Christine M. E. Hansen
University of Nebraska-Kearney, Kearney, NE, USA.
Email: cmehans2020 (at) gmail (dot) com
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Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) created a stir and surge of interest with how it pictured a feudal, mystical, and religious future of the universe, and its influences have been incalculable, leaving clear impact on George Lucas’ Star Wars and beyond. As a result, there is a rather diverse amount of literature on the book and its sequels, with numerous potential reads having been offered on various aspects of it. However, one aspect which has been neglected is queer study of Dune. This is, no doubt, in part due to the fact that aspects of the franchise have been rightly noted as hom*ophobic or explicitly anti-queer in nature, and Herbert’s own treatment of his son Bruce, a gay activist, have essentially made it clear that any queer sentiments or possible reads of Dune were far from the intention of the author.[1] But regardless of his underlying intentions, the Kwisatz Haderach in Dune emerges as an entity not bound by the traditional confines of the gender binary of men and women.
The queerness of the Kwisatz Haderach, the messianic and prophesied figure of Dune, has not been that fully explored by academics, and this concept is worth considering in more depth, as the Kwisatz Haderach is specifically messianic in function by defying the binary expectations of gender (i.e., by crossing the boundary between the masculine and the feminine). It is via this crossing of normalized boundaries that the Kwisatz Haderach is not only queer, but it is this queerness which gives the Kwisatz Haderach their messianic status. As such, this concept is important to elucidate in depth, as it is only through a queer outlook that the role and importance of the Kwisatz Haderach can be thoroughly understood.
QUEERNESS AND DUNE’S BINARY
Queerness is a particularly nebulous term with a rather shrouded history. At one point it was a derogatory slur used against hom*osexual people, particularly gay men and lesbians. However, in recent years it has become reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community but has an array of meanings,[2] which means that it is necessary not only to elucidate what is meant by “queer” in this article, but further how to conceptualize queerness.
For Judith Butler (1988, 2006), gender is not something innate that we are born with. Though there are things which we are born with, we are not born with any innate gender or gender expression, and as a result, gender is seen as performance. As Butler writes, “[…] gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 1988: 519). Thus, for gender to be performed is also for it to only have the “appearance of substance” (Butler, 1988: 520), as it is a constructed identity which actor and audience both come to believe as real. With this, the normative configurations of gender in society are not relaying something innate or real and so the opportunity for the subversion of these gender norms is possible and further, even not necessarily subversive acts can then illuminate the illusory nature of gender. I would contend that these subversions of binary gender, the lack of identification with and performance which undermines the binary, is, then, genderqueer. Surya Munro (2019: 126) defines genderqueer as “any type of trans identity that is not always male or female. It is [also] where people feel they are a mixture of male and female” and then non-binary in terms of genderqueer and also extending beyond, to include nonbinary identities that fall entirely outside of the binary and resist description in male or female terms, such as agender people. For this essay, I will specifically make use of Munro’s description of genderqueer.
Gender is typically binary as presented in Frank Herbert’s Dune, and not only binary but it has real and actual qualities to certain extents. Gender is not reified performance, but we are born gendered in the Dune universe. There are qualities of men and of women which are intrinsic and therefore Herbert’s world reifies gender (and sex) as having a factual quality to it, conceptualizing gendered differences as biologically founded and deterministic to varying extents,[3] though Herbert conceptualizes some of these as being within our control (Kennedy, 2018: 3–4). Thus, in God Emperor of Dune we see how Leto conceptualizes the differences in an all-female and all-male militaristic force, the former being calm, the latter being predatory and self-destructive (and this is linked to hom*osexuality). Kennedy (2018) argues at length that while there are explicit and at times deterministic differences between genders, there is a degree to which women are given a wider role in how they have some agency (even reproductive autonomy to a certain extent) within the Dune universe. Regardless, however, the series reifies a normative view of gender as binary and with innate qualities, which is also particularly the problem that the Bene Gesserit face, as women are unable to access their male genetic memories (discussed below). This is where the Kwisatz Haderach comes into play, as they are a prophesied being that will be conceptualized as male but be able to bridge the masculine and feminine memories, in short, a unification of masculine and feminine in a single being, transgressing the limitations of gender in normative society. And it is via this transgression that the Kwisatz Haderach is not only exceptional, but messianic (i.e., their messianic qualities are defined by their queerness).
