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Jesser, Nancy.: Blood, genes and gender in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Dawn.
Extrapolation (Kent State Univ., Kent, OH) (43:1) [Spring 2002] , p.36-61.
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Blood, genes and gender in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Dawn
Nancy Jesser. Extrapolation. Kent: Spring 2002.Vol. 43, Iss. 1; pg. 36, 26 pgs
People: Butler, Octavia E
Author(s): Nancy Jesser
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Extrapolation. Kent: Spring 2002. Vol. 43, Iss. 1; pg. 36, 26 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 00145483
Text Word Count 12578
Abstract (Document Summary)
Jesser analyzes two of Octavia Butler's most frequently discussed heroines, Lilith and Dana from the novels "Dawn" and "Kindred," respectively. Butler's female heroines confront the "data" of biology, but 留學生dissertation網not as an "enslavement" or "limitation." In place of the enslaved female body, Butler imagines a powerful, emancipating intersubjective body in which the social bosom and the maternal bosom are newly coherent.

Full Text (12578 words)
Copyright University of Texas at Brownsville Spring 2002
* For feminist critics eager to claim the most prominent African-American woman writer of science fiction as one of their own, Octavia Butler is both a heroine and problem child. Butler herself has proclaimed herself a feminist. So what could be the problem? Donna Haraway points to her as an exemplar of cyborg writing whose heroines are pioneer cyborgs. In addition, both African-American and feminist literary critics have long seen her novels as crucial in opening up spaces for African American heroines as well as revising science fiction's boundaries with regard to history and the experience of African Diaspora.1 Usually, they disagree on exactly how Butler's female protagonists are feminist For instance, is it because they reject the binary fracturing and myths of innocence and organicism, as http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/linguistic/Haraway claims? Or are her heroines, like Anyanwu "Black Eves" and "archetypal earthmothers" as Sandra Govan describes them (83)? Or are they feminist heroines because they are "healers, teachers, artists, mothers" who use their powers and exercise their authority "directly," killing "when necessary, " "brutally, efficiently, and even joyfully?" as in Frances Smith Foster's assessment (41) ? Finally, do they epitomize Ruth Salvaggio's vision of proper female heroines for exercising "brute feminist force"?2
In this article, I analyze two of Butler's most frequently discussed heroines, Lilith and Dana from the novels Dawn and Kindred, respectively. I focus on the question of Butler's biological essentialism as it relates to the genetic body, articulating key differences in her biologism with regard to race and sex.3 Then, I examine the implications of her "gene theory" on her feminism. What kind of feminist is Butler if in her fictions she holds to a biologically informed notion of lived female experience and behavior? And perhaps more importantly, what kind of feminism does a biologically informed notion make possible? #p#分頁標題#e#
Most feminist critics of Butler who discuss race and gender conflate the two forms of biological essentialism. Elyce Rae Helford in "`Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young?': The Construction of Gender, Race and Species" concedes Butler's "tendency to fall back on biological determinants in her representations of gender, " but this does not stop her from arguing for a correspondence between race and gender constructions in Butler (268). She modifies Alice Jardine's concept of gynesis (a process of troubling masculinist master narratives) to create a corresponding process regarding race and species (ethnesis and zoomorphesis, respectively). She suggests that Butler "deconstructs" categories of race and gender and destabilizes them all. She argues that Butler's narrative resistance to "simple categorization and identification" shows us "the degree to which species, like gender and race, is primarily a matter of who has the power to construct and label whom" (264). The "emotional" and "intellectual" state of "disturbing awareness" that the story "Bloodchild" leaves the reader in is Helford's most powerful argument for seeing gender and race/species in the same light, as "entirely relative to the position from which we are permitted to understand these categories" (265). However, by her own admission, the sexual biology in Butler's story is remarkably fixed even for the most other "otherworldly" and hybrid categories that Butler creates. For instance, in Dawn, among the alien species while there are three sexual forms required for reproduction, two are male and female. I believe this is because Helford's (following Jardine's) mastering narrative of gender is drawn from "humanistic philosophies" and Western political thought, not twentieth-century evolutionary biology. The gendered stereotypes on which such narratives rely are quite different from the one's promulgated by post-Darwinian sociobiologists. For instance, female passivity and deference is not always part of the story of maternal caring described in many biology texts and nature documentaries.4 One common nature-show narrative includes invoking caution when approaching females with young. The story goes that the scientific observers must always be aware of how potentially dangerously aggressive a female animal is ... if only when protecting her young. In this case, she is more aggressive then even a male protecting his territory. Therefore, the behavioral "norms" presented by this evolutionary sociobiology are often quite different from those cultural norms informed by Biblical and cultural sources,5 though they constantly interact and interface.
The associative chain linking gender to race is powerful. The argument for the analogy between race and sex was used to justify, in the 19th century, sex inequality before the law and European imperialism.6 Recently, it has had a different political orientation. But the same kind of logic is used to solidify and justify political and social alliances between feminism and anti-racism. Solidarity between anti-racism and anti-sexism is certainly in my opinion a positive thing; however, I would argue that race and gender have been linked with little thought given to this construction and its implications. Considering then metaphorical equivalents with corresponding modes of action and origins may not be the best way to change the material and social conditions of raced and sexed bodies. While the "interlocking" oppressions have some similarities in their modes of action and reproduction, we ought to pay close attention to the differences. The raced body and the sexed body have and have had different relationships to biology. I am not arguing that the "recognizable" is always simple and uncomplicated, somehow outside the social. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble has pointed to the lengths and depths of "normalization" that the sexed body undergoes. Though its boundaries and signs are produced socially, it is useful to recognize that the effects of the social on the sexed body are distinct In contemporary biological accounts race is no longer described as a biological/scientific category as are species and sex. #p#分頁標題#e#
Like the plots of many of Butler's novels, biologists' determinations are based on the reproductive possibilities of individuals. I want to emphasize here that in both cases, the social meanings of these "different" bodies are imaginary and discursive. But differently so. Butler's fictions offer us a good place to tease apart these relationships and explore her relationship to biological narratives of gender difference even as her plots contest the socially constituted boundaries of racial difference. Difference matters in Butler, but racial difference matters differently than sexual difference, which makes possible future generations.
Therefore, it is fair to say that Butler is "constructivist," when relating to racial identities;7 however, when relating to sex/gender her female characters are often, biologically coded as female-that is devoted 留學生dissertation網to self-sacrifice in the name of nurturing at one's own expense and the urging of maternal instincts. The terms of gender in Butler are drawn from the discourses of sociobiology and population biology. Her female heroines' biological position as mothers/ potential mothers affects their actions, predisposing them to a kind of altruism notably lacking in most of her male characters. There is a strong correlation between "other-directed thinking" and the female body. The correlation in Butler is not always traceable to social circumstances.8 In some characters, as in Kindred's 19th c. Black heroine, Alice, it goes against the immediate circumstances of culture, though always at a cost Butler manages to be at once committed to the accountable influence of the X chromosome on behavior, emotions, reactions of her female characters, a position rooted in sociobiology's reliance on genetics as determining factors in behavior and personality.
The implications of these commitments are varied. She is, in ways unaccounted for in Haraway's and others readings, deeply committed to a scientific worldview based on enlightenment individualism that produced today's prevailing scientific perspectives on genetics. However, what genes and sex allow her to do philosophically is use so-called blood connections to assert a metaphoric and physical connection between the past and future. At the same time, her rather biologized notions of female behavior (with regard to "offspring" and others) rescue her communities and characters from both the "hierarchical" nature of human beings, as well as a radical and self-isolating individualism usually associated with genetic explanations for human behavior (selfish gene theories and the like).
