While reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969), I was struck by how it simultaneously seems so current but yet so outdated. For instance, the novel’s focus on deconstructing gender was very familiar to me as a student in a liberal collegiate environment. However, Genly Ai’s constantly misgenders the Gethenians as male- or female-presenting, which I struggled with each time. I’m not sure if I struggled with this because of who I am and the time in which I live, or because Le Guin wrote the novel to engender those feelings of discomfort in the reader. This is one of the difficulties with reading older novels in modern times—are my reactions those originally intended by the author? How can I analyze the work in the context in which it was written when the author had a completely different reader in mind?
I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes…my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Along these same lines, while I recognize the reasons behind Le Guin’s choice of the “he” series of pronouns for the Gethenians, I found it distracting to read. It reminded me of how Romance languages often default to masculine grammar when dealing with plurals or new words. It was difficult to see the constant use of those pronouns as anything but misgendering, and I almost wish that I could “Find and Replace” the document to replace all the pronouns with “they.” However, this is certainly not a productive endeavor; Le Guin purposely chose “he” series pronouns, and those pronouns play an important role in the text. Learning to read older texts with the lens of both the time in which it was written as well as the lens of our own time is complicated and often contradictory. I hope that through our class discussions we can probe deeper into what it means to look at a text in different contexts.
Feminist Science Fictions 