#queer literature

[degenderates]

— Tony Kushner, Angels in America

[bi4bihankking]

The Locked Tomb Series Summary:

The “Lesbian Necromancers in Space” book series

The Murderbot Diaries Summary:

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

[newvision]

E.M. Forster, from Maurice

Euripides

Herakles - Euripides (Tr. Anne Carson)

[such-a-fellow]

Testing more illumination-style drawing with this!

—

Yde et Olive is a french narrative poem written in the thirteenth century. It’s a section of a larger cycle of poems that are sequels to the legend of Huon de Bordeaux, and may have been an adaptation of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, though that isn’t known for certain. It hasn’t been studied much in English, but there’s a great translation by Mounawar Abbouchi here, along with analysis and in-depth translation discussion! It tells the story of Yde, the daughter of a king who disguises herself as a man to escape from her father and becomes a renowned knight before gaining the favor of a king and marrying his daughter, Olive. In a very unusual twist for this type of story, when Yde confesses the secret of her identity to Olive, Olive brushes her concerns off and vows that they will be happily married regardless of Yde’s biological gender. Like in the story of Iphis and Ianthe, their secret is found out and Yde is transformed into a man by divine intervention before he can be prosecuted for his transgression of gender.

it’s not an unusual story in itself (a young woman disguising herself as a man, doing brave deeds, and being transformed into a man so she can marry a woman in love with her is a familiar formula!), but its handling of Yde’s gender is striking, both in Olive’s blithe acceptance and in the combination of feminine and masculine language used to refer to Yde throughout. Stories of same-sex romance that end in transformations like this are often written off as heteronormative and of-their-time, and while obviously that’s a necessary lens to apply given the religious and social context Yde et Olive was written in, I don’t think that’s the end-all-be-all of what this story can be. The transformation allows this, a story from the 1200s, to contain both a sympathetically portrayed story of sapphic romance and a wonderful, nuanced tale of a transmasculine character who grows into himself through the story. Yes, this is applying a modern lens to it; we don’t know what the author of Yde et Olive intended when they wrote it and these aren’t terms they would have had or used. But regardless, in a time when being trans is day-to-day becoming more and more difficult in many parts of the world, I think it’s comforting to find glimpses of joy in stories from the past.

[sadcypher]

"On I ride. Nice day for a hanging, as folks say." - Barry Sebastian

Recently finished Days Without End and i did not expect it to be such a tender read given the setting. very, very much recommend

[velvettapeworm]

Some of you are familiar with my work already through itch.io or this blog, but I want to say that my book, So Sang the Riverman—a story which tells of the primordial world's destruction after the spirit of life, Fervor, makes off with the heart in Decay's grave—is now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. If you have a soft spot for gay romance and "indulgent" prose, have yourself a look, and if you do decide to buy a copy, thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting my work!

[cvmcicle]

reading the picture of dorian gray rn, where my niche gang at

[spocks-got-a-glock]

When you get so irked by someone saying that "Clive and Maurice were the better romantic pairing because they truly loved each other while Alec and Maurice's relationship was based on nothing but sex" that you end up writing a small essay in a Pinterest comment section (which had to be broken up into 500 character chunks because of Pinterest's character limit).

Anyway, I actually like what I wrote so I wanted to share it here. I didn't say everything I wanted to in the exact way that I wanted to due to the word restrictions, but I think it did the job.

[dommnics]

I haven't seen Wish (2023) yet, but I keep seeing people mourning over the scrapped concepts that Disney explored for a human star character possibly being the secondary lead and love interest in the movie.

Gonna take this time to plug in my little queer space opera graphic novel series with the first book coming out in 2025, literally about a human star boy who falls in love with a human.

--

Check out more of my work on other platforms!

My Instagram -- My Twitter

[bucketsofmonsters]

Hey everyone, I wrote a book!!

A new kingdom, a new king, a new life. But nothing ever really changes for squires. A banished knight has no choice but to abandon his home in search of a new kingdom to serve. That knight's squire, on the other hand, is less content with being pulled around due to someone else’s mistakes. When a dark figure offers the squire a second chance, how could he not take it? However, this deal might be more than he bargained for. A disenchanted squire with more potential than he realizes and a cunning mage who might not be as proficient at magic as she claimed join forces to save themselves by fulfilling their end of a cursed bargain: to kill the king.

If you're interested you can order it in all forms here

[fxnfiction]

presenting: my 2023 year of reading queer literature (part 1).

next few months focus will be on sapphic books, so swing over some recommendations!

enjoy my funky commentary, im in a weird mood. all my opinions!

