Timmi Duchamp has posted her WisCon Guest of Honor speech online. As usual with Timmi, the piece in very thoughtful. It is mainly about “intelligibility”, which I think may be a word I will end up using a lot myself, because it is a good label of things I think about a lot.

As the founder of a small press specializing in feminist SF, Timmi is talking mainly about the need for women’s stories to be published. This, she says, is because women’s stories are often “unintelligible” to men, and thus don’t get published by an industry that is always looking for work that appeals to the widest possible audience. She’s quite right here, and the issue goes well beyond science fiction, or even the idea of “stories” as being limited to fiction. Many men appear to have absolutely no idea what it is like to live as a woman, which is why, when women complain of discrimination and harassment, they are often accused of “hysteria” or “imagining things”. The effect doesn’t, I think, work as powerfully the other way around. That’s partly because women are often mothers to sons and learn that way what men’s lives are like, and partly because women are often raised under the assumption that it is their job to support and care for their menfolk, whereas men are raised to believe that it is their job to protect and provide for their women (and in certain cultures, to own and control them).

Nor does intelligibility stop there. All sorts of stories are unintelligible to specific groups of people for various reasons. Science fiction and fantasy is often unintelligible to mainstream critics because they can’t cope with fiction that isn’t set in the real world. Fantasy can be unintelligible to hard science fiction fans because they can’t cope with an imagined world that doesn’t have a scientific rationale. The stories of old people are unintelligible to young people who don’t have the same depth of life experience, and the stories of young people are unintelligible to old people who can’t believe how much the world has changed since they were young. Some anime and manga is unintelligible to westerners because we don’t have the cultural background to interpret it. The myths of people like Australian Aboriginals can also be unintelligible to us (though that generally doesn’t stop us from interpreting them in ways we can understand, no matter how wrong those interpretations seem to the originators of the mythology). And the stories of transgendered people are unintelligible to the vast majority of society, which is why they are so often dismissed as “crazy” or “liars”.

If these are issues that interest you, then you will probably find Timmi’s speech worth a read. If not I’d like you to just read this one small portion of it:

…the problem of intelligibility reflects the usually imperceptible influence of privilege that allows those who are “normal” and unmarked by difference to assume that whenever they don’t get a story or understand the other’s anger that there’s nothing there to get.

Please remember that next time you see someone react to a review by saying, “you are making up things that aren’t there.”