Seems like there might be enough traction, so here we go!

Our first “book” shall be “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K LeGuin.

It is a short story that is readily available online. If you cannot purchase it, rent it, or find it online please let me know and I will provide more information on how to get it.

Trigger warnings: emotional abuse, grooming, and child abuse

I would like to include some discussion questions that are community specific, and not generic book club questions, so these will likely be questions I ask regarding every work, subject to change of course.

Some things to think about while reading:

  • Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?
  • Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?
  • Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?
  • Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

I don’t know if I’ll start adding generic book club questions, but if you’d like more general discussion questions of the works going forward, please let me know and I can include some. There’s just a lot of discussion available already for this specific piece and I don’t want answers to common questions to overshadow more nuanced discussions that center women which is why we’re all in this community. Also, this is not a homework assignment. You can choose to address any or none of the questions posed here, or talk about your general thoughts or whatever else. Please feel free to pose your own questions in the comments as well. These should serve as a handy springboard if needed, but not a mandatory outline.

Our first movie will be Kpop Demon Hunters. There were some other suggestions, but I wanted to keep it a little lighter considering this months book has some serious trigger warnings and I wanted people to be able to participate in at least one of the two, even if they would rather not engage in heavy topics. This is an animated movie available on Netflix. I know this is a little exclusionary, but there are some other ways to watch it as well.

Trigger warnings: animated violence/gore, discussion of demons and the afterlife

Same as above: I would like to include some discussion questions that are community specific, and not generic movie club questions, so these will likely be questions I ask regarding every work, subject to change of course.

Some things to think about while watching:

  • Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?
  • Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?
  • Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?
  • Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

I don’t know if I’ll start adding generic questions, but if you’d like more general discussion questions of the works going forward, please let me know and I can include some. There’s just a lot of discussion available already for this specific piece and I don’t want answers to common questions to overshadow more nuanced discussions that center women which is why we’re all in this community. Also, this is not a homework assignment. You can choose to address any or none of the questions posed here, or talk about your general thoughts or whatever else. Please feel free to pose your own questions in the comments as well. These should serve as a handy springboard if needed, but not a mandatory outline.

Comments are spoilers territory. If you want to use spoiler tags in the comments, please do, but it is not required. If you venture into the comments please keep in mind this is a discussion thread for media so there will likely be spoilers.

Going forward This is a community project. I would like to get input regarding written works and tv/movies that would be a good fit for this. I will leave a comment on this thread that you can respond to if you’d like to offer a suggestion. One suggestion per comment please. You can comment multiple times though. I’d like to make sure the selections are widely accessible, so please add that information if you know for sure something is in the public domain or available online, as that makes it easier to recommend. Please vote on the other comments you see there. I’d like to pair heavier topics in one media with lighter topics in the other, just in case you’re wondering why a specific piece was not chosen. Things like language or availability may also affect the selection. I’m also open to changing or adding discussion questions.

Thank you all for your interest. Excited to hear your perspectives!

PS: Even if you have seen or read the media before, I would encourage a reread or rewatch to best participate in the discussion!

  • ZDL@lazysoci.al
    2·
    3 days ago

    Addressing the main questions

    First I’ll address the questions of the original post.

    Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?

    It is definitely told from a feminist perspective, yes. Ursula K. Le Guin is a female writer with unabashed beliefs that include Daoism, anarchism, and, yes, feminism. All three of these philosophical and political stances thread through all her works (with varying emphasis, naturally) and can be sniffed out by the attentive reader.

    That being said, while it is told from a feminist perspective, I would argue its core concerns are not exclusively or even primarily feminist. Its project is broader and more fundamental. I’ll go into my thoughts on why in the guardrailed section below in which I address broader meaning of the work, but the short form is this:

    Omelas is a land in which feminism is no longer necessary (in the same sense that socialism is no longer necessary when communism finally takes hold in Marxist thought).

    But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.

    Free love, in all the glorious '60s and early '70s style, but without guilt, without shame, and, critically, with purveyors of it being equally men and women. With the burdens of the outcomes, usually attached solely to women, a society-wide endeavour. That is definitely the future I envisioned when I first saw the future of men and women being equal stakeholders in society.

    Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?

    Perhaps peripherally? In that someone who is a victim of an unjust system is more likely to portray said injustices than someone who benefits for it. '70s SF, even when “politically aware” rarely addressed systemic issues with the laser focus Le Guin brings to Omelas. So you had Brunner and others addressing environmentalism, while casually assuming patriarchy, for example.

    Le Guin doesn’t do this. She instead lays a trap (which I will get into in the guardrailed section) from which there is no escape. And that trap snares everybody in the system, giving nobody a pass. In that regard Omelas is more the creation of a committed Daoist than an anarchist or feminist.

    Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?