[showmethesneer]

celia was fucking insane for that

[bi4bihankking]

Guardian Summary:

Zhao Yunlan is Chief of the Special Investigations Department: a secret group of uniquely skilled individuals who investigate strange happenings in modern-day Dragon City. Although laid-back and cheeky to those who don't know him, this tenacious and cunning man fits well into his role of the Guardian. While investigating a mysterious death at a local university, Zhao Yunlan meets Shen Wei, a calm and cold professor who proves as intriguing as the case itself. Something about this reserved man feels strangely familiar. Zhao Yunlan can't help but notice the intensity of the professor's gaze, and wonders why their lives begin to intertwine―as if by fate.

All For The Game Summary:

What if the mafia were involved in a fake sport <3 and then it got gay

[newvision]

— Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

[intersexbookclub]

Discussion summary: Left Hand of Darkness

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic in science fiction that explores issues of sex/gender in an alien-yet-human society where the aliens are just like us except in how they reproduce. These aliens, the Gethenians, can reproduce as either male or female. They spend most of their lives sexually undifferentiated. Once a month, they go into heat (“kemmer”) and their sexual organs activate as either male or female (it’s essentially random).

Here's a summary of the discussions we had on 2023-08-25 and 2023-09-01 about the book:

HIGH LEVEL REACTONS

Michelle (@scifimagpie): even though it was written by a cis straight perisex woman there is a queerness to the writing that feels true and that she nailed. There is a queerness to the soul of this book that still holds up, that's true and good, and I cannot but love and respect that.

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): this book is such a commentary on 1960s misogyny. Genly is a raging misogynist. It takes a whole prison break and crossing the arctic for Genly to realize a woman or androgyne can be competent 👀

Dimitri: [Having read just the first half of the book] I wonder if it keeps happening, if Genly keeps going "woaaaah" [to the Gethenians’ androgyny] or if he ever acclimates. It's been half the novel my guy

vic: yeah a book where a guy is destroyed by seeing a breast makes me want queer theory

vic: [it also] makes me feel good to see how much has changed [since the 1960s]

THE INTERSEX STUFF

A thing we appreciated about the book was how being intersex is contextual. The main character of the book, Genly Ai, is a human from a planet like Earth, who visits Gethen to open trade and diplomatic relations.

On his home planet, and to Earth sensibilities, Genly is perisex - he is able to reproduce at any time of the month and is consistently male.

But on Gethen, Genly becomes intersex. On Gethen, the norm is that you only manifest (and can reproduce as) a given sex during the monthly kemmer (heat/oestrus) period. 

The Gethenians understand Genly as living in “permanent kemmer”, which is described as a common (intersex) condition, and these people are hyper-sexualized and referred to as Perverts.

At this point it’s worth noting that depiction is not the same as endorsement. Michelle pointed out the book is very empathetic to those in permanent kemmer. LeGuin does not appear to be endorsing the social stigma faced by these people, merely depicting it, and putting a mirror to how our own society treats intersex people.

Throughout the book, Genly is treated as an oddity by the Gethenians. He is hyper sexualized. He undergoes a genital inspection to prove he is who he says he is. 

When Genly is sent to a prison camp and forcibly given HRT, he does not respond “normally” to the hormones, the effects are way worse for him, and the prison camp staff don’t care, and keep administering them even if it’ll kill him. 

Two of us have had the experience of having hyperandrogenism and being forced onto birth control as teenager, and relating to the sluggishness of the drugs that Genly experienced, as well as the sense that gender/sex conformity was more important to authority figures (parents, doctors) than actual health and well-being.

Another scene we discussed the one where Genly is in a prison van en route to the gulag, and a Gethenian enters kemmer and wants to mate with him and he declines. He is given multiple opportunities over the course of the book to try having sex with a Gethenian, and declines every time, and we wondered if he avoided it out of trauma of being hyper-sexualized & hyper-medicalized & having had his genitals inspected.

We discussed the way he described his genital inspection through a trauma lens, and how it interacts with toxic masculinity - in vic’s terms, Genly being "I am a manly man and I have don't trauma"

Those of us who read the short story, Coming of Age in Karhide, noted that once the world was narrated from a Gethenian POV, the people in permanent kemmer were treated far more neutrally, which gave us the impression that Genly as an unreliable narrator was injecting some intersexism along with his misogyny

WHY IT MATTERS TO READ THIS BOOK THROUGH AN INTERSEX LENS

Elizabeth: I’ve encountered critiques of this book from perisex trans folks because to them the book is committing biological essentialism, and dismissing the book as a result. I think they’re missing that this book is as much about (inter)sex as it is about gender. I think they’re too quick to dismiss the book as being outdated or having backwards ideas because they’re not appreciating the intersex themes. 

