Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness explores a world populated by ambisexuals: humanoids that are each male and female. On the planet Winter, people are androgynous except when in kemmer, essentially translated as ‘in heat.’ Their sexual cycle runs around 28 days, like the female menstrual cycle. For around 21 days, the people are both and neither sex. Once in kemmer, their sex is determined mutually with their partner. They become masculine or feminine for the length of a menstrual period: about five days. This ability to switch sex, to be both male and female, makes Winter a planet without war.

The novel poses the idea of war as purely masculine through the notes of an early “Investigator,” Ong Tot Oppong. As one of the first otherworldly visitors to Winter, Ong hypothesizes about the warless planet. She thinks it might have been an experiment by more advanced peoples to eliminate large-scale aggression and killing. Ong wonders if these supposed genetic engineers, “consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped” (96). Here war is defined as a male activity—penetrating and taking by force with phallic instruments. The absence of the masculine drive that fuels war creates peace. Whether the engineer was a human or god, the question of sexuality remains: why make ambisexual creatures? If not a purpose, an effect of ambisexuality is a peace the planet enjoys.

The protagonist of the novel, Genly Ai—a human explorer that comes after Ong—witnesses a religious ceremony that involves a female with a sword, a potentially warlike figure. A special group on Winter practices “foretelling,” or answering questions about the future. At the end of the ceremony, Genly sees that “there was no moonlight only darkness, and in the center of all darkness Faxe: the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armor, an armored woman with a sword” (65). The ambisexual Faxe becomes a woman to Foretell; the act of prophecy is feminine. Yet, the woman who sees the future appropriates phallic power: holds a sword. This figure recalls many female knights, like Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury and the medieval character Silence. Feminine knighthood offers not only male power, but also the ability to sheath the sword, to set aside the masculinity. Ambisexuals, like Faxe, are able to sheath their phallic instruments. The ability to be both male and female in this vision-state as well as in the rest of life keeps the people of Winter from warmongering.

Unlike the ambisexuals, Genly cannot sheath his sword; masculine war-hunger among humans may stem from the weakness of an organ that is permanently external. An ambisexual friend of Genly—Estraven—notes the nakedness of the penis. He writes that Genly has “a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even to his sexual organ, which he must always carry outside himself” (227). For Estraven and Faxe, the penis is only revealed during some periods of kemmer; humans like Genly who are continually unsheathed seem frail. The development of other more powerful phallic objects, like swords and guns, is one way of compensating for the delicate nature of the penis, especially the flaccid penis. Virility is proven through the phallic rape of war; swords penetrate while the organ itself lies under armor. Ambisexuals do not feel the vulnerability that Estraven senses in Genly; they do not use war to showcase their phallic power.

Ambisexuals are embodiments of both sides of dichotomies—they are both the sword and the sheath. Peace comes from this completeness, this sense of unity rather than difference. The religious group that the Foretellers are a part of, the Handdarata, is focused on wholeness rather than duality. This concept is articulated in Le Guin’s title, taken from a lay from the Handdarata: “Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light. / Two are one, life and death, lying / together like lovers in kemmer, / like hands joined together, / like the end and the way” (233).

Marjorie Jensen recently graduated with her MFA from Mills College. She is an educator, writer, and editor.

The father of cyberpunk, William Gibson, follows a “cool-hunter” in his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. Cayce’s profession of hunting cool unconsciously echoes Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Cayce is successful at the cool hunt partially because of her unusual reaction to marketing materials. Cayce’s allergy to logos reveals more than the just the insidiousness of corporate marketing. Her unusual talent/affliction illustrates how pattern recognition is culturally bound.

Marketing’s use of symbols and signs is intended to tap into a collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense; however, Cayce’s allergy is bound in a cultural unconsciousness. When she arrives in Tokyo, Cayce thinks about “the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here: Whole seas of Burberry plaid have no effect on her, nor Mont Blanc nor even Gucci. Maybe this time it will even have started to work for Prada” (127). As an American in Tokyo, Cayce does not have physical and psychological reactions to the labels that would trigger her at home. The brands, immigrants themselves, have associations in Cayce’s cultural sphere that cause an allergic reaction. In Japan, these labels are recontextualized, that is, they are woven together with foreign words, a language that is read in a different direction. Her unconscious does not understand kanji. As a non-native, divorced from the historical and daily marketing semiotics—and underlying stream of cultural unconsciousness—Cayce has no allergy.

