April 7th, 2008
by
tycho garen
I’m really behind on my reading.
For instance, I’m now finally getting around to reading Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness which I’ve attempted to start reading a number of times before, but I always got involved with something else (like school). But now, I’ve sworn that I’ll finish it. I mean, I’m kinda afraid that unless I get through this I don’t really have a lot of right to continue posting to the blog.
It’s seminal feminist science fiction after all.
And this, given a lack of anything better to talk with you about (which I so love doing!) got me to thinking about how science fiction deals with difference/diversity.
Here’s the basic question that I’m pondering: Is the default position of activist science fiction to present situations where differences have been assimilated? The utopian world where being a woman doesn’t encumber political participation, where everyone’s “bisexual.” Or is there some other positive way of exploring the future of difference? The utopia, though useful in allowing us to imagine productively, is unprepared for such a gritty question.
I can think of examples of dystopian (in the cyberpunk tradition) stories where difference remains an issue (eg. Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends,) and while this sort of approach is productive as a critique of society and ultimately science fiction itself (and really, I think Trouble, is a great book on many levels,) I’m not sure that we can look to dystopias for a new perspective on dealing with difference, as they basically reflect current experience and problems in dealing with diversity.
It strikes me that there’s got to be some other option, and there probably is, I’m really on top of the genre concerns circa the late 60s, the nuances of in the fiction last 40 years, have quite possibly evaded my view, so I’m sorry if there’s a really good book that you think I should read (I’ll add it to my list, I swear).
The other possibility is that we have no positive framework for understanding and dealing with difference other than through assimilation. Which I hope isn’t the case. So I look forward to your thoughts.
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tycho garen at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Criticism & Scholarship, Sexuality & queerness, Theory | Comments (21)
I can suggest the opposite end of the spectrum. Ken MacLeod’s Norlonto (from the Fall Revolution series) is a city divided into multiple independent enclaves each based on its own political and/or religious philosophy. Many of the groups detest each other, but they all more or less recognize each other’s right to exist.
A more extreme version is the world at the start of Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes in which each of the enclaves exists in a virtualized environment so that its citizens are unaware of the existence of the other societies.
There is, however, a definite lack of books in which difference is acceptable and doesn’t lead to conflict. Possibly the closest is Iain Banks’ The Culture because Culture citizens are pretty much free to do whatever they like. Provided, of course, they that don’t cause so much trouble that their AI masters come and zap them.
Hmm, keeping with the LeGuin (I seem to be referencing her a lot recently) how about The Dispossesed where women were equal but girls tended to mature emotionally faster, there were issues on childbirth, and of course sex:
Propertarian: “But how do you tell the men and woman apart?”
Shevek: “Well…. we have discovered methods.”
I also recall discussions on whether Odo spoke equally for both sexes.
It’s seminal feminist science fiction after all.
Of all the places to put the emphasis…
I don’t think Distress consist a feminist SF work, but I really liked the treatment of gender and sexuality in it, and it actually increased the number of differences without really making them an issue (it is not, however, the main topic of the story).
What’s the significance of the quotes around “bisexual”? There’s a long history of writers using this approach to imply that individual bisexuals – or all bisexuals – aren’t bisexual at all, but are actually straight, gay, or lesbian. Would you mind clarifying what you mean here?
You really ought to check out “Born in Flames”, dir. Lizzie Borden. It’s very 80s but 3 flavors of awesome. After the (socialist) Revolution, activists and anarchists and pirate radio people and dykes and women of color — did i mention that everybody who’s anybody is a woman? — are still in a tumult. Some might call it a utopia.
… also a number of the more traditional lesbian separatist / feminist utopias engage with non-assimilation, often expressed by separate enclaves for gay men. see Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (if I recall correctly, the Castro is owned by the gay men — something that would have been possible only if the peaceful revolution had occurred sometime before the heterosexual gentrification of the last decade); Sally Miller Gearhart’s Wanderground (gay men again); and Jean Stewart’s Isis series (IIRC, str8 people had their own post-apocalyptic city that the story never bothered fleshing out.).
interesting question, btw. assimilation versus celebration of difference versus titular celebration of difference versus difficult struggles of difference.
I’ve always tagged The Left Hand of Darkness as seminal queer science-fiction – formally, I know LeGuin meant it to be feminist, but her acceptance of “he” as the default pronoun means it is far easier to read it as a queer love story set on a world where the tangled issues of sexual orientation have all been swept away.
Certainly back when I was myself just out as a queer SF fan, the two novels that you could count on another queer SF fan having read were LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness and Delany’s Stars in my pockets like grains of sand.
For me, the seminal feminist SF that I read when just out as a a feminist SF fan, was Joanna Russ’s “Whileaway”, and The Female Man, the Marion Zimmer Bradley Free Amazon novels and The Ruins of Isis, Jayge Carr’s Leviathan’s Deep, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, a short story by H. Beam Piper called “Omnilingual” – this was what I remember being available to me before the Women’s Press began to publish a series of feminist science-fiction books and before Lavender Menace (the queer bookshop in Edinburgh) moved to bigger premises as West and Wilde and began to broaden out its range of stock.
Here’s the basic question that I’m pondering: Is the default position of activist science fiction to present situations where differences have been assimilated?
No. I think the default position of activist science-fiction, insofar as there is a default, is to present a world or a culture or a situation where differences are dealt with differently from how we take for granted.
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy takes the problem of colonialist assimilation of difference to its paternalistic extremes and offers alternatives, so I think you’d enjoy how she tackled this.
Oops, that was me.
I fixed your attribution, lavendertook.
First off, thanks for all of the great book and media recommendations, that’s great. And I’m sorry I don’t come at this with more entrenched background.
