Blog #5

In this last blog I would like to discuss the book as a whole and talk about my reaction to the story. Today in class we discussed various ways that society differentiates people based on things such as gender, age, religion, appearance, etc. As we went over the various means, particularly gender, I realized that there were quite a few categories for classifying people. I also considered how Le Guin tried to remove the problem of gender in our society in her creation of Gethenians. I then realized that even with gender gone, the people in a society still categorize people and stereotype each other. For example, the Gethenians differentiate between those child-bearing and those not child bearing, those in kemmer and those in somer, as well as "normal" androgynous people and "perverted" permanently-gendered people. I deduced that another of Le Guin's themes in the book was how human nature (i.e. the tendency to categorize and stereotype other people) will always be prevalent.