Resisting Gender in “The Left Hand of Darkness”

Lola Chamberlain

When reading literature, we normally assume that an author has complete control over what is fictionally true within a story, at least on the level of content. If an author asks us to imagine something is true within their story we meekly obey. We might criticize it on the grounds that in the real world, what happens in a story is not the case, but we allow the author the power to make anything within the fictional world they’ve created true. This tendency, however, does not always hold. Sometimes, the audience of a story refuses to believe something is true, even within the fictional world, and philosophers call this phenomenon imaginative resistance. In this paper, I will examine the problem of imaginative resistance toward certain aspects of fictional works, focusing on two puzzles. The imaginative puzzle asks why we sometimes don’t (either because we won’t or can’t) imagine certain propositions. The alethic puzzle asks why propositions that spark imaginative resistance are not always fictionally true, despite the author’s intention to make them so. I will specifically investigate these puzzles as they relate to non-binary genders and how readers will sometimes resist imagining genderless worlds or societies in fictional works. I will use Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness and the response to it as the primary example of this phenomenon. 

I will begin by elaborating on the two different puzzles I consider in this paper and how they relate to the novel. Next, I will outline Brian Weatherson’s solution to these problems. I will then show how questions of gender complicate Weatherson’s solution, which assumes that a claim that generates imaginative resistance, given a specific set of underlying facts, will invariably do so. I will ultimately argue that The Left Hand Of Darkness exemplifies how a work can purposefully generate imaginative resistance as a tool to help a reader overcome their socialized biases. The variation in imaginative resistance from the beginning to the end of the novel shows how such resistance depends on more than an unchanging set of relationships between upper- and lower-level facts. Therefore, while Weatherson’s framework can certainly describe certain kinds of contradictions between narrative statements about the morality of characters, his solution is not universally true. In specific cases where the aspect of the text that the reader resists is related to societal constructs such as binary gender, Weatherson’s solution fails to describe the problem accurately. I then go on to describe how Adriana Clavel-Vazquez’s argument about rough heroines helps to explain such cases, even when morality is not the feature causing imaginative resistance. Ultimately, I argue that imaginative resistance does not always determine fictional truth, and that if this is the case, it can be used as an important aesthetic and political tool.

To begin, I will first more clearly outline the imaginative puzzle. To illustrate this puzzle, consider the following (very) short story, which I call “The Library”:

When reading this story, a reader can imagine the first two sentences quite easily. However, the last three are very difficult to imagine being true. The imaginative problem tries to account for why certain sentences or ideas within fiction are difficult or impossible to imagine, while others are not. We willingly accept physically impossible situations—like a spaceship traveling faster than the speed of light, or a radioactive spider bite making someone into a superhero—but situations involving different morality spark imaginative resistance. This kind of problem is generally concerned with the relationship between a reader and a work of fiction, and the reader’s ability to imagine things within the work of fiction.

In contrast, the alethic puzzle focuses on the relationship between the text and the fictional truth. In “The Library,” not only is it difficult for the reader to imagine that Calvin was morally right to commit arson, but the narrator’s assertion seems mistaken. In most stories, the narrator has the power to make almost anything true; however, in some cases, it seems that the narrator cannot make something true about a fictional world just by asserting it. A narrator can describe a world where the laws of physics are different, and the reader will accept it, but if they try to describe a world where morality is different, the reader will reject it. The alethic puzzle tries to explain why the narrator can make some kinds of things fictionally true but not others. 

These two puzzles are connected because what the reader fails to imagine is often exactly what the author fails to make fictionally true. However, the exact relationship between these two is debatable. It could be the case that the reader cannot imagine something because it is not fictionally true, or it could be the reverse: that something is not fictionally true because the reader cannot imagine it. Conversely, as I will go on to explain, a reader may resist imagining something (particularly something that contradicts their own socialized biases) that is really fictionally true. As such, any solution to the problem of imaginative resistance should be able to explain both of these puzzles, as well as the relationship between them.

