Verity Ritchie
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The Queer Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin
🕑 Added 2023-04-01 08:38:30 +0000 UTCHello dear Patrons! Today we’re doing something a little bit different. I’ve written a short article about queerness in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. I guess this is kind of a follow up to the Earthsea video, as I’ve read so much more of Le Guin’s work since that video came out. It would’ve been a slightly different video today, lemme tell ya! I hope you enjoy this article, and perhaps we will consider doing more Patreon articles in the future, if you like that idea (because, to be honest, we just don’t have the time to make as many videos as we would like to, so this seems like a nice alternative!). Enjoy!
When people think of queerness in Ursula K. Le Guin’s work, they think of the genderless aliens from The Left Hand of Darkness. Which is weird because, though technically a bisexual story (and one which seems exceedingly gay because of her use of “he” as the generic pronoun) it isn’t really about gay or trans people at all, but aliens with an entirely different sexual biology. These genderless aliens may be allegorically related to queer people, but they’re not all that much like us.
But on my Le Guin binge these last three years, I’ve found that - despite her work being overwhelmingly straight and cis - lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people do exist in her work. And I’ve been taking notes!
Full disclosure: I haven’t read all of Le Guin’s fiction (yet), but I’ve read quite a lot! So here is a rundown of what I have learned so far.
LGBT CHARACTERS
Her earliest portrayal of a gay character is in her second ever novel, Planet of Exile (1966); a minor character named Huru Pilotson is “a homosexual” and best friend of one of the main characters with whom he is apparently in unrequited love. Huru is not a large role by any means, but he’s there!
In The Lathe of Heaven (1971), the fact that one of the main characters Dr. Haber sometimes sleeps with women and young men is mentioned briefly. Haber isn’t a hero, but he’s not entirely a villain either…a morally ambiguous bisexual perhaps.
The Dispossessed (1974): Main character Shevek’s close friend Bedap is “pretty definitely homosexual” while Shevek is “pretty definitely heterosexual,” but they sleep together on multiple occasions throughout their lives, because it’s…just a friendly thing to do!
These two men used to have sex as teenagers, and when reunited as adults, they renew their bond through sex, though it’s suggested that Shevek is only having a week of full on fucking with Bedap selflessly, for his friend’s sake. So sweet.
…I think there are very valid bisexual interpretations of Shevek. I think the use of “pretty definitely” can be interpreted as unreliable. Le Guin references young ostensibly straight men having gay sexual relations as teenagers surprisingly often! (See: “Paradises Lost” & “A Man of the People”)
“Dancing to Ganam” (1993)*: The main character Shan is bi. He’s contrasted with the straight male Dalzul:
“He wondered if Dalzul knew that most of Shan’s sexuality had been with men until he met Tai.”
It then says that Shan is able to do what Dalzul’s “male-heterosexual defensiveness” prevents him from doing: ask women for advice.
(I recommend reading “The Shobies’ Story” before reading this one.)
“Forgiveness Day” (1995) has a supporting character named Batikam who is a bisexual “transvestite,” though it’s not 100% clear whether “bisexual” here refers to sexual orientation or something to do with gender, as it did in The Left Hand of Darkness (I think it’s probably sexual orientation though). Batikam is also enslaved. This story is part of a collection called Five Ways to Forgiveness which is about slavery and is quite brutal. For instance, in "A Woman's Liberation" Lady Shomeka rapes enslaved girls and "Old Music and the Slave Women" refers to the rape of enslaved boys and women.
"Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995)** is set on the same world as The Left Hand of Darkness and is about the experience of puberty for Gethenians, but written about 25 years later. Towards the end Le Guin corrects a problem she saw in the original novel: that any sexual pairing is between a Gethenian who has become sexually male and a Gethenian who has become sexually female, thus apparently heterosexualising this very genderqueer world. In “Coming of Age in Karhide” Sov engages sexually with other people as male and as female and refers to sleeping with one partner thusly: “we made love in every combination.” Cute!
The Telling (2000): The main character, Sutty, is a lesbian. The book isn’t about her sexuality or romance at all, though homosexuality has become taboo on the planet Sutty is living on.
Meanwhile a minor character Kieri tells us quite explicitly: - "I don’t like boys! I like men and women!"
