This week I’d like to consider (and offer up for discussion) a narrative device that I’ve read in several stories and heard in discussions about writing gender beyond the binary: not using any pronouns for a character. Not revealing their gender.
Usually this is achieved by a story being written in first person, from the character’s perspective. Other characters won’t use pronouns or other gender markers when referring to them. No one in the story will question their gender, but no one will state it.
One of the more interesting examples of this is found in Kelley Eskridge’s Dangerous Space, a collection of stories. “And Salome Danced” is about Mars, auditioning actors for a performance of Salome, faced with an actor who first auditions as a man for the role of John the Baptist, then as a woman for Salome. The actor, Jo, is dangerous and powerful. It’s an unsettling narrative choice for a person who is more than one gender and I can’t say I liked it. But there is Mars. The story never reveals Mars’ gender.
Mars recurs in two more stories in the collection: “Eye of the Storm” (reprinted in Lee Mandelo’s Beyond Binary, where I first encountered Mars) and “Dangerous Space.” In none of them is Mars’ gender revealed.
I like and dislike this.
There are people whose gender is best represented by not being ‘revealed’ by pronouns and other markers. People who don’t find any pronouns applicable to their gender. People who don’t think their gender is anyone’s business. People who aren’t gendered. On the other hand, not revealing a character’s gender leads to assumptions. Those assumptions can certainly be interesting to observe, but not positively: the character will be gendered according to what they do in the story (do they do male things or female things?), or, at times, in line with the author’s (perceived) gender. Almost always male or female. This barely troubles the gender essentialism of how ‘male’ and ‘female’ people are defined, let alone the binary default: the answer to ‘What gender is this character?’ is rarely non-binary or non-gendered. Nor, I sometimes suspect, is it intended to be.
Even if the author intends the reader’s questioning to go beyond the binary, I question the usefulness of this method. How many readers will answer ‘neither’?
I worry that it leaves non-binary gender invisible.
It is easy to write a visible non-binary character without making the story about gender: use non-binary pronouns. Spivak, singular ‘they’, ‘se’ (effectively used in Elizabeth Bear’s Undertow), and so on. Use the pronouns as a fact of life, not questioned.
I dislike my own suggestion: that we write about gender in ways that are determined by the assumptions of people who cannot see non-binary gender unless it’s pointed out for them. Even then, one reviewer read singular ‘they’ in Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Annex” and thought a human is an alien, as I mentioned in a recent roundtable at Strange Horizons about reviewing and diversity. (A less frustrating reason to be careful with singular ‘they’ in science fiction is the potential confusion if there are multi-bodied characters.) Some readers don’t want to see non-binary gender.
What do we do?
My preference is probably unsurprising: write stories in which non-binary gender is clear, varied, individual to multiple people. In a story that truly troubles binary gender—or is so far from it that the idea of ‘binary’ is meaningless—a character whose gender is not revealed will not be lost in the binary. Mars in “And Salome Danced” is interesting: a foil to Jo, a steady presence where Jo is dangerously gendered. The academic editing the texts in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World is interesting too: gender un-revealed in a book that crosses the binary so much that it starts to cross it out. But I do wonder what answer the author has in mind. (I’ll be talking about this book in full in my next post.)
I don’t want non-binary gender to be invisible. I don’t want non-binary gender to be primarily written for the people who don’t want to see it. I certainly don’t want to tell writers what they must and mustn’t do (beyond “Non-binary people are real people, try to write accordingly”), but I think there’s a conversation to be had about not revealing gender and how it relates to writing post-binary gender. I’d certainly be interested in discussing it further.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. Her science fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Clarkesworld, The Other Half of the Sky, Gigantic Worlds, Solaris Rising 3 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014).
I think that I agree with this. If we were living already in a post-binary world — that is, a world in which the culture was not generally dominated by a binary attitude towards gender — not revealing a character’s gender might have a very different effect, and might be a more worthwhile approach. But since we don’t live in that world, we have to accepted that non-binary isn’t the same thing as anti-binary, and only one of those two things is going to move us towards a post-binary environment.
I guess I can understand why writers might dislike basing their choices one what they assume their audiences assume about the nature of gender, but I think that nearly all writing does this to one degree or another (even if it’s just at the most basic level, like, “I assume that you will assume the correct meaning of these words”).
