"Success is somebody else's failure."

[tim]

"I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is."

-- Ursula K. Le Guin, commencement speech at Mills College, 1983.

(Her comment about "separatism" strikes me as dancing at the edge of trans erasure... but then, it's their world. As with many things, good if you ignore that.

And you know, I hope she wasn't talking about the need to dominate and/or be dominated in an overarchingly affectionate context of consent, but one just never knows that either.)

Comments

[dharma_slut]

Oh man, I have such a problem with Ursula Le Guin. She totally glorified women being in a powerless place all through the sixties to the eighties-- not all women want to be powerless.

Until her later book "always Coming Home" which is a masterpiece.

[tim]

Well, i think "I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated" are good words for everyone, regardless of gender (again, as I said in the OP, excepting consensual fun forms of domination, which she didn't take the time to except). I also think it's problematic when people expect marginalized groups to lay down their weapons first, IYKWIM. Without more context, it's hard for me to know if Le Guin was doing that. I've read quite a few of her novels, and some of her nonfiction, and I didn't pick up that message. But perhaps I didn't read between the lines or something.

[dharma_slut]

I was looking for one of my "Le Guin failed me" rants and evidently I've written them elsewhere than DW or LJ.

But yeah... "The Wizard of Earthsea" yanno, where there is this VERY IMPORTANT MAGIC that women can not handle ONLY MEN CAN HANDLE IT -- and the dude nearly destroys the world which looks a lot like NOT HANDLING IT in my book. But she never addressed that.

And when she finally did write women handling it -- it was *different* magic. Because of vaginas.

Which really added to my problem with having one of my own. I mean-- wasn't like anyone was saying different back in those days...

[tim]

Ah, that might well be the problem: I don't remember the Earthsea trilogy very well (despite reading it once as a kid and once as an adult).

Genitally essentialist feminism is frustrating because it seems so endemic to feminism of a particular time period, and one doesn't just want to discard everything. I mean, I could just ignore everything that isn't trans-affirming, but thinking about that leaves me feeling like I have no history, no species, not much to draw on, really. And yet the alternative is to read fiction that tells me that I'm fictitious. So yes, it's frustrating.

[dharma_slut]

Yep.

I guess that's why I started writing, though, so that there would be reading material with me in it.

[miang]

Good gravy, thank you for linking that. I don't think I've ever had a single favorite quote before, but I do now! (To wit: "and when they tell you that it's second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they're going to give you equal pay for equal time")