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So I have a final book list for my Gender & Spec Fic course:

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Marge Piercy, Woman at the Edge of Time
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing
Tamora Pierce, In The Hand of the Goddess
Ursula K. LeGuin, Tehanu
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Plus stories/essays by Johanna Russ, Kameron Hurley, Carol Clover, Gilbert & Gubar, and a showing of Firefly, plus a handful of blog entries to keep us modern/edgy. O yeah.

Started watching Farscape last night, from the beginning. Man, this show is weird. But then again, Claudia Black is hot like fire.

Is it bad that I'm more excited for House Season Five than I am for Supernatural Four? It's just that House is in this great shiny place with all these possibilities, and Supernatural is stuck in this plotline that I really don't like. All the tropes and relationships and arcs that I really liked have faded away - I want Sammy to keep being the emo little brother with troubling mindpowers, and Dean to keep being the rebellious child-parent with daddy issues who figures his own self-worth through his brother. and the show keeps taking them farther and farther from that.

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See, and this is why I'm seriously considering wandering off on Supernatural. It's almost not worth it anymore. The only thing the makes it still worth my time is watching it with people.

But BONES!! Bones is my happy place (the season 3 finale didn't happen). House is awesome as well, though since its tear-jerker finale came on the heels of Bones's wrenching, sobbing, unbelievable finale (which didn't happen), I cried for like, four hours that night.

So I should watch Bones? I just keep having this problem where I'm all "Hi Angel, hi!" all the time, and it doesn't quite work.

Supernatural gets one more season - half of one if they keep mucking it up as badly as the last. But I still love seasons one & two, so I have to hope just a little bit that the magic will come back. We will see.

Have read The Dispossessed and Tehanu. Tehanu definitely talks a lot about gender issues, but it's, uh, the fourth in a series. You guys should at least read The Tombs of Atuan first, because Tehanu is all about Tenar, and without Atuan you don't really know who Tenar is, and what her relationship is to Ged. And tell me a place that's all women and eunuchs doesn't lend itself to gender studies!

I'm thinking about The Dispossesed here, and I think it was more a general social commentary than specifically a gender one. I'm surprised The Left Hand of Darkness wasn't picked, unless you did it already--or are saving the best for last. ...or maybe it's because the Left Hand of Darkness doesn't have any actual women in it? LOL.

Left Hand of Darkness was on there, but it's ... kind of not that successful. LeGuin mentions it herself. Estraven comes off as a man with some womanliness, not as a true androgyne. Both my mentor and I prefer The Dispossessed as a book, so we picked up "Winter's King," a short story set in the LHOD universe, instead.

I would love to get Atuan on the list, being as it's my favorite by far, but I'm already having to fight for Tehanu, and I feel like Tehanu is a necessary element - it's a book about the quiet necessity of women's work in a world where there are dragons, and nobody else talks about that sort of thing.

But I would pretty much teach a Just-LeGuin Course if I thought that anyone would let me!

O rly? I liked Left Hand of Darkness better myself. Not that The Dispossessed wasn't good and all, but I don't know, somehow it missed a chord that LHoD struck for me. But this is all personal opinion, clearly. Myself, I wonder if you can accuse an androgyne of not being close enough to one gender or another when they come from a world where all these social differences between men and women never developed. Besides, if Estraven had ever gotten pregnant, I'm sure s/he would have shown a more nurturing side, but instead s/he was more concerned with things like politics and survival in the book, which might come off as masculine to someone in our culture? Idk, even if Le Guin herself says she thinks she wrote him too masculine, I disagree, and think you could write a heroine in a standard male/female world with Estraven's personality, and it wouldn't be weird. If anything, we just don't see enough of Estraven, since it's filtered through Genly Ai's alienness and confusion.

And dude, if there were Just-LeGuin courses, I wouldn't have dropped out of school. XD

No, I know what you mean. I guess I just feel like it would have been a better book if she had chosen to show him as doing stereotypically feminine as well as masculine things. Also, LHOD was back when she still hadn't figured out that "he" is not a neutral pronoun, and I'm sensitive to that sort of thing.

I've also got the course way loaded down with her nonfiction, which I love almost more than her novels. I could listen to her talk all day, and I'm kind of forcing my students to do the same :)

But that doesn't quite make sense to me, how would stereotypical male or stereotypical female things develop in a world without that dichotomy? It makes more sense that the people would just be themselves, without all that gender stuff to mess them up.

