She unnames them

I’ve seen the lions turn to cubs / And I’ve seen the hunters turn to prey / The lessons will come again tomorrow / If they’re not learned today

Kae Tempest, Lessons

What is a person? It’s a threshold question, as if it could only be asked in the passage between an end and a beginning, at a moment when the list of the virtues of human existence is exhausted, dries up, and we finally see that what we thought was properly human is, after all, shared with other beings. In its tendency to move away from purist differentiations governed by exclusive properties, science not only fails to offer this guarantee, but has contributed to shattering the logic of unity, of restriction, of what is, in short, singular.

In a 1985 essay entitled She Unnames Them1, Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a counter-history2 of the beginning of humanity through the story of Adam and Eve. We all know this story. It is told to us as a metaphor for life on Earth, where effort replaced the abundance of Paradise, suffering replaced delights and death replaced eternity, since, through Eve’s fault – the word fault is undeniable in the Old Testament – we were banished from the divine abode. In the Book of Genesis, just after creating the garden of Eden and instructing Adam not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God shows Adam “every beast of the field and every bird of the air” in order to find him a companion so that he wouldn’t be alone. Until now, in the Bible’s account, it was only God who had the power to assign names. It is through the word, the name, that all Creation comes into being, including Adam and Eve. However, at this moment, God decides that all creatures will know each other through the name that Adam, made in His image and likeness, has chosen for them and, as he gets to know the animals, Adam gives them a name. So when Eve is created soon afterwards, she also receives the name that Adam gives her. Now, in She Unnames Them, Eve removes from all creatures, as from herself3, the names that Adam had given them. Once the barrier of names has been annulled, Eve finds that she and the creatures are now closer, so close that the fear and attraction between them become one: “the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.” By removing the names, or granting herself the power to remove the names, Eve rejects the unequal power relations between herself, the animals and Adam and, by refusing ownership, finds herself in unity with nature. Then she leaves Paradise. When she says goodbye to Adam, however, without him even realizing that she is saying goodbye, she realizes that language as she knew it has abandoned her. She can no longer use it to “chatter” and no longer takes everything for “granted.” Abdicating authority, her words become “slow, new, hesitant.” What is this place that Eve occupies?

Albrecht Dürer, Arm of Eve, 1507Albrecht Dürer, Arm of Eve, 1507

A natural place

She Unnames Them questions not only the role of women within patriarchal societies, but also the impact of human actions on the natural world and its utilitarian pretensions. At issue is the power of language. Eve unnames herself – in fact, in the story, she never uses her name – but the act of unnaming the animals is also a symbol of eliminating the roles and expectations that an anthropocentric view of nature imposes on them. Le Guin wants to challenge patriarchal naming conventions – and, more broadly, the articulation of the system that has traditionally been used to subjugate women – as well as the power dynamics between man and nature, and instigate a relationship based on equity and care. God gives Adam the power to name. Eve, however, does not claim the power of language for herself. Not only does she not want to name, but by freeing the animals from the name Adam gave them, she denies him the power to name. The male hierarchy ends because she doesn’t want the power of language that wasn’t given to her. Eve opposes power to anarchy, evidence to hesitation, oneness to the collective, and authority to sameness. In this gesture, a new, unexpected disposition towards the world suddenly becomes accessible, in which action follows listening, and the overlapping of parts reveals itself to be burlesque. Le Guin’s Eve is not tailor-made for Adam. She doesn’t claim for herself the place he has obtained and the power he holds. On the contrary, she refuses that power, and what she finds, as in an adventure where one suddenly finds access to a secret, is a place of disempowerment, naivety, abandon and unpretentiousness. Ineffectiveness against the perversion of effectiveness. A natural place. 

Human nature is not a fairy tale

Ursula Le Guin looked to Taoism, particularly the yin, the feminine principle associated with water, to affirm a feminine force that ignores authoritarian hierarchies. In 1962, when the US government, led at the time by John F. Kennedy, resumed nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert, the inhabitants of Portland, in the neighboring state of Oregon, where Le Guin lived with her husband and three young children, feared radioactive contamination. Although, at the time, she was reluctant about her activist intervention, fearing that it might take her away from writing or make her didactic, she joined Portland Women for Peace, a group of “disparate but well-intentioned housewives,” for the first of a series of protests in the city. Wearing a suit and high heels, Le Guin sees a far-right journalist photographing the group and confronts him with a pronounced and seductive wink.