Cayce is immune to native Japanese brands as well as the imports; items that may be triggers once exported to America are harmless in Tokyo. The reason for this is not clear to Cayce. She “wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face” (144). I propose that she has no reaction to Hello Kitty in its natural environment because it taps into a collective unconscious that is rooted in a foreign culture. Her allergy is triggered when marketing symbols and signs draw upon a familiar set of archetypes. Jung proposes that the home of the archetypes--the unconscious psychic realm—is universal, but in cool-hunting semiotics it is formed by cultures.  

However, some cultures, and their cultural unconscious, are mirrored in countries that speak the same language; Cayce’s allergy is present in England as well as in America. She goes to Harvey Nichols and gets sick. Cayce thinks, “it’s all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing…Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she thought she was safe now. They said he’d peaked, in New York…It’s something due to context, here, with not expecting it in London” (17). Tommy Hilfiger, another American in England, triggers Cayce’s allergy. The context is different—there is an ocean between her and the US—but the language is familiar. English words are woven together, informing one another. The cultural unconscious of New York and London can be shared because their semiotics are structured around the same (or similar) signifiers. Or, in less academic jargon, culture is intimately connected to language. The patterns we recognize and the collective that we belong to are rooted in words. Our unconscious dreams in our native tongue.     

In his cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson conjures the neurolinguistic hacker. He, following in the steps of many scholars, supposes that a Sumerian priest/king (or en) named Enki is responsible for a Tower of Babel division of languages. Neurolinguistic hacking is creating a nam-shub: a speech with magical force that goes against a singular mainstream me, or set of social mores. In other words, this hacker diversifies magic.

The history lessons in the novel are an attempt to identify the mother tongue—Sumerian—and, therein, the first magical text: the ur, or proto, grimoire. As noted by Cavendish in A History of Magic, most occult books are amalgamations of other texts. He speaks of the Sefer Yetsirah, or Book of Creation, that “mingles Jewish, gnostic, Pythagorean and possibly Neoplatonist ideas.” In Occult Philosophy, Agrippa cites his sources as the Sefer Yetsirah alongside “books with feigned titles, under the names of Adam, Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Solomon, also Paul, Honorus, Cyprianus, Albertus, Thomas, Hierome, and a certain man of York.” Voodoo, in Robert Farris Thompson’s words, is “a vibrant, sophisticated synthesis of the traditional religions of Dahomey, Yorubaland, and Kongo with an infusion of Roman Catholicism.” Stephenson’s Librarian seeks the root of these grimoires, the one that cites no sources.

This radical search inspires Snow Crash’s Hiro Protagonist to praise the diversity that Enki’s nam-shub created. The eclectic nature of magic—seen in modern incarnations of witchcraft as well as alchemy and voodoo—resists group thought and blind allegiance to me. While critics often condemn Neo-Paganism for its bastardization of a variety of previous magical traditions, it is this very bastardization that encourages independent thought and personal responsibility. Since the Sumerian mother tongue was split, practitioners of magic have drawn upon diverse sources. Magicians research a variety of nam-shubs to create new grimoires and therein critically examine texts and mores.

Hiro argues that neurolinguistic hacking—creating new nam-shubs—is becoming “a fully conscious human being.” Writing grimoires with diverse citations is the opposite of being virally infected with me. Instead of being disciples to an unquestionable system of rules, magic users, beginning with Enki, are free thinkers.  

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan is a black gothic text: it has supernatural elements; doppelgängers and doubles; and places emphasis on the power of books. Classic gothic texts also cast the “other”—the non-white—in the role of the monster, like the yellow creature in Frankenstein or Heathcliff the “gispy” in Wuthering Heights. Kenan’s novel instead features a black teenager, Horace, who is haunted, doubled, and educated. Horace’s otherworldly journey (led by a “real” demon or a schizophrenic voice) brings him face-to-face with a variety of fears. One terror he encounters is linked to his queerness: the fear, as a black man, of becoming a white woman.

