So Scalzi has been ranting on Twitter about this proposal for a new F&SF award — it’s more fallout from the Hugo mess, and this person proposes more gatekeeping, requiring membership in a “web of trust” in order to vote for a new award. I’m not impressed with the idea — it seems to imply more a web of distrust, where someone in charge gets to decide who is the True Fan. But Scalzi is all over that part.
I don't need a fucking "Web of Trust" to be a science fiction and fantasy fan. I don't need a fucking gatekeeper. I'm a fan because I am.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 12, 2015
Reading the thread in question, though, I came across a comment that surprised me.
It’s when the story is used to push the one particular viewpoint that I have an issue with it. See, for example, the protagonist in Lock In, whose gender is left unspecified throughout the entire book. Scalzi’s been praised for doing so, but to me, it leaves me unable to form a mental image of the character, and I have a much harder time reading a work if I can’t picture the characters involved. This is not the only reason I won’t buy it (Fuzzy Nation was the last Scalzi I intend to ever spend money on), but it’s a very large hump for me to get over.
What does that mean?
This is a fictional character. They don’t exist. This is true of every fictional character there has ever been: the author cannot possibly specify every single biological detail about the individual. Do they have an appendectomy scar or or a small scar they got at age 3 on one eyebrow? Do they have a large pore on their left cheek? Is there a mole above one kidney? Do they have an irrational distaste for spiders? Did they have a happy relationship with their mother? Do they know calculus? Can they cook? Unless it is relevant to the story, authors tend not to burden readers with extraneous detail — you have to imagine it.
For that matter, this is true of real live people, too. Unless you live with them for 20 years, there are always surprises. Are you unable to form a mental image of a character if you don’t know their position on abortion, or whether they are thrifty or wasteful?
You might argue that sex is rather obvious and important, but in the life of the mind and your relationships with the characters in a story, one thing we can be utterly certain about: you won’t be having sex with any of them, ever. They don’t exist in the physical world. And think about all the people you know: I have no idea of the sexual orientation of most of the people I’ve met. I manage to enjoy their company anyway.
This person seems to have the most superficial appreciation of what he’s reading. He won’t bother unless he can visualize breasts, or the absence thereof, in the characters.
That was one of the cool things I enjoyed in reading Ann Leckie’s books
I’d like to see more of that, actually. It’s the least you’d expect of a good writer, that their imaginary characters ought to have attributes that transcend the merely physical.
To translate the person’s comment: “I have a complete and total lack of imagination. Kindly pander to me by spoon-feeding me what I should think the character looks like, otherwise I am totally unable to follow the plot and/or enjoy the book.”
But if we don’t know the character’s gender, how do we know whether they matter?
We should probably also know what race the characters are.
Knowing their race is only really crucial if we want to be able to recite their dialog using our own prejudices and stereotypes, or when we want to know in advance which one is going to get killed first.
I’ve seen several people say this, people who have read the book, and it’s not true. Chris’s gender is mentioned, but it’s hardly relevant – how does that help you to picture someone?
I found Leckie’s attempt to be very annoying. Many times in that book, her main character muses on how they know this particular person prefers gendered pronouns, and uses the wrong one anyway. I didn’t agree with all the praise heaped on for that aspect, it was a muddled, fucked up mess that missed the mark many a time. (Yeah, I know, everyone fucking loved that book. I didn’t.)
You’re reading
sci fi and fantasyanything and you’re not developing headcanons of what MUST be true even though the author never so much as implies it? You’re doing it wrong!I don’t understand how not specifying the gender of the main character is a bad thing, nor why it shoud leave the reader unable to relate to the character? Personally, I appreciate characters written such that I can put myself as being the main character, that the book is being written about some forgotten experience of mine. (Aside from the egotism implications), why is that so detrimental to it being a good story? Sounds to me like this particular commentator requires stories to be text versions of movies, visuals. To read is to virtually watch, every character has to have explicitly detailed descriptions to fully visualize the character to be watched as the story unfolds.
Sorry, me stuck in the aphorism “put yourself in the story, to fully experience it”
But, but, if this guy can’t know what the sex of the protagonist is, how is he supossed to avoid anything that doesn’t have a white, straight male as the only important point of view in it? He might…oh god, he might inadvertently read something about human experiences from the point of view of someone unlike him…
Does everyone have a good visual imagination, and if not, do they consume literature in the same way as you? I’m not sure that a preference for physical description is something which should inherently invite mockery. You are mirroring the main failure of the commenter in the OP, I think.
The dullness of the comment in the OP, I’d say, is that the person also lacks the imagination to realise precisely that some people don’t want or require detailed physical descriptions of characters, or as they put it:
There are many authors who do provide exquisite detail about their characters, leaving little for the reader to invent, and I’d argue that it is largely are matter of taste (or perhaps, ability and reading style) as to whether it connects with a reader. This person is well catered for in mainstream literature, and their complaint is really not valid criticism.
I wonder whether both you and PZ have failed to recognise, in your wider dismissal of the idea that some people might prefer a definitely described protagonist, that some people really may be unable to supply those sorts of details themselves and yet still be capable of enjoying narrative literature?
Honestly, there are a lot of times when I find being given a description of the character a little weird. Obviously there are times when it makes a kind of sense, like when the honourable representative of the nation of Spodge approaches the podium, beginning their speech and the narrator watches on from the gallery, taking in every scrap of detail in the centre of the room… but if it’s just the narrator on their own in a half-collapsed shack on the edge of a long-dead city, then why would we get any of that? I know I certainly don’t spend an awful lot of time noticing that my hair is brown, or the way my eyes shift from blue to green and back again as shadows play across my face, when I’m sitting alone in my office, so it would be weird for it to come up in a solitary setting.
Honestly, this has a lot to do with the psychology of the person. I both love, and hate, movies and series, based on books, because, while I can get into the story, in a book, and a read a damn lot, I prefer to “see” as clearly as possible what the author intended. I also find it jarring when I develop an image of the character, based on what I would have chosen, and the result is drastically different, when someone finally “does” describe certain details, which don’t match. One character that this happened with was one in the Thieves’ World anthology. I spent like 10+ books thinking of this guy as clean shaven, sort of distinct only due to personality, someone who was good at what they did **because** no one would give them a second glance, and got someone, complete with mustache and beard, who looked more like the vizier from Aladdan, or something. It was a major WTF moment, and not a good one, from my perspective.
So, yeah, I have no problem with the idea that people who tend to like “visual” representations of the world they are reading, even if only in the sense of the level of detail involved, would be annoyed by an entire book in which you have no idea what the person “should” look like.
I would likely get over it fairly quickly, but then, for me its a preference, not a necessity. But… like someone who is tone deaf… for some people, its not like lacking imagination, so much as just needing more to work with. Same reason I can enjoy music, maybe could even learn to write it (since I am definitely not tone deaf), but I wouldn’t be able to “remember” it well enough to play it later, or sing the lyrics. lol
So, don’t rag on the guy too badly. There really is a reason why such a book would be more jarring, and harder to deal with, for some people, than with others. Or, I at least think so.
What was said at @8…I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination or an unwillingness to do some extra imaginative work..I think he wants to make sure the hero is a man, so he doesn’t waste his time reading the adventures of *gasp* a woman. Of course, he might be willing to read about a woman protagonist, but only if she is hot.
Weren’t there studies and statistics done about how literature written by women with women protagonists is looked down on and definitely less popular with men? Don’t some guys actually confess to not reading books about female protagonists because they are not interested in romance and shopping, aka the bullshit female coded stereotypes that a lot of people think of when they see/read about a female protagonist?
