光幻之墟

Kings Who Engender Yin and Yang:
A Transgender Reading on Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Tales

Lucifer Hung





Sex and Gender Dissidence in Some Hainish Circle Stories


The Science Fiction Novels by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin could be either read
independently as single volumes and stories, or compounded together as a
linkage, which encircles the inter-galaxic continuum named the Ekumen(1).
The Hainish Circle is composed of several distinctive novels and short
story collections, dealing with issues of sex, gender, and class in a
supposed far-away future background of interstellar dynamics where the
universe is manufactured by ultra-ambitious, hyper-sensible and extremely
civilized Ekumen with their parent planet, Hain, as the main foundation.

The essentiality, motivation, dreams and visions of the Hainish Ekumen is
vividly described in a passage of the short story, Winter's King, which
is also a poignant conversation between two individuals with dissimilar
genders, exchanging and admiring each other's uniqueness(2). The intersexed
and gender-ambivalent young King on Gethen is the perceptive inquiring
voice, and the elder Plenipotentiary, a Hain-born male, answers with candid
sincerity and admiration toward the sensitive, exquisite Winter's king.
The young king Argaven XVII, though trapped in the court conspiracy and
mind-controlled to some extent, is a brilliant youth; the passionate and
tragic relationship between the king and hiis(3) cousin, lord Gerer, not
unlike the relation between Therem Estraven, the King's Ear, and hiis
elder brother Arek, might be read as a transgender butches' anguished love
story. The intimate closeness between the king and the plenipotentiary Axt
is a bond which acknowledges their mutual difference and complexity, forming
their friendship out of the appreciation for "the difference as beauty"(4).
This later story might serves as a sharp contrast to the xenophobic and
homophobic tone implored by one of main characters in The Left Hand of
Darkness, an earth-born male envoy, Genly Ai when facing the radical gender
otherness of planet Winter's individuals.


Beside a wanton phobia projected out of a straight male's mind, there is
also the closeted desire within Genly Ai longing for that mysterious,
cryptic, yet charismatic Estraven. Within the doubled Taichi circle, where
the yin and yang meets as the thematic duet of loyalty and rebellion, there
is also a love-hate dynamic which underlines the untold passion denied both
by the alien-as-a-straight-male and the indigenous ambisexual Estraven
whose undying erotic desire is toward "the same", hiis sibling. It could
also be possible to read this tale in a homoerotic allegory, where the
straight-as-outsider both resents and dreams to be one of the members in a
community where he is forever excluded; yet the appropriation and
incorporation in this tale is a reversal to the conventional narrative in
which the homosexual or the ambiguously-gendered protagonist got converted
in the end. In this narrative, even with its reticent tone, what comes out
triumphant is the straight male character's unspeakable passion for the
Other, which has to be voiced and channeled in the "mind-speech" dialogue.
What is accomplished in the major turn-out scene of this story is when
Genly Ai recognized and "accepted" Estraven's "double" gender identity,
that he is indeed s/he. However, the "he" in this book stands alone as a
transgender identity no bio-male could dethrone; what is revealed in the
book even suggests that both agony and envy in Genly Ai is the product of
unspoken sexual drive for a transgender love object.


The his-story in this book and some stories of the Hainish circle suggests
a promising key toward a transgender identity occupying the linguistic
masculine identity, but it is also an unsolved issue concerning language,
gender, and power struggle since this book's publishing in late 1960.










1. "The Hainish Circle" is loosely composed of several stand-alone novels
and short stories; here is a rough list according to the publishing date.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion (Trilogy)
Rocannon's World (1966)
Planet of Exile (1966)
City of Illusions (1967)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Remembering Tomorrow) (1969)
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (short story collection) (1975)
The Word for World Is Forest (1976)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
The Telling (2000)
The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories (short story collection) (2002)



2. "Once you said, lord Axt, that different as I am from you, and different
as my people are from yours, yet we are blood kind. Was that a moral fact,
or a material one?"

Axt smiled at the very Karhidish distinction. "Both, my lord. As far as
we know, which is a tiny corner of dusty space under the rafters of the
Universe, all the people we've run into are in fact human. But the kinship
goes back a million years and more, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient
Hainish settled a hundred worlds."

"We call the time before my dynasty ruled Karhide 'ancient.' Seven hundred
years ago!"

"So we call the age of the Enemy 'ancient,' and that was less than six
hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the
age, with the star; does all except reverse itself - or repeat."

"The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient
commonalty; to regather all the peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?"

Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. "To weave some harmony between them,
at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace
complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds
and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them -
together they would make a splendid harmony."

"No harmony endures," said the young king.

"None has ever been achieved," said the Plenipotentiary. "The pleasure
is in trying."

(Excerpt from Winter's King, a short story which appears in The Wind's
Twelve Quarters.)



3. In this section, I deliberately use the third person pronoun as hee/hiis/
hiis to stress on the dissimilarity of a transgender character; however,
in the second and the third part, I use the italic fashion of he/his/his
to emphasize the distinctive yet subtle difference of a queer masculine
subject from a straight bio-male; also I use the italic version of she/
her/her when I address a femme-like character.

4. It is a phrase in Winter's King.