Tags
I’m in the middle of reading Ann Leckie’s fantastic book Ancillary Justice. One of the things I like about it so much is that it plays with our gender expectations. The story takes place in a fictional universe in which the Radch regularly annex planets to their empire. The language spoken by the Radch has no gender, it does not recognize male or female anything. This presents a conundrum for Leckie since English requires gender designations. How do you translate? Leckie has decided to make the default pronoun “she” serve for everyone.
The story is told from the point of view of Breq who used to be a starship. She knows many different languages but she is Radch and as such always has trouble figuring out gender when speaking a language that requires it.
What is super-duper fascinating is to read everything through the “she” pronoun. I picture all the characters as women and there is nothing in any of the characters’ actions that give away what their biology might be. Nor does anyone get described as curvy or beautiful or brawny or any of the other myriad ways gender and biology get marked. Everyone is just people who happen to be referred to as “she” when a pronoun is required. But, as I said, I keep picturing all the characters as women because that is what “she” asks me to do in English.
So you might be able to imagine then how disconcerted I was while reading last night to discover an important character is actually a biological male. He was only referred to as “he” once in a conversation Breq was having with someone in a gendered language and then it is right back to “she” again. My brain went all wobbly trying to replace a she with a he but it didn’t last long. The further I got away from “he” and the more “she’s” that got piled on in referring to this character, my mind reverted right back to picturing a woman.
The cool thing is there is no reason why all the characters couldn’t actually be women. In the context of this world, there is no question about whether a woman can lead an army or captain a starship or beat the crap out of someone or rule the empire or do anything else. Gender is not recognized and when there are no gender boxes to fill it is amazing what kinds of other things can be focused on instead.
Reading a book in which “she” stands in for the universal gender points out how fallacious English is to insist that “he” can be used as a universal pronoun meaning men and women. It can’t and it doesn’t and I never believed that it did. Whenever I’m reading and come across a “universal he” I am always brought up short. I have to stop and take the time to mentally insert myself into the equation because “he” is not me. I wonder, any men reading this, when you come across “universal he” do you think, oh that means men and women? When you see “he” standing in for everyone do you picture everyone as being male? And if you are a male who has read Ancillary Justice, what was your experience reading a book where everyone is “she”?
I can’t begin to say what a pleasure it is to read a book like Ancillary Justice. It’s no surprise Leckie won the Nebula and the Hugo for it. I can’t wait to find out how it ends and I am greatly looking forward to reading the second book, Ancillary Sword.
I have not read this book but it makes me think of a science fiction book I once read called The Messenger Boy Murders by Perihan Magden. The messenger boys are genderless and in the original language (Turkish), the third person pronoun is the same for male and female. I heard the author discuss this and the compromise of defaulting to male and the expression “messenger boy” which of course informs a vision in an English reader.
I will throw in my unusual perspective. As a transgendered man I am highly sensitive and skeptical of genderless alternatives. I know there are people who do identify between genders, but having transitioned 14 years ago to live in a manner that conforms to the internal gender identity I struggled to make sense of for almost four decades, I find it very difficult to talk about or write about my earlier life experiences (even pregnancy) with “she”. It seems to become harder with time. The best attempt at capturing “gendelessness” that I have read is Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body.
LikeLike
roughghosts, How interesting about the Messenger Boy Murders. Pronoun choice definitely makes a difference in how we perceive characters and story.
Thank you for sharing your perspective! As a cis woman who has always been sort of a “tomboy” but likes to play at being “girly” now and then I’ve always longed for a more gender-fluid culture where people wouldn’t try to force me to conform to gender norms. I always imagined that it would make life easier for everyone so Leckie’s attempt at writing a genderless novel has a very liberating feel for me. I can see how your experience would definitely make you sensitive and skeptical. Do you think if we did have a truly genderless culture it would make a big difference?
LikeLike
I would love to see a society where people were given more freedom in the expression of gender because there is such wide variation. However gender expression is defined by your culture/social group (and trust me the LGBTQ community can divide on these lines too), your gender identity is assumed to conform to your physical body. When it doesn’t match in a profound and consistent way, simply having a more gender fluid language or expression does not address that body disconnect. Interestingly rigid gender norms are more strictly applied to assessment of gender dysphoria in the psychiatric/medical system. I would not meet the present criteria, I was not a tomboy. I thought if I had been allowed to grow my hair long and didn’t have a boy’s name I might feel like a girl. Looking back I was a geeky shy gay boy all along and my transition has been “successful”, but it has taken me over 50 years to understand and accept that my experience is always going to be of a different nature than that of a cis-gendered person. If books like this make people think and discuss these topics though it is not a bad thing.