THE KWISATZ HADERACH AND MALENESS
The Kwisatz Haderach conceptualized is first described in Frank Herbert’s Dune in a dialogue between Paul Atreides and the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. There are three aspects in the Reverend Mother’s interactions with Paul which demand attention, though we shall handle them slightly out of order. The starting point for us will be the dialogue between the Reverend Mother and Paul:
He [Paul] leveled a measuring stare at her, said: “You say maybe I’m the… Kwisatz Haderach. What’s that, a human gom jabbar?”
“Paul,” Jessica said. “You mustn’t take that tone with—”
“I’ll handle this, Jessica,” the old woman said. “Now, lad, do you know about the Truthsayer drug?”
“You take it to improve your ability to detect falsehood,” he said. “My mother’s told me.”
“Have you ever seen truthtrance?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“The drug’s dangerous,” she said, “but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body’s memory. We look down so many avenues of the past… but only feminine avenues.” Her voice took on a note of sadness. “Yet, there’s a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts.”
“Your Kwisatz Haderach?”
“Yes, the one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. […]”
— (Herbert, 2005: 13)
This is all extremely important. We have here a figure who is meant to subvert the established feminine and masculine norms and find a way in which they will be unified in a single body. The role of the Kwisatz Haderach person is to perform subversive bodily (and mental) acts, acts which defy gendered expectations (Butler, 2006: 199–200). What is notable is that this is both a masculine/feminine and bodily memory that is being accessed by the Kwisatz Haderach. They are not just in many places but many gendered places. Thus, what makes the Kwisatz Haderach special in conceptualization is that they are to be genderqueer in their memory access. They are a body that has access to both realms, normally excluded from those that are locked into the binary; thus, many men failed and died in an attempt to be the Kwisatz Haderach and women are “repulsed” and “terrorized” by the masculine realm (Herbert, 2005: 13).
This is perhaps where there is an antagonism in the text, which allows us to showcase the illusory nature of gender within Dune. Women are restricted to their biological sex’s memory, and men cannot access the same powers, except for the Kwisatz Haderach. The Kwisatz Haderach, here, is able to access the memories of men and women, male and female. Thus, there is a distinction that defies category in Herbert’s world. The Kwisatz Haderach accesses the biological arenas of male and female, and further, is trained and taken up as a man within women’s spaces, teachings, and ideas. The Bene Gesserit, an all-woman organization, has the goal of bringing in this “male” who has defied and subverted the sexed and gendered configurations of Dune’s universe. As the Reverend Mother says, “Young man, as the Proctor of the Bene Gesserit, I seek the Kwisatz Haderach, the male who truly can become one of us” (Herbert, 2005: 27). Thus, the “maleness” of the Kwisatz Haderach can be considered queer in more ways than one, as they deconstruct both the binaries of gender and sex in the universe and demonstrate the illusory nature of these categories. The Kwisatz Haderach is a “male,” able to transverse the worlds of male and female and become accepted in female spaces as one of them, explicitly, even accessing the arenas locked off in Herbert’s gender essentialist world. The Kwisatz Haderach is then the genderqueer messiah of the universe.
What is more, this is also explicitly what makes the Kwisatz Haderach important and gives them their messianic qualities. The Kwisatz Haderach, in being this nonbinary figure, is now able to see all possible futures and gains prescience, which in turn gives them unprecedented power, but this power is contingent on their queerness. For Paul Atreides, accessing the memories and spaces of women, being “one of us” (as the Reverend Mother says), and therefore deconstructing the binary is where his power is found. As one article notes:
“Paul Atreides is the prophet who will have both a female and male consciousness and bridge time and space. With the rupture of Paul’s gender also comes insurmountable knowledge and power; The key lies in the dismantling of the binary, in the merging of the genders.”
