The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Delany Samuel R.; Cheney Matthew;

Author:Delany, Samuel R.; Cheney, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2009-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

§5

Anarres’s egalitarianism is not intended as total. The kind of adolescent bisexuality Le Guin posits for the Anarresti exists in many primitive tribes today (as well as many American summer camps) that exhibit a far greater sexual division of adult labor and behavior than either Anarres or America.

There are at least four places in the novel where Le Guin leaves signs in the text to indicate these limitations. Before examining them, however, we must begin by saying that we do not feel that the signs as we see them do the job the text demands of them—which is to say, we feel they would have sufficed in a novel of mundane fiction. The analytical imperatives of science fiction, however (and however infrequently they are met), mark them inadequate.

Near the beginning of the prison scene in Chapter Two, we read: “The simple lure of perversity brought Terin, Shevek, and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated from their company, they could not have said why.” Sign one (p. 31/29).

And in the next scene a few years later, when a group of slightly older boys are discussing the politics of Urras, after having seen some films on the decadence of Urras (whose erotic content we have remarked on), we read: “They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company. The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.” Sign two (p. 36/33).

The semantic associations of these sentences are such that we must read them as an expression of the traditional idea that adolescent boys naturally tend to segregate themselves from girls at the onset of puberty.

Once more I am thrown back to experiences of my own—in the summer camp that prompted my parenthetical statement about adolescent bisexuality five paragraphs ago.

A number of the youngsters I went to summer camp with, between the ages of eight and fourteen, were children I was also in school with. I was not conscious of any great pressure on the sexes to remain separate in my school, but looking back on it I suspect I was not aware of it the way the fish is not aware of water or the bird is not aware of air. Our elementary school had an informal, yet definite dress code. Boys could wear jeans. Girls could not wear pants of any sort—except when it was snowing. Then they could wear slacks. For the monthly school dances, the girls had to stay after classes to decorate the music room. For school trips and fire drills the teachers lined the boys up on one side of the hall and the girls up on the other—and for fire drills boys and girls left the building separately. On the class bus, boys sat on one side and girls sat on the other. And I

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