and like i think what it is is that gender as we receive it in gideon and harrow felt totally constrained by its social context, in the same way that the characters and the world and the language available to us were all totally constrained by their shared social context. which is very deliberate and effective - we see how normative gender can be reconstituted within an imperialist society to fortify imperialist relations, we see how queerness and specifically butchness is made open to articulation within imperialist social formations. so eg. with someone like gideon, there’s always one eye on the fact that her non-diegetic ‘deviance,’ if u will – conventionally masculine name, butch, lesbian, etc. – doesn’t translate to its diegetic context because that diegetic context found a way to absorb and rearticulate it as imperialist. we receive gideon’s butchness through the lens of cavalierhood and we understand cavalierhood to be an essentially imperialist social articulation. there’s always a faltering, i think, at the edges of what these non-diegetic transgressions can do, because they always have to loop back to a site where they are being articulated, and necessary to the nature of the text is that that site has to be one of imperialism.
but then nona is full of failed lyctors, failed cavaliers, failed sacrifices; and nona drags our perspective out of the solipsism of the imperial core and into the periphery. and suddenly this sense of gender-language that can’t quite push at the seams of anything because it’s still falling back on a socially sanctioned something or other starts to falter a little. it’s the bodysharing of course but it’s not just the bodysharing - it’s the way the text leaned hard into the trans-coded or like trans-adjacent language that that bodysharing makes possible, such that you have, for example, those snippets of pyrrha shaving her face or talking in a deep voice or flirting with women rendered in this very reverent tone. or like, ianthe as the dead naberius, ianthe as at once coronabeth’s ‘sister’ and ‘boyfriend,’ as a boy, as the ‘good son,’ as the ‘lady of the first.’ where gideon was about articulating what was possible within womanhood, nona pushes a little more at the superfluity of that kind of gendered language in the first place.
[& ofc, the tower princes - new articulations of gender wholly loyal to the imperial fold but also whose existence is seemingly predicated on the failure of the god-lyctorhood relation? a retreat into more immediately recognisable kinship structures? kiriona as crown prince is kiriona as corpse prince is kiriona as representing a fundamental failure of the cavalier end of the necromancer-cavalier gendered relation.]
it’s interesting. it’s not a shift i can quite pin down, but something definitely happens in nona’s narration that makes articulations of gender feel a lot more. like. encompassing. like if the first two books were about establishing where gendered paradigms fall in this new social formation then nona is maybe the point where the text begins to ask what exists beyond those paradigm’s limitations.
