Gender and abjection in Omelas
Dec. 21st, 2018 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
entanglingbriarsThis is a short paper I wrote for my critical theory class. In it, I analyze Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" through the lens of Judith Butler's notion of performative gender. I'd say it's readable without having read Butler (or Althusser or Kristeva whom I also cite in this paper), but if you haven't read "Omelas" you should read it first.
There is a tortured child in a basement under LeGuin’s fantastic city of Omelas. We are told little of this child. It is malnourished, small, an imbecile, almost ten years of age, and—what is important for this discussion—its gender is unknown; “it could be a boy or a girl” (292). But why is this child’s gender unknown? It has genitals (293) and is open to viewing by the public, gender exists in Omelas (290), and this child was not always trapped in a basement (293). Like any person, its identity even prior to birth would have always-already been constructed in the way that any other Omelan baby’s would have been (Althusser 700). It cannot, then, be for want of a historical or biological reason that the tortured child is without gender.
Judith Butler argues that gender is not a stable, ontological state. This is not, in and of itself, controversial. Other feminists, particularly de Beauvoir, have noted that gender “is an historical situation rather than a natural fact” (Butler 901), the product of cultural and social forces that define what it means to be a woman outside of the mere biological fact of being female (902). The controversy comes when Butler takes this a step further: although gender is, in an Althusserian sense, part of an always-already constructed identity prior to birth (Althusser 700), it is brought into being through “a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body” (Butler 902, emphasis in original). Gender is not static but continually reasserted and redeclared through the “stylized repetition” of acts through which the body materializes its gender (900).
If this is true, then it follows that the tormented child in Omelas has been stripped of its gender by preventing it from performing its gender. It is kept in isolation, kind words are not spoken to it, it feels no human contact (LeGuin 293). All of these prohibitions serve to isolate it not only from its society, but from its ability to perform an identity of any sort, including gender, within that society. The identity that was always-already constructed for it from before birth, which it otherwise would have been both permitted and compelled to perform (Butler 903) is gone. Not even the child’s memory of the identity it once had is sufficient to provide it with a gender, for it has no means by which to perform that identity.
Being forbidden to perform gender, as part of a broader prohibition on performing any identity, not only isolates the child, it prevents it from any meaningful protest against its torment. The ability to perform identity is the ability to assert power “through subversive performances of various kinds” (910), but the child has no ability to subvert. It may cry “I will be good” (LeGuin 293) all it wants, but its voice is effectively unheard.
Stripping the child of its gender, of its ability to perform an identity, not only strips Omelas from the child; it strips the child from Omelas. “[G]ender is a project which has cultural survival as its end” (Butler 903), and by forbidding the child to have a gender, Omelas is effectively saying it has no role to play in the city’s cultural survival.
Except that the child has everything to do with the city’s cultural survival. On this point the text of the story is clear: “If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place… in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed” (LeGuin 293). The child is thus abjected from its society (Kristeva 1-2): always-already necessary to its survival, but forbidden from participating in that which it sustains.
This is the paradox of Omelas: its survival is dependent on something that is apart from itself, something that is forbidden from performing an Omelan identity; the child is in Omelas but not of Omelas. It is significant here that the child was not always in Omelas but not of it; it was once also of Omelas. In this state, prior to its captivity and torment, it had a gendered self, a self that came into being through acts that created the illusion of stable identity (Butler 901).
The efforts needed to strip the child of its gender, of its identity, show the strength and power of that identity. To abject it from Omelas it must not only suffer, it must suffer in a particular manner. Though it has genitals and a memory of gender, it must not be permitted to perform that gender; though it can speak, its words must be ignored; though there are mops and objects in its room, it must be afraid of them and unwilling to interact with them. In short, to deny the child an identity all possible, all conceivable avenues of identity performance must be cut off from it.
