Uncanny Race and Octavia Butler

Authors

  • Rebecca Rea Ross Mount St. Mary's University

Keywords:

Octavia Butler, The Uncanny, Feminine Uncanny, Lilith's Brood, Kindred

Abstract

This paper argues for re-framing the fiction of Octavia Butler outside of the narrow purview of science-fiction, and instead, examines her stories as a part of the feminine uncanny—a genre that is also inhabited by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Emily Dickinson, among others. Butler uses extraordinary situations and events to present race as a fundamentally normal part of human experience, but one which has been used to re-categorize other people, instead of situations, as uncanny. As a black, female writer of science-fiction, Butler frequently found herself positioned as the Other in workshops, classes, and conventions. Her experience as a radical alterity in her daily life situates her uniquely in an examination of the uncanny as a literary method of telling uncomfortable truths. While Butler is chiefly associated with cautionary science-fiction—her Parable and Patternmaster series function in this manner—two of her works particularly place her in the feminist uncanny: Kindred and Xenogenesis. These stories both share an adamant refusal to submit to binary categorization; they center around female protagonists who are placed in uncomfortable, dire situations, and choose to survive at almost any cost; and they both use race and the Other as a way to subvert the reader’s expectations. For Octavia Butler, “difference…becomes a catalyst through which power structures can be revised and new ethics imagined.”

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Author Biography

Rebecca Rea Ross, Mount St. Mary's University

Rebecca Rea Ross is a recent graduate of the Humanities program at Mount St. Mary's University. Her areas of interest and research are in feminist critical theory, postmodernism, and the uncanny.

References

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon, 2003.

Butler, Octavia E. Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy. Grand Central Publishing, 2007.

Canavan, Gerry. Octavia E. Butler. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Evans, Shari. “From ‘Hierarchical Behavior’ to Strategic Amnesia: Structures of Memory and Forgetting in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African-American Voices, and Octavia Butler. Eds. Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl. Aqueduct Press, 2013.

Foster, Thomas. “‘We Get to Live, and So Do They.’” Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African-American Voices, and Octavia Butler. Eds. Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl. Aqueduct Press, 2013.

Francis, Consuela, editor. Conversations with Octavia Butler. University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Knabe, Susan and Wendy Gay Pearson. “Gambling Against History.” Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African-American Voices, and Octavia Butler. Eds. Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl. Aqueduct Press, 2013.

Kokoli, Alexandra. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X, Anxiety.” Translated by Cormac Gallagher. N.p., 1962. https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-X_l_angoisse.pdf

Payne, Kimberly Ellen. “Examining the Fledgling Leader in Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Fledgling.” MA Thesis, Clark Atlanta University, 2011. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1780&context=dissertations. Accessed 15 October 2016.

Tucker, Jeffrey. 'The Human Contradiction': Identity and/as Essence in Octavia E. Butler's 'Xenogenesis' Trilogy.’ The Yearbook of English Studies, Science Fiction. Vol. 37, No. 2, 2007, pp. 164-181.

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Published

2017-12-19

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Section

Articles