“She Was Probably Male”: Gender and Coloniality

Abstract

One of the most striking aspects of Ancillary Justice for many readers is the novel’s speculative defamiliarization of gender. Readers are invited to imagine what gender (as a social construction) might look like from a radically non-gendered perspective—especially as the narrator stumbles through misidentifying the genders of people from alien cultures (and using their taken-for-granted pronouns incorrectly).

On one hand, this aspect of Ancillary Justice seems to denaturalize the connections between biological sex and gender, revealing gender to be the product of cultural norms. Additionally, however, the narrator’s expression of normative agender identity is also presented as inescapably imperial. Like most members of the Imperial Radch, the narrator evaluates other cultures (and their gender identities) from an asymmetrical position of epistemological superiority.