The Matter of Seggri

Last updated • 6 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
"The Matter of Seggri"
Short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
CountryUnited States
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publication
Published inCrank!
Publication typeAnthology
Media typePrint
Publication date1993

"The Matter of Seggri" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in 1994 in the third issue of Crank!, a science fiction – fantasy anthology, and has since been printed in number of other publications. [1] In 2002, it was published in Le Guin's collection of short stories The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories. "The Matter of Seggri" won the Otherwise Award in 1994 for exploring "gender-bending" and has been nominated for other honors including the Nebula Award. [1]

Contents

Style and plot summary

The story is set on Seggri, a planet featuring extreme gender segregation. Seggri is also a part of the fictional interplanetary society called the Ekumen; the story belongs to the Hainish Cycle.

"The Matter of Seggri" has been described as anthropological science fiction because Le Guin describes the society of Seggri in depth. The story is separated into five different accounts, using male and female voices to tell different stories about life on Seggri: a log written by a male alien observer, notes for the Ekumen from a female Hain native, a memoir of Seggri written by a female native, a fictional short story placed on Seggri written by a female native, and an autobiography by a male Seggri native who has worked off Seggri and wants to return. [2]

Themes

Le Guin creates a society in which she is able to experiment with gender. She does this by making the female births numerically much greater than male births, "resulting in a society in which, as one narrator observes, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power." [3] In "The Matter of Seggri", Le Guin experiments with assigning specific roles to each gender that challenge the forms of power each gender has and their status in our society. A prominent reversal is the extreme sexualization of men: Le Guin creates "fuckeries" where women can come and pay for sex with a man of their choosing. As has been observed, Le Guin explores the idea of dominance "inquiringly rather than vindictively", [4] giving women power through being the more plentiful sex.

Gender roles

"The Matter of Seggri" provides a social commentary on modern gender roles. In the story, Le Guin creates a world in which gender roles are switched. Males are trophies and have absolutely no significance in society other than for reproductive purposes, and women have all the power. Only women may have an education, only women may choose their sexual partners, and only women may work and function as a productive cog in the machine of society. This is only possible because Le Guin writes "speculative fiction". This works to break away from the limitations of common fiction and the stereotypical genres associated with it. Because speculative fiction is itself a genre about defying norms, feminist writers often use it to convey social commentary. Carl Freedman, a prominent science fiction writer, asserts that "Speculative fiction is thus a powerful educational tool which uses exaggeration to make women's lack of power visible and discussable. It can motivate women to avoid handicapping themselves by conforming to the demands of femininity." [5] Freedman asserts that the blatant interchange of gender roles in Seggri serves to clearly show the reader how absurd modern gender roles are. The reason that it is unnoticed in present society is because it is a cultural norm for men to be in power in our patriarchal society. When presented with the reverse of what is currently accepted in present society, it should become more evident that work needs to be done to eradicate culturally normalized sexism.

Points of view

The story is told from five different points of view, each contributing to this central commentary on gender roles in a different way, building a theme very evident to the reader. The importance of the varied gender roles is discussed in "The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin" by the feminist anthropologist Beth Baker-Cristales. She explains Le Guin's exploration of culture and the differences that are focused on how Le Guin uses ethnography in her writings. Ethnography's goal is to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. Whereas most ethnographic writing is realist, Le Guin's writing completely controls and invents the world in "The Matter of Seggri" through her use of speculative fiction. Cristales argues that Le Guin’s writing style has an "anthropological sensibility" and her work shows interest in how societies work and how cultures are formed. This directly relates to "The Matter of Seggri" because two of the protagonists are somewhat of anthropologists themselves. Captain Aolao-Olao and Merriment both go to Seggri to report back to their own worlds about the state of Seggri. They go to the experimental society and explore the culture, the society itself, and learn how everything within it functions. "In so much of Le Guin's work, the protagonists are anthropologists by another name. These characters inevitably face the question of how to conceptualize and react to cultural difference and, in the process, exemplify some of the field experiences and model some of the ways anthropologists tend to look at cultural others." [6] Cristales hypothesizes that as Le Guin's parents were prominent American anthropologists, Le Guin was conditioned to think about the underlying circumstances that drive societal interactions by her parents, and so Le Guin's science fiction is so deeply rooted in societal interactions and the culture that they create.

