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Originally Posted by caleb72
I've read only a couple of this list - Atwood and Le Guin. Loved both of them. I never thought of Left Hand of Darkness as a book about women though. I thought it was more about gender identity and challenging perceptions of sexuality and relationships. But I guess if you're desperate to get Ursula Le Guin on the list, why not?
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I would argue that to create and explore metaphors of gender identity
is to discuss the idea of women, in the sense that any gender role which is imposed -- mapped out for someone who might not even desire it -- is arbitrary, yet, in a given society, is seen as so ineradicably and ineffably true that it sears and stars the object to the point of reactive adaptation. Merely to contemplate that issue from different sides -- the enforcer and the enforced upon -- is to consider the idea of being a woman in an overly prescriptive society.
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I was expecting to find The Female Man on there by Joanna Russ. I haven't read it so I can't vouch for its quality, but it's a novel I've often heard mentioned in the context of feminist novels.
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I actually got to meet Joanna Russ a few times and recall
The Female Man quite fondly. But the books on my personal list are there primarily because of the level of the writing as well as the clarity of the insight of the writer. I don't know that
The Female Man, as important as it was, bears scrutiny as well as the other books I've mentioned. In
The Bloody Chamber, for example, Angela Carter crafts prose so rich she seems to alternate between jeweler and chocolatier. Sometimes she's both at once.