The Left Hand of Darkness includes a unique formulation of imaginative resistance that I argue can demonstrate new features of both of these puzzles. The novel’s basic plot centers around a human man, Genly Ai, who visits a planet populated by aliens called Genthians in order to persuade them to join an interplanetary alliance. The Genthians have no permanent sex or gender, and, aside from temporary periods of sexual reproduction, are completely androgynous.  One of the criticisms of the novel that Ursula Le Guin reports receiving is that the alien species of  “Genthians seem like men, instead of menwomen” (“Is Gender Necessary?” Le Guin 168). This is textbook imaginative resistance. The author goes to great lengths to describe the culture, dress, and physical appearance of androgynous humanoid aliens, but readers still fail to accept their androgyny and instead imagine them as male. The imaginative puzzle comes into play here. Why can’t the readers imagine the Genthians as “menwomen” although they can imagine the other fantastical elements of the story, like the existence of sentient aliens or faster-than-light travel? Le Guin believes they fail to do so because her description of the alien’s androgyny was flawed  (“Is Gender Necessary?” Le Guin 168). All the myriad narrators of the novel (both binary-gendered humans and androgynous aliens) use masculine pronouns for the aliens. Also, most of the occupations of the alien characters are stereotypically masculine ones: politicians, kings, prison guards, and so on. Le Guin writes that she made this choice because she “was privately delighted at watching not a man, but a manwoman, do all these things and with considerable skill and flair” (“Is Gender Necessary?” Le Guin 168). Here, there are two conflicting experiences of the text: (1) the author describes (and intends the audience to accept) the Genthians as ‘menwomen,’ and yet (2) the audience views the Genthians as men. In the remainder of the paper, I will argue that Le Guin’s Genthians really are nonbinary and that the audience is consequently mistaken in imagining them as men. However, other accounts of imaginative resistance have made the argument that when resistance like this occurs, it means that the audience’s understanding of the text is actually fictionally true and thus that the authority of the author fails. This is the tactic Brian Weatherson uses.

In response to the problem of imaginative resistance, Brian Weatherson created what he calls the “virtue rule.” He proposes that:

Weatherson’s point is better understood by returning to my first exemplary story, “The Library.” The narrator’s claim in the story that Calvin was right to burn down the library is a proposition p. Such a proposition is upper-level, in that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on specific lower-level facts. For instance, how destructive the arson is, the consequences of burning down the library, or the reason that Calvin had to burn it down. None of these facts by themselves are equivalent to p, but p is true or false in virtue of this set of lower-level facts. While the author can change the lower-level set of facts, they can’t change the relationship between a specific set of facts and higher-level concepts. Weatherson claims that these lower-level facts are either imported from our world or else given to us by the story (Weatherson 19). However, in either case, if the lower-level facts are contrary to the higher-level claim, the author can’t make the higher-level claim true merely by stating it. In Weatherson’s words, “If the story regards both the higher-level facts and the lower-level facts as being within its purview, then they must match up” (Weatherson 17). In “The Library,” the relevant lower-level facts in virtue of which Calvin’s actions are immoral are stated within the story. The claim that Calvin was right to burn down the library is also stated within the story. However, these two sets of facts do not match up. Therefore, the narrator of this story tries to create a relationship between the lower-level facts of the story and the upper-level concept of moral rightness that contradicts the fundamental virtue relationship between the two. 

I contend that the case of imaginative resistance presented by The Left Hand of Darkness problematizes Weatherson’s account.  Since the relationship between the lower-level facts and upper-level concepts is not always stable, the violation of these relationships will vary from person to person. Hence, the author may have the freedom to choose between multiple possible kinds of relationships, as in the case of differing gender norms across cultures and periods. The audience’s views should not be enough to cancel out the authority of the author in these cases, even though they experience resistance.

Following Weatherson’s account, the gender of the aliens would be a higher-level concept that would need to be supported by a lower-level set of facts. Since this is science fiction, these facts are not imported from our world but included in the story. Within our own world, gender is a complex social phenomenon related to aspects of a person’s appearance, internal identity, and social relationships. In Le Guin’s world, however, the idea of gender (or the lack of it) in the alien world is explored in great detail and a wealth of lower-level facts about the aliens is given to reinforce the fact that they do not fit into either human binary gender category. Yet, Le Guin’s use of male pronouns and the fact of the aliens’ stereotypically masculine occupations seem to outweigh all the other facts that make up the alien’s gender. The readers who complained to Le Guin that her androgynous aliens were actually men disregarded her authorial power to dictate what is fictionally true. 

