The Left Hand Of Darkness Feminist Essay

"Man the mast!", "Down with the sails, she's going down!" the captain barks orders out of fear of losing the beloved ship and his life. The storm is the worst this vessel has ever seen. As you look to your left for help tying the rope your friend Thomas reaches out a hand to assist. Once the rope is secure you make your way below deck to thank him but as you turn the corner, you see him take his shirt off to ring out the water and realize that "he" is not a "he" at all; Thomas is a woman. Within the Golden Age of Piracy, many women have been involved in expeditions on the seven seas. Throughout history we have seen the patriarchal society built by man (pun intended) and through various reasons, women were viewed as inferior. While times have changed and gotten better, have they changed THAT much? Women in today’s society

There are two major female authors in science fiction , Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, that have impacted the ideas of feminism without being fully aware of their actions. In addition to these authors, a women named Simone de Beauvior had a large impact on the second feminism wave despite the fact that her influential work had been published two decades before the second wave. This is an evident pattern for these three women, even though they did not have the intention to write influential feminist work, they did so successfully. One of the most impacting ideas came from De Beauvior, who uses the terms the One and the Other to define the overall problem; the One being the ruling group, or men at this time and the Other consisting of the group being ruled, who were women. This very setup is used powerfully, especially science fiction writing. In this essay, science fiction stories consisting of these ideas will be analyzed. First, a story of how women were defined, to prove the problem occurring during the second wave of feminism. Then, move to the two authors who influenced the second wave without being aware of the effects their story would have on society.

Science fiction has evolved from simple ideas to the most imaginative creations, it has been predominantly managed by closed minded people. This has led to authors of science fiction to follow a set of norms while writing. These norms include advanced technology, male heroes, and white male authors. The idea of a character being placed in a distant future and the use of advanced technology is a common theme used. Samuel Delany and Ursula Le Guin are two contrasting authors that discuss oppression of minorities in their work in similar and distinct ways.

However, SF uniquely rewrites the narrative “from the unexpected and ‘alien’ perspective” (Wolmark 54). Readers are able to reshape their expectations of patriarchal norms due to the unfamiliar elements provided by SF narratives. It is necessary that authors retain recognizable social structures (Wolmark 55). SF is able to present alternatives that re-construct gender roles, rather than mimic them. Cognitive dissonance provides a new context for individuals to re-evaluate normative gender roles. With the introduction of different alien races, time travel, or strange, new technologies provides instability to the narrative (Wolmark 55). This instability provides momentum for re-constructing conventional gender roles and relations. While SF narratives tend to be able to effectively redefine and combat hegemonic standards, it is important to consider how the genre can inspire change in the real

“It’s taken the fantasy genre decades to grow out of its image as a juvenile boys’ club obsessed with cleavage and crossbows” (Griner). Though science fiction has attempted to break the gender stereotypes against female characters, the genre still has a long way to go. Currently, the majority of female characters are still portrayed as over-sexualized, and dependent on male characters. When women are shown in heroic female roles, they are still belittled for not being a man. Seiter claims that “Many of the more stereotyped features of the portrayal of women…are also accurate reflections of the sexist reality of our society” (21). It is unfortunate that this claim is accurate, but it is. Science fiction is a fictional genre, providing an opportunity to break all stereotypes and create a world from scratch. But gender stereotypes have been ingrained into the world, making them difficult to break when producing fictional stories. Sexism has created a gender bias in science fiction that needs to be changed.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood explores the role that women play in society and the consequences of a countryís value system. She reveals that values held in the United States are a threat to the livelihood and status of women. As one critic writes, “the author has concluded that present social trends are dangerous to individual welfare” (Prescott 151).

I have, until this point in this course, complained that, with few exceptions, Science Fiction as a genre never seems to quite reach a critical mass where it can achieve breakaway-velocity and leave its rather conservative orbit of binary gender (and heteronormativity) behind. There seems to have been many times when the genre has tiptoed close to the edge of gender-binarism (for instance, in its sub-genre of feminist utopias), only to scurry away from the assumed precipice and remain firmly ensconced in the supposed safety of Man/Woman-Masculine/Feminine dichotomies. Brian Attbery’s “Decoding Gender” finally takes us over that supped cliff – or at least peers over its precipice – to speak upon Science Fiction’s potential to imagine – even predict/produce – life beyond a gender binary. Given my own research in gender identity development and deployment, I found his work to be both a sometimes-frustrating primer on the social construction of gender and at the same time fascinating deconstructive study of gender and in turn science fiction.

