With thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Devin Singer, and Fade Manley.
This is an essay about queerness, fiction, and marketing: about queer receptions and queer readings in our cultural moment. It’s an essay that starts with Kit Rocha’s Consort of Fire, but it is not about Consort of Fire, except insomuch as that novel provoked me to consider: what does it mean to say that something is queer? (What is queerness to me, or I to queerness?) How is queerness recognised?
“If part of what desire wants is recognition,” writes Judith Butler in the introduction to Undoing Gender,
“then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well. …[R]ecognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced. This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as recognisably human and who does not.”
Consort of Fire: queer polyamorous romance/the differential production of queerness?
Consort of Fire is a fantasy romance novel by pseudonymous writer duo Kit Rocha, in which a princess, Sachi, is sent to marry (and then kill) a warrior-god who goes by the cognomen the Dragon, accompanied by her handmaiden-assassin Zanya. Sachi and Zanya are in love, and the primary thrust of the romance is both of them falling in love with the Dragon, and vice versa. I encountered its existence via social media in the context of praise of and for its queerness and emphasis on the existing relationship between Sachi and Zanya: its most prominent blurb (from romance bestseller Katee Roberts) positions it as “A primal cry of queer joy.” I read it out of curiosity, because I don’t think I’d ever read
a) a polyamorous explicit fantasy romance
b) where a primary relationship between two women expanded to include a man.
Having read it, I feel the urge to prod at it. To interrogate its relationship to queerness and to my understanding of queerness. I’m not convinced that we understand the same things by the word queer.
Yet I’m not convinced we don’t, either.
The extent to which sexuality and sexual activity, here, has a Man involved at all times troubles me, with regard to the rhetorical positioning of Consort of Fire‘s blurb and marketing. The cover copy suggests something perhaps less heavily invested in penises and in masculine-centric views of sex.
Let’s pause here to mark the fact that I don’t read, and never have done, a great deal in the way of sex-heavy romance novels, and my interest in heterosexual romance has dwindled to next-to-nil over the last decade. I have been informed by a reliable friend that the conventions of “mainstream” FFM romance/erotica generally mandate that all sexual activity include the M party. My reading of the cover copy was not informed by this context: there may well be a gap between my impressions and expectations and the impressions of someone with a closer familiarity to such generic conventions as exist for this kind of romance.
It is an entirely competent, indeed compelling, novel. It has an interesting world, and develops interesting tensions. I would put its mode closer to the erotic end of the romance spectrum. The relationship between the two women is rather well done, between the trio somewhat interesting — somewhat, for I find the men of romance sadly boring, and this particular example is not really an exception.
Queer as in “Fuck You”
But I came across it in a discussion of queer fictions. And I feel that queer — as a concept, rather than a synonym for the interminable LGBTQIA+ acronym — expresses something that… isn’t here. Or is here very gently, cosily, very much in a subdued, blink-and-you-miss-it fashion. Queer orients itself with regard to power. Queer orients itself with regard to, and in opposition to norms of sex, of gender, of sexuality. It fucks with boundaries. It turns the normative world upside down.
It turns passivity into power, power into service, sharply divided categories into permeable, penetrable — and interpenetrated — sets.
Queerness subverts. Queerness transgresses.
The portrayal of sex alone, here, wouldn’t set me to prodding at the idea of what it means to call something queer, or how we recognise and understand queerness. But combine it with the portrayal of social roles, and I find myself gnawing on this bone.
The Dragon occupies a position of conventionally male-coded power. He is a warrior, a ruler, a shapeshifting being that others call a god. He is the supplicated, rather than the supplicant. Someone who protects, rather than someone who is protected: someone who has never been rendered abject. From the beginning, he is a personification of power — not of endurance, not of survival, but of the power to make the world itself respond to your will. (How he uses this power is not germane to its existence: he has it.)
Sachi and Zanya, on the other hand, at the outset occupy roles where they are in positions of limited power and agency. Sachi is an (imposter) princess sent into a form of arranged marriage — much against her will, with her life at stake, with a past full of unpleasantness: a very traditionally female position, indeed. Of the three, Zanya is the one most obviously transgressive of gendered norms: a loyal handmaid, a supremely well-trained assassin, and a woman in love with another woman. (Her past, too, is full of brutality and unpleasantness.) They are both intimately familiar with powerlessness and limited choices.
This orientation vis-à-vis power is remarkably conventional: a man holds power, a woman — in this case, two — must figure out how to survive long enough to claim power. It is conventional for romance novels, also: a powerful man (a much older man, at that) wishes to protect a woman — in this case two — in whom he is emotionally invested or sexually interested from the dangers he’s aware of, while a woman figures out whether he’s worth her effort.
