The Lobster Dance

What’s the Beyond Binaries Book Club?

Our Feb/Mar 2016 book was Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

The review contains spoilers.

The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a native of Earth (referred to as “Terra” in the novel), who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai’s mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by his lack of understanding of Gethenian culture. Individuals on Gethen are “ambisexual”, with no fixed gender identity, a fact which has a strong influence on the culture of the planet, and creates a large barrier for Ai, a male raised on Earth. –Wikipedia (that’s how hard it is to find a short description!)

1. How does the usage of he/his/him pronouns make you picture the characters, specifically the Gethenians? Do you find anything transgressive or particularly interesting about this choice?

AMR: When we read and the gender of a person isn’t clear, we often assign the person our own gender. I felt that Genly was doing that to some extent but also, in coming from worlds where gender matters and males have the power, needed to assign male to those in power and couldn’t not assign it to most others, apart from those who were extremely feminine or taking on very submissive roles like his Landlady. Even today, considering someone who looks androgynous, there is the likelihood of choosing male if one is required to make a choice. Shorter hair, minimal feminine curves, pants rather than skirts/dresses, attributes that women “can” have but not those that males “can’t” have (a man who looks decidedly feminine is femme rather than androgynous, but a woman has to be extremely masculine to be “butch” instead of androgynous). I tend to see the Gethenians as androgynous in that way, where someone whose culture defaults to man = human will see them as androgynous but probably assign male if assignment is required.

LM: I think after reading Ancillary Justice (which uses she/hers/her pronouns) I found the he/his/him usage really strange at first, but then phrases and ideas like “the king is pregnant” really grew on me. Whereas Leckie’s use of she/hers/her made me feel like all the characters were women, the use of he/his/him stood out to me most in the descriptions of reproduction and kemmer. In Ch. 7, the first envoy writes that he/his/him conveys a sense of the Gethenians being people, which also struck me as both old-fashioned but also terribly interesting, because American (and British) English both have this historical concept of humankind = mankind and using man as “neutral” for “human” or “person.”

CR: That quote is on page 94 in my book:

Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as “it.” They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer, I must say “he,” for the same reason as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman.

While I also found the use of he/his/him pronouns a little hard to get use to after the Imperial Radch trilogy, I’m actually glad we read Leckie first. Had we started with Left Hand of Darkness, I think I would have spent a lot of time longing for the story where she/hers/her was the “less specific” default, but knowing that Leckie’s series exists made it easier to sit back and enjoy this book. I did find myself longing for more lines like, “The king was pregnant,” that weren’t immediately followed by Genly’s expressions of utter confusion.

2. Genly Ai sure spends a lot of time freaking out when Gethenians appear physically or culturally feminine to him. Discuss the usage of both Genly and Estraven as unreliable (or at least biased) narrators and what it adds (or could add) to the work.

LM: I frequently wanted Genly to STFU about describing Gethenians as “weirdly” “feminine,” which always seemed to be negative associations. In describing Estraven, after getting to know him better, Genly still says things like

I was galled by his patronizing. He was a head shorter than I, and built more like a woman than a man, more fat than muscle; when we hauled together I had to shorten my pace to his, hold in my strength so as not to out-pull him; a stallion in harness with a mule– (219)

AMR: I was annoyed that Genly seemed to integrate and become accustomed to the Genethians as norm and at the end he was still calling the Genethians “he” but considering them “weirdly feminine,” as when he met with Estraven’s family. He was even freaked out by his own people when they came back because they had obvious sex characteristics, but went back to gendering the Genethians. WTF Genly?

LM: This was jarring for me, too.

CR: Seriously. 

AMR: I think this book would actually do a lot of good for people who are trying to adapt to a new view of the world as more than two concrete sexes (e.g. having a transgender, queer, or genderfluid loved one). Genly comes to accept the Genethians the way they are. I just wish Genly had kept with his new outlook at the end, rather than reverting to an agender-phobic state.

