Ursula K. Le Guin Is Still the Radical Feminist We Need Today
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鈥淯rsula K. Le Guin gave us years where she wrote three novels and short stories and essays that won major awards while raising three children. I think highly of her. For me, she鈥檚 Beyonc茅.鈥�
YES! Illustration by Fran Murphy
Ursula Le Guin is one of the great world builders to ever put words to paper. She tapped into the divinity that shapes the world, to craft universes for our imaginations, and then shared these imaginings until they began to change the world, this world.
鈥淭o oppose something is to maintain it. 鈥� You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road,鈥� she wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness.
I hope my worshipful adoration in the documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin isn鈥檛 too eager. And I hope it鈥檚 crystal clear: This writer gave us years where she wrote three novels and short stories and essays that won major awards while raising three children. I think highly of her. For me, she鈥檚 Beyonc茅.
Le Guin was rejected many times before anyone published her. She has this in common with Octavia Butler, and more recently with Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James. Perhaps after a lot of rejection, it becomes easier to relinquish the world of the normal or, in Le Guin鈥檚 case, the literary. Along the path of all those rejections, Le Guin struck out toward the odd and subversive and revolutionary. Whoever finally accepts your work, they are accepting what you persisted in creating. The people who finally accepted Le Guin鈥檚 visionary work were in the realm of sci-fi鈥攈er first editor had just been working with Samuel R. Delany, the charming god of complex fantasy and sex writing.
Speaking of lineage, Le Guin鈥檚 Taoism is a thread woven through every facet of her worldsview. It is thrilling to have come across her translation of the Tao Te Ching just as I was grappling with the depth of that text鈥攁nd even more thrilling to see how she breathes life into the ideas again and again in The Dispossessed, in Tehanu, in Always Coming Home. Each of these worlds is so different, and yet Taoism functions across all imagining: Her characters are always learning patience, decentering themselves, relinquishing the idea of a known way, of destiny calling.
Le Guin鈥檚 writing changes the way available to the reader. Her anarchist utopia/dystopia classic The Dispossessed is a required text for movements鈥攊t鈥檚 a foundational entry into her worlds. She doesn鈥檛 take the easy road, and she doesn鈥檛 allow us as readers to be far from the core question of the text. By the end, you need to know inside yourself what freedom means to you. You need to know what you would do to have that freedom, what you would give up and what you would claim. It鈥檚 a brave text, a warrior鈥檚 text. It鈥檚 an artful critique both of capitalism and of her critics while sacrificing none of its benefits. She鈥檚 pointing at us and laughing. She鈥檚 also pointing toward freedom and inviting.
I appreciate Le Guin鈥檚 slow claiming of feminism as a movement: not just thought, but as a way of reading and living and writing. She exemplifies the feminism that I think many straight women like her long for鈥攖o be equal, while sharing the work of managing home and life with men (rather than holding more of the work and less of the support or acknowledgment).
It鈥檚 beautiful to see her husband, Charles, as a feminist man in practice. Le Guin found a love that grew with her, and in the container of writer/wife/mother, Le Guin became a radical in the way I believe most people do when given the time and space to think for themselves. Le Guin鈥檚 politics are still pushing us forward today. With a smirk and a smile, she is still teaching.
I find it so fitting that her final public acts were anti-capitalist and flagrant. Let us close this love note with some of her brilliant words, spoken at the National Book Awards in 2014: 鈥淲e live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings.鈥�
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adrienne maree brown
is a writer, editor, activist, social justice facilitator, coach, speaker, and doula. Her books include Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which she wrote and edited, and Octavia鈥檚 Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, which she co-edited. They are a YES! contributor, and the creator of YES!鈥檚 exclusive collective column 鈥淢urmurations.鈥�
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