June 16th, 2006
by
Kameron Hurley
Almost without fail, Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness gets praised (and praised, and praised) as the most groundbreaking book on gender relations ever written in the SF/F field. I’m always hearing about how it changed so-and-so’s whole world, their entire conception of gender. You can’t throw a stone at a Wiscon panel without hitting somebody who gushes about this book.
This book was written in 1968.
And nothing else written since has carved such a significant place for itself in both popularity and sheer genderfucking.
I repeat: this book was written in 1968
And there’s no other book anyone’s ever talked to me about that fucked with their ideas about gender in the same way this one did – at least, not any book that was as wildly popular as LHoD.
This has been bugging me for a long time. In the last 38 years, no other book has been as widely read and as radical as LHoD?
Are we just not writing good genderfuck books? That can’t be it. You see genderfuck books on Tiptree lists every year (well, *most* of the books on the Tiptree lists. heh heh).
But where’s the book that’s going to change an entire generation’s conceptions of gender? LHoD is great, but I’d hope that over the next 50 years we’re passing around several books of the same popularity and significance as LHoD. I’d hope we’d be producing stuff that’s just as well thought out, that we can’t help but read, talk about, and watch go mainstream.
Which begs the question, what’s missing from all these other genderfucking books?
I’d say: great writing, traditional adventure (plot), accessibility.
Because that’s what Le Guin did – she gave us an apparently “safe” boys’ own adventure story from the POV of a hetero white male. Then she pulled us in and started dropping bombs. It’s the same strategy she used in Wizard of Earthsea: you don’t find out Ged’s skin color until you’re well enough along in the story. If reading about somebody of a different color might have bothered you up front, you’re hopefully too deep into it to care by the time she reveals it.
When asked about whether she would have written LHoD differently – perhaps more radically – if she wrote it today, Le Guin reminded the speaker that the book was already pretty damn radical for 1968.
It was a funny question, because you know what? It’s not up to LeGuin to write the next radical feminist book.
If the most radical and popular feminist fiction came from a white, heterosexual mother of three in 1968, what does that say about the current state of feminist SF? And the current writers? (oh, relax, I include *myself* in this category) Why are we still asking her to write and rewrite it for us? Are we all still wallowing in a post-1980s backlash (oh, fuck, to be stuck in the 80s!), or is Le Guin just so incredibly talented that you only get that mix of great writer/great thinker/great feminist once every fifty years?
Cause if that’s so, that’s really fucking depressing.
On the feminist SF list I belong to, one list member asked if perhaps Le Guin’s book was so popular because it wasn’t actually as radical as we might think. It was very safe. The hetero male protagonist doesn’t have sex with any of the planet’s inhabitants, no matter their current gender. We go off on a boys’ own adventure story, on a planet entirely populated by people referred to as “he,” no matter their gender. Le Guin is a natural storyteller, and she concentrates on the story. It’s not overly didactic. It’s engaging and entertaining.
Stuff like Egalia’s Daughters might have some far more radical ideas, but it’s got shitty characters, inconsistent prose quality (if you could call it “prose”), and bizarre POV shifts. Also: not really an adventure story. Also: silly ending.
Joanna Russ’s The Female Man pretty much consistently Freaks People Out. Especially those uncomfortable with her angry writing (I LOVE the angry writing, but I’d bet that’s a lot of why she’s not as popular as LeGuin, though her body of work is also much, much smaller).
As for more recent stuff: Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price was simple romance-role-reversal fluff reading, and ultimately about as filling as cotten candy. Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine is brilliant and haunting and weird, but it’s a weirdness that also makes a more mainstream audience uncomfortable. Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite comes closest to the adventure-feminism-good writing combination, but ultimately, she’s writing about another all-female planet, and it was ground I felt Russ had already covered pretty well in The Female Man and When it Changed. I also love everything Maureen McHugh has written, but her plots aren’t traditional “plots” and her endings tend to taper off instead of tie up. Eleanor Arnason does some very non-traditional things with her story structure as well (another author who seems to be playing with traditional notions of “adventure” plotting), and I think that’s a turnoff for a wider readership (I’d like to add that not having a wider readership does nothing to invalidate the work of these authors or their work. I love their work. I’m simply trying to understand why LHoD and not these others as “book that totally changed the ENTIRE SF/F FIELD AND MY LIFE!”?).
To be honest, LHoD has just never done it for me. Le Guin is one of the most talented writers in and outside the field, but I’ve always found her fiction a little dry (I prefer her nonfiction). She’s never been as radical as Russ, nor as angry (in writing, at least), and it’s the anger I especially identify with in Russ’s work – that anger that so terrifies and puts off so many others.
