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The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read
Jun. 29th, 2021 11:25 amUgh. 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.
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.
