phantom Le Guin quote

[truepenny]

Does anyone have Marleen S. Barr's Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond and would be willing to check it for this Le Guin quote that I know I did not make up and yet I cannot find? Namely, talking about the scene in The Left Hand of Darkness between Genly Ai and Estraven on the ice, in which Estraven is going into kemmer and they do not have sex, Le Guin says something to the effect that what female readers like about it is that it's a love scene between a man and a woman in which the woman has the label MALE HIGH-STATUS pasted on her forehead.

I used to own Lost in Space but it has eroded from my collection. And it's the only other place I can think of that this quote might be. And, yes, I've scoured The Language of the Night, Dancing at the Edge of the World, and Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness until my eyeballs bled horribly all over the page.

Of course, if it happens that you can find the quote in one of those places, I will be very grateful. Also sheepish.

Comments

[hhw]

I've seen that quote too. I just checked Lost in Space, but based on the index references to UKL and LHD, it's not there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Drat.

But thank you!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Well that's not what I like about it!

I like the fact that it's a love scene between people where one of them knows all through that he's a man and the other one knows all through that being a man or a woman is perverted.

To say Estraven is a woman even in that scene is to diminish his beautiful complexity and impose our preconceptions, he's in kemmer female right then, sure, and it's disturbing to poor Genly, sure, but that's all.

Have you read "Coming of Age in Karhide"?

[redbird]

It's the continuity that's perverted--that Genly is male then isn't perverted to Therem, it's that Genly has always been and will always be a man.

[libskrat]

It's not in the intro to "Winter's King," is it?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Nope.

I just double-checked.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I think I have the Barr book but won't be able to dig in and find out until tomorrow night. How soon do you need to know?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There's no need here. It just annoys me that I can't find it.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I have both the Barr and a couple of possible other "culprits" -- Larbalestier, Camille Bacon-Smith. I can check them all tonight.

And yes, that point-making is frustratingly familiar, but I can't place it off the top of my head either.

[hhw]

I checked Battle of the Sexes (at least going by the index page numbers for UKL and LHD), as well as Brian Attebury's book, the title of which escapes me now. And I flipped through The Wave in the Mind. I wonder if she said it in a published interview. Or maybe she said it at a con we all attended: Wiscon 20? Wiscon 27? Readercon 7?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, the catch is, it has to be something I've read. Which narrows the field to either Le Guin herself or Barr. Because I am not even remotely up to date in the field of sf litcrit.

And I know I read it.

[hhw]

I've got some more Barr I can check at home. And I'll also look more closely at the LHD 25th anniversary afterword.

[hhw]

no dice. However, I don't have a copy of Barr's Alien to Femininity; maybe it's there?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Haven't read it, so it seems unlikely.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely quote, but it's not the one I'm looking for.

I'm beginning to think maybe I dreamed it.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

It's not a LeGuin quote. It's a Joanna Russ quote, from her essay, "The Image of Women in Science-Fiction".

Thus the great love scene in the book is between two men: the human observer (who is a real man) and the native hero (who is a female man). The scene is nominally homosexual, but I think what lies at the bottom of it (and what has moved men and women readers alike) is that it is a love scene between a man and a woman, with the label "male: high status" pasted on the woman's forehead.

(p.90 in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon, which I borrowed from the library this evening at last.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!