Gender and Science Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's Herland both deal with alternately gendered societies, but in
different ways. Herland is a country that has been peopled only with women for
hundreds of years; the women become pregnant independently, through asexual
reproduction. The Left Hand of Darkness takes place in Winter, where everyone
is genderless, except during their mating periods when one individual becomes
male and one individual becomes female in order to reproduce. These lands are
seen as very strange by the protagonists, who are men from our society/world.
The authors of both these books were women, which is
unsurprising considering how in-depth and concerned with gender and its role in
our and the alternate societies both stories are. In contrast, male SF writers
such as Burroughs and Bradbury have written SF stories where the male themes of
exploration and colonization/domination take place on Mars, a newer Wilder
West. Many men who wrote SF have used the genre as a way to satirize their
cultures or human nature, but they have not dealt with gender anywhere near as
much as these two authors have. But then, men don't really have to deal with
gender the way women do.
Broadly, female SF writers use SF as a way to imagine a
differently cultured world, a different society, where gender does not shape
the people, their destinies and their culture the way it does in our world or
society. They want to explore worlds where gender is a non-issue: Gilman
because there are no men and as such only one gender with nothing to contrast
with, and Le Guin because no one has a gender and everyone is the same. To me,
these books earn their science fiction status not because they take place on
other planets (only Le Guin's does), but because they deal with the soft
sciences: sociology and psychology.
