I thought Imperial Radch handled gender interestingly in that one of the points it was making was that the Radchaai approach to gender was (a) as stifling and restrictive in its own way as a binary approach (most apparent with Radchaai insistence on not recognizing the genders of members of colonized cultures who the narrative suggested very much did have genders they cared about the recognition of), (b) to point out that gender is a cultural construct that isn't mapped neatly to physical characteristics (via different cultures assigning Radchaai characters based on different assumptions), and (c) that even if you apparently don't have gender as a concept and don't place a lot of weight on physical anatomy either, there are plenty of other ways people will find to differentiate themselves and create hierarchies and abolishing gender isn't going to fix anything (even aside from the colonial implications). So I don't think Leckie's goal in how she wrote gender in those books was to present nonbinary characters, for the most part, but it is perhaps an argument against to some strands of anti-trans discourse. I don't know if she really succeeded at doing all those things, but that was what I took out of it.
(Super interesting post you linked - really articulates a lot of why I turn so much to SFF to explore things that matter to me and why it so often resonates more with me than realistic fiction.)
no subject
I thought Imperial Radch handled gender interestingly in that one of the points it was making was that the Radchaai approach to gender was (a) as stifling and restrictive in its own way as a binary approach (most apparent with Radchaai insistence on not recognizing the genders of members of colonized cultures who the narrative suggested very much did have genders they cared about the recognition of), (b) to point out that gender is a cultural construct that isn't mapped neatly to physical characteristics (via different cultures assigning Radchaai characters based on different assumptions), and (c) that even if you apparently don't have gender as a concept and don't place a lot of weight on physical anatomy either, there are plenty of other ways people will find to differentiate themselves and create hierarchies and abolishing gender isn't going to fix anything (even aside from the colonial implications). So I don't think Leckie's goal in how she wrote gender in those books was to present nonbinary characters, for the most part, but it is perhaps an argument against to some strands of anti-trans discourse. I don't know if she really succeeded at doing all those things, but that was what I took out of it.
(Super interesting post you linked - really articulates a lot of why I turn so much to SFF to explore things that matter to me and why it so often resonates more with me than realistic fiction.)