So, that being the case, it doesn’t seem like there’s necessarily a lot of merit in hiding a character’s gender if audiences are just going to assume one for them, anyway.
Hi,
Melissa Scott did this in her excellent “The Kindly Ones”, where the gender of the first-person narrator is never revealed. It’s actually fascinating and thought-providing in that book.
Karen.
In a story Lightspeed bought from me (hopefully it’ll come out soooooon) I initially made the gender of the narrator non-specific. It’s told in first person, so it felt like a reasonable move to me…and I wanted it to be able to read as any gender because I felt the story was about an experience that could be universal to any iteration of gender. So I admittedly wasn’t trying for a character of explicitly non-binary gender, but rather one that readers could identify (hopefully) with their own identity.
Anyway, from my experience with beta readers and my writer’s workshop, there were basically two reactions:
1) The readers would choose a gender, either male or female for the character. In this case most leaned toward male, probably because the narrator is a soldier. (Or potentially because male is still the “default” character setting for most people.)
2) The readers got pretty annoyed with me. Not because I was being cute about not mentioning the gender–it was all pretty natural–but because they found it distracting.
I agree with your assessment. I think as the world currently is, if you don’t specify the gender, people are going to read a gender into it…just like when you don’t specify a race for a human character, people tend to read a race into it (commonly white). Unless the character is doing something people will think of as typically “female” I imagine they’ll end up reading the character as male whether it was intended or not. :/
As for the story, I ended up putting a few little bits in here and there to indicate the character could be read as female (refering to theirself as “Phoebe’s little sister” once, being called “lady” by a guy on the train)–and I still had a couple readers after the changes who got confused because they initially wanted to read the character as male. I’ll be curious to see how it all washes out when it’s finally published.
I wrote a short story in which the gender of the character was not revealed until near the end and when it was, it was only in one sentence. Of the people who read it, I think only one picked up on the gender. The character was a prisoner and I wanted to use a lack of gender to show how the character was starting to lose themself during their confinement. My readers made their own choice in regards to the character’s gender and were surprised when they were wrong but not distracted or upset by it. It was interesting to see how each reader place their own influences upon what they read.
I often use this device in stories which confront boundary gender issues because I am more interested in allowing the reader to project their own interpretation of events on the material without the internalized binary gender filter the reader may have inherited through nurture.
I think imposing non-binary gender on some stories would be as damaging to them as insisting on strict binary. For whatever good intentions you are suggesting that one do so, I’m not comfortable in restricting artisitic vision to what seems to be a primarily political position.
I found Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Left Hand of Darkness to be a wonderfully textured introduction to thinking about gender and its role in society, as well as how our language could change to accomodate an awareness of gender fluidity.
One difficulty with the unrevealed gender approach to stories that I’ve run into is that readers are likely to take it as a clever author trick, much like writing in second person or future tense. Not merely distracting, but a way of showing off skill in its own right. Or, conversely, they take it as the point of the story, which rather distracts if it’s intended as a way of avoiding gender issues. Because something that people expect to have definitively answered (in one of two ways) isn’t being answered, they then read it as a mystery, which they’re searching the story for clues to solve. Again, distracting.
And really, there is no avoiding gender issues. As has been pointed out in several places above, if you write a character with no specified gender, most readers will very much project the “internalized binary gender filter,” regardless of authorial intent. God knows I’ve done it; I tend to read characters without gendered pronouns as male (until specified otherwise) and those with unusual pronoun sets like Spivak as female (until ditto).
I wish I had something clever to say here about ways around this, but I don’t know of any. If I can’t even control my own tendency to slot all characters into the gender binary, even if only by automatic reaction in my own head, how can I expect to give readers a better chance at it than I could manage?
Writing while being coy about the character’s gender throws away translation rights (in essence affirming that your message only matters to people who can fluently read English).
I’ve seen it done in Spanish, very carefully. But there are languages, like Russian, where you just can’t do that.
And there are languages like Chinese and Hungarian where it can be done any time. Why don’t you ask a fluent reader of stories in such languages how _they_ deal with not knowing the protagonist’s gender?
@@@@@ Barry King
If you’re allowing the reader to project their own interpretation, they are projecting it through their binary gendered filter. You want to look into that contradiction.
You also might want to look at the part where you think representation of real people is “a primarily political position” or an imposition.
