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Are you a: Boy? Girl? Alien? Cyborg?

November 29, 2015

Professor Loza, Hampshire College

Introduction:

There aren’t a lot of representations of non-binary people, even less of people of color who are non-binary in science fiction and fantasy. In the media, and every day. While this isn’t surprising that means theorists have to take a more critical look at gender-bending narratives. Some ways in which normal gender roles are blurred in science fiction and fantasy: shape shifting, time travel, and cross-dressing. The main two points I will be discussing though, are cyborgs and aliens. Both are crafted bodies that allow for varying gender creations.

In my research I realized that there aren’t many examples of canonical genderfluid characters and that the examples given by theorists who do approach this topic are a bit of a stretch. I will be discussing the monstrous queering of gender in cyborgs, shapeshifters, and aliens. In realizing that there aren’t many fantastical non-binary options to unpack I looked for transgender characters, but similar to the media’s depiction--there isn’t one. Not until recently, in American contexts, have trans* characters and people become slightly more visible. Albeit, these are not always positive images, but all press is good press right? Wrong. Most are white transgender females who are being fetishized completely cutting off the voices of queer people of color and first nation two spirit individuals.

In addition there are little to no academic sources on this topic by transgender individuals. This is because there is barely any source material to begin with, on top of the limited amount of transgender people who are able to be educated in the area of identity politics (Bornstein et al. 198). Fictional universes within the context of science fiction and fantasy seem to be an excellent place for gender binaries to be skewed and a way for non-binary characters to become more accepted images. In this paper I look into the examples--and lack--of nonbinary culture mainly in the context of feminist, queer, and racial theories pertaining to fantastical or science fiction content.

Trending Genders that you Might not Think are Queer:

Many forms of genderqueering exist that I could have discussed such as the plethora of cross-dressing in anime and other tv shows. Yet, that is not embodying a gender identity, that is merely passing within preconceived social constructs (Melzer 234). For example Ax from the Animorphs series is a Yeerk alien who takes DNA from the two girls and two boys of the series and mixes that together to create a human morph--a morph that he can go to the mall looking like. The human form is said to look like a very feminine boy or masculine girl, not placing him anywhere on the gender spectrum performance-wise. His “fluid body enables her an adaptive identity, which challenges the stable sex/gender/ sexuality correlation without erasing the materiality of the body”(Melzer 234). Being an alien already other’s him on top of the fact he is ambiguously brown in appearance due to one of the main character’s being black. This alien is faced with prejudice due to forced assimilation and not passing fully as male and being a person of color (Cohen 445). So when he starts trying food in the mall’s food court, he is chased by mall cops very quickly.

There are children’s books about girls who dress as boys to be able to be soldiers or knights. One example Is “The Song of the Lioness” series by Tamora Pierce. Alana, the hero, dresses as a boy until she is knighted. She binds with cloth wrapping and talks deeper as the boys she is growing up with go through puberty. Meanwhile she has no idea what to do when she gets her period. Her being in a supposed man’s position blurs the lines of her gender even after her secret is let out. In addition many examples of historical fiction exist about white women fighting in the civil war. These tropes and people subvert gender divides but still identify as cisgender. In addition are able to pass more easily due to being white, which is a harsh reality. Which, in the end, gives them a privilege after the battle where a gender nonconforming character and person live on gender lines (Bornstein et al. 268).

Technologically Created Bodies:

Fans all over have questioned BMO’s gender, wondering if they are a girl or boy. Pendleton Ward has released multiple statements saying that BMO is a robot and therefore has no gender. This reflects on how society today needs to consume culture. The audience is not used to a character that lives outside of binary standard, and will not accept this reality. The problem is, just like real non-binary people, society can not accept what is in front of them. “Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment” (Stryker 115). In the gender-bender episodes of the show, BMO is the only one who remains unchanged in appearance. In addition, BMO is referred to by characters as both M’lady, and with he/him pronouns.

BMO has an alternate self, when talking to themselves, named Football. Football calls herself a baby girl while BMO calls himself a baby boy, but both are the same robot. BMO in the episode “Football” comes out to their friends as Football and wants everyone to call them by that name after switching places with their mirror self, similar to when transgender people are transitioning from dead names (Bornstein et al. 199). The agendered character BMO is possible in a post-apocalyptic world which “is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end”(Haraway 2). This little robot was built to be human-like and able to imagine, as found out from their creator in the episode “B More.” That is why BMO is married to a bubble who is has no defined body or gender and dates a female hen on the show. They are free from a gendered body and in a time of candy people and vampires, why would a robots gender matter?

BMO is able to transcend gender binaries because they are a robot (Bornstein et al. 169). Pronouns are fluid for them being referred to from “it” to “her.” The female identity is internalized whereas BMO’s masculine detective episode and being a their creator’s son is external relating to common cyborg body politicking. Robots have been used to be characters that are an “alternative narrative of cyberpunk identity that begins with the assumption that bodies are always gendered and always marked by race...Thus, the more important dividing line” for a robotic body “is between material connection and virtual connection, not between female-body-in-connection and male-body-in-isolation”(Vint 116). A created body is in theory able to go beyond racial and gender lines, but this is still within a gendered and racialized culture that these stories are being told (Vint 117). BMO is a green little robot, does that make them a person of color on the show? The only human without gills is a white cisgendered male boy, while everyone else is some kind of monster that came out toxic waste. Except BMO is a created companion with their own agenda.