I will never understand it, anyway. Women have been reading about and identifying -up to a point- with experiences of male heroes since forever, because most of the stuff is about being a person alive, not a gendered experience, but dudes can’t do the same ..because? Because everything has to cater to them? Because male is the default?
Their loss…
Also, for folks that haven’t read Scalzi’s book, Chris spends the entire book using a robot to interact with others remotely, or in a virtual world where people can look like anyone. Most residents of Chris’s world might not know what gender Chris was from visual clues. So you can’t even get a good picture of Chris from knowing ‘male or female’, since physically Chris on the street looks more like C-3PO.
Caine @ 5
Is it? Even the audio book has two versions with different narrators. What page does it happen on?
From what I understand, Leckie was trying to show that the language the characters were speaking didn’t have a way to mark gender at all. So even if you know a character is male (or female), the characters can’t express that idea casually in their mother language. Any use of ‘he’ occurs when the speakers are using a language with gendered pronouns. Using a gender-neutral pronoun might have gotten that across better, but would have its own complaints.
(It’s a long-standing problem. LeGuin mentioned after she wrote The Left Hand of Darkness that she wishes she hadn’t defaulted to male pronouns for the people of Winter, because it made it too easy to think of them all as male, but she didn’t care for any set of gender-neutral pronouns enough to use them.)
For me, it helped me get into Breq’s POV when dealing with societies where gender markers were important and/or screwing them up marked you as an outsider. Breq had lived her life in a universe where she never had to learn to tell male from female. Keeping a linguistic ambiguity until Breq makes a choice helps me stay in the cultural POV.
And speaking of the importance (or lack of) of describing characters in detail, in one of my favourite novels, “Flaubert’s parrot”, Julian Barnes has a chapter on author mistakes and whether they take you out of the narrative and/or are relevant to your enjoyment of the work.
Barnes points out that Flaubert gets the eye colour of Emma Bovary wrong: her eyes are grey, her eyes are blue. I’m paraphrasing, but basically he points out the weirdness of the whole thing, since after doing all the hard work of building an interesting character, Flaubert has to decide what colour eyeballs to stick in his heroine.
I don’t think I ever remember what characters look like unless it’s relevant to the plot or who they are personality-wise. For instance, what the Clegane brothers look like is relevant for a variety of reasons, but I couldn’t care less what eye colour Lizzie has in Pride and Prejudice or that they cast a blonde actress to play Anna Karenina.
(I’m not going to go into whitewashing characters, ’cause that’s a different lengthy conversation).
Fun fact: when Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett wrote the original “Alien”, they explicitly wrote the characters as gender-neutral, and the first page of the screenplay said, in so many words: “All of these characters may be played by a man or a woman.” (It was however Alan Ladd who decided to make Ripley a woman, O’Bannon said he’d never considered it before then.)
That said, Ripley’s gender is a pretty meaningful aspect of “Alien” and if you were to somehow tell that story without gendering Ripley it’d really change a lot of the subtext.
If I read a story set in the modern day, I’d probably be somewhat disoriented if a character’s gender was never mentioned, since identity is so relentlessly emphasized in just about every person’s development — it would be weird for it to leave no impression on a character whatsoever.
If only there existed a genre of literature existed which allowed us to imagine future societies where social attributes were thought of differently than they are today. Such a genre might be really thought provoking — especially if it caused us to question aspects of our own society that we take for granted. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone invented a genre like that?
it leaves me unable to form a mental image of the character,
Then science fiction is not for you, dear reader. Stick with history. Historical fiction might even be ‘edgy’ for you. Because if you have trouble imagining a non-gender-designated lead character, you’d certainly have trouble with HP Lovecraft, or futuristic skyscrapers, or advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Because your problem is you have no imagination.
(Actually, we know the complainer’s problem isn’t lack of imagination, it’s gender normativeness)
Ripley’s gender is a pretty meaningful aspect of “Alien”
It is?
@Marcus, yeah all the maternal/chthonic imagery. By the third movie the franchise basically Feminist Essentialist Playhouse.
Kagehi:
Given this statement:
I got the distinct idea that the problem was of the “I don’t want to encounter any viewpoint I don’t already agree with” sort.
Becca @ 13:
Not directly, but Chris’s father refers to them as son more than once, so…
As for a page number, sorry, I don’t know that offhand. I’m not even sure which bookshelf it’s on at the moment. (It’s one of over a thousand, and I’m not so good at cataloging books outside of LibraryThing.)
I find the idea of very sparse or even absent physical descriptions, including not knowing the sex of the character, very attractive, for a change. Not only does it provide an opportunity to develop the character in your imagination however you like, but it allows you to comfront your biases and prejudices, when you assume certain characteristics based on certain behaviours. That seems to me to be an extremely powerful tool for a good writer.
Are you quite sure about that? Because I think Scalzi was pretty careful to always use something like `child’ when the father was speaking — I remember thinking that it was sort of clunky. Till I realized why.
Caine
I found it well done. Because all the things that were so natural to the culture, making them obviously male or female meant nothing to her because she saw that they were all so different individually and not just two sets where people were interchangeable within each group.
Or did you mean Seivarden, where she knows that she is male but still uses “she”? As Becca Stareyes said, I think that’s because her language doesn’t have a pronoun for “he”.
+++
Any bet that this person also claims they treat everybody equally?
Oh, another thing I liked about Leckie’s work is that it shows that removing gender from the matrix of oppression doesn’t make a good world. The Raadch is a horrible place, even though you’reno longer put in a box because of the genitals you’re born with.
Books like Leckie’s, or also NK Jemisin’s Dreamblood books where a person is good looking despite being rather light skinned make me think and personally I like that. I guess our esteemed commenter in the OP objects for the exactly same reason.
Pratchett toyed with not specifying gender, making physical characteristics irrelevant to gender or making sex impossible to tell and it’s one of the themes that i’ve enjoyed the most. I really think the only reason one could seriously complain about not being able to tell what sex a particular character is, has to be rooted on prejudice. Unless you want to know because you know that’s significantly going to impact your attitude, there really is no reason to care at all.
In about 1973, I spent a fun evening at an SF convention in the UK, drinking with, among others, Chip Delaney. I was not in the least surprised when I later learned he identified as gay because his characters frequently had sexual fluidity back when it was unusual. You could, however, have knocked me down with a feather when I learned he was black. Because none of us fucking cared — we were SF fans with similar politics shooting the shit. Wouldn’t it be nice if none of that shit mattered, and we could still write about the foibles of complex people?
Ah, it’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world except for Lola.
I’m not sure you being stunned that he was black rather than whatever “default” you’d assumed is a good example of “that shit not mattering.”
Wow. Sounds more like something a Romance aficionado, rather than one of F&sf, would say. I guess they throw out books with alien or robot protagonists. (I wonder if this person was bewildered and put-off by the lack of sex-specifications for all the rabbits in “Watership Down?)
…reminds me of the scene in “Blues Brothers” —
–> Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here?
–> Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.
What gender is Korav?
Why does it matter?
so I can form a mental picture
Well, Korav is a bit on the tall side, and somewhat portly. wearing a tunic ornamented with thousands of brightly colored tropical bird feathers, leggings made of a stretchy wool, and sandals formed of slats bound to a leather thong that wraps and ties up to about knee level. This clothing appears ostentatious, but is fairly normal for Lotharians
but what gender are they?
