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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Hana Koutná Feminism in Short Stories of Ursula Le Guin Bachelor‘s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2014 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primaly and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‘s signature ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank doctor Stephen Paul Hardy for supervision and assistance that enables me to finish this thesis. I also want to thank my family for support and encouragement during the writting. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I: DAUGHTERS OF EARTH: LE GUIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION AND FEMINIST WRITER 1. SCIENCE FICTION, FEMINISM AND GENDER 1 1.1. GENDER IN HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE FICTION 1 1.2. REPRESENTATION IN MODERN SPECULATIVE FICTION 6 1.3. CHALLENGING THE STEREOTYPE 8 2. LE GUIN AS A WRITER 12 2.1. THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND 12 2.2. LE GUIN‘S INFLUENCE 14 2.3.LE GUIN AND FEMINISM 17 CHAPTER II: FEMINISM IN LE GUIN'S SHORT STORIES 1. INTRACOM 21 1.1. ON PREGNANCY AND ALIENS 23 2. THE WIFE'S STORY 26 2.1. THE MATTER OF PROTAGONIST 27 2.2. IMAGES OF ABUSE AND EMPOWERMENT 31 3. THE COMING OF AGE IN KARHIDE 33 3.1. THE LANGUAGE OF THE GENDER 36 3.2. SEXLUALITY, RELATIONSHIPS AND GENDER STEREOTYPES 38 4. THE PORRIDGE ON ISLAC 41 4.1. CORN AND OTHER MINORITIES 43 CONCLUSION 45 WORKS CITED 50 PRIMARY SOURCES 50 SECONDARY SOURCES 50 INTRODUCTION This work deals with the position of Ursula Le Guin‘s work from the view-point of feminist literature analysis with an emphasis on how her approach evolves through her career and how the analysis differs from the point of view of different waves in the feminist movement. While she originally did not consider herself to be a feminist writer and her early works tend to be more male-centered, themes connected with this movement started to appear in her works quite early in her writing career, as she ―began coming up against certain discomforts‖(White). In her later works, she explores and deconstructs gender, gendered expectations and sexuality. The intention of this work is not to be a biographical account and events of Le Guin's life will be considered only in the relation to her feminism. The main focus will be on the feminist analysis of the short stories from different periods of her career. The first part of the first chapter will focus on how feminism is used in the genre of science fiction and how it changes this genre. Genres of speculative fiction, science fiction in particular, provides space for examining and challenging the norms of the civilization and for predicting their future development. But the norms of gender and sexuality tend mostly to conform the standards of the era. If there are some changes, the future sexuality often reflects ―male ideal‖ by being less constricted and monogamous, but still very heteronormative. The other approach is to eliminate the gender division and sexuality completely, but this is usually used to further reinforce the dystopian impression from the world. This is to a certain extent caused by a stereotypical perception of science fiction as a genre written predominantly by men and for men. But ―if we can't write diversity into science fiction, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.‖ (Broverman). The second and third part of this chapter will deal with the identity of Le Guin as a science fiction writer and as a feminist writer. It explores how these identities changed trough her career and how they are connected (if they are connected at all). The second chapter will examine feminist analysis of Le Guin's short stories. This analysis will not only be feminist in general, but will also focus on the differences between reading from the point of view of different feminist waves. The point of view of the first wave feminism will be mostly omitted, since although this wave had influenced the feminist movement till the half of the 20th century, its center is mostly late 19th century – early 20th century women's right movement. The biggest space will be given to the second and third wave. The second wave is connected with the late 60s and 70s of the 20th century, is more radical than the previous wave, and shares foundation in the left wing movement with other movement of this time, such as the anti-war movement, gay and lesbian rights movement and the civil rights movement. The third wave feminism then challenges the notion of ―universal womanhood‖ and focuses more on ambiguity and diversity in movement and policy. It is also reclaiming and subverting some of terms and activities which were deemed oppressive by the previous waves (Krolloke 2). The fourth wave of feminism and its point of view will be also partially considered in the analysis. To illustrate the changes in Le Guin's opinions and approach to these topics, the short stories used for the analysis will be chosen from the different points of her career, starting from ―Intracom‖ which was first published in 1973, till ―Porridge on Islac―, published as a part of the short story collection Changing Planes in the early 2000s. The first subchapter, focused on the short story ―Intracom‖. It examines the metaphor of pregnancy and motherhood. The female body is depicted as a spaceship invaded by an alien. While the story is mostly humoristic, it raises the question of man‘s right to make decisions over the female body and how these decisions are influenced by the gender of the expected child. In the second subchapter, ―Wife‘s Story‖ from the collection The Compass Rose (published 1982) is examined from two connected points of view. The first is looking on the protagonist of ―Wife‘s Story‖ in connection to this protagonist‘s identity and the techniques Le Guin is using to conceal this fact. This is also linked to her tendency to mask in similar ways race of her protagonists in different works. Finally, the general attitude towards so called ―minority protagonists‖ and their influence on reader‘s identification with said protagonist in examined. The second part then interprets the images of the violence, especially in the context of domestic abuse, and of female empowerment present in the story. The first part of the third subchapter examines the use of gendered language, pronouns in particular, in the story ―Coming of Age in Karhide‖. As the story takes place on the planet whose inhabitants are genderless for most of their lives, the pronouns used influences how the reader perceives the characters and shows how the author herself perceived them. This is also compared to the way Le Guin approached the same problematic in the novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The second part then examines how the perceived gender of these characters influence their sexuality and behavior. It also shortly looks into the issues of heteronormativity in Le Guin‘s stories. The last subchapter is concerned with the short story ―Porridge on Islac‖ from the interconnected short story collection Changing Planes, which was published in 2003. It shortly examines the collection in general, looking at the problematic of the female traveler. The story itself is then explored from the point of view of privileges and intersection of feminism, class division and race. The terminology that will be used in the work is adopted from Mieke Bal's Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. She approaches the problematic of narratology without deriving her terminology or ideas completely from any of the previous schools of narratology, though she borrows some of their concepts. CHAPTER I: DAUGHTERS OF EARTH: LE GUIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION AND FEMINIST WRITER 1. SCIENCE FICTION, FEMINISM AND GENDER ―Traditionally, sf has been considered a predominantly masculine field which, through its focus on science and technology, ‗naturally‘ excludes women and by implication, considerations of gender.‖ (Merrick 241). This claim includes both science fiction writers and the supposed target group and has lead to certain stereotypes in the depiction of genders and gender roles. The following section will look into these stereotypes and their changes through time, will examine whence this perceived masculinity stems, how is this stereotype present in the modern speculative fiction and also what are its real life consequences. It will also shortly examine how can gender stereotypes be disrupted. 1.1. GENDER IN HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE FICTION The origins of science fiction as a genre are not completely clear. Even in the oldest recorded literature we can find fantastic motives similar to those in modern science- fiction literature. Among the precursors of the genre can be counted the fantastical travelogues of Lucian from the second century, which, while mostly satirical, shares similarities in plot with modern space operas (Amis 28). Another important predecessor is utopia, a genre that describes an ideal society, with Plato's Republic as the oldest example. Both of these trends has been later followed up in literature of the 17th and 18th century, during the so-called ―Age of Reason‖ (Železný 12). From non- European cultural space, the stories from One Thousand and One Nights (8th - 10th century CE) contains fantastical elements, such as ―the figure of a horseman sculpted in brass, which will swivel around at the touch of a hand and indicate the direction towards the City of Brass‖ (Hamori 11), a sort of prototype of a modern humanoid robot 1 There is no literary work that is ―officially‖ considered to be the first ―true‖ science fiction.
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