Texts Featured:

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

All semester, I have been an enthusiastic supporter Ursula K. Le Guin. Frankly, it’s exciting to see women represented in a field that is dominated by men both in writers and readers. Of course, all women are different and not every woman can be expected to be a radical feminist. Additionally, it is not the responsibility of women to always write about the quest for equality, feminism, or even about being women. Given that Ursula K. Le Guin is a widely-known woman in a male-dominated field, I think that many readers have just conferred to her the responsibility of being a feminist example (i.e. to produce feminist literature, to be an example for the women’s movement). After learning more about Le Guin’s background, myself as well as reading this week’s article by Russ and Le Guin’s own article, “Is Gender Necessary?,” I see this even more clearly.

 I decided to do more research on Le Guin while we were reading The Dispossessed– especially after it was mentioned that she has a degree in French literature. In completing my research, I was not surprised to find that she has an impressive background, with both a bachelors and a masters in French literature, and she even earned a Fulbright grant to work on her Ph.D. dissertation in France. However, I was surprised to learn that when she met her husband, she decided to abandon her studies and her goal to be an academic. Now I want to emphasize that I find nothing inherently wrong with this, in fact I completely understand the importance placed on marriage and family life. It’s also worth noting that the success that she has garnered for her works demands respect for her as both a writer and an academic.  In all honesty, I guess the reason why this information shocked me is because especially being a minority in a male-dominated genre, I had these unfair expectations that Le Guin would be the ultimate feminist icon. Here, we could also have a debate over what seriously constitutes a “feminist icon,” (not all examples of women in positions of power are constructive to feminism, i.e. Amy Coney Barrett or Betsy DeVos). I digress. This being said, I noticed a bit of this same disappointment in Russ’ article, when she states that very rarely do the lives of women or the child-bearing situations get described in detail– even in books written by women like Le Guin. Le Guin acknowledges this critique in “Is Gender Necessary?,” making a point that her book The Left Hand of Darkness is not actually about feminism at all and that it was not, in fact, her goal to create a work of feminist literature. In all honesty, I commend Le Guin for saying this because, even though I would so much like her to be the feminist author I dream of, it is truly not the responsibility of women 1) to educate others about feminism in everything they pursue or 2) to center all of their projects around womanhood or feminism. 

* I’d like to add that I am still a fan of Le Guin despite her feminist shortcomings and that she is certainly an example of female excellence that I look up to as both a writer and hopeful academic. She is simply not a distinctly feminist influence. 

* *Though this has already become quite lengthy, I’d like to also point out that the language choice of Le Guin in her article felt at times to be very unaligned with the women’s movement. There is a point in the article where Le Guin uses the phrasing, “The Gethenians do not r*pe their world” (165). Though I certainly understand what Le Guin meant in saying this, as well as I understand the fact that this article was written in 1979, this is just not a word choice that I think would be made (especially now) by a person who actively participates in the women’s movement. While this essay is a product of its time and Le Guin does not owe it to us as readers to make us feel comfortable, the casual use of this word in a context where another word could have easily been chosen quite honestly irked me.