galadhir | The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read

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The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read

Ugh. Re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness hits differently when you read it 30 years later and realize how easy it would have been not to continually misgender everyone. But Genly Ai is just as much of a dick as I remembered, if not more so.

It suffers (I think) because it's written by a cis person - writing about a cis person encountering a society of entirely imaginary agender people, as a thought experiment.

It seems like the author is not aware that genderless people actually exist (and why should she be at that date?)

So the whole thing is (a) theoretical for her, and (b) written to help cis people contemplate gender. And frankly, the narrator's consistent, sexist, obnoxious reading of gender into everything continues to be (sometimes overtly) insulting and sickening to me.

OTOH, her worldbuilding and language is still just as gorgeous as ever, and I still want to live in the Fastness of the foretellers.

(I'm not dissing it, it was hugely meaningful to me in my youth in the 70s, and is still a one-of-a-kind enby novel. Revolutionary and mind expanding for the time - though even then I found Ai old fashioned and sexist - it's still the only book I know of with a society of people who were more like me than this one we live in.

But I wish she had gone that extra mile and either invented a gender neutral pronoun or realized she could use 'they.' Gender neutral 'he' strikes me badly these days.)

It's nice to have The Murderbot Diaries as a modern compare and contrast for novels where the protagonist/narrator is agender.

That's progress, I guess! Nowadays my genderless comfort read is not a story where a cis person ruminates on how weird these genderless people are. Nowadays it's a story where a genderless person has adventures where their relation to gender is (a) barely mentioned and (b) continually affirmed when it is.

Nice.

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I gave this to my son to read as an introduction to LeGuin, with the caveat that it was written way before anybody was talking about gender stuff publicly, and that it was considered groundbreaking at the time. I haven't read it since college and was wondering about how it held up, so your review was interesting to read. He hasn't reported back yet about what he thinks, but maybe I should re-read it too, so that we can discuss it.

And as previously discussed (but as cannot be said enough) <3 Murderbot. :D

As I'm getting further into my re-read I'm getting more convinced that we're supposed to be yelling at Genly Ai about how stupid and oblivious he is, so maybe we're also supposed to be aware that his opinions on gender are short-sighted. I'd like it if I could think that - though unfortunately some of the quotes from other Hainish inspectors are just as bad.

It's more fun than I remembered, watching Genly walk into this obviously Communist country and gush about how wonderful it is until they send him to a gulag. I'm like 'honestly, son, the only person to whom that came as a surprise is you.'

But I'm glad to see that I'm still in love with Therem Harth rem ir Estraven after all these years. The bedrock of my personality doesn't change much :)

"The King was pregnant." One of the all-time great lines in SFF.

Le Guin did express deep regret in later years that she used male pronouns throughout the text. I prefer her later story set in the same world: "Coming of Age in Karhide."

To this day one of my favourite lines in all literature is "If this was the Royal music, no wonder the kings of Karhide are all mad." :) If I was doing a text tattoo of favourite quotes, that would be the first.

That was the one where she used 'she' for everyone instead? I know I've read it, but I don't remember anything about it other than that. I'm not sure it's a better choice, tbh.

(Checks. It's been a while since I read it.)

"I have already had some trouble trying to tell this story in a language that has no somer pronouns, only gendered pronouns. In their last years of kemmer, as the hormone balance changes, most people mostly go into kemmer as men. Dory's kemmers had been male for over a year, so I'll call Dory 'he,' although of course the point was that he would never be either he or she again."

Le Guin mostly avoids pronouns. The narrative is told in first person, by someone who hasn't yet gone into kemmer. I remember reading it a couple of decades ago, waiting breathlessly to find out what gender the narrator really was, and thus totally missing the point of the story. But I did grasp by the end - because Le Guin was very good at establishing this point - that our concept of what makes someone male or female is socially constructed, based on what activities we associate with each gender.

I think that, at this point in the day, what I most see missing from the story (unless I missed it in my quick skimming just now) is the concept of gender as a spectrum.

Oh that's odd. I have a vague recollection of a hospital setting and of everyone being called she. I wonder if that's a different story, or I just imagined it?

My main problem with a lot of stories about gender is that everyone seems to assume that (much like sexuality) it's a spectrum that revolves around two poles (male and female, with some blending in the middle). Like asexuality, which is outside the gay/straight binary, the possibility of not having a gender at all seems to be forgotten or disregarded. What I like about the Murderbot Diaries so much is that at least there the protag is allowed to state very firmly that for them gender is inapplicable.

I mean, yeah, people are going to gender you based on their own societal expectations, but it would be nice to have it understood that sometimes your own internal feeling of your own gender comes up with an error/not installed, and that's okay.

"I wonder if that's a different story?"

Could be! I haven't read much of her writings - mainly her fantasy.

"My main problem with a lot of stories about gender is that everyone seems to assume that (much like sexuality) it's a spectrum that revolves around two poles (male and female, with some blending in the middle)."

Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, a spectrum line is inadequate as an analogy of that sort of thing - though it was a highly progressive analogy in 1997, back when I realized I was nonbinary (a word that didn't yet exist in that definition). "Bigender," I called myself back then; it took a while for me to realize that this label wasn't really adequate.

(*Checks*.) Yes, "Karhide" was published in 1995. There wasn't even a nonbinary community at that point - and wouldn't be any sort of sizeable nonbinary community for another five years or so, I believe? Certainly none existed in 1997, when I went looking. So Le Guin may very well not have conceived of agenderness as a possibility. That she conceived of an ambisexual society in 1969 is remarkable enough!

"but it would be nice to have it understood that sometimes your own internal feeling of your own gender comes up with an error/not installed, and that's okay."