Butler's essentialism should be read within a context of a gene theory that undermines racial categories and constructs, but that does not abandon genetic input in other human aspects, most importantly sex/gender. Her turn to a sexed body may not be read as solely disappointing as Dorothy Allison's reading of it In "The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode," Allison mourns that Butler's protagonists act like heroines, counter-stereotypically, only in the name of others, confirming and implying that a biologically maternal and nurturing body plays a role in directing their power. While she professes to enjoy Butler's "powerful" females, she expressed disappointment that they act so in the name of an essentially heterosexually coded reproductive code. Rather than succumbing to an Allison-like disappointment about Butler's females, I read Butler's historical and biological female body as a way to return us to de Beauvoir's concept of the" situated body."9 This is refreshing after the persistent impasse between pure constructivists and what I would call female body feminists. Butler proposes a world of interaction between the female body and the culture it is situated within, while condemning formulations of racial purity and cultural identities based on genes rather than history and experience. #p#分頁標題#e#
Butler, while she undermines racial essentialism as corrupt and unscientific, retains a commitment to a qualified essentialist stance toward the biologically sexed body. We need not establish correspondences between gender and race when reading Butler's texts. Furthermore, we ought to recognize that her reliance on biological determinants is more than a lapse in an otherwise thoroughly postmodern position.
Cathy Peppers, in her article "Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler's Xenogenesis," positions Butler's plot as a dialogic text with opposing "master narratives" of origins-she asserts that Butler's entire Xenogenesis trilogy offers "alternative/rewritten feminist origin stories [which] destabilize, contradict, and contest the traditional discourses of origin on their own turf (48)." The accounts of human origins found in the novels, of which Dawn is the first, are in dialogue with the powerful and mastering narratives of western civilization and science. She argues that these counter-narratives produce alternate kinds of identities and relations to gender/race, "showing us how to acknowledge difference without necessarily resorting to `essentialist,' traditional humanist bounded-self identities. Peppers analyzes four of these narratives and Butler's counter- narratives. The two that I am most interested are those that partake in scientific stories about the human. The primary trope Peppers uses in her article is that of "miscegenation," which comes to stand for a post-modern, Haraway-echoing reproduction story that transgresses established boundaries. Peppers' analysis itself works most successfully when she is showing how Butler destabilizes racial/species boundaries "on their own turf" (48).
However, her argument for Butler's destabilizing gender boundaries or the prevailing scientific/cultural narratives about sex and the human behaviors associated with it is far less extensive and less convincing. This is because in Butler, I think, race and sex bear two completely different relationships to the body, so it is hard to make an equivalent argument Race, as has been noted by critical race scholars and biologists alike, is a historical category written onto the body. It is not a biological, scientific category that can be described in any real sense outside of historical conditions. Race scientists of the late 19th and early 20th c. tried, by going through extraordinary and suspect data collection, toward sketchy conclusions. Peppers effectively demonstrates that Butler's narratives of identity challenge 'essentialist' arguments about difference and the reproduction of sameness with regard to race through the metaphoric genesis of an alien humanity. However, as I hope to show, Butler does little to destabilize the scientific reifications of sex/gender and little to dismantle a normative heterosexuality that demands stable sex/gender positions. In short, Peppers argues that the consequence of the dialogues among competing narratives leaves the reader uncertain and in a place to theoretically re-write the narratives of both race and gender. I would argue that Butler, through her heroines and plots points to a way out of radical humanist self. The way out is through a narrative of biological extra-individual drives; the ability/need to see beyond individual survival to survival of one's kin. While there are competing "narrative" drives, the one story that dominates is an evolutionary one. It is, however, left up to readers to decide whether to take the story literally or metaphorically-as a description of the way things really are or as a parable.10 #p#分頁標題#e#
According to Peppers, Butler's novels dialogue with competing narratives of sociobiology and paleo-anthropology. Both of these "stories" of human biological and cultural origins have been popularized and promulgated through the educative practices of schools and educational television. And they interact to form a network of tales that code human behaviors genetically and transhistorically. These "tendencies" are out of time, though not always emergent Donna Haraway and Ruth Hubbard discuss how sociobiology and paleoanthropology have teamed up to offer different but mutually affirming accounts of human behavior and development that naturalize female subservience, passivity and dependence and reinforce the already powerful trope of maternal instinct.11
Through her discussion of sociobiology and slavery, Peppers shows how Butler appropriates the "myths of science" to write a parable about racialized slavery. Pepper describes Butler's parallel narrative of human capture and coercive control of reproduction as "not about using the story of slavery to flatly deny the explanatory of biology to construct our human identity; it is about changing the sociobiological story from within, using its very real explanatory power to help us imagine the origins of humanity in alien ways" (52). For Peppers, Butler does not deny the "very real explanatory power of sociobiology," but rather re-deploys it under the rubric of a positive, progressive mixing of genetic potentials for the good of the human race.12 (When one reads this redeployment against Martin Barker's "Biology and the New Racism," it feels more like the recuperated postWar eugenics, but that is the subject of another essay.) Using an alternative story of evolution and genetic/environmental interactions, a different technototem,13 Butler can substitute a new organic myth, one that has at its center organic cooperations and a kind of evolution that eschews "selfish gene" theories and the privileged position of the Master Molecule, DNA. According to Peppers, Butler privileges an "alternative" reading of microbiology and its evolutionary implications and this puts both selfish gene and Master molecule narratives into crisis.14 She uses them within the context of a discussion of "miscegenation," thereby enacting a linkage between narratives of race and narratives of gender. For Peppers, a narrative that undermines the biologized reasoning for racism also undermines a sexual biologism and vice versa.15 It is entirely possible to recast sociobiological narratives in such a way that they undermine retrograde, out-dated theories and insert in their place more modern, better narratives with "real explanatory power." That is the scientific process. Rather than seeing these narratives as in competition, it is possible that Butler is enacting the scientific process, supplanting old stories with a new more empirically accurate story. Watson and Crick's master molecule theory gets deposed by Lynn Margulis "marginal" theories. The process is momentarily destabilizing, but it does not lay out a new road. For Butler, biology still has tremendous (narrative) power, and scientific process is progress. #p#分頁標題#e#
In so far as Butler is plotting "miscegenation," Peppers' reading is right on. However, the final claim that Peppers makes for Butler, that she "exposes" the sexist genealogy of the biological origin story is far less convincing. In fact, what is in itself interesting is the desire Peppers has to equate critiques of race biology and gender biology. The critique is nearly always grounded on the same turf, race, and then argued to apply to sex, by analogy. She makes few arguments about Butler's heroines' specific mentions of sex/gender, of genetic differences between men and women and their consequent behaviors. While Butler's heroine, Lilith, maintains what could be generously read as an agnostic understanding of the role of biology in women's behaviors and choices, the plot relentlessly reinforces certain sociobiological notions of essential and "natural" male and female through the concept of biological "tendency." Butler's biological essentialism with reference to sex and sexuality is by no means ham-fisted. She does not show a woman uninterested in child rearing suddenly transformed into a yearning breeder under the influence of the biological clock However, over and over again specific female and male behavior differences are displayed through probabilities and tendencies. The explanatory power of genetic materials, while very weak for racial categories, are strong for sex-based ones; they persist cross-time, cross-species, across the universe.
In Dawn,16 the Oankali, who are "biophilic," not "eugenic," according to Peppers, manipulate human behaviors by adjusting human genetic material (55). The changes disturb the human heroine, Lilith. She argues with them when they propose or describe manipulating her physically and genetically. She feels attached to her purely human (and damaged) nature/genes, though at times ambivalently, to the end. She understand that it has been human nature that got her into this predicament and a non-human nature that will get her out
Butler's heroine certainly displays characteristics that often fall into the "masculine" code of behaviors, such as greed, aggression and a desire to dominate. For Butler, unlike many die-hard sociobiologists gone conservative political theorists, simply because a genetic tendency exists does not mean it will be phenotypically expressed. But Butler makes explicit comparisons to human behaviors and cancer. Like a cancer treatment where the cells that are malignant must be removed, watched, or changed, so must malignant human social behavior. And perhaps most importantly, this is possible in Butler's novel, not only through alien genetic manipulations but also through human interventions.
