Non-Binary SF/F and Message Fiction (or, “I don’t know what that is or why non-binary SF/F fits”)
(Note: comments will be monitored on this post due to the nature of the debate surrounding this topic. I hope I won’t have to remove anything, but I have a low tolerance for rude behavior right now. If you can’t make your point without being a jackass, even if that point agrees with my own, then take it elsewhere.) You might have seen the response to Alex MacFarlane’s Tor.com post, “Post-Binary Gender in SF: Introduction.” If not, you can read the words of Jim C. Hines and Justin Landon, who both have things to say of their own. I’m not going to address content of the primary response to MacFarlane (well, not the whole of it, anyway) or offer a line-by-line critique a la Hines. Rather, I want to talk about a specific issue within this debate: message fiction. I would also be remiss to neglect to mention my post entitled “Gender Essentialism, Genre, and Me,” which is amusingly relevant to the larger discussion being had in the community right now. First, though I’m going to try to tease out the definition of message fiction in general by the end of this post, I should note that I’m not altogether clear on what certain individuals mean when they revile message fiction, except insofar as the politics are concerned. Of the many references some in this debate have made to “the message”, none of them properly defines the term and most engage with a strawman version of MacFarlan’es argument. MacFarlane’s column concerns the tendency to marginalize works which feature non-binary genders by exceptionalizing them. Her primary example is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, which she says has been held up as the pinnacle of post-binary SF, while other equally important works have fallen away, such that we are constantly “re-discovering” them: It seems to me that there’s a similar process for post-binary texts: they exist, but each reader must discover them anew amid a narrative that says they are unusual, they are rare, they sit outside the standard set of stories. This, at least, has been my experience. I want to dismantle the sediment—to not only talk about post-binary texts and bring them to attention of more readers, but to do away with the default narrative. MacFarlane, in other words, is interested in this narrative, not quotas or checklists — the narrative which says “these texts about non-binary genders are not normal precisely because they are unusual.” The problem with this narrative is in its ability to provide a rationale for ignorance, not on some political territory where these works must be ignored because they violate some central tenet of an “ism” — though this is true to an extent — but rather on the simple basis of cultural amnesia. If we are not talking about works of a particular form, we are submitting to the possibility that those works will be forgotten, and along with them, the value they produce for the communities to which they might belong. It is for this reason, I think, that she begins the post with the following: “I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories” (emphasis mine). The word “default” is not insignificant in the context of the entire post.[1] The post isn’t calling for fiction to deliberately include non-binary genders for the sake of doing so (i.e., for an agenda); rather, it calls for SF/F to remove the default assumptions about gender in order to open up wider possibilities for inclusion (who does the including isn’t exactly relevant, since nobody has to do anything here). I think this is a far too lofty goal, and deeply hyperbolic, but it seems like some have missed that careful nuance for one reason or another. The idea that all SF/F must, by necessity, court the content of MacFarlane’s argument isn’t a notion supported by the argument itself. In all of this, the question for me becomes: do the works MacFarlane wishes to discuss in this series deserve to be remembered? Personally, I think they do for various reasons, though the most relevant here, I think, is the fact that these works, even in their most obscure forms, are an example of SF/F’s remarkable imaginative, extrapolative, and critical potential. And that potential is not isolated to “stuffy” works; rather, it is found in a whole sea of exceptional and memorable texts from before the codification of the genres to the present. This is what SF/F does best! Most of the time, it’s a lot of fun (in my entirely subjective opinion). All of this brings me back to the point about “message fiction.” The entirety of discussion about this topic concerns a term which has no defined criteria by which we can discern message fiction from just fiction. The only criteria, as far as I can tell, is that message fiction isn’t fun, but since “fun” is entirely subjective, it’s impossible to apply that in any significant way. Some who attack message fiction provide an explanation for one of message fiction’s functions, which is to subvert the natural drive of a narrative by bogging down the whole with an agenda, but the best explanation on offer boils down to “here are some works which have messages.” Even upon a deeper search into certain individuals’ posts revealed little useful material for understanding, at the very least, how they define the term. There are numerous claims about liberals taking over Worldcon, making it impossible for conservative message stories (or books by conservatives, by extension) to appear on the ballots[3] and people avoiding SF because of messages. At what point does fiction with political issues in them become “preachy” or “message-y”? No idea. The argument is never made; we’re simply supposed to accept it as accurate on the basis of someone’s word, which you’ll notice is quite difficult when so much of the discussion centers around political affiliations (liberals this, liberals that). The claims are weirdly paranoid, like the Illuminati