    I’ve read over the story a dozen times since this was announced, picking at every word. And I find no sign of gender in the narrator. Le Guin is not giving us that easy out.

    Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

    I first read this in an old, ratty pocket book I’d picked up from a used book store while I was sipping an overpriced latte in Second Cup (a Canadian coffee chain like Starbucks, only it sucks ever so slightly less).

    That coffee turned to the taste of ashes in my mouth once I figured out what Le Guin was saying. That would be a “yes”, in other words. Because Le Guin, with her laser scalpel, cut open the assumptions at the basis of all our social orders and laid bare the truth: suffering, exploitation, othering, and straight up fundamental torture are at the heart of everything we do.

    Yes, including feminists fighting patriarchy.

    And there’s simply no escape from the moral trap Le Guin set for us. She distilled everything about us into Omelas and wrote a story in under 3000 words based upon it that hits us straight between the eyes with our complicity in the real-world Omelas around us. And, as I will expand upon behind the guard rails, leaves us with no simple answer.

    The guard rail

    Here's where I stray from strictly women's issues, though I circle back around to them here and there...

    Omelas is not a feminist story, though it is written by a feminist. It is not an anarchist story, though it is written by an anarchist. It is instead, at its core, a profoundly Daoist story. And Le Guin was very much a committed Daoist. (So much so that she wrote her own translation of one of the central texts of Daoism: Laozi a.k.a. Dao De Jing. And it’s one of the better translations in that it shows comprehension of the underlying thoughts and principles instead of being a simple-minded literal translation or a reductive academic one.)

    For those who are not Daoists and have a very hazy grasp of what it might even mean, let this proto-Daoist who understands perhaps 0.001% of Laozi after six readings (which puts her literally infinitely ahead of where she was after her first reading of it!) provide a quick little guide map. Daoism is a religion or a philosophical system. Which you think came first depends on whether you agree with the Confucians or not. The Confucians say that philosophical Daoism came first and was corrupted into religious Daoism. I’m not a Confucian; I agree with the people who claim that philosophical Daoism was an attempt to sneak religious Daoist thought into a Confucian-dominated world by giving it a patina of philosophical respectability. (There is strong evidence for this case!) Either way, however, the central point doesn’t change. Daoism is a philosophy centered on the dynamic, cyclical balance of opposites, known as 阴阳 (yīn yáng). It rejects rigid binaries (齐物, qí wù) in favor of a flowing, cyclical view of nature (反, fǎn), advocating for action through non-force (无为, wú wéi) and harmony with the spontaneous way of the universe (自然, zì rán).

    And it is from this well that Le Guin dips for a devastating attack on our very being.

    For in Omelas she portrays a utopia. All good. Men and women are, as I outlined above, equal in all meaningful ways. Yet at the heart of this perfect society lies an imperfection. And true to her Daoist nature, she illustrates this imperfection, this gross, nay nauseating injustice in which a child is, in effect tortured and somehow, by the rules of the fiction, it is this grotesque evil that gives Omelas all its goods.

    But Le Guin is a Daoist. Take a very close look at the symbol at the core of Daoism: ☯. The black is defined by the white and incorporates a piece of it even, as the white is defined by the black, incorporating a piece. This is the very core of 阴阳 (yīn yáng) and the heart of Le Guin’s piece here. The evil is defined by the good … and vice versa. One cannot exist without the other. She’s not going to give you an easy out. She’s facing you with an ugly truth. WE ARE OMELAS. We live in a society that is not perfect, like Omelas is portrayed, but is far closer to Omelas than, say, to the brutality of past ages. Women are better off than they used to be, an overwhelming majority of the population (even those who are struggling!) live better than did the kings of medieval Europe, and in general we are on the line from the barbaric past to the shining future of Omelas.

    And yet Omelas is built on violence. On abuse. On torture. On injustice. Because Omelas is a figurative rendering of us. Of our world.

    And while she sings the praises (sort of) of those who leave, there is even there a quiet, almost unheard (and often-missed) criticism of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: they’ve left the injustice behind.

    Read that slowly until it sinks in. They’ve left it. Behind. Intact and still ongoing. No, Le Guin is not praising those who leave. She’s subtly critiquing those who think this is the answer.

    This is such a Daoist moral trap it makes me shiver when I read it. This is the kind of moral paradox that the entirety of Laozi is based upon. She’s not offering a solution. SHE IS TELLING US WHAT THE PROBLEM IS … and all the while closing the doors to the easy answers. There are no answers in Omelas, only questions. Profound questions she is asking with a sympathetic, but wickedly sharp scalpel as she lays bare the flesh and bones of the very system we are part of, supporters of, and benificiaries of.

    Well, beneficiaries except for those of us who are, in some way or another, the child at the heart of Omelas.