Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Naming the Love that Dares Not Speak It's Name

Just because you're writing about bisexuality in a science fiction and fantasy context doesn't mean you have to use the word explicitly. "Bisexuality" comes to us via a Victorian context of medicalization and psychoanalysis. If we can imagine dragons, we can imagine worlds where that never happened. Some examples:

Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword: From the perspective of the cyborg protagonist, gender is an uncivilized social convention. As such, sexual relationships are defined more by the ways in which they do or do not involve the caste system of her (self-applied pronoun) culture.

Door into Ocean: Primarily a mono-gendered and mono-sexual culture. However male outsiders are absorbed into the primary culture of Shorah.

The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of the Gods: Nahadoth's gender-fluidity is clearly described, as is the triad sexuality among Nahadoth, Itempas, and Yeine.

The Mirror Empire: Describes a five-gendered cultured with polyamorous relationships across all five genders.

An SF&F work doesn't have to use the words gay, lesbian, or bisexual in order to provide us with radical visions of those realities.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Ariah

I can tell you that Ariah embodies the true potential of Bildungsroman in terms of the protagonist’s journey to adulthood, and that its intelligent, powerful, emotive discussion of gender, sexuality, culture, racism, imperialism, language, family, love, autonomy and personhood, among other things, is evocative of the best aspects of both Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. That these books have been nominated for, and won, some of the most prestigious awards in the field should, I hope, convey my full meaning: that Ariah deserves a place among them. But none of that tells you how it made me feel.

On Queerness, Subversion, Autonomy, and Catharsis: B.R. Sanders’ Ariah Reinvents the Bildungsroman | Tor.com