CR: I agree that this book could be helpful to someone who is struggling to adapt their worldview to be more inclusive of nonbinary folks. I recently had occasion to speak with the parent of a genderqueer teenager. The parent expressed to me that his biggest struggle in understanding and accepting his child’s gender identity came when he realized that to do so meant also to undergo deep reconsideration his own identity. I thought of that conversation in reading Genly’s sections during their trip across the ice. I particularly appreciate that Genly’s process is not just one of acceptance of others, but that he takes some baby steps toward looking critically at himself, specifically his masculine socialization in a couple of instances. For example, following the quote from p. 219 above:

[Estraven], after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

On the other hand, if he could lower all his standards of shifgrethor, as I realized he had done with me, perhaps I could dispense with the more competitive elements of my masculine self-respect, which he certainly understood as little as I understood shifgrethor…

But yeah, the number of instances I underlined where Genly insists on making gendered observations about Genethians based on their appearance and/or behavior: 13. And I’m sure I missed some. That’s, what, at least once per Genly-narrated chapter? Get it together, Genly.

3. Discuss the document in Chapter 7 (on the sexes) vs. Genly Ai’s and Estraven’s own observations.

AMR: I like how there’s an attempt at explanation from an outsider meant to prepare Genly and it does give some historical clues to how people populated the universe. It’s a reasonable anthropological report on the planet to understand the people. It does a pretty good job of being as impartial as possible, even bringing up cultural biases that the report writer and others from their culture might have. It tries not to give unfounded answers but does offer theories for why this planet’s culture is like it is. I do not like the way it treats the entire planet as one culture. I like its inclusion also because it’s what Genly had in preparation and what he would be basing his understanding on when he got to the planet. Genly’s understanding seems to stem from that but not really take much of it to heart. He is much more emotionally affected by the genderless nature of the people. I would actually be interested in a book that was the entire Investigation of the planet, but I might be weird like that.

LM: I was reminded a lot of personal biases not just in the social sciences but in STEM: the desire to apply your own cultural ideas and internalized ideas about gender (the fabric of our lives *~*~) to experiments and studies. I wrote a bit about bi-erasure in social science research as a major limiting factor on research about attraction, but it also stands that these are Americans researching other Americans–the same patterns of attraction and friendship may not apply universally to all cultures or subcultures. (See headlines like “men and women can’t just be friends,” which excludes bi+ folks but also cultures where gender segregation isn’t as aggressive, manifests differently, or gender is considered differently.)

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact, the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter….

Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? (94)

Damn! The idea of throwing assignments of traits to genders or gender expressions out the window makes me jump for joy! The fact that these words also speak to the reader, who very likely lives in a society that triumphs gender binarism, and that Le Guin is so blunt, is just phenomenal.

And here we get into the bias:

A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. (95) [emphasis mine]

Look, as a non-binary person I might not be the right one to ask about this, but that sounds like paradise.

CR: THIS 

LM: But it’s not exactly true–Gethenians treat other Gethenians without regard to binary gender, but when presented with one in “permanent kemmer,” they freak out.

CR:

Human genetic manipulation was almost certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology? Accident, possibly; natural selection, hardly. Their ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value. (89)

Is it my ignorance of biology talking, or is it actually a great adaptive advantage for everyone to be able to bear children?

LM: Yes, I agree. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had the same capabilities of doing that –in so much as one type of people couldn’t police another kind of folks capable of giving birth or having a menstrual cycle? IT WOULD BE GREAT. Almost no one would be discriminated against based on their potential reproductive capabilities. (Although I do prefer being in a relationship where no one can accidentally have a pregnancy…)

4. Discuss the usage of a gender-outsider (culturally and physically) as the main narrator. May include Left Hand vs. Ancillary Justice.

LM: (First off: hooray for the characters not having to be white.) The tone with Genly and Breq as outsiders really interested me because the treatment is so different. Genly Ai goes from a patriarchal world in which he is in the majority group and arrives in a world in which he is considered to be abnormal because of the “permanence” of his gender identity and physical characteristics. Whereas Gethenians only present with genitalia during kemmer (cyclical “heat”), Genly’s is always there, and the Gethenians call him the “pervert” for basically having genitalia that doesn’t go away after a few days.

