Watch: Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose (2008)īutler’s writings connect the past with imagined futures, integrating sf, vampire and fantasy elements such as aliens, vampires, time travel, and dystopias, with thoughtful considerations of race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, non-Western mythologies, colonialism and power dynamics. When she began writing in the 1970s, Butler was spurred into writing, not out of a belief in her own genius (although she was the first sf writer to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”) – she faced challenges ranging from paying the bills to dyslexia – but from a realization that much less talented white male sf writers didn’t need to think twice about starting. Even in the early 21st century, the science fiction (sf) genre is described as being mostly white, male and heteronormative – although the actual histories of fans and creators might disagree. 'Neither do I.Conversations about Afrofuturist and science fiction feministwriters always acknowledge the revolutionary significance Octavia E. And heaven help me, Dana, I don't know.' 'Neither do I,' I whispered.

I said I didn't know… kept telling them I didn't know. 'Then they wanted me to tell them how such a thing could happen. The following conversation between Dana and her husband, Kevin, portrays their obvious pain after they (re)visit history: In fact, the first-person narratives of Kindred and Fledgling reveal Dana and Shori's helplessness as bizarre events unfold around them. It is in tandem with the progression of the narratives that Dana and Shori adapt to the settings that they are subject/ed to. 2 In these two texts, Butler deliberately keeps the protagonists in the dark, concealing vital information from them that might aid their survival. By making Shori dark-skinned, Butler creates the first black vampire, reworking myths and fantasies associated with the body (both human and non-human) and redefining the identities and experiences of her protagonists.Īrguing in line with Theri Pickens's observation that all of Butler's works depict characters with some disability (167), I have chosen Dana who loses an arm in Kindred and Shori who wakes up with no memory of her past in Fledgling. Possessing both human and Ina DNA, Shori is a genetic experiment. Like those in vampire folklore, Fledgling's vampires are pale-skinned species that cannot tolerate sunlight. Shori Mathews of Fledgling is an Ina 1 who wakes up to complete loss of memory following the murder of her family. She is mysteriously sent back to her home, present-day Los Angeles, whenever there is a serious threat to her life. Kindred's black heroine, Dana Franklin, travels across time to reach her white ancestor, Rufus Weylin, in the antebellum South where she saves his life multiple times. In an effort to identify disability not only in relation to race and gender, but also as initiating dialogues about what it means to be a living being, I propose to study the disabled primary characters in Butler's Kindred and Fledgling as they deal with their newly acquired identities. Schalk writes:ĭisability is strongly present throughout Butler's body of work, from her published texts and her early notes and drafts to her unfinished and unpublished works not only in the form of disabled primary and secondary characters, but also in terms of thematic concerns, often in direct relationship to more commonly discussed matters of race and gender. Jones and Anna Hinton study feminist disability and disabled black motherhood respectively in Butler's Parable series. Theri Pickens and Sami Schalk further discuss the intersectionality of disability and Butler (in addition to Butler's published body of work, Schalk draws instances from Butler's journal entries available at the Huntington archive to study the lived experience of disability), while Esther L.

Here I explore how disability inaugurates the elaborate processes of identity (re)formation and belonging in Butler's Kindred and Fledgling.ĭisability studies in relation to Butler's oeuvre emerged in 2013 with Megan Obourn who proposes disability in Butler's Lilith's Brood as a way 'to think about how one might narrate race and gender 'otherwise' without losing them as sites of identity and identification' (111). Though disability has often been de-emphasized by the more visible tropes of race and gender in Butler, it has recently emerged as crucial to understanding her fiction. Harrison, 'I think it is a writer's duty to write about human differences, all human differences, and help make them acceptable' (Francis 6). Butler insists in her interview with Rosalie G. Disability and the subsequent reclamation of lost identities and/or rebuilding of new identities are interrelated themes that traverse Octavia E.

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