Thought Experiments: Connections between genre and feminism in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Joanna Russ's The Female Man

Abstract

In this thesis, I show how the two novels The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, make use of the transformativity of speculative fiction in order to explore sex/gender. Speculative fiction is an umbrella term that contains such genres as science fiction, utopian fiction, and dystopian fiction, and I will point to elements of these genres in the novels, and show how these elements are connected to the novels' exploration of sex/gender and their expression of feminism.