Feminerd question

[gryphonsegg]

How do characters who are female but not human fit into discussions about how fiction reflects and affects the gender schema of human readers?

My inclination is to treat humanoid female characters as equivalent to human female characters because so many rationalizations of sexism, stereotypes of women, etc. are closely linked with body structure. I'd say it's more complicated for characters who are not human-shaped. Note that "it's more complicated" certainly does not mean anything gets out of analysis free, at least not with me! I think that even with very differently shaped beings, it's really easy for authors to build the characters are their human-based presuppositions about sex and gender.

While we're at it, has anyone else noticed the Problem of the Third Sex? It seems to be a minor trope or trend in science fiction to give a species an "extra" sex-- either male, female, and neuter or male, female, and a reproductive mediator that "helps" a male/female pair in mating and reproduction-- and set up the social structure so that females have the same or almost the same rights as males but neuter or mediating people are oppressed in ways and to an extent comparable to what has been done to female humans in RL times/places that are now notorious for beyond-the-pale sexism. I don't know quite what to make of this.

Comments

[holyschist]

Hmm. The only example of a neuter mediator I can think of offhand is in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, and if anything, I would say that the neuter sex is somewhat privileged, and possibly objectively "better".

(I have all kinds of other issues with those books, mind.)

[gryphonsegg]

Yeah, the Ooloi are an exception to the usual rule/subverted trope. I was thinking of the "blands" in Halfway Human, the Disty "nestlings" in the Retrieval Artist series (a prime perpetrator of The Last Blond On Earth, Er, On The Moon and a huge case of wasted potential due to sidetracking everything for the sake of the The Last Blond's manpain), the mediating/DNA-processing sex in Dark Water's Embrace and its sequel(s) (didn't go beyond the first book because even at a young age I realized that the guy who wrote it was writing too much to his own kinks), the "sex animals" in at least one of Tiptree's works, and a few others.

[holyschist]

I'm beginning to think I'm just not masochistic enough to keep reading SF.

[gryphonsegg]

The weird thing is, some of these cases just slip it in as an incidental thing to make the aliens "weird" (in the middle of the series, I started to realized that everything in Retrieval Artist is incidental to Miles and his manpain), and some of them have it because the author's kinks are on board, but others are deliberately built to say something about RL human sex/gender/sexuality issues (Halfway Human and the Tiptree story, at least, had gender commentary aims). But darned if I can figure out what that something is! I mean, there must be something beyond a vague "sexism is bad, no matter what sex is being oppressed" or "females and males of the same species aren't necessarily that different from each other." If there's not, why choose that particular set-up?

[lady_ganesh]

You echo my exact thoughts.