple of years later and my subsequent embrace of feminism.
It's interesting to me and extremely relevant that Anders, as a trans woman, fondly remembers this book. I recall it as extremely formative of my second gen feminist thinking and I can see how many modern day TERFs might also remember it fondly. Above, jamjam thinks of this book as fairly gender essentialist. Would, then, so-called "gender critical" feminists like it, as I just supposed?
Well, I mean, speaking as a third or fourth wave feminist (or ally, as you prefer, as I'm a man) who began as a second-wave feminist and also as someone who very strongly opposes transphobia, I've kind of reached a point of exasperation about whatever is supposed to be the distinction between gender essentialism and "gender criticism". I think the nature/nurture argument in general — as an ideological paradigm — is not only absurdly reductive from a scientific and cultural standpoint, it's also never — as a framework — done anything other than much more harm than good. What I do know is that human dignity, lived experience, tolerance, and kindness are where the truly important ethical and political distinctions are found.
People often argue that science fiction, more than most other fiction, is a fiction of ideas. I've never disagreed with that, but I've always found this view of SF to be sadly incomplete. In fact, how I feel about science fiction is what I feel about all other literature and art "of ideas" (which often also means "political"). Which is this: if it's primarily or exclusively ideological but not humanistic, then it's impoverished. If it's ideological and not humanistic, it's likely violent in some sense. Furthermore, even if it has no pretense of "ideas" but is wholly humanistic, it's nevertheless deeply political. And if it's an art of ideas and humanistic, then doubly so is it political. This is, in fact, the heart of politics.
Science fiction's virtue is that it it can present otherwise difficult points of view of the familiar and express different ways of being. As narrative fiction, with a theory of mind, it can provide alternative structured ways of understanding the world with an anchor in empathy and tolerance. But, because of its nature, it can also easily reify the familiar and colonise the unfamiliar by pretending to do the opposite. There very much is authorial intent relevant to which kind of things a book is — but, perhaps more than that, it's what kind of person is the reader.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:52 PM on March 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
This could maybe be its own post but since I am commenting in my own UKLG thread from all of a couple days ago, here's Amal El-Mohtar writing about, eventually, coming to Le Guin.
posted by curious nu at 1:31 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by curious nu at 1:31 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
Are you possibly thinking of Joanna Russ, jamjam? Per the Phillips biography, Russ said to Tiptree that they had ideas "no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to."
What could this possibly be about? I can only imagine that she might have been referring to The Screwfly Solution, but "ideas that no woman could think or understand" sounds way out of field for a writer such as Russ.
posted by jokeefe at 8:09 PM on March 12, 2022
What could this possibly be about? I can only imagine that she might have been referring to The Screwfly Solution, but "ideas that no woman could think or understand" sounds way out of field for a writer such as Russ.
posted by jokeefe at 8:09 PM on March 12, 2022
I recall it as extremely formative of my second gen feminist thinking and I can see how many modern day TERFs might also remember it fondly. Above, jamjam thinks of this book as fairly gender essentialist. Would, then, so-called "gender critical" feminists like it, as I just supposed?
I can never understand how second-wave feminists were supposed to be "gender essentialist", when second-wave writing was fundamentally opposed to the idea (as are "modern day TERFS", in my understanding, assuming one could use that term seriously to outline a legible political position). Specifically regarding The Left Hand of Darkness, I don't recall that it contributed much to the creation or expansion of feminist politics but was generally loved for its thought experiment and the quality of the writing.
posted by jokeefe at 8:28 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
I can never understand how second-wave feminists were supposed to be "gender essentialist", when second-wave writing was fundamentally opposed to the idea (as are "modern day TERFS", in my understanding, assuming one could use that term seriously to outline a legible political position). Specifically regarding The Left Hand of Darkness, I don't recall that it contributed much to the creation or expansion of feminist politics but was generally loved for its thought experiment and the quality of the writing.
posted by jokeefe at 8:28 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
Re gender essentialism, Le Guin and the Gethenians: A lot to discuss here. Le Guin did get some criticism for referring to the androgynous Gethenians as he/him. When her short story Winter’s King (set on Gethen and written before TLHOD) was republished in 1975 in the anthology The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, she responded by changing the pronouns and referring to all Gethenians as she/her. I do wish she had lived and written a little longer; post-millennium she might have changed it again, or revisited Gethen as she did Earthsea, to find what had changed there.
