Science fiction experiments with gender pronouns to model alternative social structures

Evidence

Modern science fiction has often been a laboratory for such language experiments, as in Ursula LeGuin’s model of the social structure of a hermaphroditic species (for which she uses only the masculine gender), in The Left Hand of Darkness (New York, 1969), or Samuel R. Delany elaborate “reply,” in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (New York, 1984), in which (for sexually differentiated beings of our own type) the feminine pronoun is used universally for the psychic subject, while the masculine pronoun is restricted to a person who is the object of desire (of whatever physical sex). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 945

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to linguistic relativity debates and pronoun-reform arguments in contemporary usage fights.
• CANDY: Delany’s convention — feminine for subject, masculine for object of desire — is a striking, tweetable literary fact.