Gender binary involves the categorization of gender into two separate types that form the ideas of “femininity” and “masculinity.” The concept Gender binary could be found as a constant theme within the various science fiction texts and films that we have encountered in class. Using science fiction, these authors and directors could direct the readers away from gender binary and instead open their minds by introducing new ideas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, Frank Oz’s 2004 film The Stepford Wives, and Leslie F. Stone’s 1931 short story “The Conquest of Gola” all contain narrative science fiction worlds that make readers question and challenge the conventional ideas of gender stereotypes.

The question arises when this ‘why’ will be end. I hope the answer lie in the fact that once the age of revolution will come when women will going to reciprocate all the pains that is applied by any person in the society. Writing about women without the present of Semion De Beauvoir will make the dissertation incomplete as The Second Sex is one of the land mark book which comments on the status of women as the Second Sex chronicles De Beauvoir’s effort to locate the source of these profoundly imbalanced gender roles. In book I, entitled “facts and myths” she asks how “human” come to occupy a subordinate position in society. To answer this question- and to better understand her question – and to better understand her own identity – de Beauvoir first turns to biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism .These

The Second Sex written by Simone de Beauvoir is started out with the question “do women exist”? Beauvoir professes this question to frame what a woman is and to show that there is such a thing as a woman but one is not born a woman. Simone de Beauvoir also professes the difference between “Self” and “Other”. She stresses that the “Self” is the absolute, which she references in culture as the man. Other almost always has a negative connotation to it, and is what the self is not, or what the self lacks which she references as the woman. This creates a hierarchy, not allowing people to live to their full potential because believe they are stuck in their group. Discrimination also occurs as you have one group against another, such as men vs. women, race vs. race, or even discrimination against different financial groups. This discrimination creates beliefs that are hard to change once they have begun. On page 15 Simone de Beauvoir

It would be fit that the first comprehensive and widely influential feminist study of recent times should focus on the simple task of defining what a woman is in modern times. De Beauvoir provides her readers with a highly logical exercise in examining some generally accepted statements by scientists and theoreticians such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Engels, whose combined efforts shaped the image of women during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, she establishes her own concept of women as not significannot

To answer to Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble and again in successive works, debates gender in terms of what she calls performativity. Gender is not so much a construct or the "congealing" of a specific sexual identity, it is rather an enactment, a performed moment, in which sexual identity "becomes" through the moment of enactment in the body: "one is not simply a [gendered] body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body"' (1990:272). This performativity is not a performance, however. Performance as a more or less consciously explained act or series of acts can never be performative, in Butler's terms, because performance is too a priori, too conscious of itself and its biases and internal, social forces. Performance is more a showing

Joan Scott (Gender and the Politics of History/Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis) and Judith Butler (Gender as Performance and Performativity) are two influential feminist scholars who have chimed in on the debates about how gender should be used. Joan Scott is a Feminist historian and author this area of study and Judith Butler is a philosopher and one of the most challenging influencers in feminist, queer, and literary theories. They are both theorists; someone who considers given facts and comes up with a possible explanation. Theorists observe various phenomena and use reasoning to come up with practical ideas that must be proven. Theorists come up with abstract ideas and then spend their lives trying to prove them. However,

Hollinger references works such as ‘The Female Man,’ ‘Bloodchild’, The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘Women on the Edge of Time’ together with people like Donna Harraway, Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler. In addition to the well-known feminist utopian works of the 70’s Hollinger also mentions Helen O’Loy, which is an early masculine focused novel. We see the importance of feminist SF when we read about works such as this, because the contrast shows that some SF writers obviously didn’t identify the historical possibility and cultural traditionalism of our notions regarding gender and sexual identity and the roles of men and women. Hollinger brings together plenty of evidence to back up her points about feminist theory and SF making for a comprehensive essay.

522). We assume that gender is natural, and often fail to realize that it is naturalized through performative acts. Gender is a constructed identity and we sometimes take the appearance of substance as reality, when in fact it is only a constructed identity. Butler states that gender is a product of historical construction and not a natural phenomenon. The natural, physical body is separate from the cultural underpinnings it comes to encompass. She posits that bodies become gendered through a “legacy of sedimented acts” that are demonstrated over a period of time. Butler does not subscribe to the notion that gender comes from a predetermined structure of being. The legacy of sedimented acts consists of habitual performative acts of the respective individual and the adoption of gender norms that produce the conditions of natural sex. Butler argues for the creation of a genealogy of gender based on a phenomenological understanding of “acts” as “socially shared and historically constituted” (p. 530). She recognizes the importance of political advancement of women, however she cautions to not unwittingly re-establish binary restriction of gender instead, Butler calls for relinquishment of power to expand the cultural notion of gender through subversive performative