@@@@@ abetterjulie
Using a cis, binary pronoun to refer to non-binary people is not exactly an expression of how language could change to better express fluidity.
@@@@@ tnv
I have a roundtable in the works with a native speaker of Russian and a native speaker of Hungarian, so some of these questions will be answered.
@barry
It does, I think, seem like a pretty peculiar argument to suggest that artistic vision is a wholly separate prospect from political discourse, considering thie history of art and artists being so politically (sometimes aggressively politically) active.
Moreover, in what way can you address gender and gender issues WITHOUT being political? Aren’t they inextricably associated?
I agree that not identifying a gender is different from writing non-binary gender, which I guess makes sense — most people do identify as a gender, and someone else not knowing does not affect their identification. But I think it often works to challenge assumptions in an interesting way (and also sometimes works to be annoying).
But it’s pretty telling that we have to offer up characters whose gender is unknown as examples of non-binary gender, since it shows how rare that interpretation is. Kind of reminds me of when my kids and I are discussing Bechtel test results for some animated films, and the results are inconclusive because the gender identity of certain talking flowers or inanimate objects is undetermined. If your representation comes down to “it’s never explicitly mentioned that these people AREN’T like you” then you aren’t really seeing that reflection in literature.
I have a story out in Lorelei Signal in which a main character’s gender is not specified, though everybody wants to know. I thought it would be difficult to write, but it was actually quite easy — probably because I don’t know myself what gender this character is. But I also must admit that I never considered nonbinary gender when writing it.
Everyone who is posting thoughtful comments about their own work and/or work they have read, I am reading your comments and mulling over how to respond, but wanted to thank you now for commenting. This is the type of conversation I want to have.
@14 @15 Comments deleted: let’s all continue engaging respectfully, and stay within the guidelines of the moderation policy.
@@@@@ Katharine
Thank you. I’d prefer not to resort to “F*ck off”-type comments on Tor.com, but comment 14 upset me, so I’m glad that it was so swiftly removed. It makes me confident that I can safely ignore such comments in the future, and focus on the good conversations I’d far prefer to have.
@12 does one assign a gender to Bugs Bunny? If so, which and why?
Two Words only: Ancillary Justice.
(which I dearly love)
:-)
It’s not permissable to point out that humans are binary-gendered? So much for biology, I guess.
@21
Biological sex and gender are distinct and different things. My biology classes were clear on that.
I think I fall with you and @1 braak on this narrative device, Alex.
I also agree with @7 fadeaccompli that some readers are conditioned or predisposed to see a non-revealed gender as a mystery or puzzle with authorial clues to find, especially in short fiction where they might expect a reveal or surprise at the ending. I imagine that is frustrating to the writers when they don’t intend the gender to be some puzzle to be “solved” (ugh).
I’m greatly enjoying reading this series and have added some works to my to-read list.
And biological sex isn’t binary either. Humans don’t do either/or very well.
I won’t pretend to have an answer on this topic – kinda feel like it all depends so much on who is writing, as well as who is reading. What confuses one reader, another will think is brilliant. What effectively touches/ resonates for one person can be erroneous or heavy handed to another.
All I can say definitively is that I LOVE the conversation itself!
And I applaud anyone who tries to raise awareness or engage postively around social issues. I’m grateful for Kelley Eskridge and other authors/ stories mentioned, as well as Alex Dally MacFarlane and Tor.Com.
I get almost all of my fiction through audio podcasts. Do you have any thoughts on how to handle gender there, since the qualities of the voice actor’s voice are going to have a bearing on listener’s assumptions.
Interesting topic. I don’t have a good answer. I have not seen ze/zey type of gender neutral pronouns enough that they’ve ever felt like part of the language to me–whenever I see/hear them I have to step out of the story to remind myself what that actually means, and then step back in. Stepping out of a story tends to increase distance for me, which I don’t want, but I don’t think there’s anything for it but for more people to adopt it so it becomes more natural. It would also help if I knew anyone in my everyday RL existence who used those pronouns, but at this point I don’t.
@@@@@Alex Dally MacFarlane – sorry, no, you’re making assumptions about the reader, and that _is_ political. So please don’t lecture me about asumptions. It’s insulting.
