WGSS 07.01: Gender in Science Fiction

Is the The Left Hand of Darkness feminist? If Ursula K. Le Guin is a feminist author, why does she imagine a world—as criticized by Sarah Lefanu—in which there are no women (137)? Why does she characterize androgynous characters as male, or construct a misogynist narrator to characterize them as such?

From this critical angle, The Left Hand of Darkness seems like a failure. There are glaring offenses of gender and sexuality that even Le Guin seems to step back from in “Is Gender Necessary?”, an essay responding to these sorts of objections. But to approach The Left Hand of Darkness with these questions of this sort distracts from the true function of the work: as a guide for the reader to overcome internal bias.

The Left Hand of Darkness is structured as a curious hybrid between an anthropological account and a narrative (Fayad 352). The style seems to be an evolution of earlier works: the narrative components are evocative of The Word for World is Forest, which explores the potential failures of colonial ethnocentrism, and the anthropological components are reminiscent of Always Coming Home, which communicates a future culture through scattered fictional records (Fayad 352). Le Guin’s goal, it would seem, is to strike a balance between keeping the reader on a linear narrative path while inviting them to fill in the blanks between anthropological entries and changes in point-of-view.

And, as Pennington deftly points out, some of these blanks are intentionally ambiguous. Pennington argues that “we begin by viewing Ai as a male, but I would argue that we initially see him as a white male; so when we find out later that he is black, we must reassess our interpretation of [Genly]… we are trapped by racial stereotypes” (355). This sort of narrative “trap”, the term used by Fayad and Cornell alike, is wholly independent from the gender subtext; yet it primes the reader to hold in question the assumptions and interpretations they make. In “The Question of Sex”, an anthropological chapter on Gethenian biology, Investigator Ong Tot Oppong seems to have especially “[internalized] masculinist discourse” (Fayad 65). The irony of describing androgyny in masculine terms is magnified by the fact that Oppong is, in fact, a woman (Fayad 65).

The reader also cannot fully adopt Genly’s perspective; they must resist his naivete and bias.

The narrative component of The Left Hand of Darkness is primarily the retrospective story of Genly Ai, the human protagonist. Genly is a lone male in a society of androgynous Gethenians—an alien Envoy with the mission of assessing the Gethenians’ societal development as a basis for joining the Ekumen, the interstellar confederation he represents. Cornell and Pennington use the terms “restrain” (317) and “resist” (351) to describe the effect this has on the reader. The Left Hand of Darkness is constructed such that the reader is restrained to Genly’s perspective, and consequently his journey around the planet Gethen (Cornell 317). But the reader also cannot fully adopt Genly’s perspective; they must resist his naivete and bias (Pennington 352). If Le Guin is to be taken as a feminist author, then Genly might be interpreted as an unreliable narrator, a human man entrenched in an androcentric worldview. Genly doesn’t just use male pronouns to describe Gethenians; he actively tries to view them as male (Cornell 317).

Cornell frames Genly’s situation by describing him as a “reader”. Genly is trying to interpret Gethen, to make sense of an alien world (318). But this is not such an easy task. Genly is fundamentally incapable of understanding the androgyny of the Gethenians (or at least at the beginning of his journey), but must establish communication and understanding with them to fulfill his mission (Cornell 325). His initial strategy, notes Fayad, is to look for sameness (71). Genly tries to humanize the Gethenians, to make them less alien. If he can associate human tendencies with Gethenians, even if those tendencies are not actually present, he can have a basis for communication with them (Fayad 71). Gender—specifically the male gender Genly experiences—is the primary tendency he focuses on.

Framing Gethenians as males in his own mind genuinely helps Genly open up to Estraven, the Gethenian protagonist, and work with other diplomatic figures. But as the novel progresses, his strategy of humanization breaks down: Gethenians simply aren’t male. They aren’t gendered binarily at all, as Fayad quotes Walker: androgyny is “not sexual hermaphrodism but spiritual bisexuality” (59); the Gethenians’ sexual identity is not a duality, but rather they are “potentials, or integrals” (94).

