Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2015-01-27 07:20 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-01-27 07:20 pm
[ SECRET POST #2946 ]
⌈ 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.
no subject
>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.
no subject
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.