[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[esteefee]

Sure, I have difficulty telling genders in some rare cases, and in those cases I ask for their preferred pronoun. But Breq? Is at sea apparently for everyone she meets. Even after 20 years of learning alone (and thousands more as an ancillary, since we have to assume the Radchaai absorbed many cultures under her watch that *did* care about gender). That begs for more suspension of disbelief than even I, a lifetime Star Trek viewer, am willing to give. :) She's had plenty of time to learn.

> but there's no reason to assume that Awn is, or would be a woman

But then why is she 'she'?

The very act of translating the story into English from Radchaai demands that the author choose a gender-neutral pronoun for a gender-neutral pronoun, don't you think? Leckie has undermined her whole premise to begin with. If the Radchaai are gender-blind, why is everyone in their society a woman? That's the first question I have to ask. Because in the English language, 'she' is not neutral.

[erinptah]

But then why is she 'she'?

Because "it" is dehumanizing, "he" gets used as a gender-neutral pronoun IRL all the time, "he" has also been used in SF in this way before (The Left Hand of Darkness, etc), so having some works with "she" used in a neutral or universal way is valuable to balance that out. The pronouns chosen in English are a reaction to our society's use of gender, rather than the in-universe use. As an English-speaking reader/SF fan, I found it refreshing (in ways I hadn't consciously realized I wanted before picking it up).

[(Anonymous)]

But Breq? Is at sea apparently for everyone she meets.

Not everyone. It's noted there are cultures where she's familiar enough with the cues and the language to not have trouble.

Also, Leckie apparently started out using "they" but found it too clumsy.

And that's the thing. Everyone always talks about using "they," but it does reduce the clarity of a person's writing, since extra care must be taken to distinguish individuals and groups.

[esteefee]

Well, there's always "one." :D

[cbrachyrhynchos]

> But Breq? Is at sea apparently for everyone she meets. Even after 20 years of learning alone (and thousands more as an ancillary, since we have to assume the Radchaai absorbed many cultures under her watch that *did* care about gender).

I only remember two cases across two novels, both of which she apologizes and corrects. In most cases, she's conversing in Radchai about persons who don't demonstrate any objections to Radchai gender.

> But then why is she 'she'?

Well, to start with there's the cosmology, which considers a divine goddess to be universe. (It's parallel to some flavors of Wicca and Shaktism, but just as G*d isn't necessarily a human "he," their cosmology isn't necessarily a human "she.") And then, there's following in the footsteps of Le Guin, who has publicly regretted using "he" for the gender-neutral pronoun in Left Hand of Darkness. If you use "he" or "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun, the default masculine kicks in, while a gender-neutral "she" or spivak "e" kicks you right out of it. Not to mention English is very much a gender-binary language, and creating readable work using only gender-neutral constructs is notoriously difficult.

Other writers have done similar things regarding single-gender and plural-gender grammars. It's pretty obvious after a few chapters that Leckie is playing with a single-gender grammar as a way of building a fictional culture and perspective and not, as "misgendering" implies, coercively dehumanizing characters by denying gender identity. Just as the Gethen are not men in 21st century American terms, the Radchai are not necessarily women in 21st century American terms.

To demand familiarity from science fiction is, as multiple critics have pointed out, missing the point.

[esteefee]

Cosmology? What in heck?

>while a gender-neutral "she" ... kicks you right out of it

Well, 'She' isn't gender-neutral and 'she' didn't kick me out of it. She just kicked me right into another slot. The author can't just erase meaning from a word by snapping her fingers, especially when it comes to something as basic as gender identification. 'She' is misgendering unless the thing were written in Radchaai itself. I would find 'he' equally disturbing as a default, and even a neutral gender term has meaning. For some of us, gender identity is a powerful, powerful thing. Down to the roots. It takes much more than some sophomoric pronoun shenanigans (no matter how many tedious pages of it) to make us believe in a genderless society. Le Guin did a much better job of it.

Maybe because she made me care so much about Estraven and Ai.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

> Cosmology? What in heck?

So you didn't read the book far enough to catch that the Radchai are a religious culture which informs everything else about their ideology.

> Well, 'She' isn't gender-neutral and 'she' didn't kick me out of it. She just kicked me right into another slot. The author can't just erase meaning from a word by snapping her fingers, especially when it comes to something as basic as gender identification. 'She' is misgendering unless the thing were written in Radchaai itself.

Of course not, it takes two novels in which the cultural perspective including the grammatical gender is consistently used and explained. Science Fiction authors play with language all the time when writing from an emic perspective. If you're not going to understand Randchai grammatical gender as different from English, you're not going to understand Le Guin or Delaney who dabble in Sapir-Whorf, first-person narratives.

> It takes much more than some sophomoric pronoun shenanigans (no matter how many tedious pages of it) to make us believe in a genderless society.

Sure, it takes more than sophomoric flat-earther prescriptivism ("words have meaning") to critique a work that deals directly with the social construction of language, class, and gender.

[(Anonymous)]

That's...not how translation works. When a word exists in another language that can't be translated directly to English, the best we can do is find a word that comes close. There is no standard, agreed upon, easily readable and easily understandable neutral pronoun in English, so the convention when coming across the neutral in other languages is to use the masculine.

As much as people would like "they" to be a neutral word, it isn't. "One," meanwhile, can sometimes work, but using it consistently leads to awkward, often grammatically dubious sentences.

English is a limited language. We have to work within those limits. Just as there is no good way to translate particles like "wa," "wo," and "hi" from Japanese into English, there's no good way to translate a gender neutral pronoun into English.