There is an alternative interpretation of the child’s genderless state: the child’s gender has not been suppressed, nor is it unknown; rather it is irrelevant. LeGuin’s language indicates that her description of the city is speculative, not objective.
If this is a case, perhaps the child’s gender is also a matter of speculation; let the reader decide for herself if it is a boy or a girl. This will not do. Even if the reader were told what the child’s genitals looked like and if the child were accorded a pronoun, it would still be without gender because the child has no means of performing a gender. To have a gender is to participate in the society that grants and enforces gender; the child is not a participant in any society, for it has been completely abjected.
Now the sacrifice of Omelas comes into clearer terms. It is not simply the case that the glory of Omelas is built upon suffering; rather the glory of Omelas is built upon taking something Omelan and exiling it from the social location of the city while keeping it in the same physical location. There are others, not the child, never the child, who leave Omelas (LeGuin 294), and the loss of those unwilling to accept the tortured, abjected child is as much a consequence of the sacrifice as the beauty and splendor of the city. The cost is the abjection; the cost is saying that something once loved and cherished shall be treated as unwanted, disgusting, abominable.
It is easy to treat the story of Omelas as a simple parable on utilitarianism. To see it as nothing more than an equation with the suffering of one child on the left and the wealth, beauty, and prosperity of the vast city on the right. But while that may be part of the parable, it is not the whole. The whole of the parable is that the wealth, beauty, and prosperity of the vast city are built on taking everything about the city that makes it the city, taking the culture that allows the performance of gender and other identities, and saying that in one—and only one—case it is to be denied. The child is not a random victim, some colonized outsider upon whose back is built the wealth of imperialism, but a part of the community who has been driven apart from it. Someone once permitted, someone once always-already required, to perform its identities, including gender, being denied them.
Omelas must fling off a part of itself as refuse, must prohibit a part of itself from being itself, must abnegate and deny everything about itself in once instance—and no other—in order to exist. It is not a sacrifice of Other to Self, but of Self to Self that enables it to thrive.
Works cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 693–702.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 900–11.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Colombia University Press, 1982.
LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Literature: The Human Experience, Bedford/St Martin’s, 2014, pp. 290–95.
There is a tortured child in a basement under LeGuin’s fantastic city of Omelas. We are told little of this child. It is malnourished, small, an imbecile, almost ten years of age, and—what is important for this discussion—its gender is unknown; “it could be a boy or a girl” (292). But why is this child’s gender unknown? It has genitals (293) and is open to viewing by the public, gender exists in Omelas (290), and this child was not always trapped in a basement (293). Like any person, its identity even prior to birth would have always-already been constructed in the way that any other Omelan baby’s would have been (Althusser 700). It cannot, then, be for want of a historical or biological reason that the tortured child is without gender.
Judith Butler argues that gender is not a stable, ontological state. This is not, in and of itself, controversial. Other feminists, particularly de Beauvoir, have noted that gender “is an historical situation rather than a natural fact” (Butler 901), the product of cultural and social forces that define what it means to be a woman outside of the mere biological fact of being female (902). The controversy comes when Butler takes this a step further: although gender is, in an Althusserian sense, part of an always-already constructed identity prior to birth (Althusser 700), it is brought into being through “a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body” (Butler 902, emphasis in original). Gender is not static but continually reasserted and redeclared through the “stylized repetition” of acts through which the body materializes its gender (900).
If this is true, then it follows that the tormented child in Omelas has been stripped of its gender by preventing it from performing its gender. It is kept in isolation, kind words are not spoken to it, it feels no human contact (LeGuin 293). All of these prohibitions serve to isolate it not only from its society, but from its ability to perform an identity of any sort, including gender, within that society. The identity that was always-already constructed for it from before birth, which it otherwise would have been both permitted and compelled to perform (Butler 903) is gone. Not even the child’s memory of the identity it once had is sufficient to provide it with a gender, for it has no means by which to perform that identity.