The growing polarization in the midst of the war, leading to Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1969, brought her frustration, sadness and despair. Ursula wonders about the dangers of moral compromise in the name of interest and, in 1973, publishes the short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. The world of Omelas is perfect and enchanting “like a fairy tale,” and it becomes authentic through a single cruelty, necessary for its preservation: the serenity and splendor of the city require that a child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness and misery. After working on the Eugene McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, Le Guin decided to retire from political action to imagine alternatives in her fiction writing, and her readings on civil disobedience and non-violent resistance led her to conceive of a society without private property and without a state: The Dispossessed was then published in 1974. Le Guin was not convinced that a radical absence of hierarchies was compatible with human nature. Urras is a state-controlled, hierarchical, patriarchal, unequal, individualistic planet. Yet it is exuberant, rich and beautiful. A century and a half before the beginning of the novel, a group of idealistic revolutionaries from Urras went into exile and settled on Anarres, a satellite planet, arid and ecologically poor, which becomes the setting for a social experience based on principles of mutual aid, an anarchist, feminist system, where social equality and the collective take center stage. There is pure mistrust between the two, which Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” tries to dissolve. In Anarres there are no politicians, no bosses, no salaries and no police. The only law is the principle of mutual aid. It’s not a utopia either. Its purpose is not in the future, in what might be achieved one day, but in the process itself, and its political action is supported by plurality. That’s why Anarres is a planet without private property where there are no possessive pronouns. 

What is this place?

Language has an inalienable political dimension and is responsible for creating and perpetuating power relations where the logic of violence is inscribed. In the rhizomatic tank of language, each word has a historically punctuated root that defines its identity and clarifies the place occupied by each of us in the lineage of human existence. Who can dominate and who must submit, the normal and the deviant, the voice that commands and the voice that says nothing. Although language is presented to us as an organic system, a whole that man masters, intimately linked to society and accessible to scientific knowledge, the laws of its functioning continue to be deconstructed and demythologized. Protocols of representation sustained by language, and hitherto taken as evidence, are being dismantled as, above all, the global majority of racialized people, women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community expose the places to which they have traditionally been confined and the violence caused by the methods of this conditioning. It is social relations that determine and regulate the conditions of language use. The relationship that destroys, controls, adds to, or diminishes a body is exercised through language4. It’s to this extent that language doesn’t always serve as a means of emancipation.  

Who speaks through me when I speak? In general, utopias written by women are very different from those written by men. While the latter tend to describe highly hierarchical societies, full of laws, statutes and regulations, where the hero usually belongs to the category to which the writer belongs, women’s utopias seek constructions of more anarchic and horizontal societies. They’re often concerned with overcoming loneliness. Their societies are classless, they aim to have enough, neither poverty nor wealth. Security is seen as fundamental: a woman must be able to cross the world naked with an emerald around her neck without being accosted. The theme of sex is always present. Sometimes it’s about affection, other times it’s promiscuous, but it always goes beyond the boundaries of what our society considers to be proper heterosexual activity. Monogamy is never a principle. There’s something tragic about the utopia, all utopias: they’re the space of absence. They’re about what we don’t have. By speaking of sharing all the things that have to be done in society (looking after the old and the children, the dead, the sick, etc.), women are actually revealing a cloistered regime and declaring that these jobs should be considered as prestigious as working in a successful multinational. It’s always a game with authority. Depending on whether it’s based on forms of repression or liberation, inclusion or censorship, language serves to bring us closer together or to distance us, to see us or to find us strange. Responsibility towards memory, building a community and caring are, in this respect, ways of resisting in which language proves particularly challenging towards what we take for granted. What are feminine values? What is this place? We occupy a space with a fragmented meaning.

Language shapes experience 

“The National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, houses a sinister painting by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien (1484-1545), Albrecht Dürer’s most celebrated student. The 64cm x 325cm oil on panel, known as Eve, the Serpent and Death, depicts those three figures against an ominous shadowy background. Eve has been made the primary focal point since, unlike the other two darker figures, her body is flooded in light and fully exhibited. Contrary to the usual employment of luminosity to suggest sanctity in religious art, here light is used to emphasize Eve’s brazen sexuality. Her facial expressions are lustful, her genitals are not covered by the customary vegetation, her left hand is holding the serpent’s tail, while the fatidic fruit is half-hidden in the right one, suggesting that she is conscious of the transgressive nature of her actions. Adam is characterized as Death itself. His body is in an advanced state of disintegration, his rotten left hand is reaching for Eve at the same time that it is being bitten by what A. Kent Hieatt (1983) has described as a weasel-faced serpent. This perverse cat’s cradle game has puzzled critics for centuries and, for Hieatt (1983, p. 299), Eve can be seen here ‘exercising a sexual temptation upon Adam […]. With devious slyness, she extends her hand towards the serpent’s tail, representing both Adam’s sexual member and Satan.’”5

