Conversation

I started reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. The main character's native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and although they're fluent in languages that do, they apparently also have trouble discerning people's gender. As a result, they refer to everyone using feminine pronouns. I'm not sure if there's an ultimate purpose to this in the story, or if it's just an authorial flourish.

For a while now, I've said the best solution to the "preferred pronouns" quagmire is to switch to using a single set of neutral pronouns for everyone, reasoning that in most communication, the subject's gender is irrelevant, and in corner cases there are other ways to denote it. However, I must say that when reading a book where this is effectively the practice (and the author's also not big on physical descriptions) it's confusing as fuck. (This is compounded slightly by the fact that other characters in the book don't share the POV's gender-blindness and do use gendered pronouns, so sometimes a single person is referred to as both "he" and "she" in the same conversation.)

I guess ultimately the characters' genders don't matter to the story. Perhaps this is the point the author's trying to make. However, my gender-habituated brain has a hard time forming a mental model of the characters without this information. It makes it a frustrating read, as I'm constantly distracted by the dissonance.

So, maybe my idea about pronouns is a bad one. Or maybe it just falls down in circumstances like this. Or maybe the author is just being a pain in the ass. I have no conclusions.

#annleckie #scifi #gender #language