"The Matter of Seggri" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in 1994 in the third issue of Crank!, a science fiction – fantasy anthology, and has since been printed in number of other publications. In 2002, it was published in Le Guin's collection of short stories The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories. "The Matter of Seggri" won the Otherwise Award in 1994 for exploring "gender-bending" and has been nominated for other honors including the Nebula Award.
Style and plot summary
The story is set on Seggri, a planet featuring extreme gender segregation. Seggri is also a part of the fictional interplanetary society called the Ekumen; the story belongs to the Hainish Cycle.
"The Matter of Seggri" has been described as anthropological science fiction because Le Guin describes the society of Seggri in depth. The story is separated into five different accounts, using male and female voices to tell different stories about life on Seggri: a log written by a male alien observer, notes for the Ekumen from a female Hain native, a memoir of Seggri written by a female native, a fictional short story placed on Seggri written by a female native, and an autobiography by a male Seggri native who has worked off Seggri and wants to return.
Themes
Le Guin creates a society in which she is able to experiment with gender. She does this by making the female births numerically much greater than male births, "resulting in a society in which, as one narrator observes, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power." In "The Matter of Seggri", Le Guin experiments with assigning specific roles to each gender that challenge the forms of power each gender has and their status in our society. A prominent reversal is the extreme sexualization of men: Le Guin creates "fuckeries" where women can come and pay for sex with a man of their choosing. As has been observed, Le Guin explores the idea of dominance "inquiringly rather than vindictively", giving women power through being the more plentiful sex.
Gender roles
"The Matter of Seggri" provides a social commentary on modern gender roles. In the story, Le Guin creates a world in which gender roles are switched. Males are trophies and have absolutely no significance in society other than for reproductive purposes, and women have all the power. Only women may have an education, only women may choose their sexual partners, and only women may work and function as a productive cog in the machine of society. This is only possible because Le Guin writes "speculative fiction". This works to break away from the limitations of common fiction and the stereotypical genres associated with it. Because speculative fiction is itself a genre about defying norms, feminist writers often use it to convey social commentary. Carl Freedman, a prominent science fiction writer, asserts that "Speculative fiction is thus a powerful educational tool which uses exaggeration to make women's lack of power visible and discussable. It can motivate women to avoid handicapping themselves by conforming to the demands of femininity." Freedman asserts that the blatant interchange of gender roles in Seggri serves to clearly show the reader how absurd modern gender roles are. The reason that it is unnoticed in present society is because it is a cultural norm for men to be in power in our patriarchal society. When presented with the reverse of what is currently accepted in present society, it should become more evident that work needs to be done to eradicate culturally normalized sexism.