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Henry aldana

Professor Batty

English 102

06 November 2018

The Absence of What We Have

In the world we live in the power dynamics of race plays a big part, some would argue a

bigger role then it should. M Butterfly illustrates that race can be a double-edged blade in which

it could hurt the one in power of it while in The Left Hand of Darkness the absence of race or

that cultural thought can dramatically change how a species further develops. Some would argue

that race doesn’t play a significant role in our way of thinking and won’t change how we come to

evolve but I’d argue that race is the reason for how the world is today. These two stories

expresses the drawbacks of the social construct of race and its implications to the societies they

talk about.

M Butterfly exposes the stereotypes typically seen in western cultures about the East and

their women. M Butterfly places the opera Madam Butterfly in a more realistic setting to

disprove those misconceptions about asian representation brought to western culture through

works like it, that characterizes asian women as weak and submissive that need a strong western

man to protect them. In the play Song expresses this belief, “what would you say if a blonde

homecoming queen fell in love with a short japanese business man?” (Hwang 17), and Gallimard

doesn’t understand her feelings. Even his wife Helga doesn’t understand Song’s feelings about

this, they turn it into jealousy of the western man.(Hwang 19) Their attitudes are a cultural

attitude expressed through their arts such as Madam Butterfly, to give western men these
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fantasies that the protagonist Gallimard has. This fantasy of finding a beautiful oriental woman

that needs the strong arms of a western man. In turn these fantasies gets Gallimard in jail and

deludes himself into thinking he had an asian woman lover and in fact he had a man cross

dressing as a woman to gain information on him and the french government. The downfall of

Gallimard stemmed out of his culture, “The particular image of “brown women” submissive to

“white men” may not stem from the desire to liberate “brown women”(Lye), it is a way to show

that the white male is stronger than the minority and this is what M Butterfly is trying to tell the

reader. Gallimard falls because he thought he had the power, his cultural way of thinking

induced this and in doing so he underestimated Song and switched the power dynamics, “turned

the story upside down, that centre of gravity remained fixed, though the victim was now not the

Oriental woman but the Western man.”(Kerr). The way the power dynamic shift is the result of

ignorance of other cultures and not understanding them as people similar to you in more ways

than one might think. The social construct of race and stereotypes that go with that race are

imbedded in our culture. How we perceive other races and people is through how we are taught

or else we would see each other as just humans because a lack of pigmentation is not how we

should separate our social constructed races.

In the Left Hand of Darkness race is handled differently, in the planet Winter there is no

race and the people of that planet go through a cycle. This cycle happens once a month and they

go through “Kemmer” in which they decide what kind of genitals they have and become sexually

active. The human Genly Ai travels to this planet in hopes of starting communication with the

Gethenians and finds the differences in their culture and their beliefs from his own and his

people in which much of it has to do with the absence of gender. In having no gender the people

of Winter are a people that see less divisions between them and their fellow gethians. In Chapter
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9 of Left Hand of Darkness, there is a story about two feuding lords and their disputed lands. The

two lords find themselves stuck together for a night due to an injury and come to an understand,

“They are the same”, said Stokven”(k. 134), that's when they look at their similarities they can

come to an understanding of where the other comes from. It is how they think culturally, that

maybe we humans see but not all of us. This isn’t just expressed in these two lords but to the

world, in this world war has never happened, “a border-dispute and a few barn-burnings and

murders, yes; but a feud between two nations?”(K. 90). If we look at our history lots of wars

were fought over ideas and race, between nations that thought of a race of people as inferior and

the cause of civil unrest but here they think differently that us humans, there are less things to

show our differences and so there are less categories they people each other in. This war that

might happen in the story is through nationalism and the separation they made through borders,

that's where this conflict erupts. These people aren’t without conflict, “We are dualist too.