O: A Bisexual Utopia?
There are three stories set on a planet called “O” in which a form of polyamorous marriage is the norm. A marriage is a four way bisexual arrangement called a “sedoretu”.
In a sedoretu, a man will have a husband, and his husband will have a wife, who herself has a wife, and that wife is the wife of the first husband. A love diamond, if you will.
Yes, it’s a little complicated! But it does mean all marriages are bisexual in nature.
In Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, when asked if sedoretu would be a practical arrangement, Le Guin says,
“I don’t know. Is monogamous heterosexual marriage practical? I don’t know. My husband and I have done it for forty-eight years, but that could just be luck, and a bit of practice.”
“Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994)* is the first story set on O, following on themes from “The Shobies’ Story” and “Dancing to Ganam”. It centres on a romance between a man and a woman, while both characters are bisexual and have relationships with other people.
“Unchosen Love” (1994)** is a story within a story. Where “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” is meant to be a true story set on O, “Unchosen Love” is not. This is a romance story from that world which those characters might have read. It focuses on two men in love, Hadri and Suord and their difficulty finding wives to complete their sedoretu.
“Mountain Ways” (1996)** confronts the impracticalities of sedoretu. You have Temly who is bi, but what good is a bisexual sedoretu to lesbians like Akal and Shahas?
ALIEN CULTURES
One of Le Guin’s major strengths as a writer is her ability to conjure up new cultures and societies, reimagining how power structures and gender could work for humans, and what these ideas say about how we live in our own world.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) has an entirely agender society, at least in theory. Most of the time Gethenians are androgynous, but once a month or so their body sort of goes into heat and becomes either male or female and they all become terribly horny and have lots of sex and possibly orgies in a local sex house. Like a universal gay sauna!
There are people on Gethen who are not, shall we say bi-sexed, but mono-sexed, and they are considered perverts (though sacred perverts). When a single human from Earth arrives, the Gethenians have no reference point for a person who looks male all the time, and decide he must be from a planet of perverts!
For more on this culture see “Winter’s King” and “Coming of Age in Karhide.”
Always Coming Home (1985): The Kesh word for homosexual is “ginkgo” because it's associated with the ginkgo tree.
"The gingko trees are sexually dimorphic. Female trees are not usually planted near male trees, lest they be fertilised, since the fruit exudes a terrific stench. In Kesh literature the ginkgo is associated with homosexuality both in satire and in celebration."
“Dancing to Ganam” (1993)*: We are told the aliens on a newly found world have
“All kinds of marriages - polyandry may be the most common, two or three husbands. A good many women are out of the heterosexual circulation because they have homosexual group marriages, the iyeha, three or four or more women.”
Polyamorous lesbians, we’ve found the planet for you!
In “The Matter of Seggri” (1994)** bisexuality is the norm in a world where men and women live separately. Men are a small minority of the population in this world where women have all the power.
"Solitude" (1994)** is also set in a gender segregated society where homosexuality is quite common, though it’s more than just gender that separates people here…
“A Man of the People” (1995)***: We see multiple cultures. On Hain there is a small culture where “It was assumed that a boy would masturbate and make some homosexual experiments, but not a homosexual pairing.”
On Yeowe, a culture of formerly enslaved men see homosexual sex as normal, because their community was entirely made up of men for generations. Once women join their community it becomes patriarchal.
In the Earthsea books homosexuality isn’t directly referenced until the last two books in which it is made clear that many witches marry other witches. Witches are generally shunned by society, despite being essential to it. Earthsea is a patriarchal world.
(I suppose I should mention that there are valid gay readings to the third Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore (1972), where Prince Arren “felt the Archmage's touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love.” This line seems to have been read universally as a platonic love. But considering that by the time Farthest Shore was published Le Guin had already casually dropped a gay character in Planet of Exile and a bisexual character in The Lathe of Heaven, as well as invented a whole genderqueer world in The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s hard to imagine she did not anticipate alternative interpretations when she told us that Arren was “in love” with Ged.
WAS URSULA A TRANS ALLY?
