The Sex of the Assemblage: Potentiality and Sex in Ursula Le Guin

KEY WORDS

Ursula Le Guin, androgyny, hermaphrodite, rhizomatic sex, kemmer, reterritorialisation

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The relationship between gender and Gilles Deleuze’s (1980) concept of assemblage has been addressed at length by academics such as Anna Bogic¹(2017) and Elizabeth Grosz²(1993). However, the way sex—less readily understood as socially constructed than gender—might be integrated within the theoretical framework of the assemblage is perhaps less obvious. Given the current re-emergence of debates questioning what it means to be a man or a woman, debates whose outcomes dramatically affect, for example, transgender rights, providing new readings for how sex and potentiality caninterplay seems fruitful. This essay aims to examine this interplay through a close reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The fourth novel in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, this text relates humanity’s discovery of androgynous aliens on the planet Gethen. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, I argue that The Left Hand of Darkness approaches sex on Gethen as event-ness, firstly through analyses of androgyny in this text, and secondly by contrasting assemblages of sex grounded in spontaneity against previously proposed theoretical models of androgynous balance (Barrow and Barrow 94). I instead propose the term hermaphroditic potentiality, whose adoption unfolds new affordances not only for readings of Le Guin’s text, but also for how we on Earth might examine sex.

The Left Hand of Darkness engages deeply with questions of sex. The text relates the negotiations between two peoples. On the one side is the gendered human society of the Ekumen—an interplanetary coalition to which Earth belongs. On the other side are the aliens of Gethen, whom the Ekumen eagerly seek to recruit for their coalition. The Gethenians were altered at some point during their isolation from other planets (89) and, while humanoid in appearance, they now lack distinct biological sex during most of their lives. Only during a short monthly period called kemmer do hormonal secretions establish, briefly, the dominance of either male or female sex in the Gethenians’ bodies. More than an encounter of planetary governments, however, The Left Hand of Darkness centres the relationship between the Ekumen’s ambassador, a Terran man named Genly Ai, and Estraven, prime minister and later exile of Karhide, the first Gethenian nation the Ekumen contacts. Genly, at first disgusted and dismissive of the Gethenian’s apparent sexlessness, slowly comes to accept Estraven, while Estraven begins to understand Genly’s permanent masculinity. This mutual growth preludes the alliance of their respective states—but is not an easy one. Initially, Genly’s confusion at Gethenian sex and gender only served to imperil an already clumsy first contact, and his subsequent expulsion from Karhide is followed by imprisonment and torture in another country. Estraven rescues Genly from this prison camp (185) and only now, on their long journey across a glacial sheet to Karhide, do they become friends. The Karhide border-guards kill Estraven upon their return (263), but Karhide finally accepts the Ekumen’s offer to join its coalition of planets, thus completing both Genly and Estraven’s dream. 

In “The Left Hand of Darkness”: Feminism for Men, Craig and Diana Barrow (1987) provide a close reading of Le Guin’s novel and discuss some of the feminist critiques regarding the perceived masculine focality of the text. These criticisms argue that Genly’s masculinity, the use of male pronouns to describe the androgynous Gethenians³, and the conventionally male roles which Estraven is perceived to occupy, all serve to embody a historically masculine perspective of androgyny which excludes femininity (Annas 151). Barrow and Barrow respond by exploring the concept of the androgyne in greater depth, considering it to be misunderstood. They discuss different facets of the androgyne, noting two distinct interpretations. The first, they argue, relates to the Greek myth of the androgyne from Plato’s Symposium:

Aristophanes describes globular eight-limbed creatures which are cut in half by Zeus and the Gods … These severed halves, which become the human race, constantly seek their missing halves, and Zeus, in pity, rearranges their genitals so that the halves can regain their original unity (Barrow and Barrow 84-85).

According to Barrow and Barrow, Plato’s Symposium defines androgyny as the completion of the journey of these two “divided selves seeking oneness” (85), and that the goal of the androgyne is “the augmentation and completion of the self.” They emphasise, however, that while Plato’s description is predominant in the west, it is but one of the two objectives represented in the androgyne. For the second, they draw on Taoism, quoting Katherine Hayles: 

Taoism does not incorporate or obliterate the self and the other …. [A]lthough the alien remains the other, once its otherness is admitted and understood, it can come into creative tension with the self, and from this tension a new wholeness can emerge. (100) 

This notion of creative tension—a coexistence rather than a completion—is perhaps unexpected, but it is certainly significant, complicating any interpretation of Plato's narrative as solely the attainment of wholeness through the absorption of the Other. Instead, by drawing on a second Platonic concept—that of the hermaphrodite—Barrow and Barrow juxtapose two opposing objectives; the first objective of the androgyne is indeed androgyny. It is the absence of otherness through self-completion, and so comes with a lack of sexual distinction of any kind. After all, dimorphic genitalia were formed only after the division of the androgyne into sexed halves, and so self-completion implies a return to this original, globular state. The second objective of the androgyne does not dissolve otherness, however. It does not dissolve genitalia either, prizing coexistence over fusion. As such, this objective might be aligned less with the androgyne and more with what Plato’s Symposium describes as “hermaphrodite” (542)—the simultaneous embodiment of both sexual organs. 