Now for the response to individual points:
TC: I scare quoted bisexual, because I’ve seen very few portrayals of bisexuality in the utopian “everyone’s bisexual,” sort of way that really capture bisexuality in a way that people experience it. So the reservation reflected in my delivery is more of a distrust of some utopian image bisexuality (I’m generally opposed to the idea that we can fuck our way to freedom, as it were), rather than a distrust of any/all concepts of non-hetero/homo sexuality…
Yonmei 1: I think that LeGuin released an edition of Left-Hand where the pronouns were more gender-netural, but the version that I’m reading isn’t that way. (I think it’s a printing from the late 70s). In any case, I think you’re right that it’s a great bridge/linking device between feminism and gender/queer thought. Drawing a distinction between these two schools of thought isn’t incredibly productive projectin any case, but I agree whole heartedly. Also Stars in my Pocket is on my shelf, but I’m trying to avoid reading too much Delany all at once, and I’ve been reading some of his earlier work, because for a long time, I had just read his non-fiction… Anyway, I’ll get to that in a little while :)
Yonmei 2: That’s my hope, when I wrote this (and still), I’m having a hard time developing even a rough catalogue of the ways that fiction deals with diversity that isn’t horribly assimilationist or dystopian.
Ide Cyan: Yes, I know. I thought about that. The punster in me had a hard time resisting.
Cheryl: Yeah, the examples you describe are the kind of thing that I’ve been thinking about, though I haven’t read those (given my love of hating on Ken MacLeod, I really want to read more of his work) they are on my list. Part of the problem with this discussion is that effective fiction needs conflict to be interesting, and ideally we’d like there to not be conflict surrounding difference. I think the most effective models developed around dealing with sex/sexuality/gender difference, will bre as backdrops for other sorts of stories where the conflict is elsewhere (say about civil liberties, or around class issues, or as part of a quest narrative.) But then we experience and make sense of the “real world” with narratives that have conflict in them, as well, so maybe fiction isn’t that different after all.
Hope that clarifies something. I haven’t been getting email notifications on this thread, so sorry that I haven’t responded more quickly. Thanks for all the great ideas.
… not sure what’s up with no-email-notifications. will investigate.
on Le Guin & LHOD: I do not know of, and don’t believe she released a version with all gender neutral pronouns. She did do the first chapter or maybe first scene in a couple of different ways. That might have been as a preface for a later edition, or I think it could have (also?) been in Dancing on the Edge of the World …
Le Guin wrote an essay where she discussed the ideas behind LHoD and the choices she made in expressing them. Later, she revised the essay by inserting comments (i.e., “I no longer believe this”). She specifically mentioned the pronoun use. I believe the revised essay is collected in Language of the Night, but don’t have a copy handy to check the name.
tycho_garen: thanks for the clarification – it wasn’t clear to me from the original post.
TC: The original essay appears in The Language of the Night, p. 161, and is entitled “Is Gender Necessary?”. The revised version, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”, appears in Dancing at the Edge of the World p. 7. (And also in later editions of Language.)
Ide Cyan: that’s the one!
Putting on my Le Guin geek hat… the alternate pronoun versions of the first chapter of Left Hand are included at the end of the 25th anniversary edition of that book. You get a REALLY different feeling from the text when those changes are made! I recommend checking it out if you can.
I also have a geeky correction to make: Le Guin’s last name has a space in it. Please, for the love of Peep, let the misspellings stop here.
Now, about the post’s real topic… I’m a little fuzzy what you mean by “assimilation”, Tycho. Do you mean that everyone is treated the same way, despite being different from one another in ways the audience can identify? That differences are somehow erased? Or do you mean that the fictional world assumes that everyone has the same rights and opportunities? Those are very different things in my view. Very little SF I can think of takes the first position, and the examples I can think of tend to present it as a horrifying possibility (e.g. 1984, or one of the possible futures in Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven). But I can think of a lot of SF that takes the latter view, which I wouldn’t really label as “assimilation”; it’s more like an optimistic projection of anti-discrimination work into the far future, where tolerance of other people’s cultures and ways are assumed.
When I think of assimilation, I think of immigrant families coming to the U.S. and buying into the American Dream, leaving their old customs behind and trying to “fit in” as much as possible. This was very common in the early 20th century and is less so now. Maybe the same is true of SF? There is a lot of Golden Age stuff that I haven’t read that might present this assimilationist view. Most of the stuff I have read is very self-consciously tolerant of difference in a way I see as very influenced by the hippies, 2nd wave feminism, and the Civil Rights movement. I think this corresponds with what Yonmei said about dealing with difference differently.
But maybe I need to spend more time coming up with some titles…
I think all utopian SF that says “if we just look past our differences to see how much we’re a like” has assimilationist overtones, even if you’re right that its probably not the same as what happened to Irish americans in the 20s, say… (Or jews, even, but later.)
This reminds me of a blog post of Ami Angelwings’s I read recently, not about SciFi Utopias/Distopias but about current attempts to foster understanding by glossing over differences, and why it’s damaging.
I thought it might be helpful for tackling the idea of assimilation utopias and their alternatives.
(I have no idea what kind of tags this commenting system supports, and know I’m too lazy to fix/change/edit/do research, so in case the link doesn’t work, here it is for copy/pasting:
http://ami-rants.blogspot.com/2008/04/something-i-have-to-say-that-is.html )
Sadly I don’t have any titles to add to the list . . . but I can’t help thinking a non-assimilation utopia would be far more interesting to read. And probably live.
When I read it, I thought the persistent use of “he” in The Left Hand of Darkness could be read as a commentary on Genry Ai’s assumption of the default “maleness” of everyone — much as our “universal pronoun” is still “he.” Haven’t read the essay or the original pronoun version though… sounds interesting…