It seems that Ursula K. Le Guin has been an ally of the gay community for a long time. In the intro to The Hainish Novels Volume II, she mentions that she took “small part” in “gay-lesbian rights” demonstrations. However, I have not yet found anything Ursula has ever said directly about real-world transgender people, at least not using the word “transgender.” But here is what I have found:
In “Forgiveness Day” (1995) Batikam is apparently a bisexual “transvestite,” and is portrayed in a positive light.
In Powers (2007) there is a culture in which boys who fail to be fully initiated into manhood leave the men’s village to go and live in the women’s village as women. My interpretation of this community, with their gendered villages, is that Le Guin wanted to portray gender as being socially constructed. The choice to separate the community by gender is social, not a biological inevitability. In Powers and the previous book Voices, a number of female characters crossdress to get by more easily in society. Gender is very much socially constructed in this series, so that what it is to be a woman or man is not defined simply by biology.
(I don’t think Le Guin meant to say that all boys who went to live as women were definitely transgender women; different societies have different ways of categorising gender and sexuality, and I think this way probably applies variously and isn’t necessarily meant to be an ideal, just a possibility, as well as an allegory for our society. I definitely feel myself that although I’m nonbinary, I have to make choices regarding the two camps of woman and man rather than enjoying the supposed gender liberation of the modern world.)
When writing The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin defaulted to the generic male pronoun “he” for her androgynous aliens. This was criticised by feminists of the time, and Le Guin took that to heart and spent the following decades thinking about what else can be done with the English language for gender neutral pronouns.
She used feminine pronouns for the Wind's Twelve Quarters reprint of the short story “Winter’s King” (set on the same world as Left Hand) giving us such interesting gender bending as having a King who is referred to as “she.” In "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" she says she invented her own pronouns in the 80s for a screenplay version of Left Hand (a/un/a's). In “The Shobies’ Story”* she also uses the (rather unfortunate) pronoun “heshe” for Gethenians.
Always Coming Home mentions a “woman-living man," which seems to be a normal gender role in the Kesh society.
In her latest interviews, she preferred to use “they” as a neutral singular pronoun and basically told the grammarians to fuck off.
In the Earthsea books, the dragon Kalessin has an ambiguous gender. In her essay “Earthsea Revisioned," Le Guin said,
“There are male and female dragons in the earlier books, but I don’t know if Kalessin, the Eldest, is male or female or both or something else. I choose not to know. The deepest foundation of the order of oppression is gendering, which names the male normal, dominant, active, and the female Other, subject, passive. To begin to imagine freedom, the myths of gender, like the myths of race, have to be exploded and discarded. My fiction does that by these troubling and ugly embodiments.”
In a 2015 interview, when asked about the missing voices of women in literature and politics, she said that women were the largest part of voices that have not been heard, but specified that there were also “all kinds of other genders” whose voices were missing. So whether she was referring to trans people specifically, or any other gender groups from other cultures, it is heartwarming to know she appreciated that gender goes beyond just men and women!
I think Le Guin probably saw herself as an ally to trans people. I think the nature of her work, finding new ways to look at humanity with little judgement and a great deal of compassion, meant that she would be a natural ally to trans people.
"Our understanding of gender is still growing and changing. I hope and trust our wonderfully adaptable language will provide the usages we need."
- Le Guin, Introduction to "Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1"
Le Guin has such an interesting body of work, spanning half a century. In some ways her later work feels like it was written by a different person than her earliest work. You can definitely see a change in her portrayal of gender over time; in the earlier stories gender is more rigid, but in later stories blossoms and becomes freer. Yet there is always a recognisable thread of compassion. Her heroes are usually the outcasts, the unusual folk who never quite fit in, who have to find their place in a society which doesn’t fully appreciate or understand them.
You all know how I feel about “good representation.” I find Le Guin’s work so satisfying because, rather than trying to set up a good Strong LGBT Role Model™, she just found places for people like us in her invented worlds. For Le Guin a culture was not complete without considering how those who don’t fit in can belong. And I just love that.
If you find yourself interested in reading some Le Guin but don’t know where to start, feel free to drop a comment telling me what kind of literature you’re into and I will give you a personalised recommendation! :D
P.S. I found this site called Ethical Book Search which helps you find ethical alternatives for book shopping in Europe and North America, in case that interests any of you! :)
* from the collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
** from the collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
*** from the collection Four Ways to Forgiveness or the extended Five Ways to Forgiveness