Elizabeth: The intersex themes aren’t exactly subtle, so it kind of stings that I haven’t seen any intersex analyses of this book, but there are dozens (hundreds?) of perisex trans analyses that all miss the huge intersex elephants in the room.

Also Elizabeth: I’ve seen this book show up in lists of intersex books/characters made by perisex people, and I’ve seen Estraven listed as intersex character, and it gets me upset because Estraven isn’t intersex! Estraven is perisex in the society in which he lives. Genly is the intersex character in this story and people who misunderstand intersex as being able to reproduce as male & female (or having quirky genitals smh) are completely missing that being intersex is socially constructed and based on what is considered typical for a given species.

WHAT THE BOOK DOESN’T HANDLE WELL

The body descriptions. As Dmitri put it: “ Like "his butt jiggled and it reminded  me of women" ew. It was intentional but I had to put the book down. It reminded me of transvestigators and how they take pictures of people in public.” 🤮

Not pushing Genly to reflect on how weird he is about other people’s bodies. We all had issues with how Genly is constantly scrutinizing the bodies of other humans to assess their gender(s) and it’s pretty gross.

vic asked: “how much of this is her reproducing violence without her knowing it? A thing I didn't like was how he always judging and analyzing people's bodies and realizing others treat him that way. And I wish there was more of his discomfort about this, that it made him feel icky.”

Dimitri added: “I really wanted him to have a moment of this too, for him to realize how much it sucks to be treated this way. As a trans person it's so uncomfortable. What are you doing going around doing this to people?”

Using male pronouns as default/ungendered pronouns. Élaina asked why Genly thinks a male pronoun is more appropriate for a transcendent God and pointed out there’s a lot to unpack there.

OTHER POSITIVES ABOUT THE BOOK

Genly’s journey towards respecting women, that he still had a ways to go by the end of the book. vic pointed out how “LeGuin was straight, and she loves men, and is kinda giving them the side-eye [in this book]. Her writing about how Genly is childish makes me really happy. It’s kind of hilarious to watch him bang his head against the wall because he’s so rigid.” 

To which Dmitri added: “I agree with the bit on forgiving men for stuff. I don't know how she [LeGuin] does it but she really lays it all out. She gives you a platter of how men are bad at things, how they make mistakes that are pretty specific to them. She has prepared a buffet of it.”

Autistic Estraven! As Michelle put it: “autistic queer feels about Estraven speaking literally and plainly and Genly not getting it”

The truck chapter. Hits like a pile of bricks. We talked about it as a metaphor for the current pandemic.

The Genly x Estraven slowburn queerplatonic relationship

The conlang! Less is more in how it gets used

MIXED REACTIONS

The Foretelling. For some it felt unnecessary and a bit fetishy. For others it was fun paranormal times.

Pacing. Some liked how the book really forces you to really contemplate as you go. Others struggled with a pace that feels very slow to 2023 readers.

WORKS WE COMPARED THE BOOK TO

Star Trek (the original series) - we wondered if LHOD and Genly Ai were progressive by 1960s standards, and TOS came up as a comparison point. We were all of the impression that TOS was progressive for its time but all of us find it pretty misogynist by our standards. The interest in extra-sensory perception (ESP) is something that was a staple of TOS that feels very strange to contemporary viewers and also cropped up in LHOD

Ancillary Justice - for being a book where characters’ genders are all ambiguous but the POV character is actually normal about how they describe other characters’ bodies.

The Deep - for being another book in a situation where being able to reproduce as male and female is the norm. The Deep was written by an actually intersex author, and doesn’t have the cisperisex gaze of scrutinizing every body for sex. But oddly LHOD actually winds up feeling more like a book about intersex people, because it features a character who is the odd one out in a gonosynic society. In contrast, nobody is intersex in the Deep - everybody matches the norms for their species, which makes the intersex themes in the work much more subtle.

Overall, as vic put it, “there's something to be said about an honest depiction that's not great, especially when there's no alternatives”. For a long time there weren’t many other games in town when it came to this sort of book, and even though some things now feel dated, it’s still a valuable read. We’d love to see more intersex reviews & analyses of the book!

[wishing-on-dandelion]

↳ ACHILLES & PATROCLUS ✧･ﾟ: ↳ ❝ He is half of my soul as the poets say. ❞

— The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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