First, an excellent article for anyone interested in further reading on black science fiction writers .

I’m rather conflicted. Is it possible for an imagined society to be simultaneously queer and normative? The male/female/ooloi trinity that replaces the male/female mode of reproduction is, to my mind, unquestionably queer. By our standards, it is polyamorous, a triad rather than a pair. It calls the binary into question by incorporating a third which is not remotely intelligible according to our conceptions of masculinity or femininity; the ooloi are always it, non-gendered, in a certain sense not quite seeming like people either. Their existence blurs the boundaries of both species and gender. The shift to nonphysical sexuality, too, is different; for all that we understand sexuality and attraction as occurring on a neurological and biochemical level, there is still something about ooloi tentacle sex that seems curiously chaste, asexual even. Sexuality is thus divorced from both gender and the physical body.

And yet, within this new system, does the possibility of non-normative sex/sexuality remain? Even before the humans begin forming bonds with ooloi, they all pair off into heterosexual couples. Did the Oankali select only heterosexual humans? If so, that would be a pragmatic choice for a repopulation effort, but this does not seem to be addressed. The introduction of the ooloi does not question the heterosexual dynamic; rather, it cements it. Everyone exists within a new unit, always male/female/ooloi, this dynamic paralleling the existing male/female/ooloi relationships of the Oankali. Human sexuality is somewhat queered, but from the Oankali perspective, humans are being incorporated into their norms about sexuality. The process of queering human sexuality (from the humans’ perspective) is, in fact, a process of (forcibly) accustoming them to a different set of norms. There is the temptation to call it heteronormative, in that it involves three distinctly different genders, but I am not sure that reusing the word in this context is necessarily helpful or accurate. Or is it?

I think one of the greatest strengths of Dawn may be its ability to imagine genders and gender relationships that I don’t even have the vocabulary to accurately describe (I had to google to figure out if there was a three-part equivalent to “binary” ). It calls into question how we articulate sex, gender, and sexuality, and suggests that there are inherent limits to our existing terminology. I’m just not entirely sure if I agree with how it questions these.