Iron Widow

“Female. That label has never done anything for me except dictate what I can or cannot do. No going anywhere without permission. No showing too much skin. No speaking too loudly or unkindly, or at all, if the men are talking. No living my life without being constantly aware of how pleasing I am to the eye. No future except pushing out son after son for a husband, or dying in a Chrysalis to give some boy the power to reach for glory.”

In Zetian’s eyes, the label of “female” has only caused her problems in life, for her world deliberately subjugates people who are labeled “female” and “woman” and relegates them to the role of tools for men to use and discard. Knowing herself to be meant for much more, given her inner strength, Zetian understandably struggles to identify with the severely limiting roles that her gender has doomed her to embody.

“There’s no such thing as karma […] Or, if it does exist, it sure doesn’t give a shit about people like me. Some of us were born to be used and discarded. We can’t afford to simply go along with the flow of life, because nothing in this world has been created, built, or set up in our favor. If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.”

Zetian believes that discomfort, sacrifice, and action need to be intentionally chosen in order to change the world. Zetian’s speech before leaving for Kaihuang thus divides the world rather simplistically into people who actively resist and those who passively accept the world as it is, and this black-and-white thinking dominates her worldview until Xiuying challenges her with a much more nuanced perspective of how people choose to navigate the forces that compel them to commit distasteful actions against their will, often sacrificing certain principles in order to protect something much dearer to them.

“I hate the way I’ve contorted myself into what people think a girl should be, ready to please, ready to serve. Yet I love the power it’s given me, a power that lies in being underestimated, in wearing assumptions as a disguise.”

Though Zetian struggles to identify with the gender expectations imposed upon her by the dystopian society in which she is embroiled and bristles at the unjust obligations placed on her by others, she paradoxically embraces the roles she is given and uses them as tools with which to compel world around her to serve her own rebellious needs.