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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
This article attempts to bring together postcolonial theory, contemporary theories of sexuality, predominantly queer theory, and SF in an examination of two works that speak with great force to the colonial/postcolonial condition: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Gwyneth Jones's Aleutian series. Both works can be read as interrogations of our current sex/gender system and its implications for the relations between women and men; both consider the implications of 'first contact' with an 'alien' race in ways that could be considered anticolonial or postcolonial. It is thus possible to read the Aleutian trilogy not only as an intervention into the same issues and debates that underwrite Le Guin's novel, but also as a response to that novel's critical legacy.
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Folded within the scientific accounts of race, a central assumption and paranoid fantasy was endlessly repeated: the uncontrollable sexual drive of the non-white races and their limitless fertility. What was so clearly fascinating was not just the power of other sexuality as such, the 'promiscuous,' 'illicit intercourse' and 'excessive debauchery' of a licentious primitive sexuality. [...] Nineteenth-century theories of race did not just consist of essentializing differentiations between self and other; they were also about a fascination with people having sex--interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex.
Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself ... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
Iain M. Banks, Excession
Racial categorization and subsequent discourses and institutions of racial differentiation and hierarchy as we know them today began in the colonial period, as did the immediate antecedents of those discourses of gender and sexuality that the contemporary Western/metropolitan world refers to as 'traditional'. (1) They are, in a sense, inextricable from the very practices of colonialism they hypostasized. As Robert Young argues in Colonial Desire:
it is clear that the forms of sexual exchange brought about by colonialism were themselves both consequences and mirrors of the modes of economic exchange that constituted the basis of colonial relations; the extended exchange of property which began with small trading-posts and the visiting slave ships originated, indeed, as much in the exchange of bodies as of goods, or rather of bodies as goods: as in that paradigm of respectability, marriage, economic and sexual exchange were intimately bound up, coupled with each other from the very first. (2)
Thus the indigenes confronted in Iain Banks's hypothetical science-fictional scenario with an 'Outside Context Problem' have historically not merely been expected to pay taxes and adhere to imported religious beliefs, but also to participate in commerce, a word whose historical meanings include 'the exchange both of merchandise and of bodies in sexual intercourse'. (3) Colonialism's ideological underpinnings require the discursive construction of the bodies of the other not only as abjected components in racialized and gendered hierarchies, but also as units of exchange in economic, sexual, and cultural intercourse. (4) It is a given that these bodies must in some way be marked by their difference--racial, gendered, and sexual--from the normative bodies of the colonizer. In each commercial exchange it is essential to be able to tell 'Us' from 'Them', even as 'Our' fantasies of difference expose the permeability of the very boundaries that create the self/other dialectic in the first place, always at risk of penetration through the very forms of contact that serve as mechanisms of exchange, particularly miscegenation, hybridity, and failures of racial classification. All three of these mechanisms of exchange play some role in the works I discuss in this article, works in which questions of gender, sexuality, and race (or human and alien species) intersect with the troubled history and imaginative reconstruction of the colonial encounter.
This article attempts to bring together science fiction, postcolonial theory, and contemporary approaches to sexuality and gender, predominantly queer theory, in an examination of two works that speak with great force to the relationship between racialized and gendered identities and the colonial/postcolonial condition: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Gwyneth Jones's Aleutian trilogy, which consists of the novels White Queen (1991), North Wind (1994), and Phoenix Cafe (1997). Obviously a period of more than twenty years separates Jones's trilogy from Le Guin's groundbreaking interrogation of gender, a period during which both SF itself and the theoretical groundwork for understanding sex, gender, sexuality, and the colonial have changed dramatically. I argue, however, that just as Sherryl Vint suggests that 'White Queen is a revision of the tropes of Childhood's End', (5) Jones's trilogy, and especially the first novel, White Queen, is even more a revision of the tropes of The Left Hand of Darkness. Jones's Johnny Guglioli can be read as a rewriting of Le Guin's Genly Ai, another naive human male locked in his own preconceptions about the aliens and their world; even their names resonate with 'difference in repetition', Johnny sounding not unlike Genly-with-a-soft-G, and Guglioli working variations on beginning with G and ending with I. (6) Of course, 'Johnny Guglioli' does not repeat the specific play on selfhood and visibility that marks Le Guin's narrator (Ai/I/eye). Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., however, in arguing that the Aleutians are essentially 'comic creations', points out that
even their name is comical: the rationalization that they landed in the Aleutian Islands is eagerly believed by human characters and readers alike [...]. Nested in their name are the anagrams: Alien, ET, and U. Their name, like their role, is a trick and a joke. (7)
While no one has suggested that the Gethenians are comic creations (although they have their moments, and their role, in relation to the novel's terrestrial readers, might well be regarded as a trick or a joke, particularly in the indigenous and androgynous sense of the Trickster or Coyote), the Aleutians still pose many of the same problems that the Gethenians do: both races are hermaphroditic, both have a culture that at first glance looks as if it should have either more or less in common with ours than it does, and both overtly refute the (Euramerican) human insistence on duality and binary thinking. Moreover, just as by the end of The Left Hand of Darkness the Gethenians have become Self and the humans Other/Alien to Genly, Jones plays variations on the Self/Other thematic even as her aliens, like Le Guin's, debunk the very notion of binary division. Both works can thus be read as interrogations of our current sex/gender system and its implications for the relations between women and men, (8) and, importantly, both consider...
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