Response 4

wooohooo — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:20:08 +0000

I seem to be one of the few people who found The Left Hand of Darkness worthy of a response paper, so maybe I read (oh God, the unintentional pun) too much into this one. However, I found Le Guin's novel extremely entertaining, and I actually thought that it raised some interesting questions not only about gender, but also about sexuality in general. Obviously, the most blatant issues deal with gender, but I feel like there are some other things that we didn't have the chance to touch on in class.
Some of the most interesting parts of the novel were those that Le Guin almost completely brushed over. The concept of incest was especially intriguing: why did the author choose to insert this interesting bit of information into the lives of the Gethenians? In many ways, she presents a relatively utopian society--there is no war and, sexually speaking, the roles are remarkably equalized. However, in addition to this liberalized sexuality, she also makes them incestuous. In the Gethenian world, incest is not only not frowned upon, but is entirely acceptable. However, there are exceptions to this rule: "Incest is permittedâ€¦between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair" (Le Guin 92). However, I could not completely understand why this restriction is so important to Gethenian society. If incest is entirely acceptable, why would it be bad for the parents to continue kemmering even after the birth of their first child? Obviously, there is some degree of taboo to incest that is inescapable, even on another world. In addition to the restriction against the continuation of kemmering after the birth of a child, there is also the ban against incest between generations. Children seem to have a certain innocence about incest that the adults do not: they cannot witness it in their parents, and their parents cannot act out incestuous feelings with them.
There is another taboo in Gethen that is hidden much better than incest: homosexuality. Although to a naÃ¯ve Earth reader the interactions between Estraven and Genly would seem homoerotic, they would not be regarded as such on Gethen. After all, Estraven "was a woman as well as a man" (Le Guin 248). Genly is obviously a difficult case, because of his "perversion," but their relationship is not overtly homosexual due to the androgyny of Estraven. However, actual homosexuality was certainly almost a moot point in Gethenian society: "If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-partners of the same sex, they are so rare as to be ignored" (Leguin 90). This is the only mention that readers get of homosexuality as the Gethenians would see it. To me, this seemed very strange in such a boundary-breaking novel. Obviously, Le Guin chose to brush over the subject of homosexuality in Gethenian culture, but she thrusts the homoerotic relationship of Genly and Estraven directly into her readers' faces.
However, it is important to remember that all of our descriptions of Gethenian sex acts come from outsiders' perspectives. Any commentary on taboos and customs must be filtered through a non-Gethenian mind. Obviously, this calls into question the reliability of the information--since the speaker has not undergone kemmering, they cannot personally know all of the details. Assuming the reliability of the information, Le Guin seems to imply that there are limits to taboo-breaking. She can make a society that accepts incest, but it will not infiltrate into the minds of its children. She can present a pseudo-homoerotic love scene, but it is not REALLY homosexuality because one of the characters is simply androgynous. The Left Hand of Darkness breaks down some interesting walls, but it also suggests the presence of other, more inflexible ones.

race/gender/science fiction - Taboos

Response 4