Remarkably conventional, especially since the novel is invested in a romantic and sexual triangle — one where all parties have similar levels of interest and investment in each other — not a tripod, where Zanya and the Dragon each individually care for Sachi and never progress past a nonsexual friendship with each other. It positions the man as central and powerful from the outset, and, given the configuration of parties present when sex acts take place on the page, as sexually necessary.
It does not transgress the boundaries of heterosexual, patriarchal norms in the way that, for example, switching the social roles around would. A decorative imposter prince and his valet seducing a warrior queen, or a princess with a handman rather than a handmaid seducing such a queen, or even the Dragon of Consort of Fire, would present a transgression of gendered structures of power, and potentially a critique of the culturally-constructed power dynamics of sexual activity (and particularly of penetrative sex acts) to which the roles of the characters here do not lend themselves.
I want to reiterate: I’m not criticising the novel for what it’s doing as a novel. It’s a well-done, playing-with-and-into-existing-tropes romance novel. I’d call all the poles of the relationships fairly “conventional,” if they didn’t include bisexual polyamory. As conventional as you get while including that, anyway. Does that make it gently radical, in romance novel terms?
It is the marketing, the cover copy, the choice of prominent blurb (“A primal scream of queer joy”), the social media narrative as I encountered it, that set me up with queered expectations.
What do we mean by queer?
The Capacity to Provoke: Queerness and Transgression
I apparently maintain a distinction between, on the one hand homosexuality (or bisexuality) as an orientation of attraction, and queer sex and queerness more generally on the other. When I realised this, it came along with the realisation that I’d accidentally reinvented a (less nuanced, more personal?) version of queer theory, absent any previous direct engagement with queer theory as a discipline or framework of knowledge.
(I always, it seems, come to theory backwards, fumbling to articulate what I mean and only finding afterwards, that the words already existed, the work already done — albeit in a form inaccessible to me at the time.)
Take an example. There is nothing transgressive about my marriage, save for the fact that it exists: save for the fact that the Ireland in which my relationship is both acceptable and normal was frankly unimaginable as little as three decades ago. It mimics the structures of heterosexual relationships among my college friends (an egalitarian bunch, to be fair), at times to a frankly uncomfortable degree.*
*There is an entire subsidiary essay here about the way in which anti-egalitarian pressures in otherwise egalitarian relationships coalesce primarily around children and childcare.
But there are those for whom homosexual attraction, in and of itself, is inherently transgressive: for them, the mere existence of relationships — of lives — like mine provokes disturbance.
And there are those of us who were raised with the unspeakability of the queering of sex and gender in all its forms: with the expectation of invisibility, of isolation, of discrimination and struggle and suffering, if one challenged it. That is, if we could surmount the unspeakability so far as to be able to develop expectations at all, rather than merely finding ourselves inarticulately, miserably, at odds with society’s conventions and received wisdom. A happy relationship — a happy marriage — between two people of the same socially-recognised gender, legally sanctioned and widely accepted, is an ultimate transgression of all those old expectations: a rebuke to an entire system for categorising sex and power.
I want to say former system, but we all know that it’s a long way from dead and buried.
Given social sanction, we recapitulate old hierarchies and situate ourselves within new ones. We no longer provoke and disturb the old system of categories, because we have created new systems, new categories — which we may or may not transgress, but which we do not transgress a priori by existing.
The current lives and literatures of homo- and bisexuality dwell between these two poles: on the one hand, transgression by mere existence; and on the other, normalised within new systems of categories, arising out of the old — normalised, at least, as long as they decline to be too challenging. As long as they’re sufficiently respectable, and not too fuck-you transgressive.
Transgender and genderqueer lives and literatures are far less normalised: sexual relationships can be hammered flat to fit in with older hierarchies where the crossing of categories of being and identity resist.
Those old categories had hegemonic, universalising power, and still hold tremendous force. It’s a force capable of deforming attempts to construct new systems. It exerts pressure to sanitise, to conform: to imitate old hierarchies and to sand down — to refuse — radical differences.
This pressure frequently makes itself felt in the existence of, and the much-debated necessity for, the politics of respectability: the idea that to be valued, to be worth valuing,one must perform in ways acceptable to the dominant social paradigm. This performance usually emphasises morality, particularly sexual morality, and de-emphasises difference, particularly sexual difference and sexual concupiscence.Respectability is the opposite of transgression.
Respectability Politics and Assimilation
“[B]ehaviors are judged respectable by comparing them to racist, sexist, and classist norms… Moreover, respectability politics’ emphasis on individual uplift ignores structural inequalities.”[Pitcan et al, 2018]
Fictional representation is a site in which respectability is contested. It is a site through which the boundaries of what it is permissible to imagine are drawn by the wider society in which those fictional representations circulate, and by which they are received.