You’d have to ask Korav how they identify. It’s not relevant to the story.
fine. What race is Korav?
Lotharian, I just told you.
Are Lotharians black? Indian? White? I need to know what color their skin is
Why? Racial tensions that exist in our world don’t exist on Vadamor. Features won’t be similarly divided either based on our ethnic stereotypical appearances.
So what are Lotharian features?
Aquiline noses and red hair, most commonly
so they’re white?
No, they’re Lotharian. White people only exist on Earth.
so they’re black, but with red hair and aquiline noses?
No. they’re Lotharian.
then what color is their skin?
considering the range of skin colors which get considered “white” or “black” there isn’t really a typical shade for those, either.
I’m not familiar with this work or author but if it involves languages defaulting to “she” because they have no words for “he” then couldn’t “son” be a default because they have no word for “daughter”?
Um, what? Every single rabbit in Watership Down had sex-specifications. They were all male except for the few females raided for breeding stock. It was not a gender-fluid story at all.
Okay, I’ll grant that the *names* didn’t conform to human gendered names with Hazel, Dandelion, and Holly (Violet was in the movie and not the book, right?) all being males, but … well, that’s not enough.
The telling bit is definitely “when the story is used to push the one particular viewpoint that I have an issue with it”. Because the idea that gender may not be someone’s most important feature is “viewpoint” that is being “pushed”, there just can’t be any other explanation. Like maybe, say, other people experience the world differently than that commenter. My (now adult) offspring is gender-queer/ gender-fluid. I’ve been in situations where one person in a room will tell me what a fine, handsome son I have, and another will tell me how stunning my daughter is, and then they both look at me in confusion, waiting for me to pin Offspring down, so they can be comfortable. But, Offspring’s comfort is more important to me than theirs. Xe is who xe is, so I reassure them that they haven’t angered anyone, but I don’t tell them a particular gender for xyr to make them happy, because it isn’t xyr reality.
Wwozy, we’re talking about two different books. Let me clarify.
In John Scalzi’s Lock In, the book is set in near-future America. The first-person narrator, Chris, never has a gender specified. Chris has been ‘locked in’ (lacking all motor control) since toddlerhood, so has spent most of their life using what basically amounts to a remote-control robot (called a threep) to interact with people physically.
In Annie Leckie’s (Hugo-winning) Ancillary Justice and sequels, the main character, Breq, and many of the other characters are from a far-future society (the Imperial Radch) which lacks any concept of gender role. Language is un-gendered, and Leckie represents this by using only feminine nouns unless someone is speaking a non-Radch language. In the opening chapters, Breq encounters someone from her past (Severden) she knows is male based on medical records, but Severden gets the same pronoun usage as those Breq doesn’t know (she/her/etc.) except in dialog where a character isn’t speaking a non-Radch language. Very few other characters are explicitly identified by gender, and most of those are in scenes where Breq is interacting with non-Imperials, so people are speaking a language with some form of gender marking (if not pronouns, then things like familial relationships).
(In addition to pronouns and familial words, there aren’t distinctions in dress, hair, make-up, etc in the Radch, to distinguish between males and females.)
So you have two authors, one (Scalzi) who does very well from himself and one who is new, but getting a lot of attention, and both of which have won a Hugo for their novels (though Lock-In was pushed off the ballot this year due to the drama) postulating that gender might not matter to everyone: Scalzi writing about a single individual in our society (or close enough) and Leckie writing about a whole civilization.
This reminds me of something I saw on Facebook recently. Actually, it’s a screenshot of a tweet subsequently posted on Facebook but unfortunately Twitter won’t let me go far enough back in time to snag the original URL– a pox on social networks and their goldfish memories! Anyway, it’s a send-up of a tendency towards sexual dimorphism when it comes to describing the physical features of male characters versus those of female characters in fiction.
The text of the tweet is as follows:
Why do I get the feeling that guys who must know a character’s gender would also be likely to have a similarly urgent need to know the… attributes of any characters identified as female?
@Caine, #5:
Put me down for “fucking loved it.”
“Misgendering” is (i think) an artifact of speaking a gendered language. If “they” became standard in English, and gendered pronouns completely disappeared, I doubt future generations would demand gendered pronouns back so they could be gendered correctly. (Again, I think) it’s more a case of, “if you’re forced to gender me, I want you to get it right.”
The AI in Leckie’s books primarily speaks a non-gendered language–but in addition, happens to be incapable of distinguishing gender in humans (or whatever species they are). Looking at breasts, Adam’s apple, jawline, etc., is only approximately useful even for cis-gender people. We don’t rely on that when we gender people; we mostly look at cultural cues like hair length, clothing styles, makeup and other adornments, posture and stance, etc.–and we can still make mistakes even with cis people presenting as their assigned gender.
It’s actually quite imaginable that future AIs might not bother with the extensive programming necessary to identify gender, esp. given that it will be wrong some decent percentage of the time, and when it’s wrong people are highly offended. They’ll probably check your Facebook profile in real time, and if you’re not on Facebook will ask you politely.
Factor in multiple cultures, and Leckie’s work rings true to this software developer.
Side note: lojban tries to be a language free of all cultural assumptions. I proposed that they remove gendered words like man, woman, boy, girl, and gendered pronouns. They argued that it’s pointless because the tanru (idiom building) mechanism would immediately give constructions like “male-type person” and “female-type child” and “male-type unspecified noun.” I tried to explain that they are encoding the cultural assumption that gender matters at all, to no avail. I gave the example of Asian languages that distinguish older from younger siblings also to no avail: it can also be done easily with tanru, but lojban doesn’t have primary vocabulary words that code olderness or youngerness.
An aside on gender-neutral pronouns: it’s funny how often we use the excuse, “well, I just don’t like the ones I’ve heard.” Like ‘he, she, him, her’, etc are such awesome words in their own right? We’re just accustomed to hearing them. Eventually, if there’s enough push that one set of gender neutral pronouns becomes familiar, then they will seem fine (like any other word in common use). In the meantime, just pick a set and use it. You’ll get your meaning across. Of course, you’ll also be criticized for pushing an agenda, so there’s that.
Why would a F&SF fan complain that a book forces them to stretch their imagination? -_-
I find myself agreeing more and more with the idea that gender is entirely a social construct.
Not having to specify social boxes is weird, somehow uncomfortable and I agree with PZ, liberating.
On a more pedantic note, how do you go an entire book without using gendered pronouns for the protagonist?
Did the author use “them” or “xe” or found a workaround that’s more widely accepted?
Strict first person narration. Means that the narration is all in ‘I’ and ‘me’, and it’s rarer to have conversations talking about the protagonist in the third person.
Found Justice fascinating, and did love the double barrelled narratives of past and present. It wasn’t perfect as a book (lacked symbolic thrust and I thought Leckie could have done a bit more with the actual concept of Ancillaries). Sword was a lot better written, and delved a lot more in to the worldbuilding of how the Raadch Empire actually operated. Narrative power not as good, though, and a couple of the subplots felt tacked on. Despite that, looking forward to Mercy.
The gender thing? Eh. A bit of a gimmick, after the initial “Wait. What?”, but if it broke the brains of some gender normative “I only like Sci-Fi if it conforms to the norms of society as it exists now” fans, then it can’t be all bad.
midorime @36: The main thing I don’t like about the proposed alternatives I’ve seen is that there are so many of them. I’ll stick to singular “they”, thanks, while the newcomers fight it out amongst themselves.
