Post-Binary Gender and Language column up at Tor.com
I participated in Post-Binary Gender in SF Roundtable: Languages of Gender, which went up at Tor.com today. Alex Dally MacFarlane asked wonderful, insightful questions; the other respondents were Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Bogi Takács.
I talk about non-binary/post-binary gender, grammatical gender and how it influences writing, Soviet SF, and more. Here is a short excerpt:
You’ve talked about English offering different options to other languages for expressing post-binary gender. Do you know of ways that writers in these languages (or others) have worked with this subject? (I know, for instance, that the original Japanese publication of Sayuri Ueda’s The Cage of Zeus avoided pronouns for the non-binary characters.)
Benjanun: I was recently directed to this poem by Yona Wallach that’s specifically about gendered language in Hebrew. Other than that I don’t have much insight to offer as in my language pronouns are not very gendered, and so it doesn’t come up as a linguistic issue.
Rose: I have thought a lot about how, despite professed Soviet ideals of gender equality, Soviet-age SFF seems to have major issues with gender representation both in terms of who wrote science fiction, and what kind of protagonists were featured in classic novels and short stories […]
I’m very pleased with how this came out, and hope you give it a read!
Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.