...This was meant to be a response to the long thread of comments on the entry titled, "The extension of human masculinity," but it became this:
It's interesting to watch people get so riled up about gender in class. I understand that some people believe it's a social construct and that stereotypes are evil, etc. etc., but I think that this belief in gender and the stereotypes attached to each one is so deeply ingrained, that there's no point in arguing aimlessly about it.
I'm maybe not going to make any sense when I try to explain this, but I'm going to try... So in my Lit Theory class today (or yesterday, technically speaking), we were discussing Nietsche's and Frost's ideas on metaphors. Metaphors are so common in our everyday language that we don't even notice them anymore (ie. "She's a warm person." Life as a journey can be extended to the statement "I'm lost."). Ultimately, metaphors stabilize and give meaning to our perceptions by helping us understand things in relation to other ones.
In the Left Hand of Darkness and Lilith's Brood, the metaphors are the references to gender that the authors make. Here's one to refresh your memory: "Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit"(LeGuin 12)
While I do not doubt that authors like Butler and LeGuin may be trying to provoke us with these gendered non-gender beings, maybe they're also just providing supposedly male, or supposedly female attributes, so that WE, as readers, can engage in and better understand (and maybe even empathize with?) these aliens.
Speaking for myself, my gender-based arguments are not aimless.
I think it's important for us as a class to hash out early in the semester just what we mean when we talk about different genders (and it will change in the context of each book, to a certain extent), because each person has a slightly different take on the issue, and we're not going to be able to have any meaningful conversation in a class on race and gender if we can't understand one another's concept of these core aspects of the class. Has discussion of race fallen to the wayside in favor of gender? Yes. But, that doesn't invalidate trying to understand gender and its portrayal and the implications of its portrayal. If everyone agreed and everyone had the same understanding of gender, then it wouldn't make much sense to have a class focusing on it, because there would be nothing for us to learn form one another.
Given the number of comments made in class, and to a lesser extent on the blog, regarding the ephemeral nature of our societal conceptions of gender, of the different concepts of gender that currently exist in different modern societies, comments from people who fall on very different parts of the attitudes held by class members, I don't think any of us is trying to argue that gender doesn't exist. What I find it often being argued over is the universality of ingrained stereotypes (which seems greatly in doubt), the validity of these stereotypes, the implications of these stereotypes, and what the authors are trying to say by employing them.
Yes, metaphors are an integral part of our language. When you have something being used in a somehow metaphoric way, though, that IS so politically and emotionally charged, has the ability to be so divisive, I find it hard to, in good conscience, just brush it aside and act like there's no power behind it.
Maybe "aimless" was a poor word choice...I meant that it seems we spend so much time on the concept of gender and gender-appropriate roles, that we don't even get to relate it to the context of each book as much as I would like.
Personally, I think my interest will continue to be focused away from gender-arguments. The class is, after all, entitled, "Race, Gender, and Science Fiction", not "Race and Gender in Science Fiction". ;) So we're on-topic when we're discussing gender issues only tangentially related to science fiction, but we're also on-topic when we're discussing science fiction issues not directly related to race or gender.