I argue that this comes from a reverse of the process that Weatherson outlines. He argues that since an author cannot make something fictionally true just by stating it, they need to support this truth with lower-level facts. But this is not what occurs in The Left Hand of Darkness. I propose instead that the failure to fully imagine androgyny precedes the accusation of fictional untruth. In other words, because the reader is not able to imagine characters referred to with masculine pronouns and in masculine roles as androgynous, they decide that the correct fictional truth is that they are ‘really’ men. While Le Guin creates a set of lower-level facts that detract from the perceived androgyny of the aliens, the imaginative resistance of the reader mostly stems from their inability to leave behind the specific gender norms of their time and place as they imagine the world of the novel. 

In order to understand this case of imaginative resistance I must first make the distinction between sex and gender more clearly. A person’s sex generally refers to their biological reproductive organs and hormones, while a person’s gender refers to their social position as a man, a woman, or the multitude of genders outside of this binary (such as nonbinary, two-spirit, and Hijra people)*. I believe in this case the reader probably acknowledges that the Genthians have no binary sex, but are gendered as male. Their claim that the aliens are “really” men, therefore, does not directly contradict the set of lower-level facts that indicate their sex. 

What complicates this view is that because gender exists on the level of the social, it is always positional and varies based on time and place. In the United States, for example, the features and rules that define womanhood have evolved considerably over the last hundred years as women have fought for the right to do things previously considered impossible for them. Moreover, within a specified time and location, intersecting constructs like race and class can affect how a person’s gender is understood. For example, during the centuries-long era of widespread slavery in the United States, black womanhood was culturally understood as innately tied to hypersexuality and promiscuity, while white womanhood was culturally understood as chaste and virginal. Because of the legacy and maintenance of white supremacy, these stereotypes still affect how the construction of gender differs along racial lines. This is all to say that the relationship between the lower-level facts that make up gender and the higher-level concept of gender proper varies in a way that, according to Weatherson’s argument at least, the relationship between lower-level acts and the upper-level concept of ‘goodness’ does not. In the case of The Left Hand of Darkness, the reader projects their own conception of gender as it exists in their particular culture and time on Earth onto an alien species. However, this does not mean that their particular understanding of gender is necessarily the fictionally true one. 

Moreover, because the concept of gender varies so much in this way, there may not be a stable fictional truth about the gender of the aliens in a way that there could be a stable fictional truth about their morality. A nonbinary person reading the novel in the present day may not have the imaginative resistance that a cisgendered reader in the 1970s had, because their idea of gender would differ so considerably. Because Le Guin can define the biology of the alien species however she likes, the sex of the aliens is undeniably androgynous. Conversely, the gender of the aliens can differ based on the perspective of the reader and their individual understanding of gender. This means that Weatherson’s claim that we experience imaginative resistance because an author writes a false relationship between lower-level and higher-level claims cannot always be true. In the case of gender, there is no such thing as an inherently false kind of relationship, only relationships that differ from current norms. Therefore, it seems like the author’s point of view should override whatever individual idea of gender the reader holds. The reader’s imaginative resistance cannot come from the author’s disregard for virtue relationships if there is no inherent and unchangeable relationship between gender expression and identity. 

My argument contradicts Weatherson’s solution to both the alethic and imaginative puzzles. Weatherson’s argument would posit that the aliens’ androgyny is not fictionally true because of the conflict between their lower-level characteristics and their supposed androgynous gender. In the section above, I argued that the author’s intention to make the aliens androgynous holds fictionally true since gender is not a universal or stable construct with an unchanging relationship between lower- and upper-level facts. With respect to the imaginative puzzle, Weatherson might argue that the reader cannot imagine the aliens as androgynous because their androgyny is not fictionally true. In contrast, I argue that some readers cannot imagine the aliens as androgynous because they have specific gender biases that the author does not. These gender biases are also the reason why the aliens’ androgyny does not seem fictionally true to these readers. I must note at this point, however, that The Left Hand of Darkness presents a specific case of imaginative resistance. Not all cases would present this problem. For example, many ethicists believe morality is universally true and does not depend, at its core, on period or location. Therefore, Weatherson’s account may be entirely adequate to describe cases involving morality, like “The Library.” Other philosophers have also considered the effects of social conditioning on imaginative resistance, and before concluding my paper, I would like to relate their argument to my own.

