Language Degendered
I’ve been thinking about gendered titles. If you’ve read my fiction, you’ll see that I have women holding the title of ‘lord’ a lot, for the shallow reason that I think it’s hot when a lesbian is called ‘my lord’. In my fantasy works, this gets more extensive.
In Her Pitiless Command, the trans femme non-binary character Lussadh al-Kattan is given the title of prince, lord, and ‘king-in-waiting’ at various points in time. After removing royalty from the equation, she assumes the title of ‘general’ as the Winter Queen’s military commander and ‘Lord-Governor’ as the administrator of the queen’s rule in her home territory Kemiraj. In the final book—forthcoming, one hopes—when she marries Nuawa, they are pronounced ‘lord and consort’. That’s something one of my partners came up with, and I’ve found it amazing for these two characters: Lussadh isn’t a woman, and Nuawa is a cis woman but not one that aligns herself deeply with femininity. ‘You are now wife and wife’ wouldn’t have worked. Nuawa goes on to be granted the title of ‘Lieutenant-Consort’, which has no precedent in Kemiraj but well… she has to be called something.
I realize that all of this, at least in Winterglass, runs the risk of Lussadh appearing to be constantly misgendered by people who still call her ‘lord’ or ‘prince’. I tried to alleviate this by adding that her grandaunt held the title of king, but this may have been with limited success; I hope Mirrorstrike clarifies more that Lussadh is not being misgendered and has always used she/her when she was the ‘king-in-waiting’. The long and short is that in her language, titles like lady, princess, and queen are barely existent—they are archaic words, and the ruling dynasty only uses titles we consider male, but which in their language are ungendered. When Nuawa arrives in Kemiraj and is at one point addressed as sir, she feels discomfort because to her it sounds gendered while an equivalent honorific in her native language is not gendered at all. She’d have reacted the same had she been called ma’am.
(As I come to this point I’ll confess that I share Nuawa’s attitude—I don’t like being addressed with certain feminine-gendered titles, in either English or Thai; the latter is good in that many courtesy forms are gender-neutral but bad in that speech in gendered in other ways, such as first-person pronouns and sentence suffixes. I realize that this may sound like I’m not entirely a cis woman but my feelings around terms of address are… complicated. Fairly sure I’m cis, though. I think my problem is with mandatory femininity, the gulf between what is imposed and what is chosen, the performed against the authentic. That’s why I don’t find mahou shoujo media compelling either—it is condescending.)
When I started writing these books I didn’t have anything complicated in mind; Nuawa is a cis woman who chooses an androgynous presentation and Lussadh is butch in her everyday attire but she’s pleased to be showy on formal occasions, thigh-slit dress and makeup and all. Four years on I’m thinking about it a little more. Here’s a thread about something that, I discovered, a lot of queer women resonated with.
I bring up my characters’ gender expressions often—I harp on it to the point of excess and obsession (I definitely talk about it more than most queer writers). Sometimes I write a femme/femme couple, sometimes I write a butch/femme one, and sometimes the primary pair—like Lussadh and Nuawa—is harder to categorize. There will be more butch/butch attractions in my next works. I like specificity, and I find it helpful in a sea of lesbian (or at any rate F/F) content where the vast majority of everything is a couple of gender-conforming girls holding hands. That holds across a truly enormous range of media, whether western films, western cartoons, or anime/manga.
Yuri is cute, but it’s hard to escape the knowledge that most of the girls are soft and gender-conforming because the creators have a male audience in mind, and a pair of two gender-conforming girls holding hands is the least threatening thing possible to the male gaze. When I eyeball the Kindle charts for lesbian romance/erotica, the covers that have people on them at all inevitably feature two white gender-conforming women holding hands or hugging. Lesbian films made in the west? Again, there’s a lot of white cis femme couples, maybe one is brunette instead of blonde for variety. And, I don’t know. My tastes don’t really align with that.
(I also feel a very large majority of this content is too soft and fluffy for my liking: I like things that are sharp. But that’s beside the point, though making everyone a bland, cuddly gender-conforming lass contributes to this lack of draw. Sometimes there’s an undercut, I guess.)
I’m not watching anything new currently (finishing up the third season of Golden Kamuy and the live-action Kakegurui) but if you haven’t watched Akuma no Riddle yet you’ll absolutely be into it. The premise is that there’s a girl everyone wants dead, who’s put into an entire classroom of (all-female) assassins, except for one who has decided to protect her.
It’s even adapted from a manga by a woman, which is relatively rare. Tokaku was trained to be an assassin from a young age and has completely dead, murderous eyes; she also puts on menswear as soon as she graduates high school, though regrettably the anime is an… incomplete adaptation, as in it leaves out the entirety of the manga’s epilogue where the two of them grow up into some sort of corporate (?) power couple. I don’t know what they do for a living but I assume Tokaku, who comes from a lineage of professional assassins, continues to do violence for hire. The manga is also much more intense in that Tokaku outright asks for Haru as a possession. My suggestion is to watch the anime and then read the last volume of the manga to get the complete story.
Still, there’s an onscreen kiss in the show and while the production value is no ufotable, it holds up quite well and the OP music rules. It should be available on Crunchyroll.