In a sense, Butler takes on a pragmatic view that it seems that men are aggressive and violent disproportionately; therefore, social treatments and conditions demand that they be watched, controlled and modified, much as a genetic predisposition to cancer would be. So while Butler offers some counter narratives to the most retrograde of evolutionary biology, she continues to be very much bound to the explanatory and predictive power of genetic sexual difference. Xenophilia comes into being under evolutionary pressure. Xenophobia is no longer a functional way to pass on one's genes to the future. While her xenogenesis is marked by boundary crossings, impurities, and transgressive pleasures with regard to race/species, the stories of male-female interactions and behaviors are largely organized according to categories that naturalize and give gender to aggression, nurturing, hierarchy and heterosexuality. #p#分頁標題#e#
When critics want to read Butler's perspective as post structural, they are forced to make her counter-essentialist and counter-eugenic. Her counter-- racialized accounts stand as analogies to her attitudes about sex or see her production of women capable of violence and power as marks of her disavowal of naturalized female stereotypes. A closer look at her characters reveals that these heroines, as Allison asserts, while they counter some stereotypes of female behavior, actually reinforce sociobiological accounts of sex differences and human reproductive behaviors.17
Michelle Erica Green, in "`There Goes the Neighborhood': Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias," focuses on Butler's introduction of race into the spate of recent feminist science fiction (Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Sheri Tepper among others). She argues that in the Patternist books (Wildseed, Survivor Mind of My Mind and Clay ' Ark as well as their seed story "Bloodchild") Butler's essentialism is "tricky; her novels focus on the exceptions to the rules she posits as human norms rather than on those who exemplify them" (167). Again racial and gender essentialism are considered within the same rubric. Furthermore, she does not distinguish between the cultural "norms" for female behavior and biological "norms." She says, "Butler might have chosen to transform reader expectations about those 'normal' gender behavior by demonstrating how natural giving birth seems to human men, rather than how unnatural. Yet, if Butler truly believed that human biology makes rape, compulsory heterosexuality, and enforced childbirth inevitable, she would have no motivation for writing 'Bloodchild' in the first place." I would argue that because Butler sees these things as biologically encoded does not follow, however, that they are "inevitable' or occur in all circumstances. But it is the fact of this tendency that makes her "cautionary tales" all the more important to tell. She is working under the rubric of recent gene theory where the codes interact with cytoplasmic and bodily environments. The genes are not simply translated into a fixed reality, even in the case of the sex chromosomes. Green later argues that for Butler "careful breeding" and "teaching" can change human biology "a good deal:"
In these books [Survivor and Mind of My Mind] human nature proves more flexible than some of the characters would like to admit. They cannot preserve an "essential" humanity.... instead, they learn to recognize the extent to which human morality and even human biology are constructed through careful breeding and teaching. (175)
A biological humanity is not, it seems Butler is saying, a "fixed" humanity. Butler acknowledges the force of biology and environment/history/learning. She could certainly believe that enforced birth was "natural." Indeed rape and heterosexuality may well be both natural and avoidable. In Dawn, human nature proves flexible, but only with serious forms of social and biological intervention. As Green points out, humans can intervene in their own "nature" through both breeding and learning. The essentialism, or more accurately, biologism, is not as tricky as it might first appear. It follows a fairly widespread understanding of the interaction between environmental "factors" and genetic "factors." #p#分頁標題#e#
Cathy Peppers looks more completely at Butler's biology of gender roles and behaviors when she analyzes Butler's rearticulation of prevailing and popular paleo-anthropological accounts of the origins of human culture. She sees Lilith re-writing the Man the Hunter premise of stories of early human social development. In its place, she articulates an idea of human social development more closely akin to feminist re-interpretations of paleolithic society that place more emphasis on women's roles in food procurement (Woman the Gatherer postulates).18 Peppers is right in that the narrative does "make it clear that humans are not biologically determined to restore the sacred image of the same" (58). While Lilith refuses to replay the earlier unfoldings of civilization from the raping cave man onwards, the story she directs in its place does little to counter what Hoda Zaki has called Butler's belief in a "human nature biologically determined" (241). The story "recapitulates" past histories of human violence and it is a sexed violence. It is not just Paul Titus (another human kept in suspended animation after the nuclear holocaust) who is kept in a sustained adolescent male state by the Oankali whose mode of interaction with the first woman he sees is to rape her. One human male literally comes out of the pod and tries to rape one of the women standing by. In a turn almost worthy of Gone with the Wind, this woman ends up "consensually" pairing with this same man, who when disoriented and barely conscious, in that liminal stage before the social, acts aggressively and violently sexual. This sexual story is coupled with disjunctions between "will" and "body" displayed when the men and women engage sexually with the assistance of their ooloi.19 Taken together these two stories of sexuality, one "hetero" and the other vaguely voyeuristic, point to some very fundamental recapitulations of standard sociobiological descriptions and justifications for a violent (masculine) sexuality in the name of the gene-trade.
In the coercive nature of gene exchanges in Dawn, human and Oankali, Butler echoes "she said no, but her body said yes rape defenses," making them morally reprehensible. However, they appear as part and portion of the human tendency that lead them to destroy the earth. Humans are served up to the aliens because of their own self-destructive will to dominate and hierarchize- a will that once served an evolutionary purpose, but no longer. Lilith tries a cultural solution. She teaches lessons aimed at instilling in the humans a learned communal behavior. She is not very successful. In Butler's plot, it is the Oankali's modification of the human genome that will accomplish what centuries of civilization, getting burnt in the hot fire of human stupidity, failed to do. Peppers points out that the human's desire for blood is manifested in the story by their rejection of the meatless diet as their first act of free human will. And the driving force behind the recapitulation-the fact that "males have more of the hierarchical tendency" than do females-never relents (58). Male resistance to female authority, while idiotic, is natural. #p#分頁標題#e#
Peppers is right that Butler offers the reader the possibility that humans as cyborgs can "choose among alternative stories of our biological inheritance (themselves technologies of meanings) with which to interface" (59). The conditions of "choices" are themselves constantly and darkly investigated by Butler's characters. Even so, if we grant that Butler offers an alternative mode of civilizing to the "Man the Hunter" story by offering a counter "Woman the Gatherer," it is not clear what difference this choice makes, if any, to the prevailing arguments for biological roots of human behaviors, especially with regard to sex. With race it is clearer that the categories of difference and sameness are constructs whose origins are suspect and which function as body technologies. With regard to sex/gender and biology, the story Butler offers is one that demands deep surgery of the sort engaged by the aliens to mitigate the powerfully inscribed male/female behaviors that shaped the stories of gatherer/hunter. While it may be feminist to revise paleo-anthropology with women's roles as central if just as mastering, it is certainly not a story that takes the essential facts of biology out of the equation. And it makes Butler a difficult fit as a female science fiction author through whose body and text the claims for a constructivist feminism can be reconciled.
Donna Haraway initiated the cyborg writer role for Octavia Butler, but Peppers, and other poststructurally minded critics, take it up as the standard under which they march forward into battle with 'liberal' feminism. However, to do so they must overlook huge tracts of Butler's straightforwardly liberal ideas about human nature, science and the role of society in mitigating human tendencies. If Butler's stories are analyzed using Ruth Hubbard's critique offered in her book The Politics of Women's Biology and other essays, then it is possible to discern the politics of Butler's human nature. In such an undertaking one must distinguish carefully between essentialisms of race and gender. What emerges from such a dis-articulation is a slightly less the cyborgian 90s model of impurities, transgressions, than a vision of bodies that are often bad for us. At least as far as sex and sexuality go. Butler's bodies have a will of their own, and it is to be found most often lodged in genetic "tendencies" if not fixities. Or their socialized will is in conflict with their biological imperatives. Butler's reliance on these "tendencies" is remarkably conservative in relation to women's behavior and heterosexuality. Her bodies say women are more or less likely to be altruistic and cooperative and men selfish, domineering and driven to rape. The question for Butler is not if this is so, but rather, what then must be done?
