Grinding Axess and Balancing Oppositions: The Transformation of Feminism in Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction: Revisioning Ursula K. Le Guin's fiction has always expressed her political commitments, and the changes in her imagined worlds reflect the ways those commitments have developed over the years. (1) The feminist re-visioning of Earthsea in the wake of Le Guin's changing take on gender narratives has been well documented by Le Guin herself: she dramatized the way "what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think" by bringing feminist "politics" into her heroic male "Fairyland" (Earthsea Revisioned 7). Le Guin's Hainish cycle of science fiction novels and stories has always been more explicitly political than her fantasy, but their engagement with changing times from the 1960s to the 2000s enacts a progression similar to that of the re-visioned Earthsea. While similar themes run through all Le Guin's science fiction, in more recent texts she reworks "archetypes" that have grown closer to "millstones" when the knowledges she understood as fundamental, essential truths grew to seem more like arbitrary and contingent social constructs. Le Guin's feminism transforms as she struggles to give representational space to voices and viewpoints she had previously, inadvertently erased; her feminist awakenings are not single or simple but ongoing and continually reevaluated.