Against the Sexless Utopia: Delany contra LeGuin

• In Event: Delany and Sex at the End of Empire

Abstract

Samuel R. Delany’s novel Trouble on Triton (1976) is famously the author’s response to the feminist science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974), published two years earlier. Triton, however, is just one half of Delany’s engagement with LeGuin’s novel: it sits alongside a long critical essay by Delany entitled “To Read the Dispossessed” (1977). This paper seeks to revisit this moment in the history of the New Wave in science fiction history in the 1960s and 70s to outline the particular contribution—and modification—that Delany’s queer and sex-positive visions of the future make to perhaps the most widely read utopian work of the 1970s. Beyond the hetero- and cisnormativity of The Dispossessed, not only does the novel downplay (if not entirely disappear) sexual desire, Delany also saw it as inadvertently undermining the gender equality it appeared to champion. LeGuin’s anarchist utopia, even as it questioned its own legitimacy (the protagonist is a scientific genius held back by his ostensibly egalitarian lunar society), is nonetheless celebrated as a possible solution to ills of LeGuin’s Cold War present. But this is only possible by absenting the disruptive forces of desire and subjective autonomy. This paper is interested in what this encounter between contrasting visions of utopia between two left-libertarian feminist authors writing in the wake of the 1960s counterculture and sexual revolution can teach us about the ways in which we might imagine emancipatory futures today.

Author

• Smaran Dayal, Stevens Institute of Technology