Science Fiction and American Culture » November 13: The Dispossessed (Part I)

November 13: The Dispossessed (Part I)

Plan for the Day

I recently came across a very interesting biological studies discussion calling into question gender as binary: “Is sex still binary?”

American Culture

I’ve been trying to work in “Celebrating Ignorance” from November 1st’s webpage for two weeks now, which is surprising because I’m never behind. Anyway, let’s take a look.

Gloria Steinem’s “Why Younger Women are More Conservative”

Gloria Steinem focuses her attention in this article (no, it wasn’t assigned) on young women. She tells us that young women are more conservative–more likely to go along with the status quo–because they are “in the stage most valued by male-dominant cultures” (230). While you’re free to disagree with her argument, let’s try to point to areas where young, conventionally beautiful women appear in the media.

Some specific points about Steinem’s article:

  • p. 230: “As students, women are probably treated with more equality than we ever will be again. For one thing, we’re consumers.”
  • p. 230: Young women “have [their] full potential as workers, wives, sex partners, and childbearers.”
  • p. 232: Women “worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career” while college students.
  • p. 232: Women “are still brainwashed into assuming that [they] are dependent on men for [their] basic identities.”
  • p. 233: “Society tries hard to convert women into ‘man junkies’; that is, into people who are addicted to male-approval and presence.”
  • p. 233: Young women may “refrain from identifying themselves as ‘feminist.'”

Steinem, Gloria. “Why Young Women are More Conservative.” Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 2nd ed. Henry Holt, 1995, 229-237. [Originally published in Ms. Magazine as “The Good News Is: These Are Not the Best Years of Your Life,” Sept. 1979, 64.]

Gender/Sexuality

I have a goal for this topic related to language. Although Le Guin’s book is pretty radical about sexuality, it’s not beyond critique for its heteronormative portrayals. This past weekend at the SAMLA 95 conference, the phrase “sexual minorities” came up. The phrase has been around for a while, but it’s, in my cisgender/hetero/male opinion, not the best phrase. It’s not a terrible phrase, but it subjects individuals to an identity related to sexual attraction and different from the heterosexual norm. Let’s unpack this through Judith Butler’s argument on language constituting an identity:

…heterosexual privilege operates in many ways, and two ways in which it operates include naturalizing itself and rendering itself as the original and the norm.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter, On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 2011: 85.

Butler’s Lacanian analysis on how subjects symbolically identify their gender and sexuality:

Lacan insists that the body as a visual projection or imaginary formation cannot be sustained except through submitting to…the law of sexual differentiation. In “The Mirror Stage,” Lacan remarks that the ego is produced “in a fictional direction,” that its contouring and projection are psychic works of fiction; this fictional directionality is arrested and immobilized through the emergence of a symbolic order that legitimates sexually differentiated fictions as “positions.” As a visual fiction, the ego is inevitably a site of méconnaissance; the sexing of the ego by the symbolic seeks to subdue this instability of the ego, understood as an imaginary formation.

Here it seems crucial to ask where and how language emerges to effect this stabilizing function, particularly for the fixing of sexed positions. The capacity of language to fix such positions, that is, to enact its symbolic effects, depends upon the permanence and fixity of the symbolic domain itself, the domain of signifiability or intelligibility….

The phallus functions as a synecdoche, for insofar as it is a figure of the penis, it constitutes an idealization and isolation of a body part and, further, the investment of that part with the force of symbolic law….According to the symbolic, then, the assumption of sex takes place through an approximation of this synecdochal reduction. This is the means by which a body assumes sexed integrity as masculine or feminine: the sexed integrity of the body is paradoxically achieved through an identification with its reduction into idealized synecdoche (“having” or “being” the phallus).

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter, On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 2011: 96.

Very straightforward explanation, right? Let’s define a couple terms:

  • méconnaissance: fancy French term for misrecognition, but it’s often not translated when quoting Jacques Lacan.
  • synecdoche: in rhetorical theory, this refers to a part that represents the whole
    Fonzie, those are cool threads uses a part of the clothing to refer to Fonzie’s entire outfit.
  • “The Mirror Stage”: from psychoanalysis, this is when infants recognize their subjectivity–they look outside themselves and develop their sense of “I”.
  • “The Symbolic”: the unconscious ordering of the self; “the pact which links…subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts” (Freud’s Papers 230)
    Lacan, Jacques. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1. Trans. John Forrester. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Norton, 1991.