Bernard Bumner@9: I think that the comment would have been rather unremarkable if it had just been that, as a matter of taste, the commenter preferred to know a lot about the physical description of fictional characters, but remember that (1) this is in the context of retropolitick SF award vandalism, (2) the commenter expressly said that his objection was to the “agenda” of writing characters without detailed descriptions of their genders, (3) he hadn’t even read the novel so has no idea how well Scalzi made the reader visualise the characters, and (4) wasn’t going to read any more Scalzi after Fuzzy Nation, a non-revisionist book set in the universe of a novel originally published in 1962.
Oops. My mistake.
=====
L. Frank Baum had a gender-indeterminate character over 100 years ago named “Chick the Cherub”. It was a gimmick (with a “Is the Cherub a Boy or a Girl?” essay contest). I think Baum just thought it’d be fun to have a character that could be either sex.
Baum also had two transgendered characters (one a gimmick, the other a simple practicality) as well as the gender-fluid Chick. I don’t think Baum was particularly progressive. I just think he honestly believed girls wanted adventure stories where girls get to have the same adventures as boys.
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I’m going to join the “don’t be too hard on this twerp” camp. He says he (um, it was a male who wrote this, right) doesn’t like it when an author “pushes a viewpoint”. I don’t like it when an author forces it and it seems gimicky or hacky and the story suffers for it. On the other hand, the entire reason I read sci-fi is to have new ideas and concepts, so if an author “pushes a viewpoint” adroitly it’s a good thing. His stated reason for why he wanted to have the sex of the protagonist given is mostly indefensible. But he is right that the the gender-fluid of the protagonist was “pushed”. I think it’s a good idea and interesting and we should question “well, why does it matter? I guess it doesn’t. And as the action takes place in a robot or a VR space it actually *is* post-gender.” But it *was* pushed as a Gotcha! for readers like him. So although I think he is wrong I don’t think he is invalid. i.e. he’s a twerp; don’t be too hard on him.
Also, I don’t think it’s quite fair to take one stupid statement you don’t like (he doesn’t like being challenged) and project a whole slew of others (well, if he’s stupid that way, he must be stupid in all ways and so he obviously is a sexist pig who can’t identify with women unless their boobs are big). He didn’t say that and it doesn’t follow that he must believe that. It’s simply projection.
But he is a twerp. Although I’m in the “don’t ride him too hard” camp for now, I’m not going to pitch my tent here.
Those are good points.
Oops. Somehow I missed that.
Well, I’m still in the “don’t ride him too hard” camp but I’m not in the “don’t ride him at all” camp.
Pushing ideas can be done in many different ways.
One way is just to push the idea describing it as good to the reader.
Another way is to make the reader reach the idea, or at least think about a particular issue.
Which one happens is also very dependent on the reader and their preconceptions.
@Becca Stareyes #38: Thanks.
I was sincerely hoping for some sort of clever thing I could have used in my own stories. =(
I actually greatly prefer just a bit of description of a character, especially if it is the protagonist or other major character. Doesn’t have to be much, there’s no need to ridicule the person’s position with specifics like “a large pore” (eyeroll), but loose descriptions can go a long way. ‘Determined, wiry, woman’ or ‘lanky, unhurried, man’ are highly general starting points that leave loads of room for the imagination. The reader is in fact actively engaged in deciding what ‘unhurried’ or ‘determined’ means to their image of that character, and with that, the internal theatre has a foundational reference.
@45
PZ
(emphasis mine)
The kid posted, in essence, that he needs to know a character’s gender to imagine them. PZ challenged why this would be so when gender could be every bit as extraneous as a large pore.
The thing is, we don’t live in a post-gender world yet and, I think, most people still do consider gender to be the most absolute defining factor of a person. In other words most people can’t imagine gender possibly being extraneous. Which is entirely the point of an author deliberately omitting it. Yes, yes it can be extraneous. And it is.
Actually, I think this extraneous argument is what’s so frustrating about the arguments “They made the character *black* in the movie! I’m not racist but that’s not how he was in the book so it’s wrong to change him for the movie…. Not racist!”
woozy, 42:
I think it probably was pretty progressive, more than a hundred years ago, to not only think that girls wanted adventure stories where girls get to have the same adventures as boys, but to actually do something about it with his writing.
If, instead of “determined, wiry, woman” we had “determined and wiry”, and instead of “lanky, unhurried man” we had “lanky, unhurried person” does that functionally change the narrative in any significant way? Is the degree of generality, and the amount of room for imagination altered in any significant way?
@Becca Stareyes #38 (and probably everybody)
This means, that the work cannot be translated to some languages unless the gender of the main protagonist is specified.
Only recently I learned that there are languages without gendered nouns and without grammatical gender altogether. This was when Petra Erika Nordlund (a Finnish artist) complained that she designed androgynous character but was forced to gender him because she wanted to publicise the comic in English and not in Finnish.
I am Czech and I speak three slavic languages. All of them are much more gendered than English or German. Even as simple a sentence as “I went home” is gendered. It is almost impossible not to use gendered language in Czech without contorting and torturing the sentences to the very border of understandability. I imagine it makes it hard for genderfluid and transgender people, but the language simply forces you to chose your gender from the binary and there is no way around it.
This means that while writing prose about protagonists without specified gender might be extremely easy in Ugro-Finnic languages, and only slightly challenging in Germanic languages, it is really difficult in Slavic languages.
Given how strongly language influences our understanding of the world and ability to communicate about it, I would not be too surprised if the ability to enjoy such a prose were somewhat dependant on the native language of the reader.
I know for sure that I would in such a case subconsciously gender the protagonist in my mind as a male. Because in my native language grammatical male gender is default in non-specified cases (yes, Czech is inherently sexist language and I have to check myself not to slip in this habit when communicating in English). And of course because due to sexist and patriarchal culture most protagonists in prose are male as it is.
Becca
Not exactly, Breq knows Seivarden is male because Seivarden identifies as male. That’s an important difference and there’s a small passage where Breq (SPOILER: who isn’t a “person” but the last remaining body of an AI, but the discussion of persoonhood is another topic that gets dealed with in the books) reflects on the nature of sex and gender. She notices that yeah, there are bodies underneath the clothes and they roughly correlate with male and female, but even then that’s just a good guess. So even though we know that Seivarden is male, we still have no clue about Seivarden’s genitals.
I fucking loved that.
Charly
Translators have been working with those problems since forever. There’s a book in English that’s been written without using the letter E? R? I don’t rememner exactly, but it. got. translated.
Often when reading Pratchetts wonderful puns I’ve been wondering how that shit got translated. Or Shakespeare…
Hebrew is one of those languages that has gendered first-person verbs (in the present tense), but luckily the vowels are generally omitted, to if you’re careful you can keep the gender ambiguous.
Charly @49
Thanks for that explanation. I speak Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin, like most other Eastern Asian languages, is genderless. One talks of person and people. i.e. business person or business people. Only when discussing men, women and similar topics does gender enter into the words but as a concept, the grammar doesn’t change.
chris lawson @ #41,
I’m sure that particular commenter was exactly as you suggest. I tried to disentangle specific criticism of their rather insipid, almost certainly agenda-driven, complaint from something I was noting about more generalised (perhaps) mockery of the idea that someone might require such details to enjoy narrative fiction.
There are many reasons that people might struggle without such detail – ability, reading style. Those factors are likely to strongly interact with socoetal and internalised (and sadly normal) prejudice about gender.
