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Mohammad M. Jalil

Professor Batty

English 102

12 December 2018

Ideas of Gender, Sexuality, and Race in The Left Hand of Darkness and M. Butterfly

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin and M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang,

are both works of literature that impose their own ideas of gender, race, and sexuality to the

readers. The Left Hand of Darkness revolves around Genly Ai, an envoy from a different world

that has landed on the planet of Gethen which is inhabited by a people who have no explicit

gender. M Butterfly revolves around the story of two “lovers”, one a male French Diplomat and

the other a man disguised as a female Chinese actress. Through the usage of the various

characters and their personality development, the authors endorse new ideas on gender, sexuality

and race and try to rid the reader of the generally accepted binary thinking.

Race has a substantial presence in both the books. In The Left Hand of Darkness, its

concludable that Le Guin tries to push acceptance to the reader of different races as stated by

Ellen Peel in her scholarly article titled “Black and White and Read All Over: The Semiotics of

Difference and Chiaroscuro in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness”: “Readers are encouraged to

admire characters who celebrate difference, whether it be national difference between

citizens of Karhide and Orgoreyn, racial difference between light-skinned Gethenians and the

dark-skinned Earthman Genly…”. You see a lot of acceptance within the Gethenian people, as

seen when Ai lands in Orgoreyn: “‘They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world,

an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his

bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will
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you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here’” (Le Guin, 125). Here, you

see acceptance and lack of discrimination. You don’t see the Orgoreyn people discriminating

against Ai, an outsider, but instead, they take care of him as one of their own. The Orgoreyn

people however do make mention of Ai’s darker complexion but it hardly plays a factor in how

Ai is treated overall. The Gethenians tend to focus more on the nature and character of others and

always assume the best of people and make their judgements accordingly. Both the people of

Karhide and Orgoreyn accept Genly Ai with open arms and take care of him without any

question. This is a suggestion to us that maybe we should view others in the same manner and

not discriminate because as seen in the novel, people tend to get along much better and less feuds

take place.

I think the same can be said about Hwang and the commentary he makes on stereotypes

through the usage of characters Rene Gallimard and Song Liling. Hwang intentionally introduces

Oriental stereotypes, to only diffuse them and raise awareness of the stereotypes. Throughout the

play, the reader develops a strong understanding that the Westerners stereotype the Oriental

women as submissive to the stronger, more dominant Western man. However, through the

manipulation of Rene, Hwang rids of these stereotypes and displays that Oriental women are just

as cunning and dominant, equating the different races. To further his riddance, Hwang has Rene,

the Western diplomat, fill in the stereotypes instead. Instead of Song being submissive and more

“feminine”, Rene becomes more feminine and submissive to Song’s demands, and Song

becomes the dominant, manipulative masculine figure. Through this, Hwang shows that a certain

flaw or commonality can’t be attributed with everybody of a certain race but instead, can be

present within people of many different backgrounds.

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Moreover, as discussed by Michelle Balaev in her article titled “Performing gender and

fictions of the nation in David Hwang's M. Butterfly”, Hwang does a great job in displaying

Rene’s need for Song to fulfill the Oriental stereotypes to allow him to fulfill the gender

stereotypes of a man. In order for Rene to truly feel like a masculine, dominant male, he needs

Song to fulfill her roles of being a submissive female. This also ties in with the aforementioned

in that Hwang introduces these stereotypes to bring recognition to the reader so that more

diversity within gender personalities becomes a norm. Hwang is bringing recognition so that we,

as a society, can become more accepting of those who share the same gender as us but differ

personality wise. Through these various expressions, I believe Hwang does a similar job to Le

Guin; both diminish the idea of having predisposed beliefs and attitudes of others and instead,

promote the acceptance of the natural values and nature of the different kinds of people and,

influence us, the readers, to do the same.

Moving on, I think both Hwang and Le Guin push towards the acceptance of different

sexuality preferences in a modest and subtle way. This connection may be a stretch, but I think

its valid and the events are there to prove this. In Gethen, the androgynous people can be either

female or male during “kemmer”, a period where people can begin their reproductive cycle. The

body adapts to have either male or female sexual organs and through this, the Gethenian people

have children. Essentially, the same person can be both a father and a mother to different

children. This, in a sort, demonstrates homosexuality because of how Ai describes the people.

For most of the story, Ai refers to the Gethenians as masculine figures, using the pronoun “he”

and adds that the Gethenian people are one sex but are still able to reproduce with each other.

Furthermore, the Gethenians are one gender except for their period of Kemmer so we can

conclude that they are reproducing with the same gender. Because of this and Ai’s acceptance of
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the uniqueness of the people, I think Le Guin is subtly pushing the reader to accept the difference

in sexuality amongst the Gethenians, just like Ai. She allows the reader to interpret the people of

Gethen and become accustomed to this difference. Le Guin displays that the difference in

sexuality doesn’t change who the people are themselves, and that at the end of the day, the

people would remain the same, regardless of their sexuality, so it shouldn’t play a big factor into

how we view others and treat them.

