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Originally Posted by Dazrin
Jumping back to an early comment:
I'm not quite done (maybe there's some in the part I haven't finished, hopefully tomorrow) but I didn't see any reference I would take as derogatory to gays. The closest I remember is this passage.
I took that to mean that Le Guin didn't want to deal with that particular topic in this book, she was already diving in enough with what she did include, so she set it up to be a non-issue on Winter. That said, given the cultures of Winter, I doubt a same-sex kemmer partner would be an issue. Unusual, yes but just due to their biology, but nothing beyond that.
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It is more the way the Ekumen views homosexuals. While homosexuality is a strange oddity on Gethen (and implicitly falls into the category of the Perverts), what bothers me more is how it is viewed by the Ekumen. Genly Ai has no experience with anything but an incredibly simple from-birth binary. Is this how the glorious Ekumen has evolved?
This is from
Ada: A Journal of New Media, Gender and Technology -
Quote:
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Le Guin apologetically acknowledges that she locked Gethenians into heterosexuality. She states that this was based on a “naively pragmatic view of sex,” and asserts that homosexual activities would transpire on Gethen and that, without a rigidly gendered society, homosexual practices would be widely accepted. This admission is likely in response to more recent criticism of the 1980s like the article “Again, The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny or Homophobia?” by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith, published just two years prior to “Redux.”
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I'm not blaming her for not going the one step further in being radical on heteronormative issues. I agree with others that it likely would have narrowed her audience further and risked shelving the book. But it is one of the reasons why it does not age well for me.
(It does irk me a little that she went into recovery mode a bit in response to criticism. This sounds much like JK Rowling's insistence after the completion of publication that Dumbledore was gay.)