Part of the gender essentialism in TLHOD specifically is down to Genly Ai’s prejudices, which Le Guin makes clear. He doesn’t trust the Gethenians because he is a man who dislikes and distrusts “femininity” and thinks of women as other, and he can’t get his head around how to relate to people who are androgynous and genderfluid. He learns to trust Estraven but still thinks of him as he— it’s only when Estraven enters kemmer that Genly has his revelation that Estraven is still Estraven in any gender:
“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. […] Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. […] I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.”
But even with this realisation, Genly never refers to Estraven as she, even while Estraven is in kemmer; and never asks how Estraven would like to be referred to or thought of. Genly can also only think in binary terms: man/woman/both/neither are the only options available. Here, I think, we come up against the boundaries of Le Guin’s thought as well as Genly’s.
So even Le Guin’s gender fluidity has a binary quality. In her later (1995) short story Coming Of Age In Karhide, set among working class Gethenians and following one of them through their first kemmer, she makes it clear that kemmer transforms a Gethenian’s body into male or female, and the person remains in that gender until that kemmer period ends. They may change back and forth for future kemmers, but only between those two binary and mutually exclusive options. A Gethenian can only become pregnant if they have kemmered as a woman and been impregnated by another person kemmering as a man. So even though the kemmerhouse is portrayed as a happily bi/pansexual place, and the story ends with the words “love is love”, there’s still that gender binary in Le Guin’s thought.
To be fair, that’s hardly surprising for 1995. (Iain M Bank’s Culture characters, for example, can change gender at will, but it still seems to be an either/or proposition.)
Le Guin did revisit Earthsea in her later years and unpick some of her earlier sexism and gender essentialism in that world. I could wish that she had revisited the Ekumen in the same way. But as it was, she and Banks and Butler and others did lay the groundwork for future authors to reimagine gender in more creative ways; and they shone a light (of some sort) in the darkness for trans readers at the time.
*************
"modern day TERFS", […] assuming one could use that term seriously to outline a legible political position
I can assure you that we MeFites, trans and cis, know exactly what we mean when we say TERF. We’ve done the reading and had the arguments and many of us have survived real harassment and harm, online and in life. Those of us not directly harmed by TERFs have still seen our friends and colleagues and their kids harmed by them. Do not come at us with this shit.
posted by Pallas Athena at 11:17 AM on March 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
Part of the gender essentialism in TLHOD specifically is down to Genly Ai’s prejudices, which Le Guin makes clear. He doesn’t trust the Gethenians because he is a man who dislikes and distrusts “femininity” and thinks of women as other, and he can’t get his head around how to relate to people who are androgynous and genderfluid. He learns to trust Estraven but still thinks of him as he— it’s only when Estraven enters kemmer that Genly has his revelation that Estraven is still Estraven in any gender:
“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. […] Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. […] I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.”
But even with this realisation, Genly never refers to Estraven as she, even while Estraven is in kemmer; and never asks how Estraven would like to be referred to or thought of. Genly can also only think in binary terms: man/woman/both/neither are the only options available. Here, I think, we come up against the boundaries of Le Guin’s thought as well as Genly’s.
So even Le Guin’s gender fluidity has a binary quality. In her later (1995) short story Coming Of Age In Karhide, set among working class Gethenians and following one of them through their first kemmer, she makes it clear that kemmer transforms a Gethenian’s body into male or female, and the person remains in that gender until that kemmer period ends. They may change back and forth for future kemmers, but only between those two binary and mutually exclusive options. A Gethenian can only become pregnant if they have kemmered as a woman and been impregnated by another person kemmering as a man. So even though the kemmerhouse is portrayed as a happily bi/pansexual place, and the story ends with the words “love is love”, there’s still that gender binary in Le Guin’s thought.
To be fair, that’s hardly surprising for 1995. (Iain M Bank’s Culture characters, for example, can change gender at will, but it still seems to be an either/or proposition.)
Le Guin did revisit Earthsea in her later years and unpick some of her earlier sexism and gender essentialism in that world. I could wish that she had revisited the Ekumen in the same way. But as it was, she and Banks and Butler and others did lay the groundwork for future authors to reimagine gender in more creative ways; and they shone a light (of some sort) in the darkness for trans readers at the time.
*************
"modern day TERFS", […] assuming one could use that term seriously to outline a legible political position
I can assure you that we MeFites, trans and cis, know exactly what we mean when we say TERF. We’ve done the reading and had the arguments and many of us have survived real harassment and harm, online and in life. Those of us not directly harmed by TERFs have still seen our friends and colleagues and their kids harmed by them. Do not come at us with this shit.
posted by Pallas Athena at 11:17 AM on March 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
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posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:12 AM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]