In M Butterfly, I think we can also conclude that Hwang treats the issue of sexuality in

the same way. In the beginning of the play, Rene says that everybody laughs at him and his story

and at the end of the play, he ultimately commits suicide to escape the humiliation he faced

because of his alleged homosexual activities. To recap the story, Rene was manipulated and fell

into a “trap” where the woman he loved ended up being a man. I think its valid to deduce

Hwang’s motives, considering what Robert K. Martin concluded in his scholarly article titled

“Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry

Hwang's Chinese Woman”, that Rene may have known all along Song was a male, considering

he himself said that he may have known deep down and the fact that in their long relationship, he

never forced Song to undress after she denied him. Because of this and the humiliation that

followed, Rene committed suicide. This, I think, may have brought some awareness to how we

treat homosexuality as a society. If homosexuality wasn’t seen as a sort of taboo or as a stigma, I

don’t think Rene would’ve committed suicide and I think Hwang pushes this same ideology to

the reader. The horror and shame of what happened to him brought him so much pain that he

killed himself. Hwang brings awareness to this and transmits his feelings that maybe we

shouldn’t treat people who have a different sexuality different than us, because we affect them so

deeply, we bring them to a point where they commit self-harm or even suicide just to avoid
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social shaming. Both the authors also wrote their stories in a time where homosexuality wasn’t as

big or accepted as it is in society today, so presuming their motives

Gender identities and their associations with the various characters also plays a large role

in both the works of literature. As stated by Christine Cornell in her interpretative article on The

Left Hand of Darkness, she states that all behaviors or qualities that are concerning or unwanted

are attributed as feminine and all behaviors or qualities that are considered impressive or

beneficial are attributed as masculine. Although many may think that this is how Le Guin feels,

I, on the contrary, feel as if Le Guin is using this as an example of how society views the two

gender identities and is trying to bring awareness to this issue. Le Guin is trying to get rid of

these predisposed notions that any associations with femininity is negative. Furthermore, I think

Le Guin is trying to get rid of these preconditioned beliefs we have about gender identities and

roles, and is trying to get her readers to accept that no gender should have specific traits assigned

to it and that it should be readily acceptable for different genders to have intermixed traits and

characteristics.

I believe this same issue is handled in a similar way in M Butterfly. Song, physically a

male, has traits that one can associate with femininity as stated by Karen Shimakawa in her

article: “Those overdetermined identifies are nevertheless resisted, expanded and openly

contradicted throughout M. Butterfly, especially (though not exclusively) in the figure

of Song. She/he is never exclusively female or male…”. One example of this can be seen

where Song is wearing a dress and when questioned by commander Chin as to why he is wearing

a dress in his spare time, he quickly answers by saying that it helps to keep him in character and

practice his role as an actress. Just like Le Guin, I believe Hwang also tries to push the reader to
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accept that gender identities shouldn’t exist and that we should be more accepting that both

genders can share certain personalities and traits.

To go more in depth, I believe Hwang and Le Guin, are overall, trying to fix societal

issues that we all face. I believe they are trying to push the readers towards the acceptance that

people are different by making obvious the differences the characters have from ourselves.

Furthermore, I believe the authors are also trying to rid our binary way of thinking, where

everything is either black or white, characters are either male or female, and are specifically

masculine or feminine. The authors do a great job by ridding us of these ideas by making the

characters a combination of these binaries. The authors allow us to see that even though you’re a

male, you can possess traits that would normally be associated with femininity and that would

pose no great issue in society, as we see with Song, and Estraven during his period in Kemmer.

From the aforementioned, we can conclude that Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness

and Hwang in M Butterfly dispose their own commentary on issues that deal with gender,

sexuality, and race. We can conclude that through the usage of the various characters and their

development, the authors try to solve societal issues by providing alternative ideologies and ways

of seeing and thinking.

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Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, Penguin Group, 1969.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York, Penguin Group, 1993.

Peel, Ellen. "Black and White and Read All Over: The Semiotics of Difference and Chiaroscuro

in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W.

Hunter, vol. 310, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center,

http://library.lavc.edu:2102/apps/doc/H1100105892/GLS?u=lavc_main&sid=GLS&xid=381badf

d. Accessed 5 Nov. 2018. Originally published in Semiotics Around the World: Synthesis in

Diversity; Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic

Studies, Berkeley 1994, edited by Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr, Mouton de Gruyter,

1997, pp. 453-456.

Rashley, Lisa Hammond. "Revisioning gender: inventing women in Ursula K. Le Guin's

nonfiction." Biography, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, p. 22+. Literature Resource Center,

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Pearson, Wendy Gay. "Postcolonialism/s, gender/s, sexuality/ies and the legacy of The Left

Hand of Darkness: Gwyneth Jones's Aleutians talk back." Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37,

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Cornell, Christine. "The interpretative journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's the left hand of darkness."

Extrapolation, vol. 42, no. 4, 2001, p. 317+. Literature Resource Center,

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Fayad, Mona. "Aliens, androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin's critique of representation in The

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Shimakawa, Karen. "'Who's to say?' or, making space for gender and ethnicity in 'M. Butterfly.'."

Theatre Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 1993, p. 349+. Literature Resource Center,

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Martin, Robert K. "Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and

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