It’s my own ambivalence toward Le Guin’s fiction that’s made me so curious about why LHoD is still held up as the primary book about speculative genderfucking. Certainly, it should be part of the SF/F feminist fiction canon, the first groundbreaking book.
But where’s that other groundbreaking book? Not just one rich in radical ideas, but so well told and well-respected that it enjoys a wide and fanatic readership?
You could argue that that sort of book builds up a reputation over time, but I can’t help but note that 15 or 20 years should be plenty of time for something written 15 or 20 years ago to come into its own. And I’m not seeing that.
Are there not enough good SF/F storytellers? Not enough good storytellers writing about radical feminism/gender/body politics?
Or, you know, is feminism just so five minutes ago that we’re all content to write about strong female heroines who are just assumed to be “equal” in whatever made-up society we throw together – where men are men and women are men, too?
Cause if that’s radical feminism, I’d love to see what we’d call a body of work today that was written in the same angry, brutal vein as Russ’s fiction.
We’d probably call it terrorism.
And that would be really, really cool.
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- More blogging by
Kameron Hurley at
http://brutalwomen.blogspot.com
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Filed under Books & Literature, FSF, feminism | Comments (16)
[...] Over at the Feminist SF blog, Kameron Hurley is complaining that no one has written a really good gender-bending SF novel since Ursula Le Guin’s The Left hand of Darkness (1968). This is not just Hurley’s own opinion (although I assume she does share it because she doesn’t offer a more modern alternative), it is a widely held view amongst WisCon attendees (or at least those who are on or comment in panels). [...]
I adore Le Guin’s fiction, but have never been able to get entirely behind LHoD. It never felt like enough of a genderfuck, probably an uncharitable reading given the time in which it was written, but its changes to gendering just don’t go far enough to satisfy me. I was also spoiled for LHoD by reading the short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” shortly before the novel, in 1995 when the story came out and I was an impressionable teenager…
I do think it’s a great book, but I agree that it’s far from the radical genderfuck it’s held up to be. I wonder if it gets cited so often partly because of its position at the top of the feminist sf canon?
The genderfuck sf that really did influence my thinking and change my life was Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. I didn’t know what to do with all the ideas it threw at me, and more than a decade after I read it for the first time I’m still making sense of some of them.
Le Guin is one of my favourite writers in the English language, purely in terms of prose – but she’s too gentle, maybe, to mess with your head in ways that (say) Russ or Delany or others that you mentioned can.
Oh man — yet another great topic, yet another cop-out on my part because I\’m not in a good place to write a full response. So, quickly, a question: Are you/we/all of us talking about gender-bending? Tiptree\’s \”expansion of gender\”? Or politically radical treatments of gender and sexism? There are differences between all of these.
And now a minor digression:
My gf likes to talk about a scientist (how can I forget his name?) who talks about the opening game in science versus the filler work. The idea is that there are opening games — scientists who go in & break new ground, open up a new field of inquiry, bring some amazing new theoretical insight to bear; and there are scientists who do a lot of back-fill, fleshing out the details and building out the model.
If you think about that in literature, then LHOD was a door-opening work. And MZB\’s World Wreckers and many others were reacting to LHOD, fleshing out its insights, testing and correcting its issues. Even UKL corrected some things — working on gender issues, rewriting a chapter to see what it would look like with different gender pronouns. But there\’s been a lot of detail-oriented work.
So maybe we\’re waiting for the next brave new work which opens up a whole new field of inquiry. Frankly, I think we\’re getting there, and i think the new field of radical work that\’s being opened up is looking at how gender and sexuality relate to / are different from all kinds of hierarchical & oppressive systems — class, labor, race, ethnicity, youth, age, religion, etc. — and how it all relates to the ultimate cornerstone of human experience, the body.
And I think we\’ll see that UKL, Octavia Butler, Emma Goldman (!) and other feminists knew about the body and laid the groundwork for these explorations, but I think the best ground-shaking work is yet to come. I feel it, building, with all the new energy from writers really looking at power in all its incarnations and really looking at the human condition.
And now I\’ve nattered on way too long and I need to focus on other things.
I don’t want there to be Only One, either!
Bujold has fabulous plots and her stories are sneaky about their genderfuck, and are quite popular. Are they mind-blowing in the same way that LHoD seems to have been?
People talk about Ripley in Alien – and about Buffy – for doing the “strong female protagonist” well, so well that it was mind-changing for them as writers or book/media consumers.