Martin Heidegger argues that language and being are intertwined: we cannot separate our experience of the world from the language we use to inhabit it, and therefore the language we use shapes the reality we can experience. Language, the language we use as speaking beings, as well as that which intimately occupies us, shapes the path of human life, just as it shapes the destiny of humanity. It’s to this extent that the biblical narrative, and particularly the Book of Genesis, is one of the most influential texts in the history of Western women. By dictating that the action of the first woman was responsible for the Fall from Paradise, Genesis has conditioned the perspective of women in history, and to this day produces pejorative and misogynistic views of the role of women in society and their place in humanity. This condemnation of the feminine spans several centuries, serving as a justification for burning witches and for characterizing women as a race of sinners who attract the misfortunes that inadvertently befall them, even if the misfortunes repeatedly arrive via men. If the language used to describe women always comes from the male perspective, then our understanding of what women are and do will always be distorted to project what men think. This is the view that the feminist movement began to question, and many works have explored this problem since at least the Middle Ages. In 1405, Christine de Pizan published The Book of the City of Ladies in the wake of the “querelle des femmes […] um debate literário sobre as relações de e entre os sexos, bem como sobre o valor da mulher e do feminino, que se manifestou publicamente em reuniões e em múltiplos escritos na Europa medieval.” (querelle des femmes […] a literary debate on the relations of and between the sexes, as well as on the value of women and the feminine, which manifested itself publicly in meetings and in multiple writings in medieval Europe.)6 In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft states that the biblical visions of Creation and the Fall served as a guarantee of men’s authority over women. The consistent feminist analysis of the male bias in the reading of religious texts, as well as the biased readings to which these texts have been subjected over the centuries, would revolutionize the way we see the world. Wollstonecraft states that, at the time, men’s typical description of women as non-rational and overly emotional conditioned their social affirmation, serving as an obstacle to their access to the education system. Virginia Woolf returns to the issue in A Room of One’s Own, where she shows how public discourse about women is shaped by men’s sense of superiority over women. Since social identity is linked to language, the destructive power of monopolizing language is still catastrophic today in the way racialized people have been defined by white people. On the other hand, as Michel Foucault shows, power circulates through language and knowledge, and whoever controls knowledge and language exercises power in the social order7. This is why any group that intends to dominate over another group begins by restricting access to education, and it is also for this reason that researchers are concerned about the erosion of cultural identities that the expansion of English can cause. The danger of cognitive hegemony, the danger of a single history, is real: English is the most widely used language in human history (it is estimated that around one in five people speak the language). Like Portuguese and other colonial languages, it began to spread through invasions, conversions and trade, and today its spread is driven by the opportunities created by the job market, as well as, on the social level, by the increased communication possibilities it offers. Children learn English in elementary school, political activists, journalists and writers post in English on social networks. Back in 2001, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu made the following statement: “L’impérialisme peut donc imposer des objets de pensée. Et il faut réfléchir sur ce modèle pour voir si et comment il est possible d’accepter l’usage de l’anglais sans s’exposer à être anglicisé dans ses structures mentales, sans avoir le cerveau lavé par les routines linguistiques.”8

Unguaranteeing the world

When Le Guin decided to rewrite the biblical text, she wasn’t just challenging the status quo for women. The act of unnaming is neither a mere linguistic resource nor just an instrument of revolt: it doesn’t explain anything. Le Guin’s short stories seem to seek the answer to some of the questions that many of us are asking ourselves today. “I’m looking for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior.”9 How does action not reproduce a reaction? “Refusing to engage an aggressor on his own terms,” would be her answer. “Defending a cause without fighting, without attacking, without aggression,” she wrote, “is an action. It is an expression of power. It takes control.” This story invites us to consider the extent to which words have power, not only over the things they name, but also over our perception of them – we mustn’t forget that the language from which Eve and the animals free themselves, influences not only her perception of them, but also the perception each one had of themselves. That’s why, in the end, the boundaries that separate living beings, boundaries shaped and created by language, are eliminated. Eve’s action generates an affinity between her and the animals that inhabit Eden, showing that language has the power to bring us closer or further away from nature and to remind us that we are an integral part of it, that we don’t exist separately. By imagining another fate for Eve, freeing her from a relationship based on the species and gender hierarchies imposed by God in Paradise, which imprisoned her in an unequal relationship, the crucial theme of She Unnames Them reveals itself to be broader and suggests the interconnection of three spheres: feminism, post-colonialism and environmentalism. This link can be rediscovered by taking a step back. What would it be like to reject the norms inscribed through language? What experiences would we be enabling if we invented new ways of speaking, naming and thinking? What words do we use in our lives, what words do we hear? And what do we say to ourselves? How does our experience change when women and marginalized communities take on the power to name and unname? Definition is not unrelated to the desire to replace the dominant, socially established system. Undefinition, however, corresponds to another strategy, one that requires us to remain open to the world and to others. Nothing, not even language, is guaranteed. After all, “unnaming” isn’t even a word. Eve has always been imagining a different world from the one we know.

Translation:  Ariana Neves Machado

by Marta Rema
Corpo | 19 April 2025 | community, feminism, Language, myth, Power, Ursula K. Le Guin, utopia