However, Genly, ever our unreliable narrator, treats the Gethenians as if they are the abnormal ones. There is a difference between wishing your cultural/physical differences to be respected while respecting others (“you have your way of doing gender and I have mine, and neither is wrong, so stop being rude to me”) and having simultaneous cultural imperialism (“your gender is wrong how dare you treat me like mine is wrong”). He’s a majority who is reduced to a minority status and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.

CR: Estraven does a much better job of eloquently acknowledging this dynamic than Genly ever does:

After all, [Genly] is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am; up here on the ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my existence. (232)

It actually reminds me a little of “white man saves Japan” narratives: both the cultures have problematic ideas about The Other, but end result in the narrative isn’t greater cultural understanding but the main character (the white guy) asserting his cultural superiority over The Other while under the guise of assimilation: getting power and station while adopting the basics of the culture but asserting the superiority of his own. This isn’t how it happens for Genly, but the attitude is similar.

For Breq, while she’s technically from the imperialist culture, her status as an ancillary doesn’t allow her to fit neatly into Radchaai culture. Although gender confuses her (Radchaai culture is agender) both in concept and in linguistics, she has a more balanced approach that attempts to respect other cultures even if she–and especially the “annexing” forces–do not understand it. Breq is also hyper aware of the colonialism and Othering that occurs not just between Radchaai and non-Radchaai or annexed planets, but the subcultures and ethnic minorities within cultures. It’s a very different set up–she’s more of a reliable narrator in so much as she can stop and check her privilege while understanding her place on the axes of privilege as an ancillary

5. Discuss the ideas presented by Le Guin about an ideal world in which gender doesn’t matter at all, keeping in mind the time of publication.

AMR: There are a lot of interesting aspects here. People are more equal, because there is not a way to divide by sex/gender, but there is no progress. Since everyone goes through a monthly change, there are accommodations for that and accommodations for child-bearing for all. The lack of wars and the way they all live in the present is presented as part of the fact that they are typically asex/agender, but I am not sure it should be. The author notes that in worlds ruled by gender, your gender is quite possibly the most important and limiting factor for what you can do with your life, something that can’t happen here. For the most part, this isn’t a paradise of gender/sex not mattering, like the Ancillary series, but one where the lack of gender/sex has caused stagnation.

LM: I actually took this as more of Genly Ai asserting cultural imperialism on the Gethenians. Like, “what a bunch of weirdos, they just can’t do progress without gender!!” Whereas the Gethenians are like, “who is this rando always in kemmer, that’s just messed up, what a perv.”

AMR: (where is the “like” button?)

LM: In a world where sexuality and sexual health are accounted for (there is equal access to birth control and understanding of abstinence for certain occasions), they could spend time and money doing other things. So what’s the issue? A dysfunctional government, superstitious people, a lack of natural resources, a lack of interest in reaching the stars (might not be top priority?)

The quote “What would a society of eunuchs achieve?” (95) is also part of the anthropological study–no doubt it influences Genly, but it also speaks to the Ekumenical culture(s) and their lack of willingness to reserve judgment of a society unlike themselves.

6. What do you think the title means (there’s a quote in the last few chapters)? Can balance exist in one person, or is the concept of binary balance itself something Genly is imposing on Gethenian culture?

AMR: I’m not quite sure about the title specifically. I do very much like the idea that to oppose something is to support it, and you have to provide an alternative, not just opposition, to truly get rid of something. There is a spectrum, from thing or for something to not-thing or against something. I think this is the Gethenian way, thinking of balance along a spectrum rather than binary, and Genly is attempting to impose a binary.

Stray Thoughts

AMR: I first read this back in 2010. I was living in Japan and really feeling the human nature vs. culture aspects of living in a different place and wasn’t all that impressed by this book. It felt like the author was ascribing too much to human nature and the culture just didn’t feel different enough to me, especially since the premise of the different cultures is that they are all from the same basic group of humans but were left alone for tens of thousands of years at least. Given how different cultures are on Earth, I thought that either the culture was not different enough or that Genly was not well trained for his job. If they have over 80 other cultures, surely a culture that was subtle about how they spoke and considered honor to be a major part of their way of life was not completely outside the norm?

