Ursula Le Guin and the Left Hand of Feminism

Abstract

Feminist SF starts with Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a novel about a planet
on which sexuality is constructed completely differently and where androgyny is the norm. Unaffected by the
gender characteristics which shape human lives, this society without fixed gender strikes the reader by its
harmony and lack of aggression, which makes it far superior to our own. The book is one of the first serious
analyses of gender to be attempted in all literature