I like how you put that. :)

*G* Yes, a lot of why I'm having a very different reading experience this time around (though it's fine when we're in Estraven's pov,) is because of all those years of people thinking about gender more deeply, and the enby community refining its terms. I'm a different person with a different understanding now, so of course it hits me differently. I still remember when it was one of the very few lifelines I grabbed onto in my teens, and I'll always be grateful for that :)

LeGuin's writings stand up much better to revisiting than CS Lewis's, who was also a big favourite of mine at the time. She is not merciless as he can be.

I deeply appreciate The Murderbot Diaries for being what it is.

(And seeing ANYONE miss the point so hard that they think that Murderbot should be assigned a gender now that it's "so human" makes me want to flip tables.)

I haven't read The Left Hand of Darkness in a LONG time, and to be honest, there's probably a lot that I didn't really understand well when I did read it. I can very much see ways in which it did not age well in respect to the ways attitudes and language have both progressed.

Ugh, yes. I can sympathize with the wish for Murderbot to move from using an 'it' pronoun - because 'it' is used for objects, and if it was (for example) to start using 'they' it would be a symbol of the fact that it's finally accepted that it is a person. But otoh, maybe the fact that it's a thing that humans made is important to it (because it reflects the reality that it is in fact a construct) and it wants to continue embracing its 'made object'ness in the same way that it calls ART 'it', because ART is a spaceship. Maybe a person can be both an object and a person? That's certainly the position both ART and MB are in.

But ultimately, if that's the pronoun MB and ART use for themselves, then that's the pronoun people should respect :)

As for putting either of them into human binary genders, ugh. WHY? In a series that's had several human people with third genders and pronouns ranging from tie to they, there are no excuses for thinking that MB has to be either male or female to be a person.

I feel like my interpretation of Murderbot is that even as it does struggle with being a person, the fact that it is not *human* remains very important to it, so I imagine "it" would continue to be its favored pronoun. Though I think that the idea of something/someone being both an object and a person is a definite ongoing theme. It'll be interesting to me to see how it continues to be explored in the series!

But right? (I feel like it is not a coincidence that the people I've seen wanting Murderbot to be assigned a binary pronoun all seem to think it should be a "him.") But I deeply appreciate the inclusion of so many non-binary human characters, whether they use they/them, neopronouns, or are considered a specific third gender.

My sibling was the one that told me Martha Wells has a background in anthropology, which I hadn't previously known, but definitely made sense to learn, haha.

I wonder if some of the desire for Murderbot to be a he comes from the audiobook - which is read very well by a man? Or if it's just that MB is so good at violence and so bad at feelings, and both of those things tend to be male coded in our society. If it was ever to be played by a person in a movie or TV series, I hope they would choose an enbie or female actor, just to counteract that expectation :)

Oh, that does make sense!

That could be! I haven't heard the audiobooks, but it seems possible that could have impacted someone else's interpretation. Though it's true - the action-oriented/feeling-avoidant personality is definitely a male-coded thing in current western society. Seems like academic paper fodder, examining how people's cultural context and personal views impact how they view MB, hahaha

I would love for Murderbot to be played by an enbie actor, should a live-action series/movie come to be!

I would enjoy reading that academic paper!

Same here!

(Hello, I got here sort of by accident, sorry to jump in like this ^^;;)

I'd forgotten that "bad at feelings" is male-coded; I tended to read Murderbot's difficulties with social interactions and feelings in general as an autism spectrum/neurodivergence thing, and that was the part I related to the most. The whole thing about struggling to act in a way that was acceptable to humans -- does my face look right, am I saying the right things, etc -- was painfully relatable, and I loved getting to see someone with these difficulties as a protagonist valued for their contributions, not their ability to appear human. It's also easy to relate to that feeling of not being able to pass as human (or just barely making it), though in Murderbot's case being a construct at least makes that concrete; if the problems are mostly in one's brain it's a lot harder to articulate why one would feel that way.

No problem! Jumping in is to be encouraged :)

I quite agree with you that MB's difficulties with social interaction are very relatable when you're not neurotypical. The number of times that I have wished to walk into a corner and face the wall while having a conversation are high. How convenient to be able to have drones so you could still see what was going on! MB's "I had to look at them with my actual eyes!" is also very relatable. It's remarkable that that expresses so well a feeling that I 100% understand, when having multiple hovering video inputs is not exactly widespread in real life. The whole 'don't touch me' thing and 'gender = not applicable' and 'sex, ugh!' things are also very relatable to me as an agender asexual person.

But I suspect that the books could still be read by a cis straight woman who would find MB's protectiveness and ability to enact violence on any threats attractive, and would find it's emotional difficulties endearing in the sense that that's what men are supposed to be like, while a woman knows that underneath they're just big babies who want to be loved. That reading would make some sense too (as long as she felt that it would develop into seeing itself as a man once it had learned enough.) And cis straight men can read it as a power fantasy, as long as they also think of it as male and ignore its asexuality (maybe by thinking of it as a robot in those circumstances. Idk, I'm making this up on the fly.)

I suppose the nice thing about Murderbot is how broad the appeal is, though I hadn't realized it at first; I used to wonder why the series was so popular before I started reading it. ^^;; I'm quite new to the idea of asexuality and being agender, and I appreciate books like these that give a glimpse of the possibilities; I tend to feel like I'm not in the right cultural context for them (I'm Asian), so it helps to read a novel that immerses me in a different context for a while and lets it sink in.

When you put it that way, Murderbot does come across as a cinnamon roll romance hero type, though I think it would hate the idea of being one. And yes, the books do read sort of like a power fantasy don't they? It's fun to see Murderbot progressively leveling up, and each upgrade feels well-earned.

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The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read

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