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thoughts on the thinking city
So I've been thinking about the idea of Atlantis as a sentient being, and particularly as the portrayal of Atlantis as female, and I've had a few thoughts.
1. Some languages obligatorily mark genders on all nouns. It's not anything to do with the masculinity or femininity of those objects; it's just a grammatical category. No, seriously: to take a very crude example, in French, bite (which is translated as "cock" or "dick" in English) is a feminine noun. Seriously.
And the thing is, English doesn't do that for most nonhuman nouns - but it does for some, and it does so pretty invariantly. When cars, ships, and cities are given gender at all, they're almost always women, in my experience. Which - that totally can reflect a bias in our patterns of thought, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bias that was created (or is necessarily supported) by modern speakers of English.
Sometimes we just don't think about our language that carefully, is the point.
1b. We could, of course, choose to refer to the city as "it" - which is the more common choice, in most situations - but then of course we run into the problem of sentience. English mostly only assigns gender to thinking beings - but the flipside of that is that it seems unnatural to talk about a thinking being with a gender-neutral pronoun. Not all languages do this! But English does.
2. Another thing that's interesting is the relationship between the sentient city and the humans within it - mostly, in the context of SGA, the relationship between Atlantis and John Sheppard. People tend to write the relationship of the city to its inhabitants as something very intimate, with levels of mind-reading and understanding that make it very unlike normal human relationships; they also tend to write it as a very sexually charged relationship. I'm not really sure why (or if) these two are related - but it's interesting to wonder if our characterization of Atlantis as female might not be related to that sexual tinge, the assumption that women (and only women) respond sexually to men. In which case - hello, heteronormativity! how're you?
I'm not saying that that's why people write Atlantis as female; I'm wondering if that's an unconscious part of that decision-making process. Ultimately, I suspect that that choice has a lot more to do with an individual author's narrative likes and dislikes, and the story they're particularly trying to tell; most of the gender and sexuality stuff isn't necessarily on a conscious level.
Thoughts? I'll be at work for the next while, but would love to poke this idea with people.
1. Some languages obligatorily mark genders on all nouns. It's not anything to do with the masculinity or femininity of those objects; it's just a grammatical category. No, seriously: to take a very crude example, in French, bite (which is translated as "cock" or "dick" in English) is a feminine noun. Seriously.
And the thing is, English doesn't do that for most nonhuman nouns - but it does for some, and it does so pretty invariantly. When cars, ships, and cities are given gender at all, they're almost always women, in my experience. Which - that totally can reflect a bias in our patterns of thought, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bias that was created (or is necessarily supported) by modern speakers of English.
Sometimes we just don't think about our language that carefully, is the point.
1b. We could, of course, choose to refer to the city as "it" - which is the more common choice, in most situations - but then of course we run into the problem of sentience. English mostly only assigns gender to thinking beings - but the flipside of that is that it seems unnatural to talk about a thinking being with a gender-neutral pronoun. Not all languages do this! But English does.
2. Another thing that's interesting is the relationship between the sentient city and the humans within it - mostly, in the context of SGA, the relationship between Atlantis and John Sheppard. People tend to write the relationship of the city to its inhabitants as something very intimate, with levels of mind-reading and understanding that make it very unlike normal human relationships; they also tend to write it as a very sexually charged relationship. I'm not really sure why (or if) these two are related - but it's interesting to wonder if our characterization of Atlantis as female might not be related to that sexual tinge, the assumption that women (and only women) respond sexually to men. In which case - hello, heteronormativity! how're you?
I'm not saying that that's why people write Atlantis as female; I'm wondering if that's an unconscious part of that decision-making process. Ultimately, I suspect that that choice has a lot more to do with an individual author's narrative likes and dislikes, and the story they're particularly trying to tell; most of the gender and sexuality stuff isn't necessarily on a conscious level.
Thoughts? I'll be at work for the next while, but would love to poke this idea with people.