Uncanny Race and Octavia Butler

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.”