(Does a big shounen anime style powerup sequence with screaming and flexing and when the dust settles I am comfortably snug in bed surrounded by beloved plushies)
One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like–no wait, two things, in order.
So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it’s not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.
But that’s a human thing, those are human categories,and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.
But then also there’s the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, ‘cop’ and 'prostitute,’ as distinguished at construction per Murderbot’s own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having’ or 'not having’ 'sex parts.’
Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I’m sure was an intentional writing move–Murderbot’s assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.’
And what’s neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!
But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it’s able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.
Being a SecUnit, being security, providing security to others, is very important to Murderbot, is absolutely in competition with the conceptually-entwined 'fiction’ and 'freedom’ for what it’s most passionate about.
But that passion only comes out as it’s able to choose to 'do its job.’ As long as security was defined on Company terms, within the Company’s shitty boundaries and for the Company’s shittier goals, when it meant being a blunt instrument and surveillance device and living bullet sponge for and against shitty people with no say in the matter, Murderbot hated it, didn’t care about it, narrated detachment from it and performed whenever possible to the absolute minimum standard. And rightly so.
It performs SecUnit-ness half-heartedly and under a mixture of implicit and overt coercion.
But given something to protect, something it both wants to and is free to, Murderbot vastly exceeds all expectations in its design function. Murderbot is a fantastic SecUnit precisely when it gets to decide what that means.
Security work wasn’t something it chose for itself, it was built for it and forced to it, but reclaiming that and remaking it into something better, something it believes in, is a fundamental part of its growth and healing process. And I think that’s really cool. And just as much part of the 'gender’ elements of the story as it is of like, the 'labor’ and 'liberation’ parts.
In fact the 'social control of labor’ and 'assigned identity categories’ always have heavily overlapped, being related forms of structuring the utility of persons, so of course this is both.
‘Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically… but in a deeply queer way.’
Wow- this approach to the text resonates so strongly with my understanding of both the character and of the queerness of gender that my breath is absolutely taken away. It puts this passage, where Murderbot reworks its rescue plan in Fugitive Telemetry, into stunning context:
That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better.
Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.
This passage has always been about redefining itself and its function, of course, but looking at it solely from an in-universe perspective, it almost seems self-delusional. What a machine intelligence is designed for and used for, how its body is designed, is in literal terms a matter of its creators’ intentions, and cannot be changed post facto. But applying the lens of queering gender to the passage gives the passage a powerful resonance.
In the same way, gender as “intended” or conceptualized by society, the oft-contradictory ways in which even the least queer of us express it, and the reality of our physical existence when our narrative of gender is stripped from the facts are often totally different. Murderbot is talking about a kind of denial of reality, yes… but in the same way that a feminine person might find self-actualization in their identity when she is free to decide which parts of femininity to opt into, to say I don’t want to shave but getting to wear a dress is part of my self-expression or My softness and compassion are a choice separate from my identity, or the ways in which a masc person might say Being gentle doesn’t make me less of a man or My masculinity is about being strong enough to protect others- I’m less of myself if I use that strength to hurt. By denying the intentions of its creators and the ways in which it has been used to to hurt people, Murderbot denies, changes, rewrites the narrative imposed upon it and thus its reality; it redefines itself as a class of being whose primary purpose is to protect, whose function is security. In the same way that we queer our relationship to gender, Murderbot queers the definition of ‘SecUnit’- in order to make it something it can be proud to identify itself as.
That is, of course, also why it’s such a tragedy that Human One shoots it despite its best intentions to save her and her fellow refugees, despite everything it has done to redefine itself. A SecUnit’s function as an oppressor’s tool is not a physical mandate upon reality, in the same way that gender is a rough categorization of identity and not a physical mandate, but they are both real in the ways that social constructs are dangerously real, have powerful impacts upon our lives through the way we view and interact with each other.
And yet despite everything, with all the freedom to self-actualize that it has in its power, Murderbot chooses to continue to perform its function and redefine it/itself as “keeping others safe.” It continues to try to be a SecUnit in a way that it can be proud to be, and I think that that’s a deeply inspiring narrative of queerness for us as queer readers, trans or cis, binary and nonbinary.
(Also, shoutout to Iztarshi and her construct gender meta, which inspired blessphemy’s gender meta, and also to Iztarshi’s OC MedUnit, who is essentially trans nonbinary in terms of construct gender: it decided it didn’t want to be a SecUnit anymore, doesn’t want to be a ComfortUnit, but still liked the parts where it was saving people, and decides to change its function to “medic”)
Newborn babies all have terrible eyesight so that their brains don’t have to process as much information. Which I think is a little bit funny.
Nature was like “Look, we get it. There’s a lot of stuff out here. A lot of pores on your dad’s face. You have no idea what a hand is. Don’t worry about the pores for now. Just figure out, in general, what a hand is and then maybe we”ll pump it up to high res.”
I only got a decade or so of hi-res life before my eyes were like “actually thats enough, pack it in”