— (jalvarez, 2021)
Paul then demonstrates something rather curious, which is that while Herbert’s universe is explicitly gender essentialist, it implicitly has now created a vast array of ways in which maleness and femaleness are no longer “factic” sex (to borrow from Butler, 2006: 199), and man and woman are no longer concrete categories, but are instead shown to be constructions themselves, as the Kwisatz Haderach is not limited by the biological or psychological confines previously thought to restrict them.
Particularly curious is that in employing the Kwisatz Haderach’s conception as the product of an egregiously long process of eugenics, we essentially find also that sex is no longer an immutable fact in the Dune universe but is one subject to both conceptual challenge and biological alteration. As a result, the gender essentialism of the Dune universe finds itself collapsing and demonstrated as a cultural construction due to the very existence of its own messiah. To allude to Butler’s discussions again, if one sees a Drag Queen/King and then we conceptualize this as “a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man,” we reify the former “man/woman dressed” as the real gender, and the other as unreal via our perceptions (Butler, 2006: xxiii). What this demonstrates, however, is the illusory nature of gender itself, such that drag is not a parody of an “original” gender, but of the fact that there is none (Butler, 2006: 188). The Kwisatz Haderach does similarly. By paradoxically unifying the realms of male and female, man and woman, into one body, they create a situation in which the concept of any original is found illusory, and this even becomes more than just a cultural element as well.
As the Kwisatz Haderach is the product of a breeding program, the universe implicitly contradicts its own essentialism, as we find that sex is not an immutable reality, but is one that can be altered, present differently, and therefore have variant biological and psychological qualities. As such, when Paul takes on the role of the Kwisatz Haderach, he also takes on a genderqueer role that demonstrates that sex and gender are constructs, even within his highly binary universe. Maleness in the Dune universe, then, is a mutable, pliable, and constructed concept in the end.
It is by this queerness that Paul is then powerful. Despite being assigned male at birth, Paul takes upon himself the feminine and masculine, and unifies the female and male worlds to create his own queer consciousness and prescience. In a way, then, we can mirror some of his experiences with that of queer and trans individuals. Taking upon this role, he “comes out” as queer (specifically a queer messiah), and this comes with both benefits of him acknowledging his identity, while also making him a target, an outcast, and many wish to exploit him; in fact, the Bene Gesserit see their queer messiah as a tool, wishing to access that male past which has been withheld from them. In this light, we then see the politicalness of Paul’s identity, and the ways in which others seek to either destroy or, in a sense, commodify it for their own ends, reducing his humanity, which comes into play earlier, as one of the inciting events for Paul to come into his identity is to “test” whether he is or is not “human” (Herbert, 2005: 8–10), a test where the Reverend Mother inflicts great illusory pain upon his hand which is placed in a box. If he removes his hand from the box, she shall kill him as an “animal.” Pain, as a result, becomes an essential part of his queer experience. In many ways, then, we can see how, as an abject identity, Paul is alienated from many of his peers, family, and has many enemies, in no small part because of his queerness as the Kwisatz Haderach.
This queerness should not be seen though as an affirmation of queer identity by Herbert nor as intentional. The world of Dune is, as noted before, essentialist in nature, and so the Kwisatz Haderach should arguably be seen as an unintentional aberration. Thus, Herbert still conceptualizes Paul as “male,” failing to see the fact that the Kwisatz Haderach actually redefines or, more accurately, defies definition as male or female, as both literally they are the result of a breeding program to create a new gender capable of unifying the male, and female worlds, and further, in terms of gender performance the Kwisatz Haderach performs gendered acts and works in gendered spaces of both, thus, demonstrating the phantasmic qualities of both categories. The Kwisatz Haderach is queer unintentionally on Herbert’s part.
