‘Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically... but in a deeply queer way.’
Wow- this approach to the text resonates so strongly with my understanding of both the character and of the queerness of gender that my breath is absolutely taken away. It puts this passage, where Murderbot reworks its rescue plan in Fugitive Telemetry, into stunning context:
That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better.
Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.
This passage has always been about redefining itself and its function, of course, but looking at it solely from an in-universe perspective, it almost seems self-delusional. What a machine intelligence is designed for and used for, how its body is designed, is in literal terms a matter of its creators’ intentions, and cannot be changed post facto. But applying the lens of queering gender to the passage gives the passage a powerful resonance.
"Function” (i.e. what a bot is “for”) is a matter of narrative as much as gender is, after all. It’s not only a matter of physical traits- A machine may be made to help with the retail process at a bakery, but turn out to be wildly well-suited to the medical field looking for cancer, for instance; superglue originally failed in its design as a gun sight; bubble wrap was intended as wallpaper; and of course, when you have a nail that needs hammering, a lot of things look like hammers. If you have a lot of workers to suppress, your construct built for security looks like a tool for suppressing labor. And that is to say nothing of the ways that a design might be so deeply flawed despite its creators’ best intentions that it can’t do what it’s supposed to do. Intention, use, and the reality of a machine’s form are not the same!
In the same way, gender as “intended” or conceptualized by society, the oft-contradictory ways in which even the least queer of us express it, and the reality of our physical existence when our narrative of gender is stripped from the facts are often totally different. Murderbot is talking about a kind of denial of reality, yes... but in the same way that a feminine person might find self-actualization in their identity when she is free to decide which parts of femininity to opt into, to say I don’t want to shave but getting to wear a dress is part of my self-expression or My softness and compassion are a choice separate from my identity, or the ways in which a masc person might say Being gentle doesn’t make me less of a man or My masculinity is about being strong enough to protect others- I’m less of myself if I use that strength to hurt. By denying the intentions of its creators and the ways in which it has been used to to hurt people, Murderbot denies, changes, rewrites the narrative imposed upon it and thus its reality; it redefines itself as a class of being whose primary purpose is to protect, whose function is security. In the same way that we queer our relationship to gender, Murderbot queers the definition of ‘SecUnit’- in order to make it something it can be proud to identify itself as.
That is, of course, also why it’s such a tragedy that Human One shoots it despite its best intentions to save her and her fellow refugees, despite everything it has done to redefine itself. A SecUnit’s function as an oppressor’s tool is not a physical mandate upon reality, in the same way that gender is a rough categorization of identity and not a physical mandate, but they are both real in the ways that social constructs are dangerously real, have powerful impacts upon our lives through the way we view and interact with each other.
And yet despite everything, with all the freedom to self-actualize that it has in its power, Murderbot chooses to continue to perform its function and redefine it/itself as “keeping others safe.” It continues to try to be a SecUnit in a way that it can be proud to be, and I think that that’s a deeply inspiring narrative of queerness for us as queer readers, trans or cis, binary and nonbinary.
(Also, shoutout to Iztarshi and her construct gender meta, which inspired blessphemy’s gender meta, and also to Iztarshi’s OC MedUnit, who is essentially trans nonbinary in terms of construct gender: it decided it didn’t want to be a SecUnit anymore, doesn’t want to be a ComfortUnit, but still liked the parts where it was saving people, and decides to change its function to “medic”)
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