Abstract
The ugly, grotesque alien is one of science fiction’s most enduring tropes. Where usually this ugly alien is the embodiment of evil, science fiction writer Octavia Butler refuses to represent it as a single-dimensional being. While she constructs insectoid and many-tentacled beings that might feel physically familiar as monsters, she endows them with humanity and intertwines them with humans in relationships that muddy the waters of power, consent, repulsion, and desire. This chapter argues that Butler’s “creepy crawlies” point the way towards a black feminist-queer politics of the grotesque, which troubles a linear theory of liberation just as it does the concept of an integral community. It examines Butler’s revisions of two figures, the ugly alien and the traitorous black matriarch, as they are articulated in Dawn, the first novel of the Xenogenesis series. By connecting these figures both figuratively and materially, Butler calls into question a post-Black Power movement nationalist discourse that premises hetero-normativity and properly disciplined womanhood as conditions for community progress. By opening the human body to queering disruptions, Butler proposes that we rethink the desirability of the black communal body—a beautiful, orderly being that must present its best face to the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), Conversations “Radio Imagination,” 118–119.
- 2.
Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999), 27.
- 3.
Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001): 58–59; Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed (New York: Oxford University Press 2010), 141–142.
- 4.
Janelle Hobson, “Black Beauty and Digital Spaces: The New Visibility Politics,” ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, http://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hobson/
- 5.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Sheryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. Radical humanisms and critical posthumanism point out that in modern thought, the dominant concept of the human has actually been constructed around white, male, heterosexual, bourgeois life, and subjectivity. Theorizing in the process of colonial projects and empire building, Europeans were only able to construct the human in opposition to people they encountered in other lands, who needed to be rendered as non-human or less than human in order to be enslaved or eliminated in service to the project of empire.
- 6.
The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, ed. Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The Feminist Press, 2009); Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); E. Patrick Johnson, ed., No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 12. The Combahee River Collective Statement and Barbara Smith’s lesbian reading of Sula in her definition and demonstration of a black feminist critical practice are, among others, texts that assert a critique of hetero-normativity and alertness to queer possibility as integral in black feminist analysis. E. Patrick Johnson also discusses a body of newer black feminist/queer work that advances queer reading practices while focusing on the black female body.
- 7.
I am thinking of recent black feminist and black queer studies, works including but not limited to Lamonda Horton Stallings, Mutha’ is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture and Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures; Dareik Scott’s Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination; Jennifer C. Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography; Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, and Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. Most of these works question the association of black women’s participation in visual and sexual cultures primarily with injury and provide productive readings of sites and performances that traditional reading strategies of both black feminism and black studies more broadly would find irredeemable within a logic of resistance.
- 8.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968): 20, 25, 32, 316–317.
- 9.
Ibid., 291, 321.
- 10.
Kobena Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007).
- 11.
McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 210.
- 12.
Ibid. I am particularly thinking about hip hop and popular culture, and being informed by Uri McMillan’s reading of performances of rap artist Nicki Minaj. Minaj, with her exaggerated visual and auditory presentation, is a vivid example of a carnivalesque aesthetic, yet she tends to be dominantly read within production of stereotypes of black women’s excess.
- 13.
Janelle Hobson, “The Batty Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 87–105. Janelle Hobson traces the history of cultural representations of black women’s bodies, particularly their buttocks as grotesque. While Hobson briefly discusses the subversive potential of the grotesque and purports to use a disability studies framework, the essay’s focus on redefining the black female body as beautiful (which, she points out, has been associated with hierarchy and imposed values) leaves the grotesque in its status as undesirable, a realm from which black women’s bodies must be rescued.
- 14.
Valerie Chepp, “Black Feminist Theory and the Politics of Irreverence: The Case of Women’s Rap,” Feminist Theory 16, no. 2 (2015): 208.
- 15.
Bakhtin , Rabelais and His World, 308, 318.
- 16.
Ibid., 438–439.
- 17.
Deborah Willis, “Wangechi Mutu by Deborah Willis,” Bomb Magazine, http://bombmagazine.org/article/1000052/wangechi-mutu
- 18.
Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 7.
- 19.
Tiffany E. Barber, “Cyborg Grammar? Reading Wangechi Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, ed. Reynaldo Anderson & Charles E. Jones (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 3–25, 6.
- 20.
Ibid., 4.
- 21.
Stephen W. Potts, “We Keep Playing the Same Record: A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler,” Science Fiction Studies 23, no. 3 (1996): 331–338, 332; De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai, “A Memorial to Octavia E. Butler,” Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 3 (2010): 356.