What is most alien to Genly isn’t Gethenian androgyny—it’s human femininity.

Because Genly is exclusively searching for male tendencies in Gethenians, he finds himself disappointed when they don’t meet his standard of masculinity. But he is completely thrown off when presented with aspects of their characters that don’t fit into his masculinization at all, “whatever constitutes otherness in the androgyne” (Fayad 71). “Qualities and behavior Genly finds suspicious or disconcerting he categorizes as feminine; what he is impressed by or approves of he categorizes as masculine,” explains Cornell (318). A simple search of the book’s text for “-femin-” reveals accompanying phrases such as “disliked and distrusted”, “annoyed”, or “damning… deviousness”. Genly is, plainly, in denial. He compartmentalizes, discarding those inexplicable (at least from his perspective) tendencies as “effeminate” so he is not forced to reckon with them. What is most alien to Genly isn’t Gethenian androgyny—it’s human femininity. “In a sense,” he explains to Estraven, “women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow” (235).

As Pennington puts it: “SF otherness… here becomes a complex metaphor for gender; the other, the alien, the unknown is centered in biological sex and sociological gender roles” (355). This otherness is centered around Estraven, who develops a complex relationship with Genly over the course of The Left Hand of Darkness (Fayad 71). Unlike most of the corrupt politicians Genly deals with, Estraven is the only character truly loyal to Genly and his cause, but, for much of the book, Genly cannot look past Estraven’s androgyny to accept this fact. It is only when Genly is forced to confront Estraven’s otherness, stuck with him on a journey across a continent, that he realizes the error of his ways (Fayad 71). As the two overcome their differences, Genly begins to understand Gethenian culture better. And, as he learns to act more like a Gethenian in Estraven’s presence, Genly’s own gender identity evolves (Fayad 71). “The more contact he has with the Gethenians, the more he loses his capacity to define himself as a masculine subject,” Fayad elaborates (71). When Genly reunites with other humans at the end of the book, they seem more alien to him than the people he has been living among.

Le Guin does not seem to expect the reader to understand Gethenians as Genly comes to.

Asked by Estraven why he, the Envoy, is sent to Gethen alone, Genly comes to a realization. “Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak” (259). Without other humans or human culture to cling to, Genly is thrust into what he initially takes to be shadow—a “dark continent”, as Freud would put it, that he is incapable of understanding (Fayad 67). But he comes to realize that the androgynous is not darkness. Darkness is a binary: it is simply the absence, the “left hand” of light, and the namesake of the book. When Genly casts off his fear of the other and stops pursuing sameness, he finds solace in the in-between, the “whitish-gray void” of Gethenian snowfall, neither bright nor dark (260).

Le Guin does not seem to expect the reader to understand Gethenians as Genly comes to over his two-year journey, and even Genly’s understanding seems tenuous at best. But, following in Genly’s footsteps, it seems to establish a path towards that same destination. There is an inherent struggle in communicating androgyny through the eyes of a man, in a language with no exclusively gender-neutral pronouns. Even the word “androgyny” is rooted in binaries, the human struggle between anēr, male, and gynē, female. Le Guin deals in somewhat Taoist notions—ideas that cannot be named but only captured in an eternal swirl of absolutes, the yin and yang. The Left Hand of Darkness, then, is not a book about restraint or resistance—it is a work about letting go.

Works Cited

Cornell, Christine. “The interpretative journey in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness”. Extrapolation (pre-2012); Winter 2001; 42, 4; ProQuest pp. 317-327.

Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in ‘The Left Hand of Darkness.’” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, 1997, pp. 59–73, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44029822.

Lefanu, Sarah. Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana UP, 1989.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/dartmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5503772.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books, 1969.

Pennington, John. “Exorcising gender: Resisting readers in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation (pre-2012); Winter 2000; 41, 4; ProQuest pp. 351-358.