CONCLUSIONS
Queerness in the Dune universe is by no means something that was intentional on Frank Herbert’s part, probably. Herbert’s life shows a staunch dislike of queer communities, including the ostracization of his son Bruce. However, unintentional consequences of his conceptualization of the Kwisatz Haderach makes a queer reading of the text not only possible, but even mandatory, as Herbert inadvertently conceptualizes the Kwisatz Haderach, and therefore Paul, as a figure who defies what is otherwise believed to be a factual and deterministic sexual and gendered binary in his world. While sex seems immutable and gender seems stable, the Kwisatz Haderach reveals not only that the biological world is mutable and subject to change, so that any binary conceptualization of sex is invalid, but that the gendered world is also subject to similar changes, in fact, it is revealed to be a performance. Taking on the role of the Kwisatz Haderach is to take on a queer role which defies the binary, and demonstrates that no one is born gendered, but that we come into gender.
This does come with caveats. The queerness of the Kwisatz Haderach can be then seen as affirming of queer identity, but as noted above, the texts of the Dune universe are anything but this, particularly in the conceptualization and discussion of non-heterosexual identities. hom*osexuality is believed to be self-destructive in God Emperor of Dune, while in Dune itself, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen recapitulates harmful stereotypes about gay men. Thus, instead of seeing the Kwisatz Haderach as affirming of queerness, we should see it as an inadvertent and accidental affirmation of the performative and constructed nature of gender. The Kwisatz Haderach unintentionally serves to elucidate the illusion that gender is, while existing in a universe that consistently attempts to recapitulate the immutable and almost deterministic qualities of gender, and sex.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London.
Butler, J. (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–531.
Herbert, B. (2004) The Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. TOR Books, New York.
Herbert, F. (2005) Dune. ACE Books, New York. [Supermarkets Hardcover Ed.]
Herbert, F. (2019) God Emperor of Dune. ACE Books, New York. [ACE Premium Ed.]
jalvarez. (2021) The Queerness Behind Dune’s Kwisatz Haderach. Science Fiction: Humanity Technology, the Present, the Future. Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20240313104713/https://kimon.hosting.nyu.edu/sites/science-fiction/2021/03/02/the-queerness-behind-dunes-kwisatz-haderach/ (Date of access: 14/Apr/2022).
Kennedy, K. (2018) The agency of women in Frank Herbert’s Dune. University of Canterbury, Christchurch. [PhD thesis.]
Manicom, D.P. (2010) Gender essentialism: a conceptual and empirical exploration of notions of material essence as a framework for explaining gender difference. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. [PhD thesis.]
Munro, S. (2019) Non-binary and genderqueer: an overview of the field. International Journal of Transgenderism 20(2–3): 126–131.
About the Author
Christine M. E. Hansen is a graduate student in English at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. She is an avid reader and writer of all things fantasy and science fiction. Her favorite book is The Lord of the Rings, which she reads every year alongside The Silmarillion. Her second favorite book is Dune. She loves writing papers, and has published on topics ranging from Tolkien’s representation of women to New Testament history.
[1] Space does not permit a full discussion of Frank Herbert’s hom*ophobic attitudes, but it is pertinent to point to a number of aspects of it, such as the negative stereotype of gay men as pedophilic in the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and his comments about hom*osexuality and the military in God Emperor of Dune (Herbert, 2019: 108–109). For his treatment of his son, see Brian Herbert’s biography The Dreamer of Dune (2004). For an in-depth discussion of this issue, see Kara Kennedy’s PhD thesis (Kennedy, 2018: 206–209).
[2] For instance, within LGBTQ+ communities a queer person can be one who defies heteronormative interpretations of sexuality and sexual orientation, or it can relate to one’s not fitting into the normative gender-binary of male-female, or any combination thereof. On reclamation of these terms, see Butler (2006: 166–167).
[3] For more on gender essentialism and essentialism in general see Manicom (2010).
