A correspondent raises the following important point:
In The Birth of a Gender-Genre, you write:
If, by whatever literary device, you cut [women] off from the whole of which they naturally form a half, the salient point about them will be that they are manless. It has to be.
Your point there is that manlessness in not the salient point about intemorphs because men were never a part of their species.
On the other hand, you refer to intemorphiction as a “gender-genre”. Which would imply that the fact that intemorphs are intemorphs is the salient point about them and is what makes intemorphiction a genre.
So – is intemorphiction a genre whose salient point is gender? Or not?
This is an excellent point and helps us to clarify the whole issue. A simple analogy should make things clearer:
Is Japanese literature a genre?
Now clearly to a Japanese person it is not a genre. It is just literature. To a Western reader it may form a sort of genre. In fact even “world music” is treated as a genre (a genre based not on what it is but on what it is not – ie., white western music).
So we can ask two questions about Japanese literature:
1. Is it all about the same broad subject range? Answer: no.
2. Does it all have certain recognizable characteristics when viewed by a non-Japanese person. Answer: mostly, yes.
Those characteristics are not so much literary as the characteristics of Japanese culture. But to a non-Japanese person, this will give an appearance similar to a genre and there are fans of Japanese culture/literature just as if it were a genre.
Exactly the same can be said of intemorphic literature. It is certainly not all one genre in the usual sense since it potentially contains almost every other genre. For example:
The Flight of the Silver Vixen is intemorphic science fiction.
The Lady Carleon series is intemorphic detective literature.
A South Kadorian Romance is intemorphic romance literature.
Endeline Towers is an intemorphic ghost story and an intemorphic schoolgirl story.
The Dream Key is intemorphic fantasy/children’s literature.
Now as with Japanese literature, each of these genres is somewhat different from its non-intemorphic (schizomorphic) equivalent because the culture is different. To give one simple example, the intemorphic detective genre does not involve murder. That is because the act of one maid killing another is so abnormal and grotesque to the intemorphic mind that a murder story – even of the genteel country house type so beloved of schizomorphic fiction – would be something more like a horror-story.
Of course there are countless subtler cultural factors that permeate the whole of intemorphiction, giving it, from the schizomorphic point of view, a genre-quality. And since most schizomorphs will regard intemorphity as a purely literary or literary/philosophical creation (a point which it is not our business, qua publishers, to dispute) it can be properly regarded by schizomorphs as a literary genre.
However one thing that is clearly apparent is that this genre is very different from the all-women worlds genre discussed in The Birth of a Gender-Genre. Because in that genre – from Victorian feminist utopias through ’50s sub-porn to modern feminist literature – the fact that the world is all-women is salient.It has to be, because for schizomorphs manlessness is a singularity (even if it has become quasi-normal under certain fictional circumstances). For intemorphs it is normality and there is no other.
Thus, intemorphity is incidental to intemorphic literature. The story may be a detective story, a space opera, a romance, or a fairytale. The intemorphic culture pervades it all, just as Japanese culture pervades a Japanese story. But, like Japanese, or any other, literature, it is a genre precisely to the extent that the reader stands outside that culture.
Calling this a gender-genre may seem like an oversimplificaton, and it is. But it is justified by the fact that the root similarity of intemorphic cultures (which are among themselves quite various) lies in the nature of the feminine principle.
And, to leave you with a little food for thought, to intemorphs, schizomorphic literature – that is, every book you ever read – would be a genre.
See Also:
History of Intemorphic Publishing
