Congratulations to Terra for realize that lesbian couples are a thing!
It does beg the question: What exactly happened in the past that seemingly erased their existence and installed a strict patriarchy?
I'm hoping the story gets more into it, but I'm not sure there needs to be a single event for things to get this way. It's been three centuries since the Circs arrived at FBB, and there are a couple of points that suggest the strict patriarchy is the result of steady backsliding over generations.
One factor is probably the relatively limited population, since the clans are only about 20,000 strong (and probably smaller in the past). There are going to be the same small town pressures towards conformity in play, and the severe isolation only strengthens that power. Given that the Circs were highly multicultural to begin with, gender/sexual minorities would probably be the most visibly non-conforming parties, and be among the first nail in need of a hammer.
Chief Xeon also says some stuff hinting that gender relations are generally constructed to facilitate population/capital growth. This might be related to the Circs' resource curse, in that any AMC clay obtained beyond meeting the Circs' needs is a valuable export. This economic structure would incentivize overdevelopment of the fishing industry, while other sectors of the economy become underinvested. In a lot of places, this gives industrial representatives a lot of power, and their response to obtaining that power is to crack down on civil liberties, education, and public funding to make it difficult to organize opposition.
At Endeavor clan, this structure seems to have evolved to a point where it has semi-independently invented something resembling Umberto Eco's description of an ur-fascist ideology. Xeon's monologue in chapter 8 explicitly touches on that since it mentions will-to-power, the cult of motherhood, and a subtle disdain towards cultural production over economic production.
At any rate, a necessary component of generating productive labor worldview is compelling women to bear children, and to do so requires reducing/stripping them of their agency to refuse. This structure is definitely baked into the twister/decompa dynamic — comphet only, strict gendered division of labor, framing it nominally as a partnership but making the Twister the voice of authority, and loosely treating women/decomping as an irrational force to be controlled. Given fishing is a prestige job among the Circs, it is likely that this worldview filters down to the rest of society as an ideal to emulate.
Both of these factors alone would probably gravitate towards a cisheteronormative worldview over a few generations, regardless of how progressive the initial founders may have been. Whatever upheaval scrambled the Idaho's fan media repository and resulted in the collapse/destruction of eight clans probably just accelerated (or marked accelerations of) those trends.
Sorry to make this post even longer, but a couple of extra tidbits from the novel's prologue (it's good, read it!) but the fact that Magiri essentially performed a lovers' suicide, followed by the implication her subordinate Sivi Endeavor (a woman) subsequently received credit for Eda and Magiri's accomplishments under the less obviously gendered name C.B. probably speaks to how lesbianism might have been viewed following that event. The fact that Magiri and Eda also led a revolution against more conservative/less visionary leadership likely further complicates things.
The prologue also notes that the Circ society has been in a state of cultural stagnation/economic recession since the invention of the pillar boat shortly after Magiri's death. This probably has to do with the resource curse mentioned above, the lack of incentive for further innovation once basic needs are easily met, and an extremely strong desire to maintain social stability. Circs are often described as "unimaginative", and Terra's active imagination is treated as really freaky by everyone around her (including Diode, at first).
At any rate, the setting sucks as a place to live. Back when we first started scanlating this, I recall coming across some Ogawa tweets about feminist theory he had been reading back when developing the series, and I'm really impressed by how seamlessly he seems to have integrated it into the work.
last edited at Dec 26, 2024 11:28AM
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