Heteronormativity and feminist focuses

Veronica Hollinger, professor of cultural studies at Trent University, wrote "(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender" to discuss the gender binarism of heteronormativity in modern society. Hollinger discusses how feminism can sometimes be self-imprisoning, just as examined in Sandra Bartky's article "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power". This can be directly related to the concept of the Panopticon prison that Bartky lays out in her writings. In this model of prison, "each becomes to himself his own jailer." [7] Each generation is taught by the previous one that women have specific roles in society and men have others, and they are taught that these roles do not intertwine. Bartky describes femininity as a prison because each generation upholds the oppressive and unfair standards that patriarchal society created. Femininity is in her view a self-imprisoning identity because most women are forced to conform to it due to patriarchal pressure. Seggri's reversed gender roles are Le Guin's commentary on the self-imprisoning nature of femininity and the gender roles in modern society. As Hollinger states, "In our struggle against a monolithic patriarchy—which is, after all, a kind of theoretical fiction produced, in part, by the very feminism aligned against it—we risk reinscribing, however inadvertently, to the terms of compulsory heterosexuality within our own constrictions." [8] Hollinger also explains how Le Guin uses compulsory homosexuality and a monolithic matriarchy to contrast Seggri with present cultural norms and further emphasize the importance of the gender roles in Seggri.

William Macellino, a behavioral and social scientist from Carnegie Mellon University, discusses how "feminist utopian works critique dominant male power and focus and offer some kind of imagined, idealized society that is not characterized by male power and focus." [9] In Le Guin's utopian society, male power is diminished and female authority is omnipresent. Males are portrayed as unimportant except for reproduction, and they are generally looked down upon by the women. Macellino's writing, "Shadows to Walk: Ursula Le Guin's Transgressions in Utopia", shows this by contrasting Seggri with modern culture.

Related Research Articles

Feminist science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction focused on such feminist themes as: gender inequality, sexuality, race, economics, reproduction, and environment. Feminist SF is political because of its tendency to critique the dominant culture. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.

Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice. No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women's contributions are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women's desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanna Russ</span> American writer and academic (1937–2011)

Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula K. Le Guin</span> American fantasy and science fiction author (1929–2018)

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".

<i>The Dispossessed</i> 1974 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Dispossessed is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, one of her seven Hainish Cycle novels. It is one of a small number of books to win all three Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, utopia, individualism, and collectivism.

The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is set in a future history in which civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"), are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, and setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, peaceful Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth but were the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain long ago, which was followed by a long period when interstellar travel ceased. Some of the races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering, including people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only come into active sexuality once a month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's style, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those diverse environments.

<i>The Tombs of Atuan</i> 1970 fantasy novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Tombs of Atuan is a fantasy novel by the American author Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the Winter 1970 issue of Worlds of Fantasy, and published as a book by Atheneum Books in 1971. It is the second book in the Earthsea series after A Wizard of Earthsea (1969). The Tombs of Atuan was a Newbery Honor Book in 1972.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Girl Who Was Plugged In</span> Short story by James Tiptree, Jr.

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is a science fiction novella by American writer James Tiptree, Jr. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1974.

<i>The Birthday of the World and Other Stories</i> 2002 collection of short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in March, 2002, by HarperCollins. All of the stories, except "Paradises Lost", were previously published individually elsewhere. The story which lends its name to the title of the collection was the most recent publication, in 2000. Only these two stories are not set on planets of the Ekumen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postgenderism</span> Social, political and cultural movement advocating for the elimination of gender in humans

Postgenderism is a social, political and cultural movement which arose from the eroding of the cultural, psychological, and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory.

Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.

Gender has been an important theme explored in speculative fiction. The genres that make up speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural fiction, horror, superhero fiction, science fantasy and related genres, have always offered the opportunity for writers to explore social conventions, including gender, gender roles, and beliefs about gender. Like all literary forms, the science fiction genre reflects the popular perceptions of the eras in which individual creators were writing; and those creators' responses to gender stereotypes and gender roles.

Sandra Lee Bartky was a professor of philosophy and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her main research areas were feminism and phenomenology. Her notable contributions to the field of feminist philosophy include the article, "Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness". Sandra Lee Bartky died on October 17, 2016, at her home in Saugatuck, Michigan at age 81.

<i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> 1969 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1969, it became immensely popular, and established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction. The novel is set in the fictional Hainish universe as part of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin, which she introduced in the 1964 short story "The Dowry of Angyar". It was fourth in sequence of writing among the Hainish novels, preceded by City of Illusions, and followed by The Word for World Is Forest.

