光幻之墟

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




Real King is the Drag-King: Bodily Performatives and Linguistic Metonymy
on the King (who might be) Pregnant


With its outstanding accomplishment as one of the classic science fiction
narratives presenting non-conventional gender issues in a sophisticated
and speculative voice, The Left Hand of Darkness is an ambivalent example
viewed by variant gender/sexual discourses. Much as it has been praised t
remendously and placed alongside with texts by Joanna Russ (The Female Man),
Samuel R. Delany (Triton), and Theodore Sturgeon (Venus Plus X), this book
has gained some more mainstream literary acclaim than those which were
treated as genre fiction only; yet it also has been put in a position
much more severely examined than its contemporary peers. It has suffered
considerable feminist critique for its conservative outlook on intersexed
and differently-gendered subjects and the conformist-imagined dichotomy of
female/male framework.

A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated,
however indirect and subtle...One winter they will not exist. One is
respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
(p. 95)

With this stereotypical assertion from the voice of the female observer of
this book, it is only too logical for feminist critics to charge against
the "appalling" sex/gender paradigm and undercurrent of the sexist tone,
which the author subtly attributed as the sole responsibility of the
incorrigible old-fashioned earth-born straight male narrator. However, it
could not be disavowed that since the author identifies herself with the
female and peace-loving anthropologist, Ong Tot Oppong, who in her field
notes implies an undeniable sexist position and strong xenophobia, that
it cannot escape this attitude might be in fact be the stand-in anxiety
and back-lash of the author, which originates itself exactly in Winter
people's eccentric gender identity. For any kind of feminist-based
critique, such "appalling experience" is but yet the starting point to
achieve, not to mention there are many types of transgression termed as
unimaginable or offensive even in the pan-sexual or multi-gender ideal
ground these feminism-based futures provides. At that time, when this
book was just published, it is all very just to accuse this text with
the charge that it is ant-feminism guised in the expression of another
sex like androgyny or hermaphrodite; among these critical issues, the
most contentious and up-to-date one is the third person's gendered pronoun.

As for the response of the author confronting the critical charge, it has
been a long-time development that it could also be a microscopic
"evolutional" process of gender-related theme by a highly acclaimed
literary writer. In the first version of the essay "Is Gender Necessary?"
in the year 1976, Le Guin heatedly retorted the oppositional critical
point by a highlighted, bitterly sarcastic stance.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, in her revision of "Is Gender Necessary?
Redux," (1988) the author clarified the former decision to use the
masculine pronoun in Left Hand of Darkness, and, at the same time,
regretted for doing so without being conscious of being manipulated by
the linguistic/gender manipulative trick: "if I had realized how the
pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my thinking, I might have
been 'cleverer'." (p. 15).

Even in the new and firm consciousness of her feminist stand-in ground,
Le Guin's repenting declaration unfortunately serves not much more than
the mainstream political correctness in a conservative feminist agenda,
which condemns both the bio-male and masculinity into the bottomless pit,
with many other gender identities associated with the masculine continuum.
Not only it is appalling to connect once more the false linkage between
the bio-male and the gendered masculinity, it is very lacking to address
the masculine pronoun "he" as something which "means what it says, no
more, no less alas!" and leave it in an illusionary package where the
biological male occupies the doubled chain securing the linguistic and
gender archetype. By refuting this false linguistic and sex/gender chain,
here I shall propose a transgender reading which might dismantle this
disjointed chain.

Even though the anthropologist in this novel insists that "the very use of
the pronoun leads me continually forget that the Karhider I am with is not
a man, but a manwoman."(95), it is such an ambivalent proclamation which
both overlooks the complexity of gender diversity, and, at the same token,
confirms that the gender identity is so dominated by the linguistic usage.
In queerizing this sentence, a "manwoman"(or a butch) is much more the man
in this statement than the normative male. My approach to view the masculine
side of the "manwoman" in this text is not to avoid its maleness, but
attributing its masculine qualities to the queerized form of the hyper-
masculinity. By which reading strategy I intend to read it via the
masculinity of a god or any "other" divine/demonic being: Such beings,
with their masculinity so grandiloquent or unearthly that it departs
radically from the location where biological human male partakes. Since
the extremely phobic and sexist earth envoy uses any kind of gender
stereotype to attack the not-so-orthodox masculine identity like the
gloomy yet sophisticated Estraven or the mad king Argaven XV, the only
bias is none but their biological sex doesn't "fit" in the categorized
female/male binary system. Thus, it is self-evidently contradictory to
charge the pronoun "he" used in expressing Gethen people's sex as a
contribution adding to the bio-male's side. It's only those who view
gender and sexuality rigidly through the straight mind would neglect
the fact that the "he" in The Left Hand of Darkness, along with other
texts in addressing queer masculine subjects, is by no means the "pseudo-
malehood" which some feminism discourses oppose passionately, but in
itself a self-crested and unique gender identity(5). Even if it is a certain
form of malehood, it's always already the dissident queer masculinity,
such as the king who might be pregnant.

As the manifestation of the divine or the otherness, the capitalized HE
or the dissident he(斜體） dwells outside the regular system to the
extent that it is impossible to link the metonymic chain between the
"masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god" (94) to any
normative biological male. Exactly because of this "trans-cendent god" is
so TRANS-gendered that HE could only be(come) one of those queer masculine
subjects outside/beyond the normative straight system. Since either be the
god or the excessively ambiguous Winter's king, their REAL essentiality
is so divine and Other that there is a fundamental rupture separating HE
from any biological male. The His-story could only be embodied by a
category which qualifies as both the fantasmatic and excessive masculinity.
Only via such reading strategy could we rid The Left Hand of Darkness of
a unfitting interpretation almost completely based on a rigid hetero-
reproductive structure. These queer masculine subjects who roughly form
an unholy brotherhood under the relatively open umbrella of transgender
identity, occupy and formulate inter-connecting kinship identities like
hard-boiled stone butch, tom-boy, dragking, the inter-sexed, cross-dresser,
passing woman, trans-man; among these identities, the most appropriate
candidate is no other than the debonair, hyperbolical dragking who by HIS
larger-than-life realization of the masculine transgression embodies, in
the phantasmatic real realm, the true king of Winter.





5. Within the contemporary discourse of female masculinity, though the
dialogue between feminists and subjects of queer masculinity still
dominates many important territories, among different voices of a
masculine continuum, there are debates which are by far more in need
of both academic and activists' attention. The differentiation of the
sexed body in terms of embodiment and sex change of Winter's people,
might be read as a trope of gender differences which form a spectrum
of variation and tension in the community of queer masculinity. Among
these issues, the one exemplifying the tension most piercingly is what
Judith Halberstam terms as "butch/FTM borderwars" between lesbian
butches and transsexual men, two queer brothers "in war" to claim the
sovereign legitimacy on a masculine battlefield:

"As the visibility of a transsexual community grows at the end of the
twentieth century and as FTMS become increasingly visible within that
community, questions about the viability of queer butch identities become
unavoildable. Some butches consider FTMS to be butches who believe anatomy,
and some FTMS consider butches to be FTMS who are too afraid to make the
"transition" from female to male. The borderwars between transgender
butches and FTMS presume that masculinity is a limited resource, available
only to a few in ever decreasing quantities." (144)