This time through, I enjoyed it a lot more in part because I was focusing on the gender aspect rather than the integrating-into-a-culture aspect. I had issues with the use of the word “bisexual” both times I read the book, thinking it should have been “bisexed” and even that isn’t true – what about intersex, genderfluid, or queer people? [LM: This! I was like, “What, cool—OH WAIT, they mean bisexual like asexual in terms of reproductive capabilities of a species, not sexual orientation.] Just like those episodes of Star Trek that say every species has two genders and we don’t need multiple gods, just the one, I was disappointed in the ideas of god and sexuality in this book. I suppose it is a product of the times, and if you weren’t friends with those who were comfortable in displaying non-normative behaviors you probably weren’t exposed to anything beyond the sex/gender binary. Still, over 80 worlds, each with multiple cultures, and there is such a strong sex/gender binary that seems to be controlled by testosterone? I don’t buy it.

LM: Religion-wise, either that, or they have a pantheon of vaguely Greco-Roman gods and a “weird” offshoot monotheistic religion a la Battlestar Galactica (but I guess BG told of all of this had happened before and all of this will happen again so, uh, okay?).

I was also surprised that the other 80 worlds of the Ekumen are–at least according to Genly–based on binary genders corresponding to our concept of human anatomy as well as patriarchies. I’m not sure if Le Guin was like “whoa, I don’t want to blow everyone’s minds here with all sorts of worlds” or if this is further evidence that Genly Ai is an unreliable narrator, a kind of sideswipe at his lack of knowledge or imagination.

CR: I read an interview with Le Guin from 2009, where she talks about her anxieties around writing this story at the time that she did. “But science fiction in 1968 wasn’t about women. It was about men. It was a man’s world. I felt I was taking a huge risk as it was, presenting a largely male readership with these weirdly re-gendered people. I thought the guys would hate it. I was wrong. They liked it fine. It was the feminists who gave me a hard time about it for years. They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been. But I did the best I knew how to do. And Genly does learn a lot!”

One thing that stood out to me in reading this book were the parallels between the narrative Le Guin has written and some of the early anthropological writing on shamanism, especially from Siberia and North America. Considering the popularity of this topic in the 1960s especially, this is perhaps not strange. It was especially apparent in the description of the ritual in the latter part of Chapter 5 (in which Genly visits the Foretellers), but also shows in the way that Le Guin’s characters talk about gender. As an example, here’s an excerpt from Aboriginal Siberia; A Study in Social Anthropology, by Maria Czaplicka (1914):

Socially, the shaman does not belong either to the class of males or to that of females, but to a third class, that of shamans […] shamans have special taboos comprising both male and female characters. The same may be said of their costume, which combines features peculiar to the dress of both sexes.

The fascination (and sometimes observable confusion and repulsion) on the part of the visiting anthropologists with regards to gender roles, identity and presentation in shamanic communities they observed is reflected in Chapter 7, and in Genly’s writing. And Le Guin is, in turn, recognized by at least one scholar. In going back and reading through some of my college textbooks from a shamanism course, I was surprised to see The Left Hand of Darkness mentioned in a discussion of the importance of gathering data with an open mind:

The novelist Ursula LeGuin, daughter of two anthropologists, wrote about a fantasy society where people could change their gender at will, depending on the social context. It is time to better understand the data already gathered on sexual practices and gender meanings, and to collect more with open-mindedness. Instead of seeing gender reversals as deviant, we may see a mirror image: anomaly turned into sacred power. The study of gender reversals can help us reverse assumptions about the sacred and the ‘civilized.’

Marjorie M. Balzer, “Sacred Genders in Siberia: Shamans, Bear Festivals and Androgyny,” from Shamanism: A Reader (1993), p. 254

(Also, from the footnotes: “One of the best lines in the novel is, ‘the king was pregnant.’”)

—

Thanks to all for the discussion! We’ll be back on June 5 with a new book, to be announced soon.