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spectru
Posted 2015-11-01 9:57 AM (#11657 - in reply to #11653)
Subject: Re: Pick and Mix 2015		Quote Reply



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Location: Fort Myers, Florida USA		<p>Leckie's treatment of gender in these novels is strange. It takes some getting used to. For me, I don't think it added to the reading enjoyment. The novels are good despite the gender issues. Leckie's explanation also leaves a bit to be desired:"...they know gender exists, but it's not really a thing they care much about. They care about it, maybe, as much as we care about hair color." We may not make much of hair color, but we don't refer to everyone as 'Red', either. I noticed that occasionally, when referring to an ancillary, the characters used the neutral pronoun 'it', however the reference may have been to the ship of which the ancillary was a segment. I think if parent instead of mother, child or offspring instead of daughter, sibling instead of sister, and the masculine pronouns, he and him, had been used throughout, the gender ambivalence might not even have been noticed by many readers. References to romance would have, perhaps, been assumed to be homosexual, whereas in using the feminine pronouns, romantic interactions are left ambiguous. There was only one case of disambiguation: In referring to her sibling, Queter called him her brother, but in the Radche language, he was she. </p><p>This gender ambiguity is much less bothersome in the second book than in the first.</p>

Edited by spectru 2015-11-01 10:01 AM

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