Critical Theory Essay
Overcoming Gender Binaries Through The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, The Left Hand of Darkness was pretty progressive and forward-thinking for its time. It is a science fiction masterpiece with a complex political backstory, following an envoy from Earth named Genly Ai as he travels to the planet Winter and attempts to convince its separate societies to form an alliance. The inhabitants of Winter differ from humans in one fundamental way: most of the time they are neither male nor female, but for a time each month they take on the physiology of one (for reproductive purposes).
The difference in the nature of gender from Earth has other implications. When Le Guin chose to reimagine gender on Winter she also changed, for instance, war. War is nonexistent on Winter because its inhabitants do not possess the male qualities that promote war. One character describes that because anyone can take on the role of a male or female, “Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally...Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else” (Le Guin 93). Social construction of gender is basically nonexistent. Genly Ai talks about the king’s pregnancy and how he finds it humorous, an example of how Le Guin uses her characters to challenge patriarchal political theory and how foreign an idea it is to Genly Ai. Genly Ai’s narration reflects his fascination with these people and also his attempts to understand and adjust to their differences.
Genly Ai’s commentary and positionality serves to reflect how difficult it is for us to shake off and break down our ideas from the social construction of gender. Feminist Bell Hooks says this is because “all of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action” (Hooks viii). Genly Ai unconsciously incorrectly categorizes certain people as male or female based on their characteristics, just like any of us would. The reimagining part comes in because none of these characters are truly male or female, yet they can still take on feminine or masculine characteristics and behaviors.
Genly Ai embodies the mindset of gender as binary, which is very common because “for many centuries in the West, our discourse has conceptualized human bodies as being produced in just two sexes (latterly, genders), so we have understood bodies as either male or female” (Haran 254). Le Guin’s deviation from gender binaries was progressive considering that the book was written in 1969. Le Guin goes beyond and weaves the theme of binaries, opposites, and duality into the heart of the novel. A prominent philosophical belief of the inhabitants of Winter is that opposites are not truly opposites, but are unified, like black and white unified in the symbol of Yin Yang.
Le Guin’s strong symbolism throughout the novel pushes us to reimagine our own ideas of gender and overcome the confines of mind/body dualism. The philosophy of Winter is eloquently expressed in this poem, “Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death...like hands joined together” (Le Guin 233). The unity in duality is a central idea to the novel. I think Le Guin would strongly believe that we are made up of both our minds and bodies, both our rational thoughts and emotions. Le Guin challenges our ideas of binaries that we are just coming to realize today. Every one of us has aspects that are considered by society as feminine or masculine. Her reimagining is in defining gender as something purely biological and not letting it determine the other aspects of one’s identity. In contrast, Genly Ai sums up the current role gender plays in society when he says that “the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners--almost everything...It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones” (Le Guin 234). As Hooks says, this is how we have been trained to think of gender.
What Le Guin was going towards and suggesting is similar to what Bell Hooks sees for the future. Hooks tells her readers to “Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction. Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility” (Hooks x). Males and females imagined by Le Guin continue to differ, but are not opposites. Gender is an insignificant piece of identity, and people can just be themselves without society’s pressures and expectations. As mentioned above, feminine and masculine behaviors exist on Winter. Neither Le Guin nor Hooks believes that gender should be removed from society. We just should not allow society to make genders categories; for, as Le Guin shows, they are more the same than they are different.
Sources
Hooks, Bell. 2000. Feminism is for Everybody, "Introduction: Come Closer to Feminism" (vii-x)
Haran, Joan. 2006. "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women in 'Rachel in Love',"
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness
