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

[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.