Hej Matilde, dejligste du <3 Ikke noget med at læse for nært, det er en kladde stadig!!
Overview
The Left Hand of Darkness is a sci-fi novel written in the speculative anthropologist’s lense of sci-fi - it sets us on the planet Gethen (or “Winter”, due to its inhospitable environment) inhabited by human-with-a-twist, and shows us how the twist and their environment restructures the society they live in.
The story itself is part of a larger universe of Le Guin’s creation, and we are told the story through the eyes of Genly Ai, a man who is sent as a first contact emissary (“Envoy”) of sorts, to recruit the Gethenians into an interplanetary spiritual coalition of human societies (the “Ekumen”, probably derived from ecumenical?).
The Gethenian physiology drives much of the story. They have no gender outside of their mating period, during which they can temporarily take any of two sexes to match their mate. After this period, the temporary male Gethenian returns to their ambisexuality (as it is referred to in chapter 7), while the female Gethenian does the same barring pregnancy. A key point that shapes the Gethenian society is the impossibility of a general division of society into genders, as anyone can embody either of the binaries, and as such noone is incentivized to create systemic discrimination against either of them.
Genly’s confusion by this ambisexuality and its effects is a key point of the novel, and also underpins the general thought-experiment Le Guin seeks to include the reader in; in what ways are our society affected by gender roles? How do we define them? And how do they, in turn, define us?
Thoughts on themes
Feminist Science Fiction
The Left Hand of Darkness is feminist science fiction, but notably written more than 50 years ago. I have not read much literature/discourse in the spirit of “what gender is” from before the 00s, which casts my “starting point” ignorant of what cultural movements lay before it. But especially in the more meta parts of the novel which are written more as anthorpological field notes, like chapter 7, “The Question of Sex”, some things feel deliberately oversimplified to limit the scope of the thought experiment.
In this chapter an Ekumen “Investigator” (a field researcher deployed prior to the Envoy) discusses the details of sex, which is described as “being in kemmer” for Gethenians. She describes how same-sex kemmer-pairs are seemingly non-existant, or “so rare as to be ignored” (p90), which feels like Le Guin saying we can set aside homosexuality for the duration of this experiment. If not for the immediate mention that “in the Orgoreyn region the use of hormone derivatives to establish a preferred sexuality is quite common” (p91) this could be chalked up to just being “the way the aliens work”, but instead feels intentional.
Genly and the Ekumen Investigators taking some parts of the role of narrator explain the male-centered analysis of many aspects of Gethenian society, but some feel like Le Guin’s own bias. She later commented on and amended a series of these biases in “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” from 1976, and later ends up writing a screenplay for the Left Hand of Darkness wherein more care is given to pronouns relative to whether the Gethenian referred to is in “kemmer”, is sexed. While Gethenians in kemmer and Genly himself are referred to by gendered pronouns, outside kemmer the Gethenians now use “um” instead of him/her (I did not spot any uses of the equivalent to he/she and his/hers in the screenplay).