Facing Xenocidal Guilt: Atypical Masculinity in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Saga

Abstract

Writing about a character once compared to Adolf Hitler and f ashioned by a self-declared homophobe for a volume on a lternative masculinities might seem either a mistake or a provocation. It is neither. I hope, rather, that my scrutiny of the atypical masculinity of Andrew “Ender” Wiggins, the protagonist of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Saga, reveals key contradictions inherent to heroic masculinity, particularly that of science fiction but also that of any (American) fiction, that determines which men are admirable, which unworthy. Heroism, of course, is not restricted to men, yet all patriarchal societies regard heroes as specifically desirable masculine role models. “The reverence felt for 9/11firefighters,” Scott Allison and George Goethals point out, “serves as a strong reminder to us that a central recipe for heroism involves a combination of sacrifice and altruism” (118). The same values are reflected in the representation of idealized masculinity, to the extent that “[t]he figure of the hero is central to the Western cultural imagery…” (Connell 213).