Michael Barnes
I was engrossed by Dolki Min's story of a shapeshifting alien. Such a character is of course going to challenge our binary categorisations of identity and gender. In our introduction to our narrator, whose name we only learn in the final page, cleverly drops information about themselves at the beginning of the story, and lets the reader assign a gender to the creature based on their own biases. This is, of course, a lesson to the reader, as the alien confronts our expectations of gender and our desperate need to gather data and slot someone neatly into a well-defined category.
Throughout the novella we are made aware of how much hostile attention is draw when they fail to successfully imitate a “normal” human, and the way this contributes to body conformity
“They can’t wait to ogle a monster. Without monsters, how would they withstand the unrelenting futility of their days?”
As a cis white able male I am unsure of how clearly this tale speaks to the experience those who society judges as non-conforming but even I can see how arbitrary and performative gender is. The alien labour under the earth's gravity and their old and constant enemy stairs I feel the story also makes pointed observations about ableism.
The translator has mentions she had to develop a different method to highlight the more alienesque thoughts than in the original Korean and her choice in the variable spacing font did a brilliant job conveying the difference.
I was engrossed by Dolki Min's story of a shapeshifting alien. Such a character is of course going to challenge our binary categorisations of identity and gender. In our introduction to our narrator, whose name we only learn in the final page, cleverly drops information about themselves at the beginning of the story, and lets the reader assign a gender to the creature based on their own biases. This is, of course, a lesson to the reader, as the alien confronts our expectations of gender and our desperate need to gather data and slot someone neatly into a well-defined category.
Throughout the novella we are made aware of how much hostile attention is draw when they fail to successfully imitate a “normal” human, and the way this contributes to body conformity
“They can’t wait to ogle a monster. Without monsters, how would they withstand the unrelenting futility of their days?”
As a cis white able male I am unsure of how clearly this tale speaks to the experience those who society judges as non-conforming but even I can see how arbitrary and performative gender is. The alien labour under the earth's gravity and their old and constant enemy stairs I feel the story also makes pointed observations about ableism.
The translator has mentions she had to develop a different method to highlight the more alienesque thoughts than in the original Korean and her choice in the variable spacing font did a brilliant job conveying the difference.