Friday, August 04, 2006

"The Women of Our Occupation"

Regendered.

Holy fucking shit.

I want both versions of this story.

(at LCRW, thanks David)

6 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

I read that earlier, since I was Googling to find comments on it.

Regendering the story makes it really mundane, non-SFnal.

Anonymous said...

That is a fascinating portal, to which I will certainly return. Ever read the novel Egalia's Daughters? I guess it's technically SF (or 'speculative fiction' or whatever the correct term is now), exploring a culture of extreme gender oppression, with females ("wim") as the oppressors and males ("menwim") as the oppressed. It's hilarious and shocking and surreal. It doesn't justify the gender oppression whatsoever, or represent this as a utopian-ish ideal, but it flips things - just like this regender site does - in a way that demonstrates all the crazy illogic of the current gender oppression regime (patriarchy, duh).

Posted by Victoria Marinelli

David Moles said...

How does regendering it make it non-SFnal?

Kameron Hurley said...

ide - yea, I don't know that the regendering makes it *un*SFnal, I think it's just more obviously been done before when it's regendered. It reads a little more like the premise of "When it Changed."

Victoria - yup, read it. It's... interesting. Not the most readable book, but valuable for its ideas. I had some quibbles with the ending, and wish I would have been able to like the characters more, but I think the author did a lot of head hopping, and I never connected with anybody.

Anonymous said...

I thought the story worked well both ways - I read "women of our occupation" and wondered if it would still be as interesting if it was "Men...", and it was: Women as leaders of a resistance, with bioguns, and given the grunt physical labour *outside* of the house. I'm used to reading about mothers who hold the family together under stress, as did the mother in the original; a mother shrivelling up from drug addiction then blowing herself away was - in my uninformed opinion :) - a stronger image than the father doing it. Both versions had patchy bits but very cool images :).
Who regendered it anyhoo?

Kameron Hurley said...

Either Kelly Link or Gavin Grant likely sent it through the regender site, since they posted the link at their site.

You can regender any URL by typing it in at:

http://regender.com/index.html