this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Not really a meme, I know, but I thought this was amazing and worth sharing and I didn't know where else to share it on Lemmy.

Ursula LeGuin was an incredible person and, although she did live a long life, her death was still a huge loss.

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[–] FlyingSquid 112 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (20 children)

She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts "I am a man." It is not about her gender identity, it's just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).

You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html

I also cannot recommend enough (thanks for the correction!) her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It's an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.

The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.

Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965...

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it's such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it's not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it's told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It's an amazing piece of work, and it's amazing it was published when it was.

[–] captainlezbian 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Well that description got me to place a hold on it at my library. I have a hard time getting into new authors and have wanted to try her work for some time

[–] Thwompthwomp 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.

[–] captainlezbian 1 points 3 months ago

So it sounds like the Mormonism in the stormlight archive. Where it’s ever present but requires literary analysis to see

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