I think one of the best things The Masquerade does is how it, rather than completely disengaging with any sort of gender politics or at least diminishing them to allow its female character mobility across what are or have been considered in the past, masculine domains, approaches and repurposes real world gender politics in this fictional world with different understandings of gender. The Falcresti domains of gender and how they’re influenced by Incrasticism. The matriarchal structure of the navy. The Stakhi construct where gendered role is dependent on how one adheres to a gendered sphere. how Baru’s own gender is mutable, taking different meanings and implications depending on the context she is currently residing within. As a Falcresti agent and product, a lot of who she is, is shaped within that structure; her presentation and role is socially feminine, she keeps her appearance relatively plain and is someone who works behind the scenes in logistics. But her identity as a lesbian and a Taranoki woman complicates this, and the role of Incrasticism, which dictates her as needing to overcome ‘the deficiencies of her race’, which assigns her as a ‘sexually provocative, excessive and indulgent’, and means there’s this constant sexually charged threat of violence in her periphery, that sexually corrective therapy, to break her down and reconstruct her. This isn’t conclusive and I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it, but it’s so fascinating.