Being forbidden to perform gender, as part of a broader prohibition on performing any identity, not only isolates the child, it prevents it from any meaningful protest against its torment. The ability to perform identity is the ability to assert power “through subversive performances of various kinds” (910), but the child has no ability to subvert. It may cry “I will be good” (LeGuin 293) all it wants, but its voice is effectively unheard.
Stripping the child of its gender, of its ability to perform an identity, not only strips Omelas from the child; it strips the child from Omelas. “[G]ender is a project which has cultural survival as its end” (Butler 903), and by forbidding the child to have a gender, Omelas is effectively saying it has no role to play in the city’s cultural survival.
Except that the child has everything to do with the city’s cultural survival. On this point the text of the story is clear: “If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place… in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed” (LeGuin 293). The child is thus abjected from its society (Kristeva 1-2): always-already necessary to its survival, but forbidden from participating in that which it sustains.
This is the paradox of Omelas: its survival is dependent on something that is apart from itself, something that is forbidden from performing an Omelan identity; the child is in Omelas but not of Omelas. It is significant here that the child was not always in Omelas but not of it; it was once also of Omelas. In this state, prior to its captivity and torment, it had a gendered self, a self that came into being through acts that created the illusion of stable identity (Butler 901).
The efforts needed to strip the child of its gender, of its identity, show the strength and power of that identity. To abject it from Omelas it must not only suffer, it must suffer in a particular manner. Though it has genitals and a memory of gender, it must not be permitted to perform that gender; though it can speak, its words must be ignored; though there are mops and objects in its room, it must be afraid of them and unwilling to interact with them. In short, to deny the child an identity all possible, all conceivable avenues of identity performance must be cut off from it.
There is an alternative interpretation of the child’s genderless state: the child’s gender has not been suppressed, nor is it unknown; rather it is irrelevant. LeGuin’s language indicates that her description of the city is speculative, not objective.
Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids… for certainly I cannot suit you all…. [T]hey could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines…. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. (LeGuin 291)
If this is a case, perhaps the child’s gender is also a matter of speculation; let the reader decide for herself if it is a boy or a girl. This will not do. Even if the reader were told what the child’s genitals looked like and if the child were accorded a pronoun, it would still be without gender because the child has no means of performing a gender. To have a gender is to participate in the society that grants and enforces gender; the child is not a participant in any society, for it has been completely abjected.
Now the sacrifice of Omelas comes into clearer terms. It is not simply the case that the glory of Omelas is built upon suffering; rather the glory of Omelas is built upon taking something Omelan and exiling it from the social location of the city while keeping it in the same physical location. There are others, not the child, never the child, who leave Omelas (LeGuin 294), and the loss of those unwilling to accept the tortured, abjected child is as much a consequence of the sacrifice as the beauty and splendor of the city. The cost is the abjection; the cost is saying that something once loved and cherished shall be treated as unwanted, disgusting, abominable.
It is easy to treat the story of Omelas as a simple parable on utilitarianism. To see it as nothing more than an equation with the suffering of one child on the left and the wealth, beauty, and prosperity of the vast city on the right. But while that may be part of the parable, it is not the whole. The whole of the parable is that the wealth, beauty, and prosperity of the vast city are built on taking everything about the city that makes it the city, taking the culture that allows the performance of gender and other identities, and saying that in one—and only one—case it is to be denied. The child is not a random victim, some colonized outsider upon whose back is built the wealth of imperialism, but a part of the community who has been driven apart from it. Someone once permitted, someone once always-already required, to perform its identities, including gender, being denied them.
Omelas must fling off a part of itself as refuse, must prohibit a part of itself from being itself, must abnegate and deny everything about itself in once instance—and no other—in order to exist. It is not a sacrifice of Other to Self, but of Self to Self that enables it to thrive.
Works cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 693–702.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 900–11.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Colombia University Press, 1982.
LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Literature: The Human Experience, Bedford/St Martin’s, 2014, pp. 290–95.
