Stay with me here.
If you take away the rampant sexism (and I'm not sure many will want to, since it's a large part of the book) this story made me think of 1984. It's set in a dystopian society and we follow characters whose thought processes we cannot fully comprehend. We do see enough humanity in them to empathize with them, though, and the dystopian nature of the world is based on things that are already happening in our world right now. Climate change, the growing power of corporations, genetic modification and engineering - the book spoke to me most about the these issues; our solutions to the problems they cause are going to change the way our world looks in the 23rd century.
I've lost you all, haven't I.
I'm with you, like, I can see it with the government overstepping its boundaries and creating the dystopian setting, but with the characters juxtaposing that by being so quintessentially human.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, I don't think that the book itself was sexist, at least not the way that we think. I think that the treatment of Emiko was meant to be really rough, but only for the intention of being realistic in the setting. I think she really accurately represents the literal dehumanization of women through sexual objectification.
That being said, the fact that you have four main characters initially (Hock Seng, Emiko, Anderson Lake, and Jaidee) and only one of them is a woman is kind of discomforting, coupled with the fact that none of the other female characters have any control over their own fate is also bad.
Like, it isn't terribly consistent with feminist values, but I didn't take as solid an issue with the treatment of Emiko as the female representation in general.