I would not try to defend the commenter in the OP, nor suggest that theit remarks be treated charitably in the circumstances.
When I first stumbled on this entire gatekeeper to the fandom … thing I was pretty understanding. I can understand that there is some pretty bad SF/F out there, and I can relate with wanting to have a way to sift through it. Then I started reading into it. There are some people putting in a lot of time and effort complaining about bad stories because there is a ‘gimmick’ in it – but they haven’t put in the effort to even read the story. If there’s a story that just doesn’t pull me in, I don’t add it to my reading list and move on from there. I don’t put in a ridiculous amount of -very public- effort to tell everyone that I can reach that stories I haven’t read are bad stories. That just strikes me as disingenuous.
Caine@5 and 21
I just picked up my copy of Lock In I didn’t re-read it (But I might, it’s a good book…) The specific place I had thought Dad referred to Chris as “son” was chapter 22, page 286 in the hardcover, I thought Dad said “Last night someone *redacted* my son” but the actual quote is “Last night someone *redacted* my kid”.
If you can remember which part of the story had “son” specifically mentioned, I’d love to check. I am so sure I remember Dad saying son at least once, but I just can’t find it now.
Mirres@54:
The full text of Lock In is apparently searchable (in ‘preview mode’) on Google Books; there seem to be just two instances of the string “my son”, one spoken by Robinson, the other by Beresford.
On the other hand, I can’t find the string “Last night someone” at all (and p. 288, though not p. 289, “is not part of this book preview”) , so perhaps despite appearances the searchable text (even though it demonstrably includes more text than is “part of this book preview”) is in fact not the entire text.
leerudolph@55 Actually, the text that came up in that search was referring to people other than Chris, Robinson is a realtor, and Beresford is an agent.
And of course the section that I was referring to wasn’t in the search. I’m actually re-reading the book now, up to page 88. I never noticed in previous readings just how awkward the “Kid” and “Kiddo” got to be so they wouldn’t reference “Son” or “Daughter”.
It doesn’t change the narrative, but then almost no descriptor of any character changes the narrative, because a lot of the descriptions include things that aren’y plot relevant. A behavioral tic for example might become a plot point when trying to detect that character in disguise, but then again it might not ever become relevant and may simply be there as a descriptor because characters get descriptors to make them more fleshed out than a cardboard cutout. The character is the better for it, as they are now a bit more tangible.
If we took the approach of describing nothing about a person except what is absolutely necessary, then every single character becomes utterly bland – not only no appearence outside of what the plot might need describing, but also no mannerisms, no inflection, no depth – just a mannequin carrying out their plot role.
This spartan approach runs into another problem: as soon as something is described, if all descriptors are eliminated except those that are plot relevant, then we know in advance that this new attribute is going to become a plot point at some stage. This is Chekov’s [X] at its worst. “Oh shit, she coughed? Well this author never includes extraneous anything so I guess she has the disease they’ve been discussing.” “Jim has a nervous tic? And they’re talking about infiltrating under the cover of that fancy masquerade? I know who’s about to be discovered!”
P.S.
Nowhere in my brief look at that person’s forum post did I see him lament such ludicrous ‘omissions’ as breast size. His complaint was also not prescriptive, but seemed limited to only his personal experience, so I see no reason for ridicule or scorn.
Holms @57.
No one’s saying no extraneous detail is necessary. They are saying caring about one particular and specific detail to the point that it’s unacceptable if *that* one detail is omitted is illogical. If a characters eye color, shape of the lip, and height is specified it’d be ridiculous to say one couldn’t visualize the character because her waist size was omitted. So they are arguing that saying you can’t visualize a character because his or her sex is (deliberately) omitted is equally ridiculous.
This is *slightly* disingenuous as we are all aware that the common and default attitude is that one’s sex is always relevant and never extraneous, so we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised when someone expresses such a thought. However if an author omits it to make the point that ones sex *is* extraneous, the reader should be able to cope and follow.
Yeah, that was basically projection based on the company he keeps. I really don’t think that is quite fair.
I tend to agree, but as others have pointed out there is a lot of context in the “gatekeeper” issue that you nor I have really exposed ourselves to.
@47
“not particularly” vs. “pretty”. A subjective distinction. To describe Baum as progressive and even feminist is not undeserved. When I claim that *I* don’t think he was “particularly” progressive, I simply mean, that I don’t think he was deliberately trying to impact a radical change to the readers. I think he was merely trying to tell stories through his viewpoint which was very liberal (for the time) although not extremely or radically so.
But it’s entirely subjective.
His second Oz book, The Land of Oz, is a very interesting contrast in blatant sexist humor and subtle radical feminist subtext. The all-girl army of revolt and their men-do-housework-while-women-eat-chocolate rule is buffoonish satire of suffragettes but, although absurd, it is presented as equally valid (and capricious) as the default patriarchy. And when everything is resolved, it is at the hands of a woman convincing a young boy to accept her true self as a female ruler. Men really had ruled long enough, although it was a cartoon that had to tell us that. … but … you still have girls shrieking on chairs at the sight of mice and the hilarious sight of men doing housework (ha-ha). …but… you have a stuffed ruler being told that revolting women (they don’t look it; ha-ha) have as much right to rule as he does. Mixed.
But I like him. His heart and head were in the right place.
But I digress.
On another thread today, and many times previously, there is a discussion about what our response should be to someone who is right on some things and horribly wrong on others. Margaret Mitchell was obviously someone who had no problem with slavery at all, yet Gone With The Wind is still progressive in terms of feminism.
When L. Frank Baum was a young man, as a newspaper editor, he wrote an editorial where he said that the only lasting solution to the problem of conflict with Native Americans was genocide. He said it as if it was a regretful necessity. Of course, sometimes people grow out of odious beliefs later in life, and I’d like to think that he did too, but we don’t have any evidence. That was a one-off, though — it’s not like it was a cause he was crusading for.
What to do? It’s a conundrum. But I’m inclined to say we should let the books stand for themselves.
“the protagonist in Lock In, whose gender is left unspecified throughout the entire book. Scalzi’s been praised for doing so, but to me, it leaves me unable to form a mental image of the character, and I have a much harder time reading a work if I can’t picture the characters involved”
The person saying this (Jay Maynard, aka Tron Guy), later on admits he hasn’t actually read either Lock In or Ancillary Justice.
Far be it for stories and storytellers to dare create a story that exceeds the demands of mere “function” or pragmatic necessity. Just because gender isn’t “functional” in a particular story, it does not necessarily follow that it’s not important or can bear some kind of meaning.
This approach to narrative is sorta crouched because you’re starting with plot, as if plot was the critical, essential element, and then the characters are defined in terms of their purpose to the plot. Most good fiction doesn’t generally work that way; the writer starts with interesting characters, and the plot arises from their conflict. From this perspective, the author can’t even really attest to the audience what properties of his characters ARE important, the whole drama of the story is letting the audience figure out for themselves what’s important and what’s not.
(That science fiction, the least character-driven of all fiction genres, thinks it can get away with leaving gender unstated, is not surprising. Very few Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke characters needed to be male or female, of course it’s probably no accident that most Asmiov and Clarke characters are dull ciphers with no inner life.)
