The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read

[galadhir]

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.

Comments

[galadhir]

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.

[duskpeterson]

(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.

[galadhir]

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.

[duskpeterson]

"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. :)

[galadhir]

*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.