Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near
We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.
It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.
Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.
Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.
Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.
Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.
The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.
Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