Duality is essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”( K. 252), they see less of it

because they don’t see the duality that we as humans see, in women and men, in race, and in

nationalism. In the entire book race isn’t involved other than Genly being an alien, “Genly Ai's

color is not attached to any meaning or history, which may be a utopian description,” (Lothian),

this isn’t in their culture to judge a person on the pigmentation of their skin. The binaries and

categories that we define and use as a society are apart of our society, “sex not only functions as

a norm, but it is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs,” (Fayad), so in a

society like the Gethians those binaries like sex doesn’t shape their governing practice. These

things that some would argue isn’t important shapes more than one might think. Race and

separations like race makes societies treat those races differently because we as a society are

already looking at our differences in which it results in stereotypes and misconceptions about
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each other. Miscommunication can change everything, that was the reason why Ai distrusted

Estraven. He thought of Estraven’s words as “frank and cautious,ironic”(K. 4) as Estraven thinks

of himself as “blunt and frank” and the advice he gives Ai was misunderstood. Even what one

might think as being blunt can be misinterpreted as having underlying meaning.

I think that shows that even if we stop thinking in binaries we still can’t truly understand

one another because we can’t actually go through our lives in other people’s shoes. We can only

assume as much of the things we don’t understand through our own feelings and experiences.

This is why causing separations like race and gender hurt understanding and communication

between one another. One could argue that its because our divisions is what makes us unique and

shows individuality and those individualities gives society more than it takes away, but I argue if

we focus too much on those differences we start to hurt each other, that’s why we see so much

assumptions about other races. That is why Gallimard went to jail and became the victim of

Song’s deception and why Ai didn’t trust Estraven nor heed his warnings causing him to go to

jail as well. These two stories illustrates how race can affect our decisions and how a world

without that social construct can be more peaceful than one might think. The narratives of both

these stories are so different but express similar ideas that could even change our world. Conflict,

I think will still happen even on a planet that sees no wars, they almost had a war in the story

because we don’t just fight over race and gender, we fight over ideas and territory. Race is a way

to divide us but only on the basis that it makes us look different, Jane Elliot said “the ignorance

of thinking you’re better or worse because the amount of pigment in your skin”, and so as a

people we should educate ourselves to get out of this ignorance of separation of ability and

assumption that we are different. We differ in all our different cultures and how we do things. In

M Butterfly, Song remarks about western education, “Well, education has always been
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undervalued in the West, hasn’t it?” (Hwang 21), and these are values that divides us and that

sheds conflict, the ignorance of western culture.

Race affects us because we as a society have dictated that it matters and in doing so

causes harm when there shouldn’t be. Race has a big role in our society and how we treat people

even with arguments that furthers the idea that race isn’t significant in our way of thinking. Race

helps in seeing how we are different, M Butterfly conveys the harm in the assumptions of how

we are different between our race and how wrong they can be while The Left Hand of Darkness

explores how a race of people could be, if they didn’t think in so many categories as gender is

not existent in their species and how it affects us as a society as eliminating other categorical

issues like race.The absence of binary thinking could really shape us in a path that The Left Hand

of Darkness illustrates but all we could do is speculate and try to predict what might happen but

as the foretellers say we may know the answer to the wrong question. I pose that if race wasn’t as

important then in those in the majority could be happy if the roles of minority and majority

switched. If say white people would be happy to be black in our society.

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Works Cited

Fayad, Mona. "Aliens, androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin's critique of representation in The

Left Hand of Darkness." Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature,

vol. 30, no. 3, 1997, p. 59+. Literature Resource Center,

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dd59e. Accessed 6 Nov. 2018.

Lothian, Alexis. "Grinding axess and balancing oppositions: the transformation of feminism in

Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction." Extrapolation, vol. 47, no. 3, 2006, p. 380+.

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Kerr, Douglas. "David Henry Hwang and the Revenge of Madame Butterfly." Contemporary

Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 196, Gale, 2005. Literature

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by Mimi Chan and Roy Harris, Hong Kong University Press, 1991, pp. 119-130.

Lye, Colleen. "M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Antiessentialism: Minority Discourse in an

International Frame." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol.

196, Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center,

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b6901f. Accessed 5 Nov. 2018. Originally published in The Ethnic Canon: Histories,
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Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu, University of Minnesota

Press, 1995, pp. 260-289.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. Plume Books, 1989.

K., Le Guin Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace, 1974.