光幻之墟

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




His-Story Retold: A Butch/Femme Reading of The Left Hand of Darkness
and its Hainish Siblings

It would be much more enriching to read this tale not only in a literal sense of
biological otherness, but also the allegory of the always-gendered body. Within the
framework of certain feminisms, their dissatisfaction about Gethenians' sex and
gender might be a product of doubt that the effect of this narrative is likely to place
the benefit of queer gender/sex into "male side", and thus deprive androgyny or
hermaphrodite of their female authentic origin; or it is also possibly a straight mind's
hesitation, that the critical paradigm could not view this multi-gendered community
within the context of queer gender/sexuality. Since the author, even in the first
edition's introduction in 1968, deftly emphasizes that the readers should read the
sex/gender of Winter's people in a metaphorical perception, it is absolutely crucial to
understand that this emblematic tale is as much as the description of certain
contemporary life as far-future imagination . In this section, I argue that this reading
based on butch/femme and transgender discourse is much as "realistic" as the reading
based on assumptions of hetero-reproductive network. By their different and deviantly
gendered body, the Gethenians occupy different parts of a lunar circle; they are "a
race of people who are essentially sexless except for a few days a month, when they
become very highly sexed either as male or female"(in the afterword of the new
edition of The Left Hand of Darkness, 1994). The hermaphrodite sex or abundantly
gendered body must not be viewed literally, but read metonymically via its meanings,
its excessiveness and remainder-as-effect on corporal form outside normative
expressive system. If we read these presentations of sex and gender through a queer
spectrum, either highly masculine or feminine bodies and their characteristics of
Gethenians could be appropriated as distinctive performatives, by which a butch or a
femme develops the distinctive "sexed" self.

In a realistic and metaphorical locus, this body as allegory of other-gender suggests an
"unrepresentable" metonymical closet where the body, sex, and language of a
transgender subject is both imprisoned and exiled, much as the meaning and
metaphors of fables within the main plot, especially The Place Inside the Blizzard or
Estraven the Traitor. These stories dwelt along the master narrative, like parasites
within the host's body; they also produce some illuminative sparks to shed light on
the agony which the main plot cautiously shields away. These fables, with surprising
strength and no-nonsense attitude, deal with outlaw desire, incestuous passion
("brothers" as lovers or intergenerational sex) or tragic loss. They are like remainders
in a doomed subject's unconsciousness, constituted in an allegorical expression to
bring out the unspeakable traumatic subject's sinful past or deadly secret, to release
them in a way that regular system prohibits the subject to accomplish. Therefore, the
usual reading of this book is as reticent as a "normal" gendered body. However, under
the attention of transgender reading, these alternately gendered subjects, along with
their his-or-her-story, could be free of the heterosexual-plus-homogenous
interpretation which denies their recalcitrant subjectivity; they could reclaim a
primordial real in signification of both outlaw status and its obstinate anecdote, much
like the dark and anti-heroic Estraven issuing his voice in an enigmatic self-exiled
way.

Thus, under the limelight of butch/femme interpretative framework, we might read
these characters in a milieu where queer gender/sexuality weaves them into a splendid
tapestry. On this tapestry, various butch/femme personifications idiosyncratically
stand out, and within it the eccentric, shadowy Estraven stands out as the central
figure. As an individual who burdens himself with concealed, tragic past, also with a
muscular stocky body, Estraven could be perceived as a Hitchcliff-esque uncle butch .
Under the same reading framework, Estraven's long-term lover Foreth rem ir Osborth
and his elder brother Arek are two figures representing certain butch/femme types.
The former one's image and character is very much as a tough femme's sharp
unyielding persona, yet the later could either be an androgynous undeveloped youth
or a tomboy who dies young. Since even within the context of free-flowing sexuality
of Gethen, there are still condemnable transgressions, thus, that Estraven painfully
loves and mourns his deceased brother reveals the possibility of two tomboys in love
and produces an enigmatic taboo, in which incestuous love between brothers born of
the same "flesh parent" are severely punished and outlawed. As for the two kings
appeared respectively in The Left Hand of Darkness and Winter's King, the first one
is that archetypical, unreasonable and ultra-negative Argaven XV, who is charged
relentlessly with low manhood and foul womanhood, exposed under a xenophobic
gaze. However, the uncanny power is born exactly to the low, vulgar character of this
degraded king: Argaven XV expresses his twisted, "dragqueen-like" effeminate
characteristics with clown-like gestures and a campy posture so dramatically that this
incorrect "effeminate" king, hated by both the narrator and (perhaps) the author's
unconsciousness, not only disrupts that anxious hostile gaze of the straight bio-male
envoy, but this campy embodiment as a returned gaze prominently reverses the
legitimate power positions between the gazer and the gazed, and thus places the gazer
into a helpless bottom position.

Almost on the contrary, King Argaven XVII is the dazzling eternal youth and tragic
beautiful hero, behold under the cherishing eyes of the sympathizing Hainish male
ambassador and other characters; his story with his heir as infantile monster and the
subtly transformed "reverse Oedipus twist" portraits a vivid picture in which a
princely butch suffers a traumatic father figure. As for the "mage-hermit" pair, the
arch-mage teacher Faxe and the apprentice Goss, they are two enchanting types of
femmes: Goss is a sharp witty young femme and Faxe an ancient wizardry high
femme with hermaphrodite aesthetics. They are two exceptional characters among
Winter's people excluded from judgmental attitude of the narrator and regarded
benignly by Genly Ai. The mischievous apprentice is a delicate girly youth who
teases the straight male into relaxation, and the teacher is gifted with supreme power
of foretelling and profound wisdom. One of the most spellbinding passages of this
book should be Faxe's transformation into which s/he became "a woman in light",
and it is the divinity of Ying that s/he represents. In that scene, s/he is armored with
"holy radiance", prophesying a striking future. It is Faxe who embodies a sublime
"divine femme" archetype that touches the core of the compulsively gender-blind
earth envoy and releases the light of redemption.