The role of women in speculative fiction has changed a great deal since the early to mid-20th century. There are several aspects to women's roles, including their participation as authors of speculative fiction and their role in science fiction fandom. Regarding authorship, in 1948, 10–15% of science fiction writers were female. Women's role in speculative fiction has grown since then, and in 1999, women comprised 36% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's professional members. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley has been called the first science fiction novel, although women wrote utopian novels even before that, with Margaret Cavendish publishing the first in the seventeenth century. Early published fantasy was written by and for any gender. However, speculative fiction, with science fiction in particular, has traditionally been viewed as a male-oriented genre.

Gender essentialism is a theory which attributes distinct, intrinsic qualities to women and men. Based in essentialism, it holds that there are certain universal, innate, biologically based features of gender that are at the root of many of the group differences observed in the behavior of men and women.

The anthropologist Leon E. Stover says of science fiction's relationship to anthropology: "Anthropological science fiction enjoys the philosophical luxury of providing answers to the question "What is man?" while anthropology the science is still learning how to frame it". The editors of a collection of anthropological SF stories observed:

Anthropology is the science of man. It tells the story from ape-man to spaceman, attempting to describe in detail all the epochs of this continuing history. Writers of fiction, and in particular science fiction, peer over the anthropologists' shoulders as the discoveries are made, then utilize the material in fictional works. Where the scientist must speculate reservedly from known fact and make a small leap into the unknown, the writer is free to soar high on the wings of fancy.

<i>Sensible Sensuality</i> 2010 book by Sarojini Sahoo

Sensible and Sensuality is a collection of essay by Indian feminist writer Sarojini Sahoo. Published in 2010, the book contains the author's view on feminism. Sahoo is a key figure and trend-setter of feminism in contemporary Indian literature. She has been listed among 25 exceptional women of India by Kindle English magazine of Kolkata. For Sahoo, feminism is not a "gender problem" or confrontational attack on male hegemony and, as such, differs from the feminist views of Virginia Woolf or Judith Butler.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coming of Age in Karhide</span> Science fiction novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1995 in New Legends

"Coming of Age in Karhide" is a science fiction short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1995. The story is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, the same as Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and is a part of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. The story explores themes of growing into adulthood on a planet where individuals have no fixed gender identity. Reviewers stated that the story went further than Left Hand in its exploration of gender and sexuality, and was a "quietly feminist" work. It was also described as lacking the "dizzying impact" of Left Hand. In 2002, it was anthologized in the volume The Birthday of the World, along with many other stories exploring marriage and sexual relationships.

A gender novel is a genre of novel that features gender, or the concept of gender, as a central theme to the plot of the novel. The concept of gender may be used to initiate debate regarding gender stereotypes, gender equality or the reversal of gender roles within books. This term is synonymous with gendered fiction. Gender novels may be categorized not only under the genre of gendered fiction but crime, novel of manners, romance novels, western novels, fantasy, and science-fiction.

Sarah Antoinette LeFanu is a Scottish author and academic.

References

  1. 1 2 "Bibliography: The Matter of Seggri". Isfdb.org. 1996-04-30. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  2. "Chapter 17: "Solitude" and "The Matter of Seggri"". Science Fiction Research Association. Archived from the original on July 11, 2015. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  3. Wolfe, Gary K. (2012-12-23). "Gary K. Wolfe reviews Ursula K. Le Guin". Locus Online Reviews. Locus Magazine. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  4. Shippey, Tom (2012-11-22). "Outer Space, Inner Lands". Where on Earth. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  5. Freedman, Carl (2000). "Science Fiction and the Triumph of Feminism". Science Fiction Studies: 278–289. Retrieved 15 April 2015.
  6. Baker-Cristales, Beth (2012). "Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin". Anthropology and Humanism. 37: 15–25. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01105.x.
  7. Diamond, Irene; Quinby, Lee (1988). Feminism & Foucault: reflections on resistance . Northeastern University Press. p.  63. ISBN   978-1-55553-033-4 . Retrieved 11 April 2015.
  8. Hollinger, Veronica (1999). "(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender". Science Fiction Studies: 23–38. Retrieved 15 April 2015.
  9. Macellino, William (2009). "Shadows to Walk: Ursula Le Guin's Transgressions in Utopia". Journals of American Culture. 32 (3): 203–213. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.2009.00711.x.