Chapter 3: GENDER.

Science fiction; Gender; Feminist science fiction; Feminism; Women authors; Left Hand of Darkness, The (Book : Le Guin)

The chapter explores various aspects of the representation of gender concerns in science fiction (SF) by examining some features of feminist science fiction writing. Women's science fiction, or feminist science fiction, is a more recent development than the genre as a whole, but today constitutes one of the most exciting and most vigorous aspects of the mode, in terms both of actual SF texts and of criticism. It is also, following on from the previous chapter, a development that dates primarily from the 1960s, one that has grown up in dialogue with the more male-oriented SF of the Pulps and the Golden Age. It is worth noting how contentious Le Guin's position is within the body of female SF, as a means of pointing up that female SF is not a straightforwardly or narrowly single quantity. The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the acknowledged classics of SF; it won, for instance, both a Hugo and a Nebula award, the two most prestigious awards in SF publishing. But much of the feminist criticism of Le Guin is rather cold, sometimes dismissive, and occasionally outright hostile. Critic Sarah Lefanu finds Le Guin's writing fatally limited, too character-based to be SF at all, and not very well realized as character studies either. One of the reasons why feminist criticism of SF has a radicalism that seems almost old-fashioned when compared with the subtler, more complex feminisms that characterize criticism as a whole is that women are a relatively recent arrival in the realm of SF writing itself.