In the primary conflict of The Left Hand of Darkness this same tension exists. The Ekumen adhere to Plato’s androgyne, whereas Hayles’ “Taoist” hermaphrodite more adequately describes the sexual philosophy of the Gethenians. Only by understanding this difference can Genly and Estraven begin to connect with one another:

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. … I had not been willing to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. (248)

The wording in the last sentence of this excerpt is important, specifying coexistence over dissolution: Estraven’s sex is not the absence of male and female, nor their fusion, but rather the intersection of two discrete processes: of man becoming woman, and of woman becoming man. During the beginning of kemmer, this process of becoming one or the other becomes a biological reality for Gethenians. Each monthly kemmer cycle starts at the intersection of male and female, and the resulting sex is determined by whomever the Gethenian encounters first, their body becoming physiologically male or female in response⁴. Once kemmer ends, each body returns to the potentiality of becoming either sex once more. In a material, tangible sense, until one of the two takes dominance during kemmer, Gethenians possess both sexual organs, and are thus not androgynous but hermaphroditic.

The Gethenian rejection of androgyny is encountered again when Estraven discusses Handdara—Karhide’s spiritual philosophy. Genly, assuming the Gethenians share the binary thinking of his own two-gendered world, and the platonic objective of self-completion it encourages, tells Estraven: “[y]ou’re isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism” (233). Estraven disagrees; Gethenians are “dualists too.” However, their interpretation of dualism is quite different from Genly’s. They are “less aware of the gap between men and beasts, more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part,” than Genly is with his human focus on “myself and the other” (233). Amy Chan Kit-Sze (2021) explores this distinction further, suggesting “the idea of ‘hermaphroditic neuters’” (135) to describe Gethenians sexuality. Her combination of the terms “hermaphrodite” and “neuter” is apt, for while Hayle’s Taoist hermaphrodite finds “its otherness is admitted and understood” (100), this is not the case for the Gethenians’ treatment of the Terran ambassador’s sex, which they consider perverse. When Genly visits the spiritual practitioners of Karhide and he is introduced to a member who fills the ritual role of “the Pervert” (Le Guin, The Left Hand 63), Genly discovers that about three or four percent of Gethenians have a hormonal imbalance strong enough that they remain in a permanent state of kemmer as either physiological males or females. They are treated “with some disdain” by their society (63), and—like Genly himself—are excluded from participation in the kemmer-houses. Barrow and Barrow have argued that The Left Hand of Darkness seeks an “androgynous balance” (94), and to them the exclusion of these unusual Gethenians might be explained as a rejection of those unable or unwilling to embody that balance. However, this argument posits the discussion of androgyny firmly in the realm of gender—not sex—because neither Genly nor the Pervert of the Foretellers are able to anatomically transform themselves into hermaphrodites. When Barrow and Barrow centre the novel’s goal on the balancing of “the driving linearity of the ‘male,’ … and the circularity of ‘the female’” (94), they are discussing behaviour, social roles and ideology, abandoning the physical tangibility of the hermaphrodite as a material body. Despite their previous rejection of Plato’s globular androgyne in Symposium, their conclusion remains in Plato’s immaterial realm. 

Moving away from Plato’s immaterial realm, in Kit-Sze’s article the suggestion of the term hermaphroditic neuters for Gethenians is followed by her observation that the way “the hormonal dominance of male and female decides who is man or woman during kemmer [is an] interesting exampl[e] of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “a thousand tiny sexes” (135). This movement towards Deleuzian ontology to explain the Gethenian cycles of sex and sexlessness proves fruitful, and, following Kit-Sze’s line of thought, I argue one step further: Deleuzian theory in fact provides a more comprehensive understanding of the Gethenian experience of sex than that which Barrow and Barrow have proposed. 

Returning to Genly’s encounter with the Foretellers of Handdara, here he meets Foreteller’s weaver, Faxe (Le Guin, The Left Hand 59), who introduces Genly to the Handdara philosophy that will, eventually, help him accept Estraven on the lonely expanse of the Gobrin Ice. Faxe, who holds the ritual position of weaver, guiding each Foretelling ceremony, tells him that “[t]he only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next” (70), and this reveals the underlying value of Gethenian philosophy. As mentioned above, Genly previously assumed Gethenians “[we]re as obsessed with wholeness as [the Ekumen] are with dualism” (233), but in this statement he now sees his Platonic prejudice: a desire for self-completion which the Handdara does not share. Gethenians instead prioritise spontaneity and potentiality, evident in their refusal to even count years on the calendar, forever staying in “Year One” (3), and the unique sexual specificity of every kemmer cycle. Where Barrow and Barrow have suggested “balance” (94) as the aspiration of Gethenians, I propose hermaphroditic potentiality. After all, when Gethenians call hormonally imbalanced kin “halfdeads” (Le Guin, The Left Hand 63), they do so not because they perceive a lack of balance in their gender identity, but rather because one who is unable to experience kemmer lacks the potentiality that is vital to Gethenian life. If uncertainty and spontaneity are the Handdara’s objectives, then it is their fixed state which robs “halfdeads” of their “living half.”

