HERSTORY MONTH

Beyond Gender? Imagining Utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness MA Thesis

Yin-Yang Dualism in Gethenian Biology and Politics in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
Philology, Culture and Education, 2018


Artea Panajotovic


Ursula K. Le Guin’s relationship with Daoism is one of the most widely known, but at the same time least researched, aspects of her work. In her SF classic The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin takes dualism as her central theme, and the view of dualism expressed here is firmly grounded in Daoist philosophy and its theory of the dynamics of yin and yang. In order to shed light on this influence, the paper analyzes two aspects of dualism in the novel: the specific physiology of the people and the political balance of power on planet Gethen. The dynamic androgyny of the Gethenian race is examined as a fictional transposition of the mixing of yin and yang characteristic of Daoist internal alchemy. At the level of society, duality finds expression in the organization of and interaction patterns between Karhide and Orgoreyn, two Gethenian countries founded on the principle of yin and yang respectively. The analysis of biological and socio-political dynamics on Gethen thus provides an insight into the specificities of Le Guin’s understanding of duality and reveals its deep Daoist roots.

Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Philology, Culture and Education


Towards a genderless society: Androgyny in late 20th century

Jane Allcroft

This dissertation will look at the concept of androgyny and the form this takes in contemporary novels, focusing on four different works of fiction taken from the late 1960s to early 2000s. A brief overview of the development of the idea of androgyny within literary texts from early creation mythology, through Plato to the fiction of the modernists provides contextual background to understanding current representations. Concepts of androgyny within contemporaneous literary and social theory will also contextualise the fictional representations, looking at how they both draw on and reflect theoretical concepts and social discourses.
Androgyny will be shown to be an archetype which takes on various forms depending on the social circumstances in which it emerges. The forms in which androgyny is manifested in the four novels under consideration here will be seen to range from the embodiment of both maleness and femaleness in futuristic androgynous humans in Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the earliest novel analysed here, through to poststructuralist genderless and intersexed narrators in the two later novels, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002). The dissertation will look at how this is achieved within the novels through a consideration of plot, narrative and textual analysis.
Concepts of androgyny will be shown to be bound up with destabilizing the categorization of people via gender and sexuality in its ultimate aim to become obsolete as a referent in a post-gender society. Androgyny’s ability to bring this about can be seen to lie in its fluid and multidimensional nature.

Family Frontiers: The Space Age Fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula K. LeGuin
https://www.academia.edu/9687360/Family_Frontiers_The_Space_Age_Fiction_of_Marge_Piercy_and_Ursula_K._LeGuin

Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, 2014
Sue Dib Norton
Issue: 277
More Info: Issue No. 277