You also seem to be presupposing that authors know what message they’re trying to send when they’re writing a story, how the reader’s are supposed to interpret their story and imagery, and that an author need only lay out precisely the information required to convey the desired message. I work with a lot of writers and I can tell you this tends not to be the process, they write a story, create realistic character and situation, and then other people read it and come to their own conclusions about what it means. A character may be woman: the author thought this wasn’t relevant, but readers may think otherwise. When the artist decides in advance which details about a character aren’t important and which are tends to yield very didactic and symbolically obvious material. Most writers I know struggle just to keep the story interesting and compelling, and they leave the moral interpretations to the audience.
You’re also looking at this from a very textual perspective; I work in the film industry, and in in a movie, while we can say that a character’s gender “isn’t important,” it’s impossible to actually portray a character without sex in a movie. People present as male, female, third sex, androgynous, whatever, and a person who looks androgynous cannot be said to have “no gender,” they do, they’re androgynous, androgyny is a positive gender identity. Real human beings have a sexual profile they present to others that fits on a big field of possibilities, they can have romantic attraction, and biological gender that can be any one of many different things, and all of these permutations have different social and cultural meaning and entailments. And watching how characters encounter and work with these can be a really important part of revealing their motivations and personality. There are no real people for which gender “is irrelevant,” and there’s a huge difference between positing a world where men, women, gay and trans people can do anything they want, and positing a world where gender is subsumed and indistinguishable.
I’m familiar with that. I think he was naive and young and catering to/influenced by the opinion of his extremely anti-Indian community. He did live through these conflicts and came to the conclusion (admittedly eurocentric and patronizing) that centuries of lies and oppression had left the indians bitter, violent, and destitute. Sitting Bull was universally reviled and feared by Baum’s community and his first editorial reads like a eulogy to bin Laden. He never denies the popular (and inaccurate) opinion of Sitting Bull as a hateful violent enemy, but the editorial lists all the injustices done to the Lakota and Native Americans in general that made Sitting Bull that way (as he was perceived). The editorial ends with the killing of Sitting Bull and seven supporters that the town can rest easily now that an enemy is dead but states when Indians do such we call it a massacre, but when whites do it we call it a victory. After the editorial, hostilities continued and Baum’s community felt abandoned by the government which they felt had lied to everyone involved. Baum wrote two more editorials each slightly more bitter and it was the third in which he expressed that simply eradicating Indian culture was the only solution, that Indians had been oppressed too long and been reduced (in his opinion) to scraps of societies, that it was too late for any hope.
I think he was naive and did not realize just what the genocide would entail. And I think he viewed the situation from the narrow perspective of the settlers while history has shown it to be far vaster and tragic. At any rate, it was the nadir in his otherwise optimistic and idealist life. But no, it was very sadly on the wrong/tragic side of history.
Back on topic:
Actually the quoted stuff above is really the least offensive and most reasonable thing he said. The following illustrate his viewpoint more:
I have two copies of Lock In in audiobook format. One is narrated by Wil Wheaton, the other by Amber Benson. Both narrations work because Chris’ gender is never specified.
I’m guessing you’re suggesting Ozma as one of these two characters. I never thought about Ozma as transgender, but I often tend towards being literal in my reading. Book says magic spell. I think ‘magic spell’. I didn’t think it had been that long since I last re-read them (and have read them all countless times) but having a moment here — who are you pegging as the other?
Off-topic, I knew you had to be an Oz fan with that name and avatar! I was an IWOC member for years, made it to two Munchkin conventions, part of Fred Meyer’s Story Circle back in the ‘old days’. /derail
You have completely missed the point of what I meant by “function”.
99.9999% of all existing literature vividly describes the genders of the characters. Those who like having such descriptions in their fiction quite literally have nearly all extant fiction to choose from to satisfy that desire. They could easily just ignore those few works that do not describe gender, and yet here some of them are, feeling a need to vociferously complain about such works. As if even the tiniest smattering of diversity on this matter was completely unacceptable.
I find this attitude notable.
@60 brucegee1962, Mithell is only progressive in terms of feminism if feminism is defined as about and for White women. She certainly wasn’t progressive in terms of Black women.
I didn’t know that Baum had advocated for the extermination of Native Americans. Changes the way I will look at TWOZ from now on.
Sorry, I meant “Mitchell”.
Ah, Jay Maynard. I knew him on Usenet back in the 90s, but hadn’t seen his name for years until the Hugos and his ridiculous plan to prevent wrongfans from having wrongfun. I see he’s as much of a right-wing tool as he was back then.
Cat Valente made an excellent comment about “story” and “message” in the context of this discussion. Seriously, go read the comment in its entirety, and not just the fragment I’ll quote here:
Soooo, this person with no imagination would be utterly unable to read any of the Culture novels because the sex, sexuality and even the apparent species of the protagonists is utterly fluid. I would also be willing to lay good money that the Malazan series confuses the hell out of them because the race of all the characters is utterly fluid; Quick Ben for example (who is a mage and a sort of a hero, sometimes), would in our terms be black.
@Amphiox All I got is what’s on the page.
I’m not really talking about audience’s taste, it’s more a question for me about wether or not characters of null gender are aesthetically compromised.
Off-topic:
A lot of transgendered bloggers write that Ozma was an inspiration to them. Always, the devil’s advocate I like to point out that her transformation wasn’t voluntary and Glinda even made the apparently anti-trans statement that he had to become a girl and she wouldn’t be allowed to switch back because he was a girl and trying to appear as something you are not is evil. (Although, I supposed what you “really” are can be interpreted as one’s true nature hence this could be pro-trans “you *must* be true to your inner self otherwise you are living a lie” message.) I don’t think of her as “trangendered” as transgender is a modern concept but I think of her as the equivalent. She was a boy and now she is a girl. Her gender changed. It’s equivalent.
In actuality Baum was only trying to make a clever gimic for a future stage musical.
The other isn’t an Oz character but the fairy who becomes the mortal Prince Marvel for a year in “The Enchanted Isle of Yew”. Sesley, a girl from a noble family, and her friends find a fairy in a fairy bower and are allowed therefore ask it a wish. The fairy had actually allowed herself to be caught in the desire that she could talk the girls into making a wish for her. (Fairies can grant wishes for mortals but not for themselves.) The fairy was deathly bored of being a fairy and wanted to experience life for one year as a mortal. They ask if the fairy wanted to be a girl like them and the fairy hesitates and says “perhaps”. The girls explain that without nobility or money a woman would be expected to cook and do housework and other drudgery. The fairy says that’s no good as she wants to travel and have adventures and see the world; can’t women do that? Sesley answers it’s uncommon or at least she has never heard of it. So the fairy says she wants to be a prince for a year. The girls wish it and the fairy becomes Prince Marvel and has dashing adventures for a year.
end derail (for now)
I don’t think it should. Or at least it should as an additional layer.
I can’t deny that Baum wrote that editorial. But it does seem to truly be at odds with every else he ever said, wrote, or advocated in his life. It really needs to be read fully. It was written from the view point of settlers at a time of frequent violent conflict. It’s primary purpose is to criticize General Miles and the U.S. Government for poor policies in the conflict. The lines of “rights of conquest” and any line of white expansion is said very bitterly and includes criticism of “wronging them for centuries” but he does advocate ending the conflict once and for all by extermination as a final act of war. I really, really, really want to assume he was simply being bitterly and cynically ironic or hyperbolic but I think he probably was in earnest. But I also think it was in a 19th century “Catharge must be destroyed” viewpoint that has since been deemed unacceptable (just look at ISIS). I think it weighed heavily on him and he wasn’t advocating it lightly. But he did advocate it and I have to acknowledge that. But I don’t think he was a blood-thirsty imperialist either.
Sorry. More derailing.
