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*Buffy-verse: all the Slayers are female. I mentioned a fanfic I heard of, where a Slayer transitions to male but keeps his powers.
*Temeraire books by Naomi Novik. The Longwing dragons only choose female riders, but how do we know how the author is defining male and female? Maybe *most* of the Longwings choose female riders, but the occasional one wouldn't, and that might be regarded like queerness is in our culture. Someone also mentioned a fanfic dealing with a trans rider (FtM I think) who was supposed to inherit a Longwing. Also the dragons seem to think less about gender than the people do.
*A Companion to Wolves by Monette and Bear
*Babel 17 by Samuel Delaney</i>
*Glass House by Charles Strauss
*Cetaganda and Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold
*Xenogenesis books by Octavia Butler
*The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
*The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
*Richard K. Morgan
*"Torch of Honor" or perhaps the sequel--switching gender
*Grant Morrison's "The Invisisbles" (comics)
*Terry Goodkin (faily) binary magical powers between men and women
*Dune - the Bene Gesserit have secret powers around reproduction, but their ultimate goal is still male power
*China Mieville's books: the Kepri have a large division between male and female. The females are sentient and the males are basically cockroackes.
*Terry Pratchett - male and female dwarves looks the same. Monstous Regiment and Men at Arms were mentioned, but there are many Discworld books.
*Emma Bull, Finder
*Laurie Marks, the "Logic" books. Women and men are truly equal in these books, seen as soldiers and farmers and co-parents.
*Scott Sigler
*The concept of covens vs. singular male wizards. Or if male wizards are in a group, they are a secret society trying to do harm of some kind.
*Gate to Women's Country (faily, gender-essentialist)
*I ranted about my loathing for the "Hominid" trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer. They have some cool interesting concepts (all the Neanderthals are bisexual), but do a lot of gender-essentialist things and want to address the "problem of male violence".
*Star Trek. The trill are genderless, but have the experiences of male and female hosts. Some species use pheromones to control men, which is the ultimate sexual power.
*Transformers - why are they all male? Why can't they just TRANSFORM into female?
*Godzilla is female in the newest movie adaptation
*AIs as gendered vs. gender-neutral
Overall, I thought this was a very good discussion! Good depth.
Comments
*boggles* Was no one there who remembered the '80s Transformers movie? I was so excited that they finally had a female Transformer, but she was PINK & pretty boring. (I realize she was a token! I'm just surprised no one mentioned that technically they weren't all male...)
I can't even remember what might be gender/species-y in Finder--bizarre, I used to love that book (probably still would, if I could get over my disgust w/the author).
I think Juliana was worried before that all/most of the discussion would be about werewolves, hehehe.
I don't remember what anyone said about Finder.
Yeah I think Juliana mentioned paranormal romance, but almost no one else in the room had read any of those!
Seriously Incomplete Bibliography of Fiction in Which Gender is Eliminated or Ambiguous
which reminds me that it's _Written on the Body_, not _Sexing the Cherry_, that has the ambiguous narrator.
Not all the titles on that list have gender-undeclared narrators, but I'll bet the one you're looking for is there.
And oh, yes, the subject of reader projection of gender is so fascinating! I expect future generations of grad students to mine many dissertations from the responses to Usenet posters who do not make their gender clear. Or even those who do! I go by Susan, but I have been referred to as 'he' at times.
Edited at 2009-07-03 04:41 am (UTC)
I think the trouble with this is that rarely are we shown any sort of robot/AI in SF (or, I guess I should say, USA-SF) that's not gendered in some fashion. So it's not a case of whether or not they should have gender (robots don't need them, unless they are granted them by humans, or "need" them for the purposes of interacting with humans in some way), but simply that they are gendered and that gender is typically male.
Most likely you're right that they are gendered/voiced as male for purposes of hitting a target market -- that sort of deconstruction is useful, but doesn't really answer questions about why the world of the series is the way it is. (For example, that the female transformers were all destroyed somehow off-screen. Which is kind of a messed-up explanation, if you ask me.)
I do wonder if the people who write these stories think that humans (in general, or the target market in particular) are more comfortable having robots/AIs gendered as opposed to genderless. Certainly almost all AI characters in movies are gendered even though the don't need to be. Or, they can switch genders very easily. The terminators can do this, for example, but they still go back to their default form after switching, and that default form is gendered. Having genderless characters would be subversive and I suspect the big moviemakers don't want to do that!
Closely related to Dune, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time definitely needs mentioning here, with the differences between saidar (female magic) and saidin (male magic).
I also haven't read Robert Jordan, although I think the concept of men and women having different forms of magic is interesting, and also potentially essentialist. It makes me wonder again how the author is defining male and female, and what about intersex people, and what about trans people, which were the things that kept coming up in this panel: the idea of gender and sex as a spectrum rather than a binary.
Yes, it's just one word choice, but I have word choice on my mind a lot lately.
Still adore the books, though. Good times.
I'd forgotten all about the piggies-- I guess I hadn't realized they were all male! Thanks for mentioning them. I love those books too but boy do they have some issues.