Luke Johnson
asked
Ann Leckie:
What influenced your decision to use she/her/herself as the 'default' pronouns for the Radchaai?
Ann Leckie
There were a lot of thoughts that went into the decision--my (and presumably the majority of my potential readers') unfamiliarity with the various gender-neutral pronouns that have so far been proposed was one. I do think it would be good for those to be used more in fiction in general, though. I would love to see them used more.
And while "they" is a perfectly good gender-neutral singular pronoun, the potential confusion when you're dealing with multi-bodied people is enormous.
I also had been thinking a lot about the concept of the masculine default--when it comes to pronouns that's often expressed as "the masculine embraces the feminine," as though "he" could somehow actually be gender-neutral. It can't, of course. And using "she" in that way to a certain extent points that out, in a way that's less easy to see when you're using the standard default as though it's neutral. The drawback of course is that "she" can't be gender-neutral either. But really, any choice I made was going to have problems, and I was going to have to own whatever drawbacks my particular choice came with.
And of course the question of how Ursula K LeGuin handled pronouns in The Left Hand of Darkness was on my mind. That was definitely something I thought about.
And while "they" is a perfectly good gender-neutral singular pronoun, the potential confusion when you're dealing with multi-bodied people is enormous.
I also had been thinking a lot about the concept of the masculine default--when it comes to pronouns that's often expressed as "the masculine embraces the feminine," as though "he" could somehow actually be gender-neutral. It can't, of course. And using "she" in that way to a certain extent points that out, in a way that's less easy to see when you're using the standard default as though it's neutral. The drawback of course is that "she" can't be gender-neutral either. But really, any choice I made was going to have problems, and I was going to have to own whatever drawbacks my particular choice came with.
And of course the question of how Ursula K LeGuin handled pronouns in The Left Hand of Darkness was on my mind. That was definitely something I thought about.
More Answered Questions
Kendra
asked
Ann Leckie:
I wonder if you could write a little about your linguistic influences in the Ancillary series world? The way things and individuals are named and the differences between naming conventions in different areas speaks a lot to the idea of colonization and decolonization, and it would be interesting to know more about how you approach those things. Thank you for such smart and beautifully crafted books.
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