LikeLike
I’ve gathered from friends and people I have worked with who were part of the LGBTQ community here that there can be divides and they can be rather vicious sometimes which surprised me. I can see how a more fluid gender language would still fail to address the body disconnect when gender and biology don’t match. It may have taken a long time to understand and accept your experience, but I am glad you were able to. I know there is still a long way to go before the general culture makes it easier, but I hope it is getting easier for people.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks. That is why I have made the decision to speak/write more openly. It is more comfortable to hide but nothing changes that way.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am reading the book now, about 120 pages in, and I’m enjoying it, even though I’ll be honest I had a hard time understanding what was going on for the first 50 or so pages. I’m beginning to see it that “she” is not just one person, but many – a bit like the Borg, but not. I think I’m thrown off more by all the different cultures. I almost wish she had an appendix to keep track of it all…of course, I don’t read a lot of science fiction and maybe this is why. As for Leckie using “she” all the time, it really doesn’t bother me once you understand, or at least as I am doing trying to understand, what she is doing. I like it but might have to take a break between this one and the second one because of the…well…I’m not sure how else to say this…and even this I’ll try to put politely…mind-screw that it is.
LikeLike
Bryan, I thought of you and wondered on how you were getting on with it! Ah the ancillaries! Kinda cool, aren’t they? I keep wondering what it would be like to have all those bodies and all those simultaneous points of view (never lonely!) and then to be cut off like Breq now is. The book is kind of mind-screwy but I love books that do that 🙂
LikeLike
I’ve read both, and I found that I actually stopped noticing genders halfway through the second book. It’s a great way to draw attention to the question of gender in language. I did find that when I thought about it afterwards though, I imagined certain characters as male and certain characters as female mainly because of their behaviour, which shows how deeply these ideas are ingrained!
LikeLike
Sounds an interesting book. I remember enjoying Le Guin’s Left Hand Of Darkness where the narrator has to make sense of the Gehenians(?) constant shifts of gender.That must have been pretty far out in its day!
LikeLike
Ian, it is an interesting book. Yes, LeGuin’s book was really groundbreaking and still is in a way. I like that other writers are getting on board to explore the issue.
LikeLike
That’s why I love Le Guin, she was so ahead of her time” 🙂
LikeLike
bookwards, interesting! It is a great way to draw attention to gender and language and the characteristics we assign as belonging to each. Though I have to admit, recently in my reading Anaandar was referred to as “he” and I’ve not had any trouble keeping him a he even when called she. I guess in my mind evil emperors are male 🙂
LikeLike
I hadn’t even picked up on that! I imagined her as an evil empress haha. Talking about this is making me really desperate to read the next in the series, but I have no idea when it’s planned to come out. She wrote the first two in such a short space of time…
LikeLike
Oooh I definitely want to read this! Hope my library has it. I was so disappointed w Left Hand of Darkness (on the gender level), but this one sounds wonderful.
LikeLike
Eva, I hope your library has it too. I’m so glad you said that about Left Hand of Darkness! No matter how innovative it was for it’s time I was still disappointed too.
LikeLike
Interesting. Other SF books have explored this, including Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, Carolyn Gilman’s Halfway Human and John Scalzi’s Lock In.
LikeLike
Jeanne, yes, it is one reason I love SF so much, it’s a genre that can and does explore things like this.
LikeLike
Years ago, I got into an argument with a friend in a biblical translation class about this very problem. He kept saying that it should be enough for me to know that he included me when reading the Bible in English and that we shouldn’t diverge from the original Greek to make it plural and more inclusive. I maintained that it was more important to keep to the meaning of the original (which was clearly universal) and that I shouldn’t have to remind myself of that. I wondered if he would have found it so easy to write off the difficulty if she were used and he had to remind himself that he was part of that she.
Anyway, it can be really hard to see just how deeply embedded that notion of male as default is when he is treated as our “catch-all” pronoun. I was disappointed that LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness defaulted to he because it caused me to see the characters as male no matter how often the story reminded me that they were neither. It’s great to see authors playing around with that more. It’s so revealing of how our language shapes our thinking.
LikeLike
Teresa, oh, now that’s an argument I would have loved to hear! I suspect you are right he wouldn’t not have found it so easy to write off if She was the pronoun of choice in the Bible.
I had the same disappointment with Left Hand of Darkness. Even when the people weren’t gendered I still thought of them all as he. It’s revealing and kind of scary how language shapes our thinking!
LikeLike
I just saw this when I was looking up other books…the title attracted me, but then I got distracted and lost my thread, so how serendipitous that you are writing about it! It sounds very intriguing–will have to check it out. I do like the idea of reading everything from the ‘she’ perspective. It sounds like it was a little disorienting at first.
LikeLike
Danielle, I’m so behind on comments! I just finished the book and loved it. It was disorienting at first but in a good way!
LikeLike
Pingback: Technically Speaking… | Still Unfinished