That’s not an unimportant way to read the text. If all the characters differ from each other such that they are individuals, and if every person in the Radchaai Empire is female, then readers are truly being treated to a fictional world in which women are as vast and varied and multitudinous as they are in real life. In doing so, readers are then forced to grapple with the pervasive problem in all fiction of only writing women in specific ways or abiding by generic, reductive, and harmful tropes. This way reading the text has the benefit of forcing readers to read about a variety of characters- brave, scared soldiers, ruthless tyrants, stuck-up nobles, and arrogant, down-on-their-luck drug addicts-as female. The first is to imagine that, since all the characters are called “she”, they are all female.
As I was going through it, I realized there were at least two different ways to read the book given the use of “she” as the chosen pronoun, and with my two reads, I’d used a different way each time. I’m in the middle of rereading the Imperial Radch trilogy, and a few days ago I finished reading the first book Ancillary Justice for the second time.
Much Internet ink has been spilled over Ann Leckie’s decision to not only write the Radchaai Empire as a society in which gender is not a conscious identity that the Radchaai understand themselves as having or are capable of identifying in others, but to use “she” as the pronoun that the Radchaai use to refer to everyone.
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