#like in the second (?) murderbot book there’s a throwaway line like ‘two women and one tercera (which is a gender signifier in X culture)’

[exponentiate]

Thank you for articulating this; it’s something that bugs me in a lot of recent speculative fiction. Like it’s not even that your story has to be ABOUT queerness and oppression, but when people are touting a book as like “it’s a super fun story, it’s EXCITING, it’s QUEER,” and it manages to completely avoid talking about issues of identity AT ALL?? In this day and age?? I like space laser battles as much as the next guy, but your story’s not “queer” just because you picked one character to have a wife at home (not pictured) while she’s off doing space opera things, and another character to go through and change all the she/her pronouns to xe/xyr. Even the commonly-applied label “queernormative” feels very silly to me, like, is it queer or is it normative?

I feel like a sentiment growing in popularity is that queer people want stories were queerness is incidental, because they're tired of stories about struggling against oppression and want something more escapist. But I've been reading some speculative fiction recently where the queerness of characters is completely unremarked upon, and finding it deeply unsatisfying. It feels less like like escapism to me and more like a gaping hole in the worldbuilding. It's not an issue that the societies depicted are queer-neutral or queer-positive, it's that there is like nothing addressing what those societies think about sexuality, gender, and family systems at all. There's a lot of interesting ways you can write about third genders and same-sex societies/relationships in speculative culture and ignoring all of it entirely to plaster over a surface level modern queer culture veneer is just tragic, in my opinion