This article explores her multivalent approach to questions of futurity and the bodily reproduction it is reliant upon in Wild Seed (1980) and “Bloodchild” (1984), works that look critically at the ...past while remaining grounded in the present. In these stories, reproduction is multi-sexed, gendered, and posthuman, vividly rendering the yet imagined possibility of male impregnation and more capacious relations between human and nonhuman animals. Here, the importance of the question about what good this is for Black people frames an exploration of Butler’s incisive speculation about the possibilities of Black reproductive power as a resistant mode of being that dares to exceed boundaries erected by narrowly defined structures of identity rooted in sexist and racist ideas. Butler presents a socially fraught representation of biological reproduction in all its bodily grotesqueness, marked by an insistence on attending to the lateral and hierarchical relations complicated by procreation. She reminds us that to reproduce is to bear a visceral burden, and that this burden holds immense implications for the ethical making and sustaining of lives, especially in oppressive conditions.
Abstract
This article takes up science-fictional visions of the future against the “deep time” of the Anthropocene in order to explore the possibilities for utopia that remain in an era that only ...seems capable of producing necrofuturological dread. The piece surveys a wide range of contemporary literature and film; the key prose authors discussed are Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These texts are used to identify patterns of thought that have become habitual in the cultural moment of the Anthropocene, and they are explored as critiques of, alternatives to, and lines of flight away from its more pessimistic ideological formations.
With the onset of global climate change and the human-induced alteration of ecosystems across the planet, the territories on which nations and communities rely are undergoing massive transformations. ...If the foundation of the nation-State is sovereignty over a fixed national territory, then climate change is a threat to the basis of our political reality: the nation-State. As a result, many expect that climate change will disrupt settled national existences, upend our current political reality, and produce new flows of human migration. As such, the relationship between migration and climate change is frequently understood in terms of security and how so-called ‘climate refugees’ will threaten political-economic stability. Recent science fiction emerging from the Americas, however, has imagined new forms of political agency emerging from the intersection of climate change and migration. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how Octavia Butler’s Parable novels imagine a new political agency based on the emerging figure of the climate refugee. Rather than trying to avoid a perceived migration crisis provoked by climate change (i.e., preserving the nation-State political system in the face of climate change), Butler develops a new climate change political agency based on the climate refugee.
Con el inicio del cambio climático global y la alteración de los ecosistemas inducida por el hombre en todo el planeta, los territorios de los que dependen las naciones y comunidades están experimentando transformaciones masivas. Si el fundamento del Estado-nación es la soberanía sobre un territorio nacional fijo, entonces el cambio climático es una amenaza a la base de nuestra realidad política: el Estado-nación. Como resultado, muchos esperan que el cambio climático perturbe las existencias nacionales asentadas, trastoque nuestra realidad política actual y produzca nuevos flujos de migración humana. Como tal, la relación entre migración y cambio climático frecuentemente se entiende en términos de seguridad y de cómo los llamados “refugiados climáticos” amenazarán la estabilidad política y económica. Sin embargo, la ciencia ficción reciente que surge en las Américas ha imaginado nuevas formas de agencia política que surgen de la intersección del cambio climático y la migración. En esta presentación, demostraré cómo las novelas Parable de Octavia Butler imaginan una nueva agencia política basada en la figura emergente del refugiado climático. En lugar de tratar de evitar una crisis migratoria percibida como provocada por el cambio climático (es decir, preservar el sistema político del Estado-nación frente al cambio climático), Butler desarrolla una nueva agencia política de cambio climático basada en el refugiado climático.
Bloom's Butler's Taxonomy Panaram, Sasha Ann
The Black scholar,
04/03/2022, Letnik:
52, Številka:
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Journal Article
Recenzirano
Two years after Octavia E. Butler died in 2006 due to a stroke, The Huntington Library sent a truck to her home in Pasadena, California and proceeded to cart away her papers. Although Butler had been ...hesitant about donating her papers, after multiple conversations with Curator of Literary Manu- scripts Sara S. "Sue" Hodson, who spotted her at a conference and boldly inquired, "Do you have plans for your papers? The Huntington would be interested," she gradually embraced the idea Of donating her writing to this institution. 1 In 2008, Natalie Russell, then a library assistant at The Huntington and now the Assistant Curator of Literary Collections, was tasked with cataloging Butler's files. The catch? When she assumed the job, Russell did not have any familiarity with Butler's writing whatso- ever. Russell reflects on her experience of arranging Butler's manuscripts and miscellany movingly in "Meeting Octavia E. Butler in Her Papers."2 In a conversation with Russell at the start of 2021, spurred by my own inability to access Butler's papers due to the pandemic, she reiterated, as she does in her article, a personal connection—a friendship—that developed with Butler over time as she learned about her life throughout her files.
African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much ...scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.
The lives and careers of early medical doctors have long been studied, and early women lawyers have been the subject of considerable academic and professional activity particularly in the years ...leading up to the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, but comparatively little attention has been paid to early chartered surveyors. This paper introduces Irene Barclay, the first woman to qualify as a chartered surveyor, in 1922. Her family background informed her politics and ethos and her career choice will be set against a consideration of the career options available, the preparation for a professional life laid by Octavia Hill's house manager training system and the development and professionalisation of housing management after Hill's death. Barclay's place in urging and mentoring other women to professional qualification is reviewed, along with the role of professional and women's networks. The paper draws on Barclay's work in the public and private sector (simultaneously) over a career lasting from just after World War I until her retirement in 1972 and finds that, after the opportunities opened from 1919, the progress of women in chartered surveying was, into the twenty-first century, still very slow and continues to be low (with on 15% female in 2020).
The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs decision in June 2022 came as a shock. Yet, upon reflection, the decision simply reinforced what history has shown: women’s rights and ...opportunities have always been subject to controls, fluctuations, and specious rationales. Dobbs is one in a long line of legal edicts in the U.S. and elsewhere that either allow or curtail and control female agency, including reproductive agency. The decision’s devastating consequences for U.S. women’s reproductive lives are damaging enough, but they are only part of the story. In addition to its hobbling effects on reproductive rights and justice, the Dobbs decision goes hand in hand with the underlying causes of today’s unparalleled environmental emergency. This article argues, through ecofeminist theory and feminist and Native American climate fiction, that Dobbs is a catalyst for understanding the role of patriarchy—as a particularly insidious form of androcentrism—in the destruction of our planet. Evidence is mounting to support claims made by ecofeminists since the 1970s: patriarchy and resulting masculinist values have been foundational to the extractive and exploitative attitudes and practices regarding marginalized peoples, colonized lands, and racialized entitlements to natural resources that have endangered the earth’s biosystems.
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