The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K (5 points)

 

I was acutally required to read this for another class but I really enjoy Ursual K, so I gave it another read. And I am really thankful I did. There are tons of things you don't pick up when you read a book for the first time because you're so focused on understanding the book that you don't comprehend what is actually happening.

This book is really great because as this society progresses and begins to accept new ideas and sexuality, it is very interesting to see what artists of the past have done to portray these ideas that seemed so alien and uncomfortable in days' past. In The Left Hand of Darkness, author Ursula K. LeGuin explores the idea of an androgynous people and the way their society revolves around this fact. Their adaptable anatomy that forms only once a month as they pair off for kemmer was a pivotal part of the novel, and acted as a foil to the main character's rather sexist point of view sometimes.

I find it very interesting that such a subject was discussed as early as 1969. Although the novel was published only months before the Stonewall riots, gender and sex was still much less publicly talked about than sexual orientation. Having so forward of an idea as androgyny (even through a very scientific lens) was not something I have seen in literature from this time period. However, I found it coming from much less of a space of representation and more of a space of exploring an unexplored idea. The context in which the Gethenian's androgyny is discussed is so purely scientific it's almost unsettling. Additionally, the fact that characters in the novel assumed that Gethenians were scientific experiments abandoned on their current planet dehumanizes them in ways that did not sit well with me.