Potentiality and process are core principles of Gethenians and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage alike. Rejecting any notion of permanent state, the assemblage is formed by the “connection between disparate components” (Shildrick 21)—characterised not by “constants but rather [foregrounded] variation to variation” (pp). Handdara spirituality shares this focus on multiplicity, rejecting the oppositional relationship of subject and object that Genly evokes with “myself and the other” (Le Guin, The Left Hand 233). Just as Deleuze and Guattari state that “[t]here are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (8), so do the Foretellers operate in webs of difference, with each participant of their ritual—the Pervert, the Kemmerer, the Zanies, the Celibates, and the Weaver (Le Guin, The Left Hand 63-65)—seated in a circle and prized precisely for their difference. Neither multiplicity makes a claim to a greater “unity” (Deleuze and Guattari 9), refusing any attempt at “overcoding” (8). Instead, both assemblage thinking and Handdara prize event-ness over fixed states of being. The continuous potentiality provided in kemmer has already been discussed, but in the ceremony of Foretelling this event-ness is also reflected: when Faxe weaves the minds of the Foreteller participants during their ritual, they demonstrate the “alliance, uniquely alliance” (25) that characterises the assemblage. The Foretelling is formed by a temporal coming together of different components and, once finished, “the web of power [falls] apart” (Le Guin, The Left Hand 66). 

A final point of intersection are the processes of de- and reterritorialisation. Just as Faxe weaves the “web of power” to create Foretellings, Deleuze and Guattari explain the processes of de- and reterritorialisation as invocations of relational maps where meaning is shaped by the intersection of bodies, not by their autonomy or self-containment. They write that “[t]he wasp is … deterritorialised, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome” (10). Certainly, these processes are reflected in Coming of Age in Karhide during the first kemmer of the young Gethenian Sov. Initially, while they have not yet fully entered kemmer, Sov is approached by Karrid, who—male in this cycle—deterritorialises Sov’s body by making it a compatible heterosexual sexual partner to his own (Le Guin, “Coming of Age” 102). Sov’s body responds by entering kemmer as a female, as Karrid wanted, but Sov re-territorialises her now-sexed body by having homosexual sex with another female Gethenian instead. During the rest of her kemmer, Sov has sexual encounters with different numbers and sexual distributions of participants, and in each of these encounters her body and its sex are de- and reterritorialised, discarding previous lines of meaning and reassembling themselves in relation to the next intersection of bodies. Gethenians, not only during each kemmer but also during each sexual encounter while in the kemmer house, are in a continuous process of reassemblage. What fundamentally differentiates them from Genly and his foreign, monosexual body is then not this event-ness—Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the wasp and orchid is not hermaphroditic, after all—but their Handdara spirituality, which fosters an appreciation of the assemblage, rather than the rigid adherence to fixed states.

To conclude: in this essay I have outlined how the perceived androgyny of the Gethenians in the Left Hand of Darkness has been discussed by different scholars. Some, like Annas, are deeply critical of the masculine portrayal of the aliens through Genly Ai’s eyes; others, such as Craig and Diana Barrow, have defended Le Guin’s portrayal, broadening understanding of the definition of androgyne as more than a purely platonic pursuit of self-completion by incorporating Taoist elements to describe the creative tension extant in the hermaphrodite as well. Finally, following Kit-Sze’s description of the Gethenians as hermaphroditic neuters, and her suggestion of Deleuzian imagery in Le Guin’s text, I have delineated the assemblage as a productive framework to discuss Gethenian anatomy, particularly as it relates to the kemmer-house. Through this Deleuzian framework, the androgynous balance that Craig and Diana Barrow posited as the goal of Le Guin’s text is reinterpreted as hermaphroditic potentiality, a term I have coined to emphasise the rejection of self-completion and aspiration to potentiality that Handdara spirituality emphasises. The affinity for assemblage is enacted most concretely in the Gethenians’ continuous reterritorialisation of the body in kemmer, where each encounter with a sexual partner reconfigures the roles, gestures and expressions of the body. In kemmer, the acquisition of a sex does not occur solely when hormonal dominance manifests a sexually dimorphic organ: it is reacquired in every encounter of bodies that follows. 

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