UN-LEARNING THE ANTHROPOCENE: AN ECOFEMINIST READING OF URSULA K. LE GUIN’S THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, environmental issues and climate change have found their way into mainstream discourse, wherein ecofeminism can act as a transformative project. The subversive and visionary science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), with its focus on gender and nature, has imaginatively cleared the road for the reader to conceive an alternative to the world of capitalist modernity, a world that has led to the subjugation of women and nature not only for those experiencing modernity within the so-called West, but also for those—the Rest of us—at the periphery of this fragile world order. In order to tackle the dehumanization of women and the degradation of the natural world, Le Guin, while highlighting the impacts of the Anthropocene in her own world, deconstructs and rethinks the dualistic hierarchies, through her narrative world, which contribute to oppression, domination, and the reification of male dominance. In this article, we approach The Left Hand of Darkness as a fictional forum whereby the audience is given the chance to reinterpret and reflect on their relationship with nature against the backdrop of the unprecedented ecological crises we face today. Our ecofeminist reading of the novel foregrounds Le Guin’s treatment of the nonhuman Other in her speculative narrative world, and sheds light on our angst about the current geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.