Let me now turn to the heroines and plots of two important novels in order to make clear the uses Butler makes of gene theories of human behavior and theories of the interactions between genes and environment.20 In both Kindred and Dawn, the physical body relentlessly asserts its presence, demands, and vulnerabilities. Even as both novels take place under opposite temporal conditions-one an imaginative leap into the past and the other into the future-- the characters in both are negotiating between sometimes-conflicting needs and experiences of self. It is precisely how the main characters, heroines Dana and Lilith, react to these conflicts that sets them in some ways apart from other characters and make them heroic. Through these characters Butler stages contemporary debates over the physical, biological mechanisms of human emotions and behaviors as well as the relationship between genes (genotype) and manifested, lived experiences (phenotype). Butler's plots stage a debate between competing "technototems" of reproduction. #p#分頁標題#e#
According to David Hess, Barbara McClintock's studies of DNA replication and reproduction contest the DNA replication theories that name DNA as masterful and in control of the process. In McClintock's theory, crucial interactions between genetic material and cellular environments produce the specific organic outcome of reproduction. In powerfully similar ways, the plots of Butler's novels contest the Master cell theories of Watson and Crick, as noted by Peppers. Both novels and their heroines use the plot line of interaction between cell/environment in its stead to undermine any overly deterministic readings of genetic material. Some examples of Butler's appropriation of this particular genetic theory are visible in the development of parallel characters. In Kindred, Kevin and Rufus are paralleled as European American males, whose characteristics of whiteness and maleness are tested in different environments. Likewise, the experiences of an African American woman are tested "empirically" by contrasting and paralleling the experiences of "twins" under different conditions. Obviously, the experiments are not "double-blind." The characters themselves are at some moments unaware of their parallel natures (though the reader is cued to it) and at other moments resist or embrace this identification.21
In Dawn, the discussion of genetics is much more explicit. Because the Oankali are expert readers of the human genome as well as its manipulators, Butler uses them to explore the mechanisms and limits of the effects of genotype manipulations and the experiences of lived bodies. In addition, because they can accomplish deep cellular manipulations, they put into crisis the seamless experience of pain and pleasure, will and self. Before the Oankali "press" their emotional buttons, they were less keenly aware, although they had an inkling, that their emotional experiences had a biochemical component. The Oankali show them just how physical their psychology is. This produces the acute sense of dissociation of self, felt by the humans as they are programmed to find pleasure in an alternative/perverse sexuality. Most experience this as a terrible loss of self and will. But from the reader's perspective, and from Lilith's reluctant acknowledgement of the realities of the body and the primacy of its desires, it is as though we are peering from behind the one-way glass, seeing the experimental animals react either to the Oankali drugs or to their own genetically determined behaviors (xenophobia, tendency to hierarchize, men's desire to dominate). In addition, the new triadic sexuality is counterpoised to a natural heterosexuality assumed by Lilith and all others, including perhaps Butler. It is striking that in the Oankali's 250-year study of human behavior and human culture, they never came across a reference to "faggot" and need to ask Lilith what it means.
Both books represent explorations in human "tendencies" and the role of environments in the fulfillment or adjustment of these "tendencies." What's important here is to tease apart Butler's exposition of contemporary beliefs on the interactions between genes and environment, and an agnostic stand on the exact relationship between the two, then to see how she distinguishes between racial difference and sexual difference. One is seen as a massively orchestrated deployment of a human tendency to xenophobia, but which represents race and racism as socially constructed and historically contingent The other, sexual difference is seen as transhistorical and while influenced historically and environmentally, largely "natural" and outside the bounds of human and alien manipulations. Sexual difference is even a universal concept, the Oankali, though they have three genders (one "neuter") understand and live the male/ female split However, having a third term does not disrupt the binary as completely as it might in the most hopeful imaginings. That Lilith can "know" the sex of her captor/interrogator gives her great comfort in the face of the utterly alien and disgusting presence of the sea slug. This is the first "comforting" news she gets upon being "awakened" fully by the Oankali. Part of the creature's initial horror is that its sex is not discernible to Lilith. It does not seem categorical in human terms. But to her immense relief it is. Her first contact with the wholly other turns out to be familiar on at least this one point. #p#分頁標題#e#
In addition, the Oankali learn about human responses to difference/race through years of behavioral observation. And given their "empirical" study most assume that Lilith will choose for her mate someone with similar complexion but different genitalia The Oankali who knows Lilith best witnesses "deeper" similarities that drive her to choose someone "like" her on the "inside" rather than superficially. But not so alike as to have the same sex organs. So early on in the novel, racial and sex difference are plotted with different trajectories. Genital likeness is deemed as somehow "undesirable,' relegating a homosexual "choice" as virtually unimaginable to both Lilith and the Oankali. "Likeness" resides below the surface of skin, but not so far as to not follow a heteronormative pattern. Lilith's choice makes her different from most humans who are trapped in their acculturated understandings of race and culture or who tend to hate racial difference. And it demonstrates the learned nature of racial difference recognition. And even though distinguishing sex is also, obviously learned, Butler's view on the origins of this knowledge is quite different.
Xenophobia, while manifested in new situations, dissipates, even in the face of the extreme alien-ness of the Oankali. Some residue of human history remains in the memories of those raised on earth in English speaking places before the nuclear war, but racial differences lose their power in the face of the differences between humans and Oankali. In addition, this xenophobia quickly becomes a maladaptive behavior that will not be passed on. The behavior is controlled through drugs, coercion, and `brain washing'.
Genetic sexual identity manifests itself without the same authorial scrutiny. The female characters demonstrate a tendency to "not want to lead" for the sake of leadership, but who will lead in the name of helping others (altruism). The males crave power, are consistently violent, wish to lead at any cost, seem (irrationally) driven to be alpha and threatened by all other males. When Lilith, with Oankali backing, leads the group intended to re-colonize Earth, it is not so much Lilith's leading them that sets the males off in rebellion. Rather, they are rankled by the power of her mate Joseph. First, Peter, then Curt, then Gabriel, and all the other males fall into the pattern of hierarchical violence, despite the fact that it goes against their personal survival, and probably group survival as well. In addition, the men consistently use rape (which is naturalized and located in the male body in both Susan Brownmiller's sense22 and a 70s sociobiological one as described in Fausto-Sterling) to assert male dominance. While Lilith describes this as "cave man" style human behavior, it is there and abiding always under the surface ready to be revealed when social constraints and powerful regulations of law are taken away. They are in the Oankali-made forest the group inhabits as it prepares to recolonize Earth. #p#分頁標題#e#
Following on her genetically informed theory of human behaviors, Butler provides therapeutic models for the potentially dangerous genetic condition of human life. One of these models involves the deep surgery done by the Oankali. This alternative meets resistance from Lilith because it modifies the essence of what it means to be human. However, this is not the only therapeutic model offered in the story. Lilith's body's "talent" for cancer gives Butler a way to discuss interventions into genetic predispositions. The cancer she is disposed to is a model for genetic alterations on both individual and species levels. The presence of cancer and its mechanism shows that genetic changes/alterations in human cells is not "un-natural". When this talent is taken and used it can provide ways to transform the body and the species without the intervention of a fantastic alien species. Another therapeutic alternative outlined in the book is the contemporary treatment for cancer. First, invasive and in a sense "radical" surgery, followed by continuous "watching."
