I’m still interested in what happens in this novel in terms of race, and the representation of racial issues in the future. We might of tried to touch on it in class, but the overwhelming struggle over the meaning and the philosophy of gender in society was definitely something that took over. It clearly has for almost all readers of the novel, down to the feminist writers who proclaimed that Le Guin’s use of the male pronoun was the number one most anti-feminist act of all time. I’m not sure how many people shared my first impression, that race is something of a stagnant, bypassed, non-issue; but as we’ve seen from Starship Troopers, race can be expected to take on a number of different appearances and undergo a number of different transformations in its manifestation in any brave new sci-fi world. So I was/am suspicious that more is going on here in terms of racial politics than meets the eye. I’m of the opinion that talking about gender separately from race is inherently problematic, since all aspects of identity (but I would say these two in particular) are inextricable from one another. They all intersect.
Since one of the things that third-wave feminist literature (of member of which group this novel is ostensibly a part, according to its retrospective classification by people other than Le Guin) is reacting to is the failing of second-wave feminist literature to extend a critique of gender to other social structures, I tend to presume a consciousness in the work of the ways in which gender cannot stand alone from an issue like race. But where do we see this in the work?
On the one hand we certainly have some of the Star Trek “federation” model of race-overcome in Le Guin’s universe, at least in the abstract and far-off body of the Ekumen. Genly’s elegant turn of phrase is not unfamiliar: “we come all colors” (39). Genly himself is (to me) a typical Le Guin protagonist in that he is revealed to be dark-skinned, presumably of African descent, several pages into the novel. Surprise, he’s not Caucasian! I think one of the passing comments in class was very accurate: Le Guin does do a certain recognizable amount of messing with what she knows are going to be the reader’s assumptions, and revealing them to the reader in such a way as to make us unable to deny the systems that inform our reading of any text. It’s interesting to me here that Genly’s race is one of the “unsettling revelations” she chooses to make, in a style similar to that in which it was casually dropped in that “...even in a *bisexual society* the politician is very often something less than an integral man...” (20).
On the other hand, we still have what seem to be remnants of bizarre racial stereotyping worked into the novel, though in some cases I think I’m willing to put it down to less-than-conscious decisions by the author. I’m not the only person to notice the Gethenian specific inability to differentiate between the “l” and “r” sounds, or the Chinese-imperialist-style royal city-within-a-city (as evidenced in various places on the blog so far). Bizarre referencing of “oriental” stereotypes, it feels like. These are only a few instances of several when I felt a correlation between a familiar stereotype and Le Guin’s fleshing out of the people of Winter in detail. There’s also the King’s fascination with not only Genly’s “sexual perversion” but his skin color, which is a troubling icon of difference to the King, alongside Genly’s maleness.
It’s also important, I think, to keep in mind the *literal* presence and intersection of race and gender here. To Genly Ai and the world he represents, the people of Winter are literally a different *race* of human. The manifested differences in gender and sex, as well as various other less-novel physical traits of the Gethenians are in this way categorized as *race* differences. It’s just an interesting thing to try and pick apart, since the Ekumen feels in many ways like a believable future for humanity. Race isn’t actually easy to define now, and I could easily see it undergoing a transformation of meaning and definition faced with a new and changing universe.
On a slightly different note, I enjoyed the book immensely, especially since its purpose seemed to be to disrupt the reader. I think I love this book simply as an exercise in breaking down societal givens, rather than a treatise on the inherent nature of man (human) or an attempt to solidify any one problem with modern society by reflecting it in dystopia or utopia. It’s open-ended, and though we see through Genly Ai’s eyes, it is much easier to experience the world with a sense of wonder and perhaps discomfort that feel much easier to separate from the protagonist’s own rationalization of the world than say, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which we cannot seem to escape Offred’s head and social isolation. Interesting, since both main characters narrate their own stories precisely as stories, and both tales are conceived of as direct reports which stand as evidence for a past, unreachable experience. I can’t seem to grasp at why that is, except perhaps that the literal unseating of a gender (or sex?) dichotomy is the more novel to us, the more confrontational and the newest frontier to the reader themselves.