19
Me reading Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie:
(sh.itjust.works)
I didn't know where else to share this but it's what I think every time someone says something like "ok 'Breq' from 'Gerentate.'"
I love this series. I love how everyone is just vaguely described as humanoids with probably two legs and probably two eyes, but the humanistic aspects we ascribe to them come solely from their cutting speech and the cruel actions and customs they impose on one another.
Her dense writing style takes maybe 7 or 8 pages to get used to, and then after that you're just reeled in to this vast universe of identity politics, intrigue, and puppetry.
tbh being more or less nonbinary I actually really love the approach to gender this book takes, and actually not because the Radch is largely gender abolitionist (although that is pretty great). Also: fair warning, this is a discussion about gender as a philosophical concept, sociopolitically speaking it's a fact that trans people deserve to exist however they damn well please and people as a whole really need to stop acting like that substantially affects them. The fact that this has resulted in people feeling physically and economically unsafe is a huge problem that needs to be handled a lot better than we're currently doing. To me, a big part of the reason I haven't pursued any kind of gender changes on my government paperwork is that I really don't think it was any of their business to begin with, and I don't feel the need to give the government MORE information about my gender.
While the characters in the Murderbot Diaries definitely sucked me in more, the approach to gender in that one almost struck me as unrealistically subject to our current moralism around gender. Most of my interaction with gender as a concept is that it's the way the culture that surrounds you perceives you. Not even just other individuals around you: the culture as a whole. I'm androgynous enough that while my gender tends to fall one way for most people, it's not unusual for me to be perceived the other, both, or neither. A lot of people seem to have difficulty with the concept that I'm showing a reduced amount of gendered traits, while some just decide they don't care altogether, and the variety of pronouns I overhear about myself is always interesting.
So while I understand the desire for self-determinism, it makes a lot more sense to me to see a world where gender is a lot more determined by things like what language the interaction is being conducted in. And while I love that the Radch is gender abolitionist, it also raises the point that just because you got rid of that one particular way people assign social standing, doesn't mean you haven't found other ways to do that and be shitty about it.
well said!