Conceiving an Ecofeminist Utopia: Genre, Gender, and Ecology in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

Abstract

In her essay “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula K. Le Guin states “Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip.” Her analogy is to the Chinese Yang-Yin symbol where yang is masculine, and yin is feminine. Yang is also “active, aggressive, lineal, progressive” where yin is “yielding, passive, participatory, circular” (all Dancing at the Edge of the World 90). But what does it mean to critique the literary genre of utopia as masculine? This is not an observation others have made about utopia. Utopias have been studied as feminist or masculinist but in relation to their content not the genre itself. In a separate essay, Le Guin satirizes the logic of “Civilised Man” who considers everyone and everything available to him as required for his purposes: Civilised Man says: I am...