@woozy #74 and #75: While some of Baum’s work might be perceived as forward-looking in gender or feminist terms, possibly in response to the influence of his wife and mother-in-law, almost all of his writing that deals with non-white human characters and other racial issues is backward, embarrassing, and laden with stereotypes. Unsurprising but nonetheless unfortunate.
@76
I was just thinking this afternoon that it is a great disappointment that Baum never embraced or consider multi-cultural diversity as he should have or as Herman Melville had a half century before. Which is too bad as Baum’s life experience and overall philosophy was that he really should have. *All* of Baum’s books’ major theme was respecting and actively celebrating individual differences and he was very good at representing all classes (I love the fact that Trot, Cap’n Bill, and Button-Bright of Sky Island and the Scarecrow of Oz represented such differences in classes) but it’s almost as though he had never considered different races as capable of interaction (or even of actually existing). Which is strange as, as I said before, his major theme was to explore and be impressed by differences. His works are rightly lauded for being “American” and expressing american self-definition but it’s all European descended self-definition.
Disappointing.
I wouldn’t say “almost all of his writing that deals with non-white human characters and other racial issues is backward, embarrassing, and laden with stereotypes” because he had so few writings with non-white human characters. At least not children or main characters. The Arab villian in John Doe and the Cherub, for example, was straight out of comic operas and was not in anyway supposed to be identifiable. But, yes, you are right. The Woggle-bug Book is an embarrassment and Dot and Tot of Merryland has one very horrible paragraph about servants made of chocolate that’s quite unreadable. (Although it also has a paragraph about licorice children being highly praised and respected which I honestly can not make sense of.)
Still, all in all, I don’t think Baum is in the same class as, say, Jean de Brunhoff (creator of Babar the Elephant). Or maybe I’m being an apologist.
I could talk about Baum until the cows come home but we are high-jacking the thread perhaps.
Aesthetics are subjective. There is no such thing as “asthetically compromised” as a subject that can be discussed or reasoned or debated between two people who subjectively believe differently. It is thus not a question that can even be asked.
Or to put it another way, the question “is this aesthetically compromised” can only ever have two possible answers:
1. “It is unanswerable” because every individual has his or her own unique aesthetic sense and judgment, none of which can be said to be privileged over those of any other.
OR
2, “It is not” because someone, somewhere, finds it aesthetically appealing, and thus it has a target audience that is satisfied with it, and has thus fulfilled the only objective requirement for aesthetic validity that exists. The opinions of those who are not in that target audience simply are not relevant whatsoever.
Moggie
From your quote:
I think there lies the point: White men used to have a wealth of stories featuring them. They never had to walk through a story as the “other”. Everybody else learned early to immerse themselves in stories about not them. We’re used to it, right? When I first read the Lord of the Rings I sure didn’t stay in the Shire with Rosie, Rivendell with Arwen or Lothlórien with Galadriel. I went on adventuring with the boys (and I was terribly glad to be allowed to travel with Eowyn for a while).
Now I notice how this reading socialisation shaped my imagination. When people of unspecified race/gender become white/dudes automatically and then you come to the point you realise you were wrong. Personally, I take some masochistic pleasure in this. I think that the outraged dudebros have similar experiences, only that they think that the fact that a character they imagined as white/male is PoC/female is a terrible betrayal and evidence of nefarious ideology pushed onto them when they themselves were the ones who set that stage in their imagination.
They want to know upfront whether they’re dealing with a white guy or not so they can put down the book immediately and aren’t “tricked” into liking, feeling with somebody who actually isn’t a white dude. Imagine arriving at the end of the novel and finding out your totally kick ass hero is a black lesbian!
Though, really, all 3 of them likely had some sort of adventures that would have made good stories. Rosie was there through the occupation of the Shire. What did she do when the place was overrun by Sharkey’s men? Probably something, even though the book makes it sound like the whole place sat there waiting to be rescued. It’s strongly implied that Galadriel is active in defending Lothlorien and probably in distracting Sauron from the main characters. She had one of the elven rings. What exactly did she do with it? And while there is less textual evidence for Arwen doing anything active in the war, her personality as described in the story in the appendix is not really consistent with her just sitting around and hoping Aragorn would succeed so she likely was active too, if not in walking to Mordor. (Sorry, off topic, but really any of these stories could work…)
@Jamie Hardt, 73
Is it possible that it depends on the context, and that there’s no hard and fast answer to this that applies in all cases?
dianne #81 I bet there’d be considerable response to somebody pulling a mainstream Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-Are-Dead/Wide-Sargasso-Sea on these characters. That would be fun to see …
(of course I’m sure a lot of this has probably been done; I just don’t know on what scale or if there is any chance of such work being limelighted “in public” to a readership less familiar with fanfic)
dianne
One of the few things I enjoyed about Jackson’s last Hobbit movie was her single-handedly kicking Sauron’s ass after all the dudes failed and had the floor wiped with them. Tolkien wrote a great many kick-ass women, especially for his time and place. Makes you wonder what he’d have written if he hadn’t been raised on a steady diet of racisma nd sexism.
I’m not trying to provide a hard and fast answer. After all, this is sci-fi, a talking cube of marble can be a character in a sci-fi story. It’s just that many times the human characters might as well be talking cubes of marble. It is a more general question about characterization and not necessarily restricted to gender, I agree. This might also be related to a more general anti-humanism in science fiction: if an author thinks the human race is insignificant and meaningless in the cosmos, that it’ll be destroyed by itself, absorbed by the Overmind or consumed by grey goo, it would probably follow that gender isn’t very important to him.
It also probably makes sense that gender wouldn’t matter if the author wasn’t interested in placing his character in a romantic or a family context. So you end up with lots of action and violence and techno-thrill but a prudish avoidance of sex (I suppose Lock-In might fall under this rubric).
Gender might also not matter if the author only wants to write about his own gender, but he doesn’t actually want to say that. Thus male characters to do male-coded things, the genderless characters do male-coded things, and female-coded behaviors are done by… nobody, because no female-coded activities are relevant to the plot, or if they are needed, by explicitly-defined women.
Oh. I’m not sure how far we’re going to get if subjective questions can’t “even be asked.” Questions like, “Does this character’s gender matter?” or “How should we decide who wins a Hugo?” (Quick, someone call the Rationalist Police.)
It kind of reminds me of the nobody poops rule. People in books never go to the bathroom, and if they do, it’s usually freighted with meaning. When you have a genderless character you make their gender into something that happens in the bathroom.
That’s not the worst thing in the world, though if you have a reader or an author making the point of saying “this character’s gender doesn’t matter,” it’s hard to avoid the interpretation that he things the character’s gender belongs in the bathroom and that the subject isn’t merely irrelevant, but you’re a jerk for asking. So we don’t know Chris Shane’s gender, but if you asked Chris Shane, “does your gender matter?” would Shane agree that it doesn’t? I just think the underlying values are interesting.
It’s a bit dehumanizing and the other examples I immediately thought of were Heinlein and Howard Hawks. Heinlein had gender-ambiguous character if only to make the point that, yes, women too can be powerful, as long as they pursue his ideal of machismo (and were redheads). Hawks was a filmmaker so he couldn’t do gender-ambiguity literally, but he’s considered a progressive because he generally didn’t code behaviors among characters and women did all the things men did. It’s also meant most of his movies were war movies, or crime movies, or movies about people who worked 30 hours a day in professional jobs; gender didn’t matter as long as you knew how to fly a plane, were a reporter on a hot case, or could shoot indians. It uses gender neutrality to replace diversity with the author’s ideal of, usually, some version of manhood.