As for pronouns, well, English is kind of lacking in good neutral pronouns. There's the s/he and hir thing, but that reads a bit oddly. Instead of being "invisible" in a sentence like "him" or "her," it constantly draws your attention to the pronoun rather than the sentence. Some non-fiction books talking about a general topic that do not wish to be gender-specific (a book on child-rearing that could apply equally to sons and daughters, for example) will switch pronouns every chapter in the name of fairness, but that also seems weird to do in a novel. There's "it," but that's considered offensive and dehumanizing, something used for inanimate objects instead of people.

I think a good case could be made for calling the androgynes in LHoD by female pronouns, since this is what's done with single-gender species on Earth. Then again, English is a pretty sexist language, and while in biology female is the default, in English male is the default. With "man" and "woman," man is the base, and woman is marked. Older styles of writing refer to all humans as "men," or "mankind." Calling them by male pronouns might not indicate maleness of the people or even bias of the author, but more bias of Genly Ai and the Ekumen, or even bias of the language itself.

When I read LH0D, I make "he" a neutral pronoun.

I haven't seen her nonfiction around. Got some titles to rec? I'll find it somewhere and read it. :D

And also, I meant to say this in my earlier comment, but I didn't know about Winter's King. What collection is that in? I read Coming of Age in Karhide, which was in Birthday of the World, but I didn't know she had another short story in that universe.

Winter's King is in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

Okay, so when I'm talking about gender roles I'm thinking extratextually - both the reader and the author are not Gethenian, and we have all the usual prejudices and stereotypes available to us. You're totally right that Gethenians would not think of themselves in those terms, but we certainly do. It's like your point with the female pronouns. In order to not make Estraven just a guy who can have babies, LeGuin has to swim upstream against our linguistic and cultural assumptions.

She actually goes into this in a fabulous double essay, "Is Gender Necessary: Redux." The first part was written in the 70s, and then in the late 90s she came back to it, annotated it, and printed those annotations along with the original piece so that you can see her in dialogue with herself. It's been printed in two of her books: "The Language of the Night," which deals with sf/f, and "Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places." Both of those collections are excellent; this last winter I found her newest, "The Wave in the Mind," and I've been having a love affair with it ever since.

As far as pronouns go, I favor "their," which is perfectly grammatical and was english standard for a long time before someone decided our language had to look more like Latin.

Ooh, will read. Just got Lavinia on loan from the library, so I'll probably finish that up first, but then it's straight on to her nonfiction.

They/their is actually a pretty cool neutral pronoun. I've stood up to people who told me it was grammatically incorrect, since I happen to like it. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. It might be a smidge confusing to write a whole novel that way, I'm not sure, but it certainly has possibilities.

IIRC, Le Guin's stance on fanfic is that it's something of a violation of her imagination, and if you do it she doesn't want to know about it, which is actually a pretty cool standpoint by my POV, as she's not outright forbidding it, and I think it can be detrimental when the original creator gets too involved in fandom. That said, I've never really wanted to write fanfic for her works, or read much of it, simply because what she wrote satisfied me. I did see some Earthsea fics around, which was inevitable given the miniseries and Goro Miyazaki's film, but not much else. So, now I'm wondering, has anyone written good LHoD fanfic?

None that I've ever seen, alas.

musesfool has written some lovely Ged/Tenar, though.

I read Lavinia this summer. Its lovely, very Atwood-esque.

I would love to write Earthsea fanfiction, but I can't. It's like this perfect little thing that just hangs in my mind like a static, enclosed jewel. I can't find any way in, can't think of anything in particular to write, but oh I love it so.

Hang with it my friend. We have a gang of LOST lovers that I turned on to Farscape and I now have four of them so hooked they are amazed the show eluded them all this time. They are getting into Season 3 now and have been hooked since The Hidden Memory in Season 1, when Scorpius is introduced. THAT is when the show really finds it's footing and takes off for most. We have a LOST website http://lostroom23.blogspot.com as well as a Farscape and general scifi site http://thefarscapeproject.blogspot.com where we share stories on our favorite shows. We also have a wonderful chat room we connect from AICN. Drop by if you find the time.

Scaper at heart.

Edshrinker

ehansen@nc.rr.com

Genderbending or Occupation?

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