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The Woman's View
Jan. 3rd, 2011 02:53 pmApr 2010
Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * *
At the risk of displaying the very habit of categorisational thinking that certain of its adherents decry, I would like to make an observation about feminism (hey, we all have a gender so it's a game that everyone can play). Its various forms fall into two main schools of thought that closely mirror the left-right split in politics. One - espoused in liberal, socialist and post-modernist feminism - argues that gender roles in society are socially constructed. Men and women can perform the same roles and there should not be artificial barriers of law or social expectation preventing, say, a woman from being a bishop or a man from raising a child. Another view, which I think is what radical feminists are saying, is that women are naturally different from men and that the issue is that social institutions and cultural practices - especially those of science and technology - do not adequately reflect (and in fact actively work to suppress) women's ways of working and thinking. The difference between the two lies in the recommended solutions to the practical problem of the under-representation of women. The former favours a technocratic approach where equality of law or class eventually leads to social parity, while the latter implies that no amount of gender-neutral law-making or socialist revolution will fix the issue and instead we must learn to live with and mitigate as best we can the inevitable conflicts between male and female ways of looking at the world.
Ursula Le Guin has investigated both these types of feminism in her writing, but in her middle- and late-period work she seems to me to incline towards the "naturally different" view. Certainly one or two of her books are off-putting for male readers - Always Coming Home, with its recipes and less than subtle fables of male brutality (oy! I'm a man but I'm not brutal, so stop lumping me in with men who are!), is one that I am unlikely to read again. But another theme that runs through Le Guin's writing is the Taoist balancing of opposites, and in Lavinia she finds a way to infuse the strongly masculinised world of Virgil's Aeneid with feminine values and concerns without denigrating the former. The result is a triumph, and a book that I shall definitely come back to.
( Read more... )
Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * *
At the risk of displaying the very habit of categorisational thinking that certain of its adherents decry, I would like to make an observation about feminism (hey, we all have a gender so it's a game that everyone can play). Its various forms fall into two main schools of thought that closely mirror the left-right split in politics. One - espoused in liberal, socialist and post-modernist feminism - argues that gender roles in society are socially constructed. Men and women can perform the same roles and there should not be artificial barriers of law or social expectation preventing, say, a woman from being a bishop or a man from raising a child. Another view, which I think is what radical feminists are saying, is that women are naturally different from men and that the issue is that social institutions and cultural practices - especially those of science and technology - do not adequately reflect (and in fact actively work to suppress) women's ways of working and thinking. The difference between the two lies in the recommended solutions to the practical problem of the under-representation of women. The former favours a technocratic approach where equality of law or class eventually leads to social parity, while the latter implies that no amount of gender-neutral law-making or socialist revolution will fix the issue and instead we must learn to live with and mitigate as best we can the inevitable conflicts between male and female ways of looking at the world.
Ursula Le Guin has investigated both these types of feminism in her writing, but in her middle- and late-period work she seems to me to incline towards the "naturally different" view. Certainly one or two of her books are off-putting for male readers - Always Coming Home, with its recipes and less than subtle fables of male brutality (oy! I'm a man but I'm not brutal, so stop lumping me in with men who are!), is one that I am unlikely to read again. But another theme that runs through Le Guin's writing is the Taoist balancing of opposites, and in Lavinia she finds a way to infuse the strongly masculinised world of Virgil's Aeneid with feminine values and concerns without denigrating the former. The result is a triumph, and a book that I shall definitely come back to.
( Read more... )