Androgynous Aliens:

Many literary examples of androgyny from the 70’s and 80’s appeared alongside second wave feminism. Creating an androgynous culture meant creating one where women were equal, in power, and able to be masculine (Annas 145). For example, in The Woman From Space uses “it” as a pronoun for love interest Lella at first, a dominant and masculine woman-ish from the planet Aronia. It is powerful, beautiful, tall, strong, and an intelligent scientist. Yet Lella’s femininity shines through as she forms a heterosexual relationship with the man who first meets her, Sarrazin from Earth. Both planets are set in gender binaries that oppose the other possibly queering the relationship they have. But, like most sci-fi feminist novels, it is a stretch (Larbalestier 76-78) Some books contained all female societies where women had learned how to clone themselves negating the usefulness of men.

The main example I will be delving into is one of the more famous books of the feminist science fiction genre, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. The novel takes place in two societies called Karhide and Orgoreyn. They live on a planet called Gethen. The planet is populated by hermaphrodites who only have a chosen gender expression during “kenmer.” The theme of androgyny is used to represent different forms of bigotry being displayed in the human race and how having a “race of androgynes who live harmonious, peaceful lives” is used as a “cure for gender bifurcation and decisive hierarchies”(Pearson 28). This was the first famous creation of a queer utopia, that wasn’t so utopian. Androgynous societies often either show the shortcomings in our own or are meant as a plot point of a peaceful option that is “agendered. “

Gethenian believe that everyone else is disgusting. The king calls others with constant sexes “a society of perverts”(Le Guin 21).Whereas the human Genly, who is there to try to get them to join an intergalactic peaceful “Authority” is constantly being shocked by their gender incontinuity. He refers to almost every being with he/him/his pronouns no matter how femme they seem. He still is seeing through a binary lens, “I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man's voice, but scarcely a woman's voice either”(Le Guin 10). Genly, pronounced Genry by Gethenians, is in constant culture shock due to the gender fluidity of locals. The belief that any type of variant gender expression is wrong and shunned while being exoticised is similar to the sentiments felt today. It also existed in the late sixties when this book was written. The main character has his room showed by his “landlady”(Le Guin 26). He is a spectacle. This is similar to transgender women in mainstream media.

Ursula K. Le Guin made monstrous images of alien people of colour and an ignorant black both entrenched in racism. The king asks Genly if everyone is “as dark as him”(Le Guin 21). While aliens at the “Voluntary Farm” are described as growing darker. Yet they earlier are described as red-to-brown colouring with many inhabitants matching Genly’s skin colour. The author uses racist imagery of developing darkness as evil or traitorous. This idea is affirmed when Estraven early on explains patriotism as “I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression”(Le Guin 14). She explains this to show how “in these binaries a nostalgic longing for nature, a Rousseauistic desire for a community unfettered by the violence of cultural systems”(Namaste 223) exists no matter the society. The only way to break free is to escape, which is what Genly does.

The problem is that a lot of early feminist science fiction books with genderbending narratives are written by men, so therefore sexist. In Woman’s World the conclusion involves the way to solve gender differences is for men to gift women more responsibilities. How nice of men. What a lovely, yet misogynistic, sentiment. The Disappearance by Philip Wylie has a similar message (Larbalestier 79). The ending does state by multiple characters that “sex” is a woman + a man. To separate the two creates havoc, but this is just by heteronormative standards(84). What about the lesbians? What about the asexuals? So much of gender ideals in this gender are based on physicalities. What genitalia is “female” what bodies are “male” and going off of masculine and feminine societal ideals. In addition, when talking about bodies race never is discussed, in fact there are no black men in the book (Larbalestier 85). The women are called a “coloured colony” living in tents behind white women’s houses. Being owned by them. The ideas are along the lines of everyone is equal and similar sentiments and now that people realize that everything is going to be ok. As if all who identify as male or female have equity within those labels (Larbalestier 80). There is a plethora of role reversing novels in feminist science fiction, written by men, as a way for males to understand their privilege. And the books that are written by women are mostly white women who are internally oppressing themselves without realizing it and using racist imagery that has been normalized by white male science fiction writers.

Conclusion:

The failures of articles on cross-dressing, androgyny, and any kind of gender blurring. In other words, how word transgender seems to be invisible in academia while also in white feminist based theory. Society thinks of the wish to cross dress as a sexual fantasy, so it makes sense that hermaphroditism and greying of gender lines in more commonly accepted in the fantasy genre. But, there is little to no representation and the theory reflects,“one of the great failings of queer theory and especially queer politics has been their inability to incorporate into analysis of the world and strategies for political mobilization the roles that race, class, and gender play in defining people’s differing relations to dominant and normalizing power”(Cohen 457). Cyborgs are created bodies similar to the created bodies transgendered people and transvestites medically create through hormones and surgery. To have a nonbinary character on a popular children’s TV show is a good step towards more fantastical interpretations of gender besides Androgynous aliens and other monsters.

Bibliography:

Annas, Pamela J. "New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science Fiction."Science Fiction Studies 5, no. 2 (1978): 143-56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239176.

Applegate, Katherine. The Predator, Book 5. Animorphs. New York: Scholastic, 1996.

Bornstein, Kate, and S. Bear Bergman. Gender Outlaws: The next Generation. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2010.

Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437-465.

De Lauretis, T. (1987). THE TECHNOLOGY OF GENDER. In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (pp. 1-30). Indiana University Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzmbr.4

Haraway, D. (2006). Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Comps.), The Transgender Studies Reader (pp. 103-116). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Haraway, D. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York;Routledge,1991), 149-81.

Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middletown, (CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 73-103.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Melzer, P. (2006). Beyond Binary Gender: Genderqueer Identities and Intersexed Bodies in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed and Imago and Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man. In Alien Constructions (pp. 219-258). University of Texas Press.

Namaste, K. (1994). The Politics of Inside/Out: Queer Theory, Poststructuralism, and a Sociological Approach to Sexuality. Sociological Theory, 12(2), 220-231. doi:1. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/201866

Vint, Sherryl. Cyberpunk: Return of the Repressed Body. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (pp.102-123). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

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