In essence, this is the strategy Lilith employs when faced with male predispositions to violence and aggression. When men enter the community, she is willing and compelled to use coercion to control them In addition, she takes an ever-watchful stance. Of course, like early therapies for cancer, the success rate is not total; recurrence happens, as does the occasional disease that is undetected until too late. This doesn't mean therapeutically that one gives up on interventions because they are not totally effective; rather it is a call for increased interventions and watchfulness. Lilith as the one charged with Waking and raising a community of humans offers cures for the human tendency to hierarchize. She approaches the biological condition both epidemiologically by setting up Public Health rules that supersede individual pleasures and rights as well as intervening in individual cases, bodies, and exercising both attempts to cure bad behaviors as well as, with the help of the Oankali, isolating the incurables who by initiating violent behavior set off a cascade of the "disease" throughout the community (an epidemic of misogyny). In addition, through changes of "diet," "environment" and community interaction, Lilith hopes to make the conditions sufficiently different than earlier environmental conditions. In these new conditions, the body, situated as it is with certain "tendencies" and potentials can therefore be lived differently. Just as a person with a family history of cancer lives in their body differently with this historical knowledge, so can human species with their differing 'tendencies' to hierarchization change.
Of course, the danger here is that, within the community, one's biological situation could be taken as a script for one's future. Such a deterministic model would demand that humans, unmodified, would all remain in their pods. But Butler's hope for the human body and species is a therapy based on a theory of genetic and environmental interaction and the validation of human cultural interventions in the human body. So, even as her character mourns her bodily integrity, and purity, she accepts surgical interventions to save her body from cancer. She touches the scar as a reminder that she has been modified. Only in this way can what has been a curse and a disease passed on be transformed into a talent, a potential for modification and new bodies in which surgeries would be less and less necessary. The scope of time and evolution; however, proves to be a long journey, in part because of human resistance to surrendering their idea of their body as inviolable. In this way, Butler does manage to embrace the cyborg impurities Haraway anoints her with. But it is through a fairly conservative view based on common tenets of evolutionary and medical biology. This 'tricky' essentialism could be construed as 'realism' or as a way to infect the future with the same stereotypical knowledge of gender contained in the sociobiological tales told by biologists and anthropologists about human behavior. And while conceding a role for the environment and culture, the bottom line is still the reduction of complex human interactions and behaviors into easy gendered categories. Lost is the true complexity of sex, genetically, and sex, phenotypically. Lost are the role of potentials and manifestations. Hubbard's critique still applies. She asserts that we can never adequately separate and understand the relations between genes and environments. The Oankali's knowledge of genes and environments sway Lilith. She believes they know what they are doing, and that gene therapy works, though only in a limited way for gendered genetic flaws. In Dawn, while the modifications may not be sufficient, the process itself never fails to change the human being at his/her core. #p#分頁標題#e#
So while Butler messes with racial categories and understandings of difference, the one difference that is important and operative in human behavior is sex and sexual reproduction. Yet if we read the stories as parables, the biological difference between men and women is the way out If women did not tend toward being less aggressive, less hierachizing, and therefore able to escape their own "selfish" desire for social position motivated by a desire for the good of their community and kin, then the species would be totally doomed. She takes theories of "kin altruism" and rescues them from their racism, by asserting that human kinship overrides superficial, and socially constructed, differences (though perhaps only in the face of enormous extra-human threats). Whether this gender difference is real, and I think for Butler it is, or "metaphoric," acting on it may be the way to save humanity from itself, by asserting the female self-sacrifice over the self-interested power-hungry male. The therapy depends on one's understanding of the disease. It is radical, invasive, and requires violation of the body and the self in the name of others. If women have a "talent" for this then it should be exploited, that is the only morally tenable position. Butler is a lot less postmodern than she appears. The transgressions are postmodern, but they are grounded in liberal understandings of social orders, ethics and genetics.
The fantastic tales Butler weaves refuse an easy resolution of Butler's ambivalence about and attachment to biology in general, and genetics in particular. Nevertheless, she is not a thorough going postmodern, anti-essentialist, hip to the latest theory produced by Judith Butler. Her female heroines consistently act as women driven by their need to over-ride self-interest and act for the good of their children and kin (a popular sociobiological theory). They look out for and nurture others unlike the characters who inhabit male bodies. They act solely on the basis of a more powerfully genetically determined tendency-which though human is clearly lodged disproportionately in males-the compulsion to "hierarchize." Butler's women, because of their gender, have a way out of that tendency because of another genetically and biologically determined tendency. Causation is exactly the point of contention for Hubbard, who argues that it is often the product of analysis as much as empirically constituted. Butler herself consistently undermines racially based biological determinism and promotes "miscegenation" as a solution to dangerous or cherished genetic "purities," even to the extent of interbreeding with non-humans. Communities across time and across generations are established because of quasi-genetic, blood connections to offspring and ancestors. At the same time that Butler forces an examination of the human tendency to note and fear "difference," a social position that is dangerous and bad for family and species, she codes biological sex differences, and the genders they produce, as a way out of that other human tendency, to "hierarchize" differences. A tendency in males is largely unmitigated by the female "urge" to care for and mind offspring and relations. These blood and species connections motivate individual women's desires and actions,23 sometimes against their better judgment Self-sacrifice goes against rational self-interest, the cornerstone of enlightenment citizenship. #p#分頁標題#e#
Butler writes about the costs of damaging ideological fantasies such as slavery and an unwillingness to change fetishized notions of genetic purity. Butler's often biologized understanding of survival and survival strategies encodes racial purity and ideologies of racial purity as both mistaken identifications of kinship and bad for the future of the species. On the other hand, she continues to hold onto biological gender differences in order to provide a mechanism out of an equally biological human situation-the desire for dominance even to the extent of self and species destruction. Whether this belief is a rhetorical trope or a scientific conviction is almost impossible to determine. What is variously called compromise, collaboration, or trade, sexual and reproductive acts produce situations that are morally questionable, but biologically on target As Lilith says to one of her companions, "we're all a little bit coopted" (240). Co-optation, in Kindred and Dawn, almost always means a woman crossing racial or species boundaries emotionally, sexually and reproductively in the name of the future. It does not mean a woman performing her way out of a discursively constructed female body. These "co-optations" are powerfully counter stereotyped gendered behavior with women taking on powerful systems and institutions to manipulate them into ceding the future. Butler's heroines act, however, according to biologically coded imperatives and in line with recent evolutionary biological theories of gender.
Another mode through which Donna Haraway invokes Butler's writing as a source for theorizing is the cyborg. Haraway's call to break down the machine/ organism split, and her dismissal of organic holism are the prelude to her discussion of SF to stand as models for the monstrous cyborg logic that could release feminists from received doctrine of a radical and necessary separation of the technical and the organic. In her compendium and admittedly "very partial reading" of Butler's text, Haraway presents Butler's plots and heroines who trouble the "statuses of man or woman, human, artifact, member of a race, individual entity, or body" (17 171 ). Specifically, Butler offers us a series of alternatives to natural, innocent (white) goddesses. These maternal figures are motivated by maternal connections, "blood mothers" and "Community othermothers."24
Haraway credits Butler with writing in Wildseed of "an African sorceress pitting her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival. Of Butler's Kindred, she describes a tale "of time warps that bring a modern U.S. black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-- ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth." And finally, in Dawn, Haraway's assessment is that it is "a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-- century race and gender." Haraway sees Butler largely as the creator of cyborg heroines, heroines who are neither wholly innocent nor innocently whole. Damaging and damaged, they constantly negotiate with power and with their own "humanity." In order to transform their position in the world and their communities position in the world, they parlay with their oppressors, always mindful of their limits. These limits are demarcated by two competing ties-- individual integrity (of the body and mind) and the survival of kin-present and future. #p#分頁標題#e#
Butler, for Haraway, is an exemplar of cyborg writing because of her willingness to sacrifice the notion of organic and moral purity as well as the radical separation of humans from the world of species. I agree that while Butler's heroines refuse innocence, refuse organic holism (but not an organic/originary Eden-- Africa), and interrogate the boundaries of individuality, humanity, history, time, they do so with a constant eye towards a pragmatic survival and generation-- generation not of raceless, historyless, people but of communities tied together through affinity and blood. In this way, Butler does "stand for" cyborg writing when it "is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other" (Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-- Feminism in the Late Twentieth-century" in Simians... 175).