Melissa Scott in (I think) The Kindly Ones has a first-person pov protagonist who has an active sex-life (with reference to partners whose sex is specified) during the plot of the novel, without it ever being specified what the protagonist’s sex is, or their gender or their sexual orientation.
So, not necessarily confined to the toilet ;-)
Also wielding political, academic and/or physical strength and courage is not coded male or female in the world(s) depicted.
I guess I would have to read it to come to a firm conclusion but it sounds almost Victorian. So this character has an active sex life, but we don’t actually know their gender so we don’t actually know what “sex” means or entails in context. It’s almost like the readers are all 11-year-olds and as far as we know sex is hugging really hard, and the author is the big 7th grader on the playground gossiping about who’s having all the sex, again without having a really clear idea what this is.
I mean how exactly do we know the character has had sex? I have this image in my head of Steve Carell from The 40-year-Old Virgin talking about how he was totally sexing this girl one day and just going freaky and she was so into sex with him and he was so sexing her all day. If it’s just stipulated that it’s happened I guess that’s fine, I don’t think clinical details are appropriate or necessary, but you kinda see how, under such conditions, the writer can’t actually talk about sex, they’re actually talking about a certain bundle of social constructs and analytic a priori beliefs we have about sex — Like, for instance, what exactly a “healthy” sex life is, a point I will not contest but which is totally defined by cultural norms. Sex becomes metaphysical and abstract, but sex is as real as a chair, so there’s a contradiction. You can handwave sex, just like you can handwave FTL space travel, but a handwave is a handwave.
No, just in the world of the reader and the writer, the one where the writing and interpretation happen. Writers can construct worlds different from our own in order to comment on our world, they don’t have to but we’re free to interpret them in that way.
Giliell @ 80, exactly, all of this. It’s a bit like hearing a resentful “the speakers were half women!” and then finding out it was actually 2 out of 50.
Jamie Hardt @ 88
Well. If you’re just talking about gender, the revelation of genitalia could be made right there on the page without ever revealing gender at all.
But a first person narrator could have all kinds of described sex without discussing their genitalia. They could perform oral or manual sex on their partner(s), penetrate their partner(s) with toys, receive anal or nipple or foot stimulation from their partner(s), etc. For many people, their own genitals aren’t all that important to the act of sex. Or they could receive genital stimulation without such detailed descriptions that the reader can tell the difference between a clitoris and a penis.
Yeah, that means the sex might skew a bit away from cis-heteronormative “sex is when a vagina and a penis snuggle” descriptions, but plenty of cishet people are having the non-procreative sex, too.
@Mello I don’t know the book that’s being discussed, if all of that is in there then that’s great — a lot of your examples sound like 3rd base to me, but I digress… You are though sketching out a vision sex that’s sortof pleasure-centric, which isn’t wrong. We can take this to the logical extreme and just assert that all sexuality is mental, Brain Sex is real sex, all the physicality is redundant. That’s totally valid too.
I don’t want to dwell on the copulation question too much, I’ve really spent too much time on it as it is, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make. My point (originally) was that you do actually have to think through all of this stuff, gender and sexuality are elemental properties of characters, insofar as those characters are human, and these creative choices aren’t necessarily political- or value-neutral, nor are they necessarily progressive. You can elide sexuality but it seems to lead to a certain kind of story, one that emphasizes action, violence, technology and dehumanization. This may be a necessary consequence, indeed these concerns may motivate a lot of the experimental gender writing in science fiction. People who reject this kind of writing are not necessarily closed-minded trogs.
I guess I don’t like this approach because I find the writing style really patronizing; if a character could be either gender, that’s sortof an independent question from what gender they actually are, so every time you hit an artful pronoun the author is smacking you in the head saying, see, see, it isn’t relevant to my story! It’s so irrelevant I’m constantly engaging in sleights of hand to protect it’s irrelevance!. It’s not necessarily political but it is a little insulting, I could have made that distinction without your help, thank you very much. Offred had to be a woman; John Connor didn’t have to be a man; Paul Atreides, who can say? Wether a character’s gender is relevant to a story is a function of their relationships and what they do, not the pronouns the author slings at them. At least this way we’re asking people to read the book and think about it a little bit, instead of just tacitly accepting some compact, facile moral point from the author about the nature of gender.
Jamie Hardt
While that may be true (TMM has given you ample examples of how this may not be true), it’s hardly Victorian. On the contrary, it takes sex firmly out of the “reproducing couple” category and puts it into the “people having fun” category. There can be detailed descriptions of sex that do not reveal either gender or genitalia (not the same thing), just like there can be detailed descriptions of bodies that don’t reveal either.
And it’s also not like I can’t find a ton of books that describe genitals and gender in detail for when I want my juicy bit served in an easily digestible manner.
This says more about you than it says about the authors and the books. An “artful pronoun”? Like singular “they”? As I mentioned in my #80, you seem to feel cheated by not getting information you think is important. Are you acting like this every time a character’s hair colour isn’t revealed? Or when you don’t get any information on a character’s sexuality because fucking and sexual attraction don’t feature in the book?
Personally, I like my books to challenge my thinking. If I react strongly to something like that, or find myself surprised by some revelation or other, I like to think about it, rub my ideas and preconceptions against this and reexamine my positions. of course you could call that “an agenda”, but so is writing the same old stories that sure don’t ruffle any feathers and that sure don’t challenge people to think beyond the status quo.
Okay so firstly the singular they is evil and must be destroyed with fire. I’m not saying we can’t have a neuter singular pronoun in English, but singular they is an atrocity unto all that is decent. /snark
Me too, that’s why I think gender neutrality should actually be justified by characterization, and not be an Informed Attribute. I guess this was the point I was trying to make.
I’m sorta feeling like you’re not actually reading what I’m writing…
Hmm, Jamie Hardt. If the singular they is evil, what about the singular you? Thou wouldst prefer that English had not dropped the singular second person pronouns (thou/thee/thy/thine)? They were rather useful, perhaps, and as melodious as any other English pronoun.
But, to your last point, books should challenge your thinking. However, I think for a lot of people, the idea of sexless characters isn’t very challenging at all. Indeed, I think for a lot of readers the concept is really comforting.
Hmm…can it be done without violating the Tolkien family’s copyright? Because I keep thinking about Rosie’s adventures as an underground agent in the occupied Shire…Probably not the character I was supposed to go after, but elves bore me.
@ dianne I presume that in practice any such project would need their permission. Bet it would get a few readers, though!
@ Jamie what sexless characters? The fact that the reader may not know the sex of a character =!= sexless character, particularly if the text has that character having sex; conversely there are any number of characters whose sex is known and who could arguably be described as sexless (very common in characters in children’s books, especially older books. Peter Rabbit and Biggles are both male and could be described as sexless. Unless of course I completely misunderstand what you mean by “sexless”. Perhaps I should ask you that first; what do you mean by “sexless”?).
@opposablethumbs I think, from the context of the thread it’s clear, I mean a character who’s biological or presented gender ID are unstated and constructed in such a way as to be ambiguous, neither male, female, androgynous, transmale nor transfemale, third sex nor asexual. No gendered pronouns or name, no positive physical description, no socio-political historical or cultural references, e.g. “Sarah and Chris could only get married after their court case.”
This seems particularly stupid because people tend to imagine a character how they want to, anyway, regardless of description.