Also, just remaining in print and being canonical for college students or late high school doesn’t seem to be on the same scale of popular/commercial success as a Star Wars or Buffy. So, it’s another question, but where is our truly genderfucked commercial success story? I don’t think wishing for the level of success of LHoD is *enough*. We can’t even seem to make a decent space movie where the women characters don’t suck, much less a radical feminist one.
Quick thoughts fired off into the ether – now I have to go feed smoothies to a horde of children.
So wait. Is what’s wanted something that’s easy reading as far as plot structure, i.e. not “difficult writing”…. and yet that screws massively with ideas? But not so quickly or clumsily that our hypothetical person (not necessarily you or me, but maybe?) gets bored or feels turned off. IN other words with its ideology obscured?
A couple of responses on LJ:
http://matociquala.livejournal.com/827874.html
http://fjm.livejournal.com/224059.html
Liz – yes. I’m getting the impression I wasn’t clear enough in the post about what I meant. Because I ended with some yelling at writers who assume that writing strong female characters is a radical act these days, everybody keeps trying to send me reading lists of genderbending fiction.
I’m waiting for somebody to send me a link to something *I’ve* written.
The issue isn’t “Where’s the genderbending fiction?” Obviously, I’ve read a great deal of the “classics” and own everything by Russ. The issue is, where’s the other book that takes the feminist SF genre by storm and influences the wide # of people that LHoD did?
As Bear points out on her LJ, it likely *is* because, you know, LeGuin is brilliant.
But I’d like to think that we’ve got some really brilliant people around now who can write a book just as popular and just as mindblowing. I’m just curious as to why we haven’t seen something take off like LHoD.
Laura – I like that idea of door-opening works, though I think many door opening works haven’t necc. been popular; they just ended up influencing someone else who then went on to influence a wider readership.
I’d say it’s harder to point to a single, outstanding work when women’s SF is freed (however momentarily) from the myth of the isolated achievement, and the degree of revelatory insight afforded by fiction — its consciousness-raising potential — depends on the relationship between theory and experience, which means that there can be no new breakthrough if the political conditions that produce the author and her readers are the same, unless the knowledge already aquired is buried to perpetuate those conditions.
So your options are to displace the focus of interest in a work away from the unchanged political roots, to mystify those roots and ritualise the rediscovery in an addictive, palliating pattern, or to transform society.
The popularity of a work is itself necessarily dependent on its relationship to readers, however, but for the answer to why there are no new canonical works, you have to look at the relationship from the readers’ side, not the books’, since books have no autonomy, and it is human beings who transmit awareness and control access to them.
“but for the answer to why there are no new canonical works, you have to look at the relationship from the readers’ side, not the books’, since books have no autonomy, and it is human beings who transmit awareness and control access to them.”
Absolutely, point taken.
“which means that there can be no new breakthrough if the political conditions that produce the author and her readers are the same, unless the knowledge already aquired is buried to perpetuate those conditions.”
Or can that breakthrough only happen when the political atmosphere that produced the writer’s work and the readers *is* the same, that is, that they’re on the same page? So there’s an author/audience/work connection that has to totally line up in order for a work to capture so many imaginations and have such a big impact on other writers?
Would LeGuin’s work have “broken out” in the 1950s, before anyone was ready to read it? (which, I realize, is a stupid conjecture, as LeGuin is a product of her times, and couldn’t have written the same book at any other time). But, in 1968, the readership was ready for a book like this one; the political climate *was* just right?
I’m thinking of Melissa Scott’s _Shadow Man_, which was mentioned at Wiscon 30 quite a few times – a book portraying a society with many genders that, according to Scott, “didn’t sell well” when it came out in 1995.
Was the audience just not ready for it? Or was it just “too hard” for a wider readership to read? Which does loop back to an audience not being ready to approach the work in the first place.
I do wonder how much of the weight of a successful/groundbreaking work is “right place, right time.”
By “no new breakthrough if the political conditions that produce the author and her readers are the same” I meant, not as each other, but (taken together) as they were when the initial breakthrough was made. I missed the ambiguity in my sentence there. To rephrase: when the research’s been done, but things haven’t changed, new insights are rare. In other words, you can’t keep rediscovering the wheel — knowledge of it has to be lost or suppressed in order to seem unprecedented.
Here’s some more reponses by oursin and pantryslut, and their commenters.
[...] 2. Kameron Hurley wonders where the popular radical feminist books are, or why The Left Hand of Darkness seems to be the only one people name. In fact, she raises a number of related issues, each of which probably has a different answer. On the question of why The Left Hand of Darkness is The Book That Everyone Talks About when it comes to having their eyes opened about gender relations, well, it’s probably partly just how reputation works—it’s self-perpetuating; plus the groupmind only has room for one book at a time—and probably partly down to the fact that you can only have your mind truly blown a limited number of times. (Although see also.) [...]