However, as I have shown, the iconic Butler Haraway presents is "very partial" and for feminists seeking cyborg heroines, in an important way. While Butler disrupts body/identity equations, undoes myths of original innocence, and their "longing of their fulfillment in apocalypse," she does so in very particular ways, ways which make her ill suited to the cyborg fantasy. Her tracing of ancestorship, her depiction of Africa as a generative Edenic site, and her focus on "blood" as productive of and guarantor for ancestral bonds and genetic connections show a Butler more fixed in determinative organicism. This organicism is one not bound to racial categories, but to connections produced through the reproductive body, and in particular the female body. Butler lives up to Haraway's assessment in the sense that she is keen on genetic coding as a major trope of the new (postmodern) order.
Genetics is the science of Butler's science fiction. The translation of genotype to phenotype is the plot. The network among humans is determined and actualized by the genetic pattern passed on, though not always acted on. The plots of her novels, especially the ones I focus on, turn on coercive intercourse with its resultant offspring. Importantly, the link established by genes is never diluted to the point of inconsequence-ancestry and shared DNA force and establish contacts generations down the line. At the same moment that the fixity of identity of an individual human is challenged, both in a physical and a cultural sense, the individual is fixed into kinship, and shared genes represent a powerful determinative of destiny, affinity, and connection. For feminists who are seeking to disrupt the sex/gender connection, the naturalized causal connections between genotype and phenotype, Butler's "naturalized" hierarchies and the inevitable workings out of biological destinies force a reconsideration of the terms of debate-nature and nurture.
Her reworking of the family into an extended network of kinship with concomitant links and responsibilities represents a utopian vision of feminist generation, but it is also one that is bound to a troubling foundation of biological difference and sociobiological notions of human behavior. Communities are built upon extended notions of kin. Female characters are "gifted" with the desire to escape their own "selfish" condition and selfish propagations in order to construct a larger social world where hierarchies of difference are not the only operative sociobiological behaviors. As in the novel Kindred, it is only when they have no chance to help secure a better future for their offspring that they consider "selfish" acts like suicide. And in a parallel, it is when Lilith bears the mixed species child, she gives up her own (irrational) dreams of escaping into a completely human world. #p#分頁標題#e#
In ways that make anti-essentialist feminists uncomfortable, Butler finds disparities in power engendered by genetic dispositions to be real and determinative. Butler presents us with several alternative "biologies." For Butler's humans and aliens, there are the choices to survive or to die as individuals and as species. Left to its own, human nature will work to weed out in humans the inborn (though to differing degrees) tendency to "hierarchize." Evolution will help the cause. One of the only and best weapons in our genetic arsenal is the almost as compelling tendency of women to be self-sacrificing in the name of their children or species. Difference and its concomitant inequality will constantly emerge. Struggles for power happen just as "naturally."
For Butler, this is a sad fact, one that tends toward apocalypse, given humans' intellectual abilities. It is countered only by the impulse to generation, toward using power to protect kin. This parallels, though not as pessimistically, de Beauvoir's sad facts of female biological "enslavement" to reproduction. The consolation is that this commitment to the future, to the community, and to children is what drives community and survival. It leads to both accommodation to power and resistance to it It is no coincidence that the beings in Dawn and Kindred, who most often act this way, have female or neuter bodies (though not always human). Butler has stated that she believes that "hierarchies are inborn" but that does not mean they must be "lethal." (Interview). Often they manage to not be "lethal" because of heroic female acts of self-sacrifice and nurturing across socially maintained hierarchies of difference whose origins are biological. In Dawn, the "lethal gene" is genetically and physiologically mitigated. In any case, amidst her fantastic narratives the given world which includes both the social circumstances and the biological is always a place where we work out less lethal consequences, find our homes amidst oppressive structures, and most importantly survive. The offspring of "indecent" situations-Dana, (Alice her great-great grandmother is forced into a sexual relationship with Rufus) and Lilith's child, an alien human hybrid-are not only survivors and products, but they are powerful and promising alterations of a bad past One case demonstrates the species need to be genetically altered if they hope to undo the pattern of hierarchization and violence, the other demonstrating the historical construction of categories of race, which have social but not physical meanings.
In Dawn, sexual intercourse with the aliens and the deep penetration of Lilith's genes rule out the replication of sameness-disconnects her profoundly from the offspring-and yet she comes to see that the fetishizing of purity, genetic purity-is the source of the replication of violent, hierarchical, human traits into the future-that will guarantee the repetition of the history as a one way journey to apocalypse. Indecent situations are indeed productive, thus their consequences are never purely decent, always a "little bit co-opted." But the crucial difference between the two situations is that one brings into being a socially constructed human hybrid and the other a hybrid whose human-ness is qualified. The nostalgic fantasy Dana feels for her slave "home," the plantation which comes to be a welcoming light in a dark and unwelcoming past and Lilith's desire to produce a wholly human child for a wholly human earth must be acknowledged as lost (though it may never actually have existed in that pure form), and then put aside for the sake of the future. #p#分頁標題#e#
In Kindred and Dawn, respectively, Dana and Lilith's compliance with indecent sexual/genetic exchanges to gain their ends-survival of themselves and their kin- is the central question of the plot. Their very purposefulness and power is in negotiations with and allied to the powerful men who force them to engage in indecent actions. It is precisely because they are connected to the future and future generations that they do have to "rely upon eroticism to gain their ends." The sexual exchanges are not always quid pro quo-they are more often about instigating the least painful or least tragic outcome.
In the case of Kindred, Dana acts as a procurer to the slave master Rufus in order to spare Alice the violence of forcible rape (the sexual violation is written by Rufus as inevitable and read by Dana as inevitable because she is the product of the violation. And it is clear that Alice would never have "consented" to intercourse). She herself refuses the erotic exchange offered to her by Rufus, but she is nonetheless part of the economy. She is its broker.
In Dawn, Lilith is never violently "forced" against her will into genetic exchange or penetration by an alien "tentacle." This allows Pepper's to describe the Oankali as the more positive "biophilic." However, she comes to tolerate the exchange when she realizes there is no other way for humans to survive and when she feels a genetic bond with the Oankali through her child. The logic parallels Alice's "acceptance" of Rufus's brutal sexuality, though methods of coercion are far less brutal. Lilith's acceptance of "trade" with the aliens is the only way she has of ever returning to earth and building a human community. In addition, the aliens intervene in her lovemaking to her chosen human mate-- producing a child only after he is dead. Her consent to these "un-natural" acts is indeed driven by her purposefulness, and she is chosen for them because of her power-and yet her power and her knowledge are manipulated if not controlled by the aliens. Without resorting to violence or "lying, " they manage her; her assent to their suggestions and manipulations cannot be seen as consent in any real sense of the word.
And yet, Butler argues compellingly for recognizing the actualities and demands of the powerful as survival and future generation compel us to act indecently with regard to racial and species purities. Her heroines, however, always act as mothers and caretakers against their own self-interest The drive to secure a future for one's offspring is the only uncompromised female desire. This trait has earned Butler the criticism that her heroines act heroic in the name of others, confirming that their nurturing body plays a role in directing their power. The powerful females and the powerful males resemble each other in all other ways.
Critics get caught up in either/or notions of "essentialism" in Butler, seeing her as either wedded to an overly scientistic biologism or a feminist revising traditionally held notions of women. Butler is in some aspects "constructivist" and when relating to race she is almost completely so, though she writes into her plots bloodlines and recognition of kinships, though not always directly parent-- offspring. When relating, however, to sex/gender her female characters are devoted to self-sacrifice in the name of the future, embodied by offspring or the young of the species. Their biological position as mothers/potential mothers affects their actions, predisposing them to a kind of "altruism"25 notably lacking in most of her male characters. #p#分頁標題#e#
Butler authors plots committed to the accountable influence of the X chromosome on behavior. The emotions and reactions of her female characters rely on genetics to explain otherwise irrational behaviors and personalities. Her characters make sense because we know the stories of a biological nurturance deeply written into the female body. In ways totally unaccounted for in Haraway, Butler is also deeply committed to individualism and social progress (both wedded distinctly non-postmodern metanarratives). What genes and sex allow her to do is use genetic connections across time to assert a metaphoric connection between the past and future. At the same time, her rather "essentialized" notions of female behavior (with regard to "offspring" and others) rescue her communities and characters from both the "hierarchical" nature of human beings as well as a radical and self-isolating individualism usually associated with genetic explanations for human behavior (selfish gene theories, "kin altruism, and the like.)