- 22.
Saidiya Hartman, To Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007).
- 23.
Ibid., 496; Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler, “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre,” The Black Scholar 17, no. 2 (1986), 15.
- 24.
Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990, revised second edition (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002).
- 25.
The Time Has Come 1964–66, directed by James A. DeVinney and Madison Davis Lacy Jr., in Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954–1985, created and executive produced by Henry Hampton (Blackside Inc., 1990). For example, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee engaged in voter registration drives before and after its turn to Black Power as an ideology. But where previous voter registration drives may have been framed in terms of the need for inclusion, black nationalist emphasis on voter participation was premised on the idea that those in demographic majorities in areas (largely black people in Lowndes County Mississippi where the SNCC adopted the black panther as a political symbol) should control the politics of those areas.
- 26.
Algernon Austin, Achieving Blackness (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 52–55; Charise L. Cheney, Brothers Gonna Work it Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 32, 35–39; Cheryl Clarke, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 3.
- 27.
Austin, Achieving Blackness, 52.
- 28.
Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), 111; Cathy Cohen, AIDS and the Boundaries of Blackness: The Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999), xi, 11.
- 29.
Alexander-Floyd, Gender, Race, and Nationalism, 133–142. Alexander-Floyd compares the black woman-as-traitor trope to the Chicano figure of La Malinche. The Black Malinche, according to Alexander-Floyd, often appears in highly publicized spectacles of black male embarrassment, in which black press and commentators focus on black women as the temptresses who undermine the careers of powerful black men.
- 30.
Michele Osherow, “The Dawn of a New Lilith: Revisionary Mythmaking in Women’s Science Fiction,” NWSA Journal 12, no. 1 (2000): 69.
- 31.
Ibid., 79.
- 32.
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction Utopia and Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), xvii, 6.
- 33.
Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Popular Library, 1987), 41.
- 34.
Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992): 296, 313.
- 35.
Butler, Dawn, 159.
- 36.
Ibid., 147.
- 37.
Kumiko Nemoto, “Climbing the Hierarchy of Masculinity: Asian American Men’s Cross-Racial Competition for Intimacy with White Women,” Gender Issues 25, no. 2 (2008): 81.
- 38.
Amie Breeze Harper, “The Absence of Meat in Oankali Dietary Philosophy: An Eco Feminist Analysis of Octavia Butler’s Dawn,” in The Black Imagination: Science, Futurism, and the Speculative, ed. Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 111–129, 123.
- 39.
Ibid., 164.
- 40.
Robin Kelley, “Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter) Nationalism in the Cold War Era.” In Is it Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 67–90, 86; Sean L. Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon: Eldridge Cleaver’s Cold War,” Diplomatic History, 37, no. 3, (2013): 538–571, 551.
- 41.
Harper, “The Absence of Meat in Oankali Dietary Philosophy: An Eco Feminist Analysis of Octavia Butler’s Dawn.” In The Black Imagination: Science, Futurism, and the Speculative, 123.
- 42.
Butler, Dawn, 165.
- 43.
Ibid, 240.
- 44.
Ibid, 87.
- 45.
Harper, “The Absence of Meat in Oankali Dietary Philosophy: An Eco Feminist Analysis of Octavia Butler’s Dawn,” 120.
- 46.
Butler, Dawn, 170.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Patricia MacCormack, “Mucosal Monsters.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, ed. Bettina Pappenburg and Marta Zarzycki (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 234.
- 49.
Ibid., 226.
- 50.
Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, 296, 313.
- 51.
Butler, Dawn, 190–191.
- 52.
Ibid., 203.
- 53.
Ibid., 193.
- 54.
Dareik Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 9.
- 55.
Butler, Dawn, 41.
- 56.
Ibid., 248.
- 57.
Osherow, “The Dawn of a New Lilith,” 79.
- 58.
Butler, Dawn, 132.
- 59.
Ibid., 11, 33, 78.
- 60.
Following Sylvia Wynter’s contention that the liberal bourgeois subject of Man is only an overrepresented genre within the human, not the human itself, and Zakiyah Jackson’s critique of posthumanism as dismissing black radical humanisms that seek to undo, rather than become Western man, I use the term otherhuman rather than posthuman. ‘Post’ human suggests something after or beyond a singular human subject rather than ‘other’ forms of human that have preexisted, coexisted, and intersected Western Man.
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Davis, J.A. (2018). Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal Body in Octavia Butler’s Dawn. In: Rodrigues, S., Przybylo, E. (eds) On the Politics of Ugliness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76783-3_15
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