Throughout this paper, I have argued that Brian Weatherson’s account of imaginative resistance does not adequately explain the kind of imaginative resistance experienced by readers of The Left Hand of Darkness; the resistance of the reader is sparked by their socialization to view gender as a binary rather than some inherent contradiction within the text itself. Adriana Clavel-Vazquez makes a similar claim when she argues that the audience is less likely to align themselves with rough heroines than rough heroes. Rough protagonists in general are protagonists who act unabashedly bad without justifying their actions or showing remorse (Clavel-Vazquez 203). Clavel-Vazquez claims imaginative resistance to rough heroines arises because the audience’s conditioned gender biases make them see rough heroines not simply as bad people but as bad women (Clavel-Vazquez 208). Clavel-Vazquez’s argument centers around the audience’s conflation of gender and morality. In the case of The Left Hand of Darkness, however, the morality of the aliens does not play a large role in generating the imaginative resistance because every character besides the narrator is androgynous, and each exhibits different moral behaviors. While much of the literature on imaginative resistance focuses on morally deviant scenarios as examples to analyze, I believe that it can be extended to include not just morality but visual and cultural imagination. Therefore, I extend Clavel-Vazquez’s argument to apply not to the audience’s allegiance to certain characters, but their ability to imagine the appearance of those characters as they are described. 

Importantly, Clavel-Vazquez argues that imaginative resistance can be used as an artistic tool so that an audience member can overcome their resistance to characters that break social norms and through doing so, learn about and challenge their own biases (Clavel-Vazquez 209).  In The Left Hand of Darkness, the reader’s imaginative resistance is mirrored in the narrator, who initially relays his struggle to see the aliens as anything but men. However, by the end of the novel, the narrator realizes that “I saw then, again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man” (Le Guin 249). At this point of the story, the ideal reader should have come to a similar conclusion and faced less resistance to the idea of a person both man and woman. The work thereby provides exactly the political value Clavel-Vazquez speaks about in that it allows the reader to overcome their bias towards binary gender. In the future, they may be able to import their ability to imagine and therefore respect nonbinary people into the real world. Several literary scholars have praised this feature of The Left Hand of Darkness. Christine Cornell notes that “There is no doubt that the pronouns are an additional burden on the reader, but they are a valuable part of our education” (Cornell 323). In the real world, someone might face barriers to imaging nonbinary people as nonbinary, if they exhibit characteristics that are traditionally gendered within a binary. If we practice overcoming the association between traditionally gendered characteristics and gender binaries within the language of the novel, we simultaneously can practice overcoming that resistance in the physical world. Cornell identifies the usefulness of the “burden” of imaginative resistance: the process of reading the novel helps the reader to slowly overcome their initial bias towards binary gender and provides a gradual “education.” Moreover, the novel forces the reader to be aware of this transition because it takes place both in the protagonist and in themselves. 

Following in Clavel-Vazquez’s stead, I argue that this process of overcoming imaginative resistance points to its utility not just as a philosophical novelty but as a vitally important part of art and literature. If, as Brian Wetherson has suggested, imaginative resistance was an unchangeable property of certain relationships between lower-level and upper-level facts, it would be impossible to overcome in the first place. This would point to a static relationship between certain concepts (like gender, but also like race or class) and the qualities that determine the veracity of these concepts in particular people. Once it is taken as a given that in some cases, like in The Left Hand of Darkness, imaginative resistance can be overcome, its utility becomes clear. As Clavel-Vazquez argues, artists can purposefully generate resistance in the people who consume their art and then assist their audience in surmounting this resistance (Clavel-Vazquez 209). Particularly in the present moment when prejudice against nonbinary people continues to grow, educating citizens against these inherited prejudices is a vitally important task. The Left Hand of Darkness portrays a character learning to reduce his tendency to misgender nonbinary people. By reading the novel, the audience lessens their own tendency to do the same. 

* Additionally, human sex does not neatly fit into binary categories either, as intersex people are born with both male and female sexual characteristics. Some theorists also construe sex as an unstable phenomenon. However, for the purposes of this paper, the sex-gender distinction is useful because it appears that the reader is using this distinction to justify their claim that the aliens, despite being of androgynous sex, are gendered as male.

Bibliography

Clavel-Vazquez, Adriana. “Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice: What Rough Heroines Tell Us About Imaginative Resistance.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 76, no. 2, 2018, pp. 201–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12440.

Cornell, Christine. “The Interpretative Journey in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation, vol. 42, no. 4, Jan. 2001, pp. 317–27. https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2001.42.4.317.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Is Gender Necessary?” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Putnam, 1979, pp. 161–71.

—. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1st edition., Harper & Row, 1980.

Weatherson, Brian. “Morality, Fiction, and Possibility.” Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 4, 2004, pp. 1–27.