Quote from: gooseberry on August 02, 2017, 08:12:14 AM
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guinn.
This is a story about a planet where everyone is gender neutral. The book explores this but for the most part it is about the adventure on the planet. I enjoyed it, though I will say it was written in the sixties and some of it may seem a bit outdated now, most of all the fact that all the gender neutral characters are referred to as "he." (Le Guinn herself apologised for the problems, saying that she did her best but found researching the topic a struggle, which I can in the 60's)
Yes!
Left Hand of Darkness is a great read! It's a science fiction/adventure story which will keep you engaged while Le Guin makes her points about gender. Most sci-fi writers are just into technical gimmickry, but Le Guin goes deep into personality and culture. (She is the daughter of a famous anthropologist and grew up in an environment of cultural exploration. She has lots of insight into traditional, pre-literate cultures, though that's not at play in
Left Hand.) She is able to write both male and female characters with conviction - something that lots of authors can't do.
I think what Le Guin is doing in
Left Hand is trying to separate out and study the common features that make us all human from the specific gender roles of men and women. That is, what parts of our personalities do we share with others irrespective of gender? In the story, a modified human race is gender-neutral most of the time. Gender only emerges periodically (about monthly) as an episode of "kemmer," sort of like reproductive "heat" in most mammals.
As the gender-neutral folks enter kemmer, they develop distinct sexual organs and secondary sex characteristics and assume a strongly gendered personality for a period of days. As kemmer fades, so do the sex and gender characteristics. These folks can't tell in advance whether they will be male or female at the next cycle. If you were male/masculine in one cycle, you may just as easily be female/feminine in the next, so everyone at one time or another experiences each role.
Maybe I was reading too much of my own feelings into
Left Hand, but I felt that the un-gendered normal everyday personality of this race seemed kind of flat and featureless. I like my whole life female/feminine, thank you very much!
Another great Le Guin novel is
The Dispossessed, which deals with a strongly egalitarian, almost anarchist society struggling to survive on a planet with poor resources. Not as much gender-related content to that one, though.