Butler's essentialism should be read within a context of a gene theory that undermines racial categories and constructs, but does not abandon genetic determinants of other human aspects, most importantly sex/gender. But this turn to a sexed body may not be solely reactionary.26 Such a turn allows us to leave behind the hopelessly Manichean positions of essentialism and constructivism. Beauvoir's concept of the situated body, which is recently receiving renewed critical attention, may offer a way out of the impasse of the body in feminism. And it may also offer a way to understand some of Butler's choices about a biologically informed female body. She could be read to propose a world of interaction among the human genome, the female body and the culture it is shaped by, while condemning outright any scientized formulations of racial purity and cultural identities. For racial aspects of difference, for Butler, history and culture offer the proper explanatory referents of human behaviors and actions.
De Beauvoir begins The Second Sex with the "Destiny: The Data of Biology." She describes reproduction as an "enslavement" of the body by biological demands. This assertion coexists with her insistence that the body's "resistance" to dismissal is not tantamount to destiny. Women, like men, she insists are bodies. But the body is insufficient to describe the social position of women as well as the organization of society. Butler's science fiction plottings of the female heroine seem also to insist on the bodies' refusal to be dismissed. De Beauvoir says:
The enslavement of the female of the species and the limitations of her various powers are extremely important facts; the body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as woman; there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities and in the bosom of society. (36-37) #p#分頁標題#e#
Butler's female heroines in Kindred and Dawn confront the "data" of biology, but not as an "enslavement" or "limitation." Instead, their connections to their bodies are more than a form of bondage. Rather these constitute the possibility of connection, joining together in common and transcending the limits of self. Butler mirrors de Beauvoir's materialist existentialism, mending the monstrous cartesian self/body split.27 In place of the enslaved female body, Butler imagines a powerful, emancipating intersubjective body in which the social bosom and the maternal bosom are newly coherent
[Footnote]
Notes

[Footnote]
1. Among these are Frances Smith Foster, Sandra Govan, Ruth Salvaggio, Michelle Erica Green and Beverly Friend. See bibliography for citations.
2. Elizabeth Gant-Britton in her dissertation "Women of Color Constructing Subjectivity Towards the Future: Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Cynthia Kadohata," Univ. of California-Los Angeles, 1997, argues that Butler imagines a future in which female and African American agency is greater. She discusses Butler's narrative and temporal strategies in Kindred and Parable of the Sower, among others.
3. The argument in my essay has been informed by several articles that discuss this issue only indirectly. Following Haraway, Robin Roberts in "`No Woman Born': Immortality and Gender in Science Fiction" suggests that Butler offers an female vision of immortality via regeneration and biology to counter male science fiction

[Footnote]
writers accessing immortality through technologies that abandon the body. She describes the regenerations contained in Butler's novel Wildseed as an "altruistic hope based on biology"(141). Brett Cooke in "Biopoetics of Immortality: A Darwinist Perspective on Science Fiction" was valuable for formulating Butler's use of Darwinist evolutionary biology theories, especially Dawkin's selfish gene theory. He discusses Pamela Sargent's Earthseed, but not Butler. Stacy Alaimo in "`Skin Dreaming': The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler and Linda Hogan." Judith Lee describes the Xenogenesis series (of which Dawn is the first novel) as an exploration of the concepts "human" and "immortality." She argues Butler replaces religious immortality and scientific theories of longevity popular in much speculative fiction. The replacement concept is "relatedness," which Lee claims Butler "represents as biological interdependence" that is acutely felt because of "unstable corporeali ties" (176-7). Jim Miller does an excellent and thorough reading of Butler and Butler scholarship. He sees Butler as confronting not only race and gender in the context of science fiction, but also class. He argues that Butler offers a cyborg and postmodern view on the body, social and individual, both of which are "constructs." He does not give much credit to any of those who read Butler as in anyway essentialist. even while he acknowledges that Butler essentializes human and Oankali behaviors toward difference. His discussion has a lot of merit, but I believe it also conflates race and sex essentialisms. #p#分頁標題#e#
4. Examples of re-assessments of female passivity in evolutionary biology/anthropology range from descriptions of female chimps actively seeking out sex from non-dominant males, on the sly, to the "active" role of the egg in its meeting with and reaction to sperm. Ehrenreich has a summary of most of the counter-70s sociobiology data emerging in the 80s and 90s.
5. The conflict between these two "norms" of female behavior is highlighted when a woman kills her children. The anxiety about Susan Smith's "maternal" condition took on two forms. One that her normal instincts had been interfered with by her sexual abuse, confirming a biological foundation for maternal instincts and the other that her desire for a new mate had superseded her protection of her offspring. Her actions could be read as confirmation of the role of the social in over-riding the biological, as well as its reverse.
6. See Nancy Leys Stepan "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science" in Anatomy of Racism, Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Stepan describes how the metaphoric associations of race, gender and class played a role in producing data supporting the analogy and with it a science of racial and sexual inferiorities located in the body. In the same collection, Sander Gilman describes the power of the "associative chain" in producing a logic that connected race jewishness), gender and disease. The chain worked its way through various historical moments from the 18th c. through the 20th. In Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man, revised edition, he laments the recursive power of racist modes of assessing intelligences within evolutionary biology and psychology.
7. This is not to say that Butler does not regard race as a central "matter." Many have written about her commitment to "kinship" and Africa as a more than symbolic ancestral place. I am not arguing that Butler doesn't think race matters. Rather that it

[Footnote]
is that race is the sign and symbol, culturally and socially constructed to stand for bloodlines and genetic links. What is operative is the genetic link, not the physical racial characteristics that might link any two people of a racial group. This is, in Butler, extremely complex. She by no means abandons the importance of racial categories, even as she suggests that they are social. It is actual genetic links (often across racial categories) that link her characters across time and in kinship. Racial characteristics point not only to a potential genetic kinship, but also to shared histories and experiences. They do not represent for Butler a stable transhistorical category as does sex.
8. The slippery boundaries here can also be teased out in Carol Gilligan's psychological theories of women's thinking and their popularized versions found in such books as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. De Beauvoir, and even Mary Wollstonecraft have all admitted that women "act" differently. The question has always been why? #p#分頁標題#e#
9. Indeed, it is the heterosexist components that are for me most disappointing in Butler, rather than the essentializing of female "nurturance" and "altruism." Butler's evolutionary biologism sidesteps non-heterosexualities as invisible or inconsequential. Since reproduction does not necessarily require a full-time commitment to heterosexual intercourse, one has to wonder if this is not the more dangerously "naturalized" discourse in Butler. And one given surprisingly scant attention by critics who see her as a "cyborg" author-heroine.
10. Butler's more recent novel Parable of the Sower suggests that she sees her novels as "speaking" in parables. In an interview she describe her books to Elizabeth GantBritton as "cautionary tales" (October 1995, cited in Gant-Britton.)
11. See Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs and Women and Hubbard in her essay "The Political Nature of Human Nature" in Feminist's Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott.
12. Peppers goes on to specify: "Butler's appropriation and redeployment of the idioms of sociobiology involves recasting the usual origin story of the evolutionary rise to dominance of the heroic individual http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/linguistic/(that first organelle floating in the primeval soup) through ruthless competition and survival of the fittest, by privileging instead the "marginally acceptable" story of Lynn Margulis" (54)
13. Technototem, David Hess's term refers to the "coproduction of technical and social difference" (21 and following).
14. If this were the case, then I would argue that Butler also invokes Barbara McClintock's alternative to Crick and Watson.
