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]

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.

[mistressofmuses]

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.

[galadhir]

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!

[mistressofmuses]

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!

[galadhir]

I would enjoy reading that academic paper!

[mistressofmuses]

Same here!

[sleeplesspotato]

(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.

[galadhir]

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.)

[sleeplesspotato]

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.