I have heard this issue mentioned in discussions of Anime/Manga translations. Kino’s Journey comes to mind, in the English version of the Anime, Kino is refered to by name usually, but which gendered pronoun is used varies by the speaker. Kino comes off as gender neutral to me although gendered pronouns are used. I think readers may find it distracting because of english pronouns being usually gendered and not wanting to use the wrong one or needing to mentally compartmentalize (I recall as a child at summer camp it bothering me not being able to use pronouns for one other child, (and thought it would be far too embaressing to ask)). I have moved past this from learning more about gender and I now default to they (it is correct grammer). The pronoun “it” should not be used unless referring to an object (but can be used to great effect for some AIs)
@27 As they are newer to common usage there are also different gender neutral pronouns, the prefered varying by the individual.
@29″As they are newer to common usage there are also different gender neutral pronouns, the prefered varying by the individual.”
For me, at least, I think the variance makes the alternate pronouns harder to adopt. If there were a single set of agreed-upon ungendered pronouns for people I think it would be easier for the language to become common usage. If there were, theoretically, a single set that no one would be offended being referred to as, then we could just use those for everybody.
I find using singular “they” harder to adopt than a completely new pronoun. “Ze” and other ones like that have the advantage of being clearly something new, so even if they make me skip a beat there’s something clear there that I need to understand. With repetition I think those’ll be more straightforward to absorb. But when I hear “they” used singularly it can be confusing about the number of people actually involved, and sets off an imaginary squiggly green line of my mental grammar check.
Merely as an additional data point, singular-they has actually become my default.
As far as the specific topic of the post, I was just re-reading Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar series, which are (wonderful) mystery novels, in which the title character is the first-person narrator whose sex, gender, and sexual orientation are never mentioned (presumably this worked better in the 1980s in Britain, than in the 2000s in the USA, where that first name inevitably makes me think of Clinton). There’s little bits in the last book that lead me to think that Caudwell was after an essentially asexual, aromantic narrator, as way of contrasting with, or implying a more objective view of, many of the characters whose sexual and romantic passions drive the plots. (Yes, I know that this goal doesn’t require concealing sex or gender. This is, in any event, only a theory.)
(Spoilers for Bone Dance:) Emma Bull went beyond the initial scenario described above when she wrote Bone Dance, which I believe took me till around page 82 before I noticed that Sparrow was lacking in pronouns. But she didn’t leave it there. The issue was brought up and turned out to be part of the story. One also notices that different people assume Sparrow is male or female depending on context.
Mary Gentle’s “Golden Witchbreed” might be worth looking at in this context. It’s a long time since I last read it, but I seem to remember that the envoy sent to deal with this human-like alien race discovers that the reason they use a neutral pronoun for children is that they genuinely are gender-neutral until they reach adulthood.
I had a protagonist without their gender specified in my story “The Scorn of the Peregrinator.” Most readers assume that Kes is male but it’s never made explicit. Now I am working on a novel with Kes as one of the protagonists and I’ve been reading about breaking the gender binary and some anthropology on gender and pondering just why it seems necessary to have Kes be unlabelled. Thanks for giving me more to think about, Alex.
kate nepveu @31,
I admit, I read the Hilary books as gendered male- it took Jo Walton’s pointing out the trick for me to notice it.
I just (finally!) read Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand where the default gender is ‘woman/she’ with ‘man/he’ reserved for those the narrator finds sexually attractive.
Pam Adams, oh, right, I forgot Jo wrote those up! A bunch of different views on Hilary’s gender in the comments there.
I’m about a quarter of the way through writing my first novel, which I currently describe as New Adult modern fantasy erotica. (And isn’t that a mouthful!) Its characters all come from Modern America, but for many of them, the novel is the story of their exploration of sex, gender, and orientation. They come to see how thin the walls between them are, and have to determine where they best fit into that more complex reality. The focal character is literally genderfluid, waking up one morning with her physical sex changed – without her prior knowledge, desire, or consent. “He” then has to come to terms with the consequences of her new male body and its lack of, among other things, a legal identity.
Closer to the topic at hand, though, I’m trying to avoid blunt racial exposition in the text…with one exception. There’s one character for whom I’m deliberately avoiding a physical description, until it can be revealed in a certain scene. I’m aiming for something much like what Heinlein achieved with the title character’s race in Friday (among other places), where the lack of hard description leads readers to fill in the blanks themselves, only to expose the reader’s assumptions when he finally spills the beans. At the same time, I’m trying to be true to their race in all of the interactions up to that point, so the reader can look back and see that everything fits. After all, the reader is the only one unable to see the character, and it’s not exactly a debatable data point for anyone they interact with.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. :) But then, if the story were easy, I wouldn’t have a reason to write it…
@25 David Steffan – Audio gendering is a really interesting point. I struggle to listen to podcasts/audiobooks (I can’t concentrate on audio consistently enough to understand what’s going on) so I don’t think I could write about it, but it’s certainly something I could consider a roundtable on in the future. Thank you for bringing it up.