Near the end of his journey, Horace encounters his double putting on whiteface; Horace fears himself performing a white female act. Horace “realized. Saw clearly. It was him. Horace. Sitting before the mirror, applying makeup. Of all the things he has seen this night, all the memories he had confronted, all the ghouls and ghosts and specters, this shook him the most” (219). After chasing after a voice, he finds an embodied figure: himself. His double is engaging in a feminine act: putting on makeup. Furthermore, the makeup that is being applied is “milky white greasepaint” (219). The performance crosses gender and race while emphasizing its performativity; Horace’s double is not a white woman, but a black man putting on white makeup like a woman. The audience is in the “costume barn” (218), seeing what goes on backstage. The dressing room is where Horace, who is naked through much of his quest, is terrified.

The doppelgänger attacks Horace with the white makeup, reiterating that Horace fears performing a white feminine act. Horace’s double offers a chair, Horace takes it, and “with an ominous movement, and with delicacy, the image picked up a tube of the same white greasepaint he had used and handed it to Horace, who eyed it with caution. He had no intention of taking it” (220, my emphasis). The added prepositional phrase, “with delicacy,” indicates that the act is stereotypically female. Also, the double had, “with an uncanny grace, paint[ed] his lips a midnight black” (220, my emphasis). The descriptor is again set off with commas and reinforces that the double’s act is a graceful—female—one. Furthermore, homosexuality in men is also stereotypically defined as moving with grace and delicacy or, in other words, as appearing feminine. The terms doubling for feminine and gay indicate that Horace is afraid of his queer identity.

Horace fights with himself over applying the makeup; he is afraid of the game of pretending that is being shown to him. Horace’s “reflection put his hand firmly on Horace’s shoulder and pushed the tube into Horace’s face…grabbing Horace’s hand, the image put the tube in his hand and forced him to make a mark on his face” (221). Literally, Horace is battling with his queer identity. The effeminate (and therein both white and female), gay identity is shown in opposition to black masculinity. Horace has been journeying naked with a gun, doubling the phallus, and specifically the black phallus. It is in a theater that Horace is confronted with his gayness. Not only is male actor a stereotypically gay role, but Horace is also is facing a performance of identities. He is afraid of the consequences of being himself.

Soulless Bodies: A Brief Analysis of Corpses

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the recently dead bodies of Elizabeth and Justine signify the exit of the soul. Here, “soul” is synonymous with individual character: personality and morals. Frankenstein considers his creature—made up of dead bodies—“monstrous.” The women’s soulless bodies offer one explanation for Frankenstein’s rejection of his soulless collection of human parts.

Elizabeth, who is considered “so worthy” (145) by Frankenstein, is unconnected to her body once she is murdered. The “deadly languor and coldness of the limbs told me, that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips” (145). Elizabeth’s individual character—her soul—no longer remains once she has died. The creature’s act of murder divorced soul and body. The “loved” and “cherished” woman ceases to exist. She is no longer even human; Frankenstein refers to her as “what”: merely a thing, a collection of parts. He is quick to reject the corpse of the person he loved the most, which echoes his rejection of the creature. On the birth of the creature, Frankenstein says, “the beauty of the dream [to give life to animate parts] vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (35). Elizabeth is defined as vanished instead of horrific, but the soulless body is present in both cases. The creature is composed of parts not unlike those that make up Elizabeth’s corpse.

Justine, whose morals are tested but found true in life, becomes a felon upon death. While known to be innocent by both Frankenstein and Elizabeth, Justine “perished on the scaffold as a murderess” (60). She is, postmortem, only a killer, not a “unjustly condemned” or “innocen[t]” (59) woman. Her soulless corpse cannot tell of its “ignominy” (59). Justine’s confessors made her believe that she was a “monster” (58) before her death, but Elizabeth and Frankenstein convinced her to admit her innocence. They were certain of it, but could not prevent her guiltless soul from leaving her convicted body. The body on the scaffold remains a monster. Frankenstein, knowing that his creature is responsible for the murder Justine is accused of, does not save her life. Privately, he says he is “the true murderer” (59) as the father of the creature. Frankenstein gives life to a body that has no individual character, or even fragments of character from the bodies it is created from. He does not consider animating soulless pieces of people as an act of creation, but an act of murder. The creature could not be a moral character because Frankenstein discovers that the soul leaves at the time of death. He does not take responsibility for raising the creature; Frankenstein merely leaves it to what he considers its soulless nature.