Hello and welcome to this series all about gender in science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding!
If you’re working on a novel that includes worldbuilding around gender, I hope this blog post series will give you new ideas and food for thought—on both creative and inclusive fronts.
Each of these posts uses a published book as a springboard for discussion. I’ll talk about things I’d bring up if I were providing sensitivity feedback or worldbuilding consultation on the novel.
In the previous post, we looked at how the three-gender system in A Psalm for the Wild-Built didn’t stand up to scrutiny. It included non-binary people on the surface level, but the lack of deeper worldbuilding meant it brought along all the cisnormative baggage of our current Western binary gender system.
Today I’d like to follow on from that by looking at how Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee uses gender cues to create a non-cisnormative three-gender system.
Phoenix Extravagant takes place in a fantasy version of Japanese-occupied Korea. It follows Gyen Jebi (they/them), an artist who finds themself reluctantly tangled up in the politics of occupation and resistance.
Gender is not a focus of Phoenix Extravagant and the gender worldbuilding is a background detail. Yet it’s clear that the author put care and thought into building the book’s three-gender system, and the way he presents it to the reader is elegant and simple. Let’s unpack why it works so well.