A novel of homo-affective romance set in a world where sexual orientation is not an axis of discrimination… both is and is not transgressive. It provokes disturbance only in those for whom homosexual relationships are a priori a transgression; it transgresses against a norm that insists on homosexual suffering. At the same time, it often assimilates itself to other structuring norms of heterosexual romance and behaviour, and to normative categories and hierarchies of power.
Do I need to offer examples, or can I assume that part’s obvious? Let’s take — oh, let’s say an arranged marriage romance (like in Everina Maxwell’s Winter‘s Orbit, or Foz Meadows’ A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, both novels I deeply enjoyed). Such a romance usually assumes certain structuring norms, such as the existence of marriage itself and associated principles of property inheritance. The existence of marriage as a legal convention assumes certain things about society, and the existence of arranged marriages invites other assumptions with regard to hierarchies of power. These stories might in the end complicate, subvert, or upend these assumptions, or they might play them — so to speak — straight.
In its assimilationist form, queerness is reduced to sexuality and attraction. Whether that sexuality is lewd or chaste, a glorious excess of pornographic raunchiness or the most tentative awakening of attractive awareness, it still becomes a matter of genitals and what happens with them, rather than to the wider, more subversive, deconstructionist possibilities that come with deliberately refusing (or refuting) hetero-patriarchal categories, structures, and relations of power.
The queerest book I read in 2023 was Martha Wells’ Witch King. Its queerness had very little to do with sex, but with embodiment and identity. Kai, the titular Witch King, is an extremely queer character. Not because of anything to do with sex, but because of how hard he transgresses categories and norms — for the reader, but also within the world of the story. He crosses borders and boundaries, and fucks with cultural, physical, and metaphysical norms, both voluntarily and out of duress or necessity. He is a figure of ambivalence, whose existence defies easy categorisation. He provokes reconsideration of categories.
This, to me, is also what makes Ann Leckie’s work queer. Not the pronouns, though that choice in the Ancillary books was a provocative delight, but — to paraphrase from a conversation with Elizabeth Bear — the exploration and recasting of societal power expectations. In the Ancillary trilogy, this is primarily seen through forms and relationships other than the sexual. Breq fucks with categories of personhood and power: with subject and object positions, with who is, who does, and who is done to.
But let’s go back to the question of respectability and transgression for a moment.
Paradoxes of Success? Queerness, Radicalism, Comfort
“Respectability politics… reinforces within-group stratification to juxtapose a respectable us against a shameful other.” [Pitcan et al, 2018]
The current moment in science fiction and fantasy is one in which the word “queer” has become marketable– after a long struggle to see its existence welcomed. The successes of Gideon the Ninth and Winter‘s Orbit offer two examples: an audience (of which I am part) has long hungered for the validating support of visibility. And can find it, now, sometimes,in valorised and heroised figures, instead of at the margins; as text, rather than subtext.
Yet we must acknowledge that the queer audience for texts depicting non-heterosexual sexualities is not the only audience: success, in the capitalist marketplace of cultural production, requires making those texts palatable to a wider — to the predominant — social context. The boundaries of the publicly acceptable are circumscribed by what this context will tolerate, and it tends not to tolerate a complete defiance of its legitimacy, or of its right to judge.
Respectability, and its close cousin familiarity, becomes key to reaching this wide audience. Familiar things afford comfort: they are known. They do not require explanation or examination. Their power to perturb is limited.
This presents a constant tension with the radical and transgressive possibilities that queerness contains. The capacity to provoke and disturb social power relations, and social power expectations (and its potential to — as it were — embody Bakhtin’s carnival), remains for me its most defining characteristic.
Queerness exists in tension with comfort, and with the familiar. Not because of genitals, not because of sex, and not even because of histories of discrimination, but rather because of its power to cross and complicate categories and boundaries: its ability to de–familiarise and de–naturalise ordinary assumptions and expectations, and the gendered hierarchies of power which are so entwined in the structures of our society that we almost forget they’re there.
You might remember the impossible-to-attribute quote, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” (Which always struck me as a strange formulation: if everything is about sex, and sex is about power, then what it’s actually saying is that everything is about power. Perhaps sexualised power, but still. Power.) Queerness isn’t about sex (except, of course, when it is also about sex). Queerness, too, is about power: about the structuring logics of who has it, who is subject to it, and who can reject it.
And it is at the site of power that queerness as a marketing artefact,and queerness as the potential for the radical overturning of existing categories, come most visibly into conflict.
Works cited:
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. 2004.
Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E Marwick, danah boyd, “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 23, Issue 3, May 2018, Pages 163–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy008
Kit Rocha, Consort of Fire. Seattle: Montlake. 2023.
Works mentioned:
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy.
Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit.
Foz Meadows, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance.
Martha Wells, Witch King.
κῆπος τῶν βιβλιοθηκῶν | a garden from the libraries 