15. Anne Fausto-Sterling discusses the "gendered" readings of cell biology in Women's Bodies. In Science and Technology in a Multicultural World, David Hess discusses the implications of race and gender in "technototems" of cell biology. He discusses Barbara McClintock and Ernest Everett Just's "alternative"conceptions of the interactions of genes and cytoplasm on pages 27-32.
16. Dawn is a projection into the future of the present trajectory of history. This trajectory leads to an apocalypse, a spasm of nuclear war that would have ended history, if it were not for alien intervention. The alien intervention is the miracle that saves the earth and humanity from total annihilation. The Oankali keep humans in suspended

[Footnote]
animation while the earth heals. They wake them slowly and delicately in order to gain their trust. Lilith is the first of the human's who manages to overcome her disgust with the Oankali's alien-ness in order to interact with them and learn their ways. Within the conventions of the post-apocalyptic novel in which a few human survivors "begin again," Butler plays out Lilith's desire to escape and re-build a (human) community and the Oankali plan to repopulate earth with a new (nonhuman) species. Lilith has been recruited as leader of the first settlement because they feel she is the most promising individual human. Throughout the novel, Lilith sees the human's chance of escape as a matter of playing along, playing for time, with the Oankali. She must learn survival skills as well as understand "the enemy." Things become more complicated when she becomes incorporated or absorbed into the Oankali kinship structure and experiences love for them With and without her consent, she is modified both biochemically and intellectually. Through her interactions with them, she learns about this alternative family (two sexes and a gene manipulator) and alternative species plan (gene trading). She begins to love her captors/rescuers even as she learns that she is a pawn in their acquisitive project. The Oankali are "gene traders." #p#分頁標題#e#
17. Jim Miller has an excellent discussion of this debate over essentialism using Butler. He cites Zaki and Allison's arguments and attempts to unravel them. He says that Zaki reads Butler as essentialist because she "confuses Butler's position with the biologistic Oankali" (432). Instead he suggests that Butler "favors" social construction as just as important as biology. He dismisses Allison's critique out of hand and concurs with Michelle Erica Green. That is, the heroine's very actions define them as counter to "traditional notions." The debate contained in this argument suggests how very important it is that we separate out "traditional" cultural notions of female behavior from contemporary biological notions of female behavior. Anne Fausto-Sterling in Myths of Gender describes sociobiology as a "theory of essences" (195). But as the content of her book shows, the exact nature of the essences in the biological story are changeable and change. New assessments of female athletes (Fausto-Sterling, 213 and following) as well as new theories about female sexual appetites, and chimpanzee"cheating" appear almost as frequently as re-assertion of old sociobiological stereotypes of female monogamy and male propensities to rape. Butler's female heroines go against traditional, FI 0. White's and Dawkins' sociobiologized norms do not mean they do not conform to other biological theories of gendered behavior.
18. Discussion of these can be found in Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 149-181.
19. The Oankali accomplish their genetic and physiological manipulations through the ooloi, the "non-gendered" beings. Through a snaking arm-like protuberance the ooloi both controls the gene exchange and delivers pleasure through brain chemicals to both the men and women in a whole body orgasm that eclipses "regular" orgasms. Most of the humans become addicted to this pleasure, even as they resent their dependence on the ooloi. They rebel, with disastrous results, to the ooloi and the human colony.
20. Note here Anne Fausto-Sterling's discussion of recent biological theories of reproduction and gender in "Sex and the Brain: Addendum to the Second Edition," pages 223 and following.

[Footnote]
21. Dana and other characters recognize her physical and psychological similarities to her ancestor. Kevin resents Dana's implied comparisons of him to Rufus. Maternal connections are inscribed as more powerfully written into the body-mind, while paternal ones exercise other more fabular forms of power.
22. In Against Our Will, Brownmiller states that men rape because they can: "In terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercouse incontrovertibly exists .... When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it" (4).
23. This kind of community across generations can be seen in the Xenogenesis series as well as the Patternist group of novels. It is also evident in Kindred as I have discussed in my manuscript "Troubled Worlds: feminist theory, practice and fantasy in the US anti-rape movement." #p#分頁標題#e#
24. For a description of these two models of Black motherhood see Patricia Hill Collins's in "Black Women and Motherhood" Black Feminist Thought, 115 and following. 25. See Martin Baker's discussion of the cloaked racial content of "kin altruism" and
new sociobiological understandings of "difference" and "aggression" in "Biology and the New Racism, " in Anatomy of Racism, especially pages 30-33.
26. Here I think it is important to distinguish the claims for female bodies made in fiction and those made as Truth with a capital "T." In her March 1999 article for Time, Barbara Ehrenreich recuperates science and the narratives of biological truths about female bodies in a way that seems only to prove that science often discovers emergent social truths. Hers is a kind of "I told you so" narrative that, ironically, confirms science as the best arbiter of the natural and the potential of female bodies; the cover proudly offers sciences backing to feminist "opinions, "The latest research into the secrets of biology and evolution reveals that women are tougher, stronger and lustier than anyone ever thought." In the article, Ehrenreich uses biological data to underscore her vision of the female body liberated from social norms into a wild, natural and powerful state. In a sense Butler tells a similar story; however, Butler writes science fiction, parable and cautionary tales, not popularized versions of scientific truths, which, as has been amply pointed out by even Ehrenreich herself, often are fantasies cloaked as biology "the prostitution theory of human evolution." By couching new data as more "advanced" and more "real," she reinvigorates sciences disciplining of the female body. Today's "truth" becomes tomorrow's enslavement, as history has shown. Her account of the "new science" would have been well-served to contain some of Ruth Hubbard's agnosticism and Donna Haraway's skepticism about our ability to discover "sacred tenets" of evolutionary theory, psychology and physiology.
27. See Alaimo for a discussion of "bodily transgressions" and "monstrous cartesian portraits" in Butler's Wildseed and Mind of My Mind. She argues that Butler "casts off the body as a mere vestment or investment and transforms it into a liminal space that blurs divisions between humans and animals, subjects and objects, nature and culture (130). The boundary not blurred by the bodies in these books, however, is gender. The male Doro represents the monstrous cartesian portrait while Anyanwu the "embodied" knowledges. She is an "alternative" not only because she shapeshifts instead of stealing bodies, but also because those beings that are bred live with her as family and kin, not slaves. (127-130).

[Reference]
Works Cited

[Reference]
Allison, Dorothy. "The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode." In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed Henry Louis Gates, Jr. NY: Meridian, 1990. 471-478. Butler, Octavia. Dawn. New York: Warner, 1987. #p#分頁標題#e#
Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1989.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. 1953. New York: Vintage, 1974.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. "The Real Truth about the Female" Time 8 Mar. 1999: 56-66. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, rev. ed New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Foster, Frances Smith. "Octavia Butler's Black Female Future Fiction." Extrapolation 23.1 (1982): 37-49.
Friend, Beverly. "Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Milhiser and Octavia Butler" Extrapolation 23.1 (1982): 50-55.
Goldberg, David Theo, ed. Anatomy of Racism. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Govan, Sandra "Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction." Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984):82-87.
Helford, Elyce Rae. "'Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young?:' The Construction of Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler's 'Bloodchild."' African American Review, 28.2 (1994): 259-271.
Hess, David Science and Technology in a Multicultural World. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991.
Hubbard, Ruth. "The Political Nature of Human Nature." in Feminist ' Theorize the Political Ed Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992. 175-191. Kenan, Randall "An Interview with Octavia I- Butler"Callaloo (14) 2: 1991. 495-504. Peppers, Cathy, "Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler's Xenogenesis. ScienceFiction Studies 22.1 (1995): 47-62.
留學生dissertation網Salvaggio, Ruth "Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine, "Black American Literature Forum. 18. 2 ( 1984): 78-81.
Zaki, Hoda. "Utopia, Dystopia and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler." SFS 17 (1990): 239-51.

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