If you have a free summer, I suggest reading Freud and Lacan to really immerse yourself in psychoanalysis…For today, let’s consider the argument that we construct our identities through language, a socially constructed medium. And we agree (or have been made to agree) what the words mean in order to construct identities that “make sense” to others in a culture. Also, we (re)construct the identities of others with words…

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

It might be helpful to look at Louis Althusser’s definitions of State Apparatuses:

…we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular significance):
the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),
the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’),
the family ISA,
the legal ISA,
the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),
the trade union ISA,
the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sport, etc.).

Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2014.

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel takes a radical view of gender/ed roles and makes you think about why we have such things as absolute. Our goal isn’t necessarily to try to find out why society has prescribed roles for men and women and attributes associated with masculinity and femininity; instead, we need to identify how those roles affect subjects in society. The first step is identifying them and recognizing that they–gender roles–are all part of the cultural menu that we “freely” pick and choose from.

Le Guin on Science Fiction and Gender

Le Guin refers to her science fiction writing as “question-asking: reversals of an habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination” (163, emphasis added). She also writes, “They are questions, not answers; process, not stasis” (163), so you probably know why I assign her work. Le Guin’s work envisions (until I explain why it doesn’t) radical rethinking of gender roles. When discussing The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a novel about a planet of ambisexual inhabitants, she explains, “To me the ‘female principle’ is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power-structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws” (165). While this is essentialist thinking to some extent, Le Guin should be credited with pushing the envelop. Compared to Mary Wollstonecraft, she’s quite radical, and she’s radical for contemporary times where neofascism seeks to re-entrench gender/ed roles.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Is Gender Necessary?” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood and Ursula K. Le Guin. HarperCollins, 1976. 161-169.

Define these words

  • Extreme: attitudes, beliefs, practices, behaviors, etc. that are consider far outside of the mainstream or “middle of the road” thinkers/citizens
  • Radical: complete or an attempt to completely rethink the situation; radical views on culture advocate total rethinking or restructuring of the system

Although the author isn’t the sole arbiter of meaning, I think it’s important to consider that this novel is dedicated as, “For the Partner.”

Le Guin’s “A Left-Handed Commencement Address”

In this commencement address, LeGuin raises the issue of a woman’s “place” in society. Sure, the address is from 1983, but I think we can continue to point to contemporary situations where women’s roles are defined in relation to men: think hegemony and patriarchy.

  • para 2: “Intellectual tradition is male”; therefore, men are the standard in academic circles and their modes of discourse are seen as the norm.
  • para 3: If you want kids, have them…
  • para 4: “Success is somebody else’s failure.”
  • para 5: “You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you.”
  • para 7: View of society–“The so-called man’s world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power.”
  • para 7 & 8: What’s her issue with Machoman?
  • para 9: To live in a world “without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated.”

How might we read Le Guin’s address as a text that addresses compulsory heterosexuality?

Compulsory Heterosexuality: (Adrienne Rich) “women may not have a preference toward heterosexuality, but may find it imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by society.”

Topics to Consider–time permitting

Because this is a two-part discussion on the novel, I’m going to go against LeGuin’s attempt to get us to think nonlinearly and try to focus on the first half or so of the book and ground us in some important topics. I know this is a long book, so, if you’re not completely done, that’s fine, but don’t expect us to give away the ending today! You’ll need to keep reading. We’ll try to cover Revolution and Time in Thursday’s class. As mentioned above, there are lots of topics to consider. Let’s start by identifying the key characters and their missions or goals.

Anarresti

Shevek, Sabul, Takver, Odo

Urrasti

Atro, Oiie, Chifoilisk

Novel of Ideas

This work is considered a novel of ideas, which means it deals with questions usually covered by philosophy and attempts to reconcile, uncover, and challenge readers’ ways of thinking about culture and society. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What does it mean to live in a Capitalist society? What does it mean to be free? All of those are questions that a cultural studies lens (the approach we use to interpret the readings) assists readers in exploring. If you were hoping I’d have written “assists readers in answering,” you’ve missed a few classes.

LeGuin gives readers two worlds to explore from a social science fiction point of view: Anarres and Urras. This work was published in 1974, so, from a historical point of view, we’ll have to consider what was going on in America at that time, specifically, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the distrust of the government. Other topics we should consider are below:

  • Walls: “all in all we’re just another brick in the Wall”
  • The Economy
    • Money, demand, privilege
  • Education
    • Student
    • Teacher
    • Institution
  • The State
    • Egalitarianism
    • Power
    • Ownership
    • Law
  • Gender Roles: Family, Society
  • Philosophy
    • Suffering
    • Revolution
    • Time (General Temporal Theory and chronosophy, the study of time)

Next Class

We’re going to finish discussing all these wonderful topics on Wednesday. Remember, your Essay #2 is due Friday, 11/17, 11:00pm on Canvas.