Many interesting comments. Thank you!
You’ve definitely confirmed the complexity of this narrative approach: the different reader reactions, the different reasons and decisions taken by writers. It’s difficult. A certain conclusion is that we need more works that approach gender in a wide variety of ways, to destabilise the default of binary that almost all of us (if not all of us) experience. It will make non-binary pronouns easier to read, it will contextualise non-gendered narrators differently, it will normalise non-binary people (who do exist, contray to some commentors’ flawed understandings of gender and biology). I’m really glad to have prompted further thinking about this from readers and writers.
@tnv If you are talking Mandarin, the spoken language does not distinguish between ‘he’ and ‘she’, there’s just a generic 3rd person pronoun, but the written language now distinguishes between them as a part of the character changes instituted by the Communists (simplified characters). In other words, there are two pronouns that sound exactly the same, or else one pronoun that is written two different ways. I learned traditional characters (used in Taiwan) in college because the department head was from Taiwan but iirc even there we used the new pronoun forms.
(Part of the traditional character for the 3rd person pronoun derives from the character for ‘man’, which also meant ‘person’, so I think this was an attempt at giving women more rights or feeling of being represented. In simplified characters, ‘he’ is written with the old character for 3rd person pronoun and ‘she’ is written with the same character except the part derived from ‘man’ is replaced with a part derived from ‘woman’.)
Although I assume the pronoun character situation is the same in all Chinese dialects/languages, I don’t know the spoken words for the pronouns in any dialect/language besides Mandarin.
@netweird I love Ancillary Justice! I hear there is a sequel coming out next fall. I will just huddle inside all summer with my AC and concentrate on all the books coming out in the fall.
@Pam Adams I haven’t read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, but it sounds very similar to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which netweird referenced above, where the default gender is female. The main character is an AI downloaded into a human body and she has trouble telling human genders apart, so she only uses ‘he’ for somebody if she’s absolutely sure and if it’s also overwhelmingly relevant.
Hello,
I have to confess to not reading “Levá ruka tmy” from Ursula Le Guinn (Left Hand of Darkness) in my native czech (part of slavic language group), it’s on my list of books to buy after finishing my bookshelves in my new flat. Partly it’s because I like her Earthsea series and partly because I want to see how translator tackled difficulties in translating to our language the genders of the story.
It’s because of grammar structure of our language, we have to use declension and conjugation with correct grammatical genders in verbs and nouns.
But because I am not linguist, I’ll just link wikipedia page about that, it’s rather well written:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension
One of the hard parts of not being incomprehensible in many languages is having to identify with one of two genders. (People will still do the double take and some if you speak from the neuter position in a language that has one.) When I speak Russian, Spanish, French, and other languages, I tend to invite approbation by not feminizing my endings for verbs, nouns, and/or adjectives, when I am not mistaken for a man – as Ondrej points out is expected for Czech. This can be a dangerous error in the wrong situation.
However, this is a type of intervention into the language conventions, in the same way “hir,” “zhe,” and all the other interventions into English work. It is a trade-off that may prevent translation rights being sold. OTOH, it’s an inevitable push that will com from within these languages that are binary-gendered in structure. Translators are not necessarily in a position to perform this kind of intervention due to being paid by publishers who want to sell the most books possible, but we could promote this type of work with grants, etc., if we really wanted to…
Love the subject, thank you @alex Dally Macfarlane :)
The first I remember encountering gener neutrality is in Greg Egans story Diaspora. He uses “ve” to refer to the main characters and it works great because they are not human (though humane enough to be very relateable). Since leraning about gender neutral pronouns in English I’ve been pondering how to achieve a similar effect in my native Latvian, which also bends verbs and adjectives to match gender.
I liked that Left Hand Of Darkness was mentioned, because I read it translated, I think, and had forgotten there were any gender irregularities. I’ll have to try to look it up in English and compare it to the translation.