Hey, usomitai? Remember that post you made about an author that said a character was more interesting when they were only based on grammar and not... on humans, or something like that?

I was reading this essay by Joanna Russ that I found on Feminist SF, I think you would like to read it. It made me think about that discussion, how language is a non-subject and how it could be mystified. It's a pretty interesting essay anyway.

This part is very relevant to that discussion:

Artists, like other people, respond to the day-to-day, moment-to-moment specificities of life which they, like everyone else, must live out. Nor is it possible to talk about such topics as "sensibility" (long a favorite in literature classes) and be anything but trivial without reference to the social and economic system that surrounds us and is inside us, as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. Nobody responds to an abstract view of the universe, whether in physics or theology, unless that abstract view metaphorically embodies a social reality with which the responder is intimately familiar. But avoiding social and political realities by the appeal to false universals is an old habit of the humanities.

(Keep in mind this essay was written in 1978.)