Genly Ai struggle to see Gethenians as they see themselves is hard for a reader to do without any backstory about him or the world he comes from. We can assume he comes from a world just like earth but that would be an unreasonable assumption. Considering how different life would be if we had intergalactic space travel, “Mind speech”, and access to resources not habitable to our home planet due to interplanetary trade. So for the sake of having some basis for my opinion I'm gonna assume his culture and sexual practices would remain the same as Earth as we know it with the adding of all the space goodies I listed above. The only thing Genly clearly reveals is that he finds having no basic gender roles is odd to him and I would have the same opinion and anyone else in the world we live in would probably have the same opinion considering one of the first things we do when identifying people is placing them into one of two gender roles. The only people that probably wouldn't find this strange on our planet are ocean biologist considering some species of fish like eel, clown fish,and cuttlefish have been known to switch gender roles.
On a side note in chapter seven when the investigator commented that having no specific gender provides little adaptational advantage I disagreed with her. On a planet with one of your biggest enemies being the planet itself with such freezing uninhabitable weather before the Gethenians developed proper housing a lot of them probably died and having equally strong bodies that could choose a gender role freely would be helpful for breeding keeping a steady population. Especially since in chapter 8 it is hinted that when a Gethenian is in their female stage they are more susceptible to the cold.
I agree that Genly's main struggles were with gender because it's not straight forward male and female they're just people in the eyes of Gethinians.
ReplyDeleteI found it hard as well to understand Genly's struggles due to the fact that we don't know if he did come from our Earth. The only way to fully understand is if we just assume he is from here despite having "mind speech" and such. I agree that the only apparent struggles that Genly faces in the book is the cold and genders.
ReplyDeleteLets say he did come from earth and hundreds of years in the future we develop "mind speech" and space travel amongst other things. Is it possible that we Earthlings sought out new planets and colonized them? Like what happened to that one bird and the Galapagos Islands and how each planets population adapted to their surroundings.
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