Texts Featured:

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed 

One of the very first things Le Guin introduces us to in The Dispossessed is the language difference between the Urrasti and the Anarrasti people, who speak Iotic and Pravic, respectively. Not only are these people speaking different languages from each other, but we come to understand as readers that these languages are also very different from the English that we are reading. By far the most prominent cultural aspect of the society on Anarres is that the people live with no possessions- not even the idea of possession. This is reflected in their language, as we can see in a few examples within the first four chapters. Two of the most notable examples to me were the lack of idioms for sexual acts (pp.53) and the function of the words mamme and tadde (47). Instead of using the idiomatic phrasing “to have sex,” the people of Anarres either say “copulate” or a word more akin to “fuck.” 

The word ‘copulate’ is a way to delineate sex as “something two people did, not something one person does or has.” The other word, similar to ‘fuck,’ “had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape” (53). This peculiarity of the Pravic vocabulary interests me for two reasons. For one, I think this language quirk is one of many ways in which Le Guin critiques patriarchal society and its way of sexually objectifying women and regarding sex as a transaction (you cannot “have” a woman or “have sex,” the act is always equal and requires consent from both parties). Secondly, the use of a word like “to fuck,” which is considered taboo in our everyday speech, indicates an important element of the Anarrasti society- that being that the Anarrasti have no real sexual taboos and are a very frank, unashamed people. 

In the second chapter, Le Guin includes an explanatory note regarding the usage of mamme and tadde. From the moment I read that Gimar said “The tadde” instead of “my tadde,” I was able to correctly infer that the people of Anarres consider families and parenting as fluid, just like they do everything else. This often results in blended or extended families. I will say that I was surprised that the term to refer to parent or guardian-type figures isn’t gender neutral. This is an indication that though sexuality is considered fluid on Anarres, gender is still a more solid construct. Another example of how this is apparent is through the bisexuality (or, at least the bisexual experimenting) of Annaresti children, yet there is never any mention of Annaresti who explore gender fluidity.