Ndtyhij

In the book Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie most characters are indicated as female with the pronouns selected. There's some discussion about the main character being able to identify the sex because a language requires gender where as the normal language does not.

So is the ancillary, Breq, just assuming everyone is female, unless there's data to say otherwise, or are most characters really just female?

It's neither. Some characters (e.g. Seivarden) are definitely male, and probably there are as many female as male Radchaai (at least I din't find any hint about a gender imbalance in the book.)

We are essentially reading a (fictional) English translation of a Radchaai book. The Radchaai language does not mark gender in any way, but in English, we do not have gender-neutral pronouns, so the (fictional) translator has to make a choice. Usually, people chose the male pronoun in this case, but Ann Leckie chose the female pronoun.

Normal Radchaai seem to be able to recognize one's gender, but Breq has trouble doing so, maybe because a ship doesn't have sexual organs, and the ship had bot male and female ancillaries.

I think this quote from the book shows this well:

Since we weren't speaking Radchaai I had to take gender into
account--Strigan's language required it. The society she lived in
professed at the same time to believe gender was insignificant. Males
and females dressed, spoke, acted indistinguishably. And yet no one I'd
met had ever hesitated or guessed wrong- And they had invariably been
offended when I did hesitate or guess wrong. I hadn't learned the
trick of it. I'd been in Strigan's own apartment, seen her belongings,
and still wasn't sure what forms to use with her now.

In contrast to the answer by Jim Davis, I posit that the lack of explicit gender-related questions is intentional and exactly the point. The author has kept it so deliberately vague that it highlights only our own questions and assumptions about the role of gender (both in the stories we read and society in general).

In terms of the fictional universe, I think most Radchaai have little preference in gender. Breq's difficulty in guessing correctly is a little odd, but not entirely implausible when you consider the following:

1. She's essentially a different species. When you look at monkeys in the zoo, can you immediately tell their genders without looking at their genitals?


2. Radchaai in uniform all dress the same and may have similar haircuts, lack of facial hair, etc... which would make it more difficult for a non-human to tell, even one who is very capable in other areas (such as combat and technical functions).


3. Most of the time, Justice of Toren relies more on data from its sensors and implant-uploads about emotional states, rather than actual facial recognition.

Breq refers to at least two characters (Seivarden in chapter 1 of Ancillary Justice and Uran, the younger brother whom Queter tried to protect from Raughd's coercion by blowing Raughd up, in Ancillary Mercy) as he in other languages and she in Radchaai and in the narration, but she messes up at first with Uran and is forced to guess with a bartender. Brother and sister are used along the same lines for Uran.

This makes it very hard to picture these characters and its confusing, so far Im very unpleased with this book and regret spending on it.

I was discussing this just last night with my SF book club.

Our consensus is that

1. the Radchaai are human (though some are augmented)




2. As such they have two sexes



3. Nothing in the book says anything about sexual preferences. For instance we do not know if any, most, or all of them are pan-sexual, or have the same distribution of homo- and hetero- sexuality as "we" do.


4. There is nothing in the book to say anything about other sexes/genders, transsexuals, etc (vs, say LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, or Iain M Banks "Culture" novels, or even Heinlein's short story All You Zombies
   


5. the Radchaai language does not distinguish between genders, but this does not prove the Radchaai are indifferent to sex in choosing partners. Note that English (which does require male or female pronouns) does not lexically mark "race" or for that matter hair colour or bra size, yet people will often choose sexual partners based on such features. We have words in English for all these things, but the language per se does not mark them or require them.


6. Breq reports having difficulty deciding the sex of people from other cultures based only on external observables.

Our sentiments were that while Leckie told us about the absence of gender in the language, she told us nothing about the gender arrangements in Radchaai world. In particular, we do not know if there is gender discrimination. The feminists among us were left unsatisfied. (Not because we only want to read utopian feminism, but because interesting questions were not even asked, much less answered.) We know a great deal more about their gloves than their loves

We also found Breq's inability implausible, unless we are to think she's damaged, which we also doubted. It's hard to imagine a being capable of running a starship and able to fight very well being unable to do this.

There are many things to admire in this novel, but we did not admire it as an examination of gender.