{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Left Hand of Darkness: Le Guin's Ambisexual Planet","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/a778bc41-f2c7-4d47-88f8-0b40cee3d754.jpg?height=200","description":"Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines Gethen, a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual — they have no fixed gender, entering a brief fertile period (kemmer) during which they may become either male or female. An envoy from a gendered society must navigate this world, and the novel traces his failure to truly understand what he is seeing. Le Guin was the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, and her SF is always anthropological thought experiment — what would a world without gender actually look like? How deep does gender go? The novel was published at the height of second-wave feminism and the Stonewall era, and became a touchstone for feminist and queer readers. This episode examines the novel's extraordinary imaginative achievement, Le Guin's own complicated later reflections on her use of male pronouns, and how the book opened a door in SF that has never closed.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}