Of the responses I’ve seen on the Internet, a couple of points from comment threads stuck out at me (and I’ll try to link to the comments directly, later):
1) A number of people critiqued the non-radicalism of Le Guin’s LHOD. On one thread, a commenter pointed out that male writers get props for even recognizing gender issues at all; while women writers — Le Guin in particular — are endlessly dissected for not being radical enough.
2) Another person pointed out that LHOD’s frequency of citation for mind-blowingness may be in part due to its incorporation into a general literature canon and the science fiction canon generally. In other words, Le Guin’s LHOD, like Butler’s Kindred, gets read by audiences beyond SF, and gets read more broadly within the SF community than many similar works. Extrapolating a bit beyond that, I note that since LHOD is probably read more than The Female Man or Melissa Scott’s Shadowman, it will blow more minds just as a matter of numbers; moreover, since it’s being read more broadly it is also likely to be the only gender-fuckery read by many people who don’t particularly seek out gender-fuckery. Since LHOD assumes the mantle of the gender-fuckery title for non-genderfuck-fans, then genderfuck-fans must necessarily engage with LHOD more than they might otherwise.
Le Guin herself says that she regrets elements of LHOD in her essay in Dancing on the Brink of the World – and in particular that it assumes maleness as the ´norm´in lots of implicit ways and that it privileges heterosexuality exclusively.
Of course it´s influence is a product of time and timing; though I wouldn´t say it´s THE mind-blowing book on gender for me, maybe that´s a product of my reading before and since. Kindred, for me, was a mind-opening book. I think Laura Q is absolutely right to say that both Kindred and LHOD are seen by non-sf readers as ácceptable´and so both become ´acceptable faces` and¨”gateways” into the genre.
And maybe it´s okay that its 38 years (maybe!) – some books just are that big. But I like the idea there is another/are others just around the corner. Which corner, please?
In terms of quiet genderbending, there’s Stars in my pockets like grains of sand, where, though both the central characters are male, you do not in fact know the gender of many of the characters in the story – I think the majority of them, in fact.
This would make an interesting post in itself: Books That Blew My Mind.
Late to the game, I know.
Just this: In your original post, Kameron, you wrote something that struck me: that you found Le Guin’s fiction ‘dry’ and preferred her non-fiction. I feel the same way, and here’s why—Le Guin is distressingly and noticeably far more feminist in her non-fictional/critical work. When you read pieces like “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction” or “Is Gender Necessary?” or “The Space Crone” or even something mythical such as “She Unnames Them” she sounds almost like a very stately Joanna Russ: eloquent, profound, yet funny as hell and more than a little pissed off. Then you open one of her books and all her major characters are…men. This includes LHoD. Have we forgotten that to be genderless STILL means to be male? And don’t, boys and patriarchal girls (I know you’re not listening anyway) try to tell me the pronoun is incidental, ’cause LeGuin herself admitted it’s not.
On the other hand, LeGuin will throw you those curve balls that point out our own deeply rooted automatic assumptions about gender and race: dropping in that detail about Genly Ai’s skin color more than halfway through LHoD? How did we envision him beforehand, hm? Or, for a gendered example, not revealing that Odo was a woman until a third of the way into _The Dispossessed_? What gender do we assume an anarchist revolutionary would be?
I’m led to the conclusion that LeGuin seems more concerned with genderfucking than with feminism. A few of her more fascinating genderfuck thought experiments—since LHoD—occur in the collection of short stories called _The Birthday of the World_: “The Matter of Seggri” envisions a world where the women have control over society and men have prestige but no power at all. This story won a Nebua or a Hugo in the 90s. Another of interest is “Mountain Ways” in which marriages are between four people instead of two…
In reference to Ide’s post, I’d argue that *sigh* society has not changed much—maybe the laws have, but who said this I can’t remember—even when gender/racial inequities have been ostensibly excised from the legal system, so-called invisible, insidious prejudices remain. The fact that LHoD is still radical to many people indicates that the general population hasn’t changed its assumptions about gender all that much in the past 38 years. People write radical gf-sf , and some people (like us) even read it. But hand one to your average bodice-ripper aficionado or espionage behemo-junkie*, and three pages into it s/he’ll squeal or bellow as the case may be and fling your precious mindblowing genderfucking paperback bit o’ revolution at your head.
*not that there’s anything wrong with being either of these, if that’s what you’re into :|