WORK
The Left Hand of Darkness
Le
Guin's 1969 novel set on Gethen (Winter), a planet of ambisexual humans who spend most of each month without gender — Genly Ai's journey with Estraven across an ice sheet, learning to see beyond the categories his culture imposed.
Ursula K. Le Guin's
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) follows Genly Ai, a human envoy from the Ekumen (an interstellar confederation), on the planet Gethen, called Winter by its inhabitants. Gethenians are ambisexual: they spend three weeks of each month in a dormant sexual state (somer) and enter kemmer (sexual receptivity) for a few days, during which they may become male or female depending on context and partner. Genly Ai cannot see them clearly — his perception is organized by the gender binary his
culture imposed — until he crosses eight hundred miles of ice sheet with Estraven, a Gethenian politician exiled for helping him. The
crossing strips away the categories. Genly learns to perceive Estraven as a person rather than as a man-who-is-sometimes-a-woman. The novel won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, established Le Guin's reputation, and became a founding text of feminist SF. Its achievement is not the invention of an