O presente artigo busca investigar no romance distópico A parábola do semeador, da autora afro-americana Octavia Butler, questões concernentes ao gênero observadas no livro, ou seja, ponderações ...acerca do espaço que o estudo de gênero encontra na literatura. Vale destacar que esse foi o primeiro livro da duologia Semente da Terra, tendo sua primeira publicação em 1993, embora tenha começado a ser traduzido no Brasil muitos anos depois. Dessa maneira, por meio da exposição de trechos selecionados na obra supracitada, serão abordados, também, estudos acerca da desigualdade de gênero. Portanto, discorreremos, aqui, sobre os seguintes assuntos: as diferentes visões dos papéis a serem desempenhados por homens e mulheres na sociedade e relações de poder e domínio do primeiro para com o segundo, bem como reflexões sobre as masculinidades, protagonismo feminino e violência de gênero. Para isso, serão considerados os conceitos propostos por autores como Butler (2003), Oliveira (1998), Gomes (2016), entre outros pesquisadores que tratam dos estudos de gênero na literatura.
This article aims to analyze racial issues in the resistance community depicted in Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia Butler, named ‘Acorn’. By researching the critical approaches to this novel, ...I observed that, as much as they admit race as a force that interferes in the relation between offenders and offended, they have not gone further in questioning how the variety and the complexity of the previous backgrounds of these racialized subjects cannot be ignored and homogenized in the establishment of bonds among the offended as well. As I aim to demonstrate, the world experience carried by each character, determined especially by race and social class, helps meditating on their own asymmetrical positions and showing how their empathy towards one another has to be built and (re-)negotiated all the time.
In the introduction Schalk lays out the most important concepts and terms in the manuscript—Bodyminds and (Dis)ability, explaining that the former rejects the Western dichotomy between the mind and ...body. ...this is a point of pride for Schalk who writes, “I worked to keep my sentences direct and clear because I hope that this book is useful to a range of individuals, including artists, fans, and activists” (29). Schalk does not explicitly critique the inaccessibility of most scholarly criticism in Bodyminds; however, her careful and consistent signposting lays out her argument for all readers and reflects a commitment to deconstructing binaries of simple/complex, able/disabled, and theory/praxis—ideas reflected in the introduction.
The importance of Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower continues to crystalize, as Butler’s prescient imagining of urban California torn apart by neoliberal divestment comes to fruition. ...Following in the space opened up by Black feminist scholarship on Butler, the present essay examines her relevance beyond literary and cultural studies. I argue that Parable is a Black feminist crip theorization of political economy that diagnoses the disabling conditions of precarity under neoliberalism and also prescribes collectivity for crip and mad survival. Neoliberalism describes a global stage of advanced capitalism wherein governments are both incentivized and disciplined into enforcing economic policies that include privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. As Jodi Melamed defines it, neoliberalism requires a certain kind of political governance, that puts the interests of business over the well-being of people (2011). Neoliberal governance engenders what I call “disabling contradictions,” yet the blame for conditions of precarity is deflected onto bodyminds themselves. In Parable of the Sower, Butler theorizes these disabling contradictions of neoliberal governance under advanced capitalism, drawing into focus the political economic systems that cause suffering. Parable also depicts strategies for crip and mad survival that are made possible through the conscious creation of community and networks of solidarity that counter the neoliberal state’s devaluation of bodyminds. Gathering to read and discuss the novel, rather than a distraction from the crises, furthers the emergence of crip and mad collectivities. As such, it is an urgent and timely practice for building futures for crip and mad people.
Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, together with Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter, was a founder of the British National Trust. He became a major force for the preservation of heritage, some of his ...contemporaries arguing that he neglected his ecclesiastical duties (for thirty-four years, he was Canon of Carlisle1) in order to save diverse cultural materials. Encounters with objects, places, and people, he fashioned into essays that allowed him to express opinions on a wide variety of subjects. Things literary, archaeological, topographical, socio-historical, folkloric, biographical, and numerous other interests attracted his curiosity and industry. He was especially keen to capture and record stories he collected from all parts of English Lakeland.
This article explores the ways in which Janelle Monáe’s audiovisual performances leverage black female flesh to trouble historically constituted imaginings of ‘the human’. Tracking Monáe’s ...audiovisual aesthetics across ‘Many moons’ and Dirty Computer, I interrogate acoustic and imagistic resonances that recall the repeating horrors of bondage, and which also constitute performative ‘fabulations’ whereby freedoms that are engendered specifically by and within black female flesh might be imagined. Monáe ‘enfleshes’ the cyborg to critique cyberfeminist and posthumanist theories that advocate for material dissolution as a framework for liberation, as well as to trouble black women’s historical relationships to the category ‘human’. Rather than understand Dirty Computer as a (re)turn to the human Monáe, I contend that the project extends the artist’s longstanding critical engagement with the black female cyborg and black sonic cyberfeminist liberatory potentialities.
PDF
