Constructing gender with pronouns

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness is another interesting example of a science fiction novel that confronts the reader with "difference" and asks him to shift his perspective during the course of the narrative, "seeing" the world finally through other eyes (I use 'he' deliberately here for the generic pronoun, as the novel arguably assumes a masculine point-of-view even while it interrogates notions of gender.)

The inhabitants of Gethen - Winter - are androgynous; they only have distinct sexual characteristics for a few days a month, during "kemmer", when any individual may become either male or female. What interests me here is not their sex, but how this is transmitted to the reader using language, namely, through gendered pronouns.

Le Guin generally uses the masculine pronoun to refer to these people, although she mixes it up sometimes by combining mascuine pronouns with feminine kinship terms or titles, or on rare occasions by switching pronouns (for example, to indicate that an individual has become female during kemmer). One of her short stories, "Winter's King," which is set in the same world, was rewritten to use female pronouns throughout combined with masculine titles.

Le Guin has sometimes been faulted for her decision to use the masculine as a generic pronoun, rather than using an artificial genderless pronoun (either one of her own or extant options such as "s/he" or "sie"), and she herself has taken various positions on the topic, suggesting that she might have made a different decision were she to write the novel now. (See her essays "Is Gender Necessary?", "Is Gender Necessary: Redux" and her afterward to the novel written in 1994). However, I think the use of the masculine pronoun works, and it creates a very different effect than if she had used an invented pronoun which would have emphasized the Gethenians' strangeness. Because the point is not that they are "alien", but rather the extent to which gendered categories are rooted within our thinking and our perception of the world, that we have trouble getting beyond these categories even when they are not useful.

The world is described primarily from the perspective of an outsider, Genly Ai, who is visiting Winter as a sort of diplomat and who constantly projects his notions of gender upon a people for whom this category is scarcely relevant. Genly acts as a mediator for the reader, his use of pronouns is a reminder of his - and our - inability to comprehend the Gethenians for what they are. Until the end, when he comes to see this "unsexed" state as being natural, and ourselves as trapped within a divided, unnatural state. What the book finally offers is a gradual transformation, a way to get a glimpse of a world in which we are not primarily male or female but simply human.

Although this movement seems in some ways to be the opposite of what I was looking at in my previous post, I think the hermeneutic process is ultimately quite similar. In both cases the familiar is made strange -- in Riddley Walker through a deformation of familiar language, in The Left Hand of Darkness through an interpretive dead-end, that is, through a failed attempt to apply familiar categories which results in the need to discard these categories.


And just for the sake of it, I append a bibliography of articles dealing with language and the linguistic construction of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness. I started collecting this list for a term paper (which I ended up not writing) in a linguistics class, so it's limited to topics that seemed relevant to the project at the time -- i.e., I was concerned with language/gender, not sexuality per se, even if these are arguably never completely separate.

Barrow, Craig and Diana. “The Left Hand of Darkness: Feminism for Men.” Mosaic 20.1 (1987).


Cornell, Christine. “The Interpretive Journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 42.4 (2001).


Fayad, M. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin's Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic 30.3 (1997): 59-73.


Myers, V. “Conversational Technique in Ursula Le Guin: A Speech-act Analysis.” Science-Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 306-16.


Pennington, John. “Exorcising Gender: Resisting Readers in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 41.4 (2000).

Also interesting is the study Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender by Anna Livia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), in particular the chapter "Epicene Neologisms in English" which contains an extensive discussion of The Left Hand of Darkness along with a number of other science fiction novels.

Language as Verfremdung

I'm interested in the way some science fiction novels transform language in order to emphasize the 'otherness' of the society being portrayed so that the reader is forced to actively negotiate this difference in the process of understanding the story. We might call this a form of Verfremdung. I'm abusing Brecht's terminology here, but I'm not sure that there's another term that expresses what I mean. Shklovsky's ostranenie is no better, because he -- like Brecht -- is concerned with it primarily as an aesthetic effect, that of making the familiar strange. In the stories I want to look at, something else happens, a form of negotiation between the familiar (self) and the strange (the 'other)', i.e., precisely that which resists being subsumed into the familiar. The emotional distancing, which is so crucial to Brecht's theory, and perhaps implicit in Shklovsky's, is counterproductive here: the story requires a certain amount of identification, of Einfühlung, in order to be most effective. Caryl Emerson speaks of  "subject - object relations" in Shklovsky rather than "subject - subject" relations**, which captures the point pretty well.

I'm thinking in particular of Hoban's Riddley Walker and Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, which are narrated in a heavily modified form of English. This is important: instead of interlacing the story with vocabulary in an invented language, they alter the reader's own language. The effect created by this technique is considerably different, I think. Inventing terms in a foreign language marks them clearly as being embedded in a specific context, one which is, moreover, separate from the world of the reader. And by including -- as is so often done -- an explanation or translation of these foreign terms, the 'otherness' of this world is mediated for the reader, the strangeness is in a sense concealed precisely because it is explicitly labelled as foreign. However, when it is our own language that is being distorted nearly to the point of incomprehensibility, we are confronted all the more forcefully by the fact that we cannot take comprehension for granted.

(Both of these stories have first-person narrators, and this, too, may help produce this effect -- the reader is put inside the narrator's head, so to speak, asked to share his point of view. It is not, I think, necessary however.)

One might compare this method with that of those translators who maintain that a translation should not read like an original, that it should maintain a strangeness which reminds the reader that they are reading a translation.
Schleiermacher puts this in a manner which is useful in this context: Entweder der Übersetzer läßt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgegen [this is our 'faithful' translation]; oder er läßt den Leser möglichst in Ruhe und bewegt den Schriftsteller ihm entgegen [i.e., a naturalizing translation. (From: Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens, 1813)


** See Emerson, Caryl. "Shklovsky's ostranenie, Bakhtin's vnenakhodimost' (How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain)". Poetics Today 26.4 (2005) : 637-664.

Tauron = Greek?

So...we watched the Caprica prequel on DVD last night & it looks like the series will be interesting. I'm still a little bit doubtful about setting everything so few generations before the events of Battlestar Galactica, but the story is good and promises to have the same thoughtful characterization and exploration of philosophical problems as the earlier series, so I'm willing to give it a chance.

What interested me the most, though, were some linguistic tidbits: a number of tantalizingly brief segments in the Tauron language, which meant I got to spend time trying to identify the words instead of paying attention to the plot. From what I could hear, I'm fairly certain that it was Greek -- or something remarkably close to it. "therapōn" = minister, "aner" = man, "dikē" = justice. Now, the fact that they would use Greek in particular is not terribly surprising, since the religion and a lot of the names come from classical mythology. But the question is: ancient or modern Greek? Or neither?

My ear isn't fast enough to catch it. I wish I had thought to ask Matt to see if the DVD had close-captioning before he returned it -- maybe I would have been able to get a transcription, at least. None of the fan sites seem to have touched on this important issue (yet).

Edit: Never mind. Apparently it would have helped if I spelled the language correctly when searching -- it's "Tauron" not "Tauran." The BattlestarWiki confirms my intuition that the language is ancient Greek, although (frustratingly) they don't give any further details or sources.