So what is intemorphiction? What is so unique about it that makes it a whole new genre?
Intemorphiction is fiction about intemorphs. Intemorphs are races that have two feminine sexes. Both look like human women (if they are humanoid species) but neither are. Neither are female but both are feminine.
So essentially, this is a variant on the “all women worlds” theme, even though you don’t actually call them women?
Well, we’d dispute that on several grounds. But let’s just start by taking that question on its own terms. Where you have “all women worlds” stories, whether 1950s style fundamentaly-patriarchal versions or pre- and post-50s feminist-influenced versions, ultimately these women are women and they are, to a large extent defined by their relations, or non-relations, with men. This is both textual and meta-textual. That is, the “man question” is both present in the plot, and the story is making points that reflect back on the male/female world from which it emerged.
This isn’t a criticism. It is how it has to be and should be. That is what women are. They are one half of a two-sex system, the other half of which is men. If, by whatever literary device, you cut them 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.
This genre began with Mary E. Bradley’s novel Mizora in 1880, which gave rise to a number of feminist-utopian all-women-worlds novels, the most famous of which was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in 1915.
In the 1950s there were various fundamentally patriarchal approaches to this. There were films in which all-women societies were just panting for male companionship (sometimes forbidden by a small man-hating elite); others in which they were more ambiguous. Ambiguities increase from the second-wave feminist era of the 1960s, but the “man question” never goes away. It can’t.
Intemorphiction deals with peoples who have never known men. Who are complete in themselves with their own two sexes. They don’t love men or hate them, they have no very strong reaction to them if they encounter them, which, for the most part, they don’t. More importantly, they cannot see mascûli, whether negatively or positively, as potential mates, any more than they would any other alien life-form.
Also intemorphiction is not making points about Tellurian (earth) gender relations – even analogically. It just isn’t what we are about.
So you’re saying that intemorphiction is really irrelevant to real-world (what you call Tellurian) gender issues – and other issues too?
Yep. Consider it a complete alternate world, if you wish.
Perhaps you don’t even consider yourselves human?
No comment. We are discussing the genre, not its writers. They may have various views of themselves.
Okay. Well here’s the nub as far as I – and would guess a lot of folks – are concerned. If your characters “aren’t women”, how can you say they are feminine? What does “feminine” even mean outside the context of male/female?
I agree. That is the nub. This is where intemorphiction is so different from other genres. On the surface it is about two feminine sexes, but underlying that is a whole different view, not just of gender but of what you Tellurians call “science” and “reality” – at least in the current phase of your history.
You think of gender as something either biologically determined or socially conditioned. You may argue about which of the two influences is dominant – what mixture of culture and biology “creates gender” – but you can’t conceive of any other determinant. Your current “scientific narrative” forbids that.
Now we intemorphs see gender in quite another way. We accept that both biology and culture play a role in its deployment on material worlds. But both of these are only mechanisms for the manifestation of cosmic realities that predate the material universe itself.
So you are saying gender is a “cosmic reality”? And are rejecting the whole scientific point of view?
Absolutely we are saying gender is a cosmic reality. And we are rejecting not science but certainly the “scientific point of view” – meaning the popular narrative based on a loose understanding of something called “science”, which is really just the philosophy of the ostrich: “Whatever I can’t see doesn’t exist”.
There is nothing outlandish about seeing gender as a cosmic reality based in celestial prototypes. It is what all your people believed until the 17th century when you think you had an Enlightenment and we think you embraced a new kind of darkness.
Is this a genre, then, or one writer’s point of view?
It is a genre. There are several writers of intemorphiction, and it is growing. We would have to say that Alice Lucy Trent’s The Feminine Universe has been very influential in shaping the genre. She did not actually write intemorphiction, but she did state the Feminine Essentialist philosophy very clearly. That is why the Sun Daughter Press is proud to take over the publication of The Feminine Universe.
Most of what Miss Trent says is not new. She is stating the view of reality that existed throughout your world – in all civilizations, from empires to tribes – before the errors of the Enlightenment. She does not reject science but she points out the limitations of the purely materially-directed scientific method. The parts that are new in her work consist of her reinstatement of the primacy of the feminine principle which she holds to be the ancient and original position of Telluria.
But Miss Trent did not initiate intemorphiction. The first fully-intemorphic book – The District Governess by Regina Snow – appeared a few years before The Feminine Universe*, with other, shorter, intemorphic works appearing before that. They are all based on broadly the same philosophy. Miss Snow was just the first to expound it systematically in print.
I understand that this philosophy states that while femininity is an essential quality of sentient life, masculinity is merely an accident that may or may not exist in any given humanoid species.
It is a bit more complex than that, but yes. And let me say that Miss Trent never says that. But the Feminine Essentialist philosophy certainly leaves the door open for that position. So, if you want to, you can call intemorphiction a scientific-speculative genre – but one based on a different view of science from that currently prevalent in Telluria.
Are all writers of intemorphiction Feminine Essentialists?
We haven’t taken a survey. Some are, some aren’t. Some aren’t even interested in philosophy. What I would say is that, just as the view of the world based on the Enlightenment makes possible the modern novel, even for those who have never opened a philosophy book, so Feminine Essentialism makes possible intemorphiction.
Similarly if Marx had never written, all modern social-protest literature would look very different, and if Darwin had never written, 20th/21st-century literature would be a whole different animal – if you’ll excuse the expression. Darwin fundamentally changed what Tellurian human beings think they are and – as one example – made possible the concept of “sex” in the modern sense (the word is first used in that sense 1926, by the way).
I may seem to be getting away from the point. But what I am saying is that fundamental philosophies – how we understand ourselves and the universe to work – are crucial to how our literature works. Intemorphiction is literature based on a different paradigm.
A feminine paradigm.
Exactly. In fact the modern Tellurian view of “science” is a quintessentially masculine view. It is because the society is masculine that it conceives reality the way it does. Intemorphic literature is founded on a feminine paradigm in ways that go beyond obvious gender.
See Also:
Is Intemorphiction Really a Genre?
History of Intemorphic Publishing
