Coming of Age in Karhide
"Coming of Age in Karhide" is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, a part of the Hainish universe, created by Le Guin.
The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Earth and Gethen, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels.
[2] The inhabitants of Gethen are sequentially hermaphroditic humans; for twenty-four days (somer) of each twenty-six-day lunar cycle, they are sexually latent androgynes.
[4] This absence of fixed gender characteristics led Le Guin to portray Gethen as a society without war, and also without sexuality as a continuous factor in social relationships.
[5] The story is told from the point of view of Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, a teenager who lives in a large communal home in the Karhidish city of Rer.
[6] Upon turning fourteen, Sov witnesses the "Somer-forever" party of their mother's sibling, who has reached the age where sexual activity is no longer possible.
[9] On the day Sov is due to kemmer, their family takes them to the kemmerhouse after presenting them a new set of clothes and going through traditional celebratory rituals.
[12][13][14] In addition, first-person narration discusses the difficulty of telling a story about people without fixed male or female characteristics, in a language that only has gendered pronouns.
[15] Sandra Lindow stated that the kemmerhouse was an "effective cultural solution to the problem of sexuality", because socially acceptable promiscuous sex (both homo- and hetero-sexual) occurred in the absence of a power differential, thus making it healthy.
[16] The story further challenges conventional sex mores because the narrator Sov is physically embraced by her male parent Karrid so that she may kemmer for the first time as a woman, according to the tradition within their family.
[19] Alexis Lothian called it a "quietly feminist story", which demonstrated Le Guin's shift in political views since writing Left Hand towards more explicit feminism.
A review of that volume stated that "Coming of Age" lacked the "giddying impact" of The Left Hand of Darkness, with which it shared a setting.
