Explorations of the Posthuman in Octavia E.

Butler’s

Xenogenesis Trilogy

By

Maria Papadimitriou

A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School

of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

April 2009
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction........................................................................................................1

Chapter One

The Posthuman Subject....................................................................................14

Chapter Two

The Organic Body in a Posthuman Future.......................................................49

Epilogue............................................................................................................82

Works Cited......................................................................................................86
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to Dr Domna Pastourmatzi, who has been incredibly generous with her

time and essential feedback in her numerous readings of this manuscript in progress. With

her knowledge, dedication and intellectual guidance, she has stimulated my critical thinking

and has been a source of insight and inspiration during my studies in American Literature

and Culture.

I would like to express my warm gratitude to Dr Tatiani Rapatzikou and Dr. George

Kalogeras, members of the supervisory committee for their time and advice.

I would also like to acknowledge the significant contribution of the professors of the

Department of American Literature and Culture to my pre-graduate and graduate studies.

Above all, I treasure the love and support of my husband, whose help has been

precious along the difficult path of researching for and writing this dissertation.
 INTRODUCTION

What good is any form of literature to black people? What

good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the
future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or
to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What
good is its examination of the possible effects of science
and technology, or social organization and political
direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates
imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off
the beaten track, off the narrow footpath of what
“everyone” is saying, doing, thinking—whatever
“everyone” happens to be this year.
Octavia E. Butler
“Positive Obsession” (1996)

For several years, Octavia Estelle Butler (1947-2006) stood alone as the sole

recognized black woman writer of science fiction. Her thirteen novels and numerous short

stories attest to her loyalty to a genre that has battled historically with established

conventions associated with American literature in general and with science fiction in

particular. The challenges Butler faced when entering the world of science fiction in the mid-

1970s originated in the common-held views which discriminated “serious” American

literature from what was classified as “fantasy,” “escapism,” “mere entertainment” or even

“para-literature.” For decades before Butler started publishing her own works, science fiction

was popularly read but persistently uncanonized by academic circles. Consequently, as a

genre, it was deemed a product of low or popular culture. It was recognized as a creative type

of writing, but not acknowledged for its literary weight and its practical social value.

Because of this marginalization of science fiction in terms of its respectability, many

African American writers felt they could not afford to invest energy in producing science

fiction, even more in searching for publishers. Benjamin Lawson reports that African
 Papadimitriou 2

Americans who sought a place in science fiction often had to cope with one more obstacle:

the belief of the black community that “science fiction has been a white world or, perhaps a

world in which race plays little part” (87). As Lawson continues, under the impression that

the frivolity of science fiction weakened any political statement a black writer had to make,

black scholars and the public maintained that science fiction

would seem simply no business of the responsible black writer whose degree of

essentialized “Africanness” and dependence on folk traditions separate her or him

from the heritage of Western science and technology which science fiction has

been said to celebrate. In this way of thinking, science fiction expresses the ethos

and values of the West in a literary genre also Western. The author’s choosing the

genre becomes a choice, willy-nilly, to accent the American in “African

American” and to denigrate pride in race. (Lawson 87)

Butler herself remembers many times having to justify her profession, usually to black

people, something which she admits to have always resented (“Positive Obsession” 134). The

truth is that the science fiction she was exposed to as an adolescent did not include African

American authors or images of African Americans.1 For this reason, and because of the fact

that she grew up in a segregated America, Butler had little confidence as a young black who

set her mind on creating science fiction stories of her own.

Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22nd 1947. After her father

died when she was very young, she was raised primarily by her mother, who earned their

living as a maid. To escape the boredom of poverty, Butler began writing tales at the age of

ten. Despite her dyslexia, by the time she was twelve, she had become an avid reader of

science fiction. She studied at Pasadena City College, California State University and UCLA

1
She comments that she did not even know that science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, Jr. was black
until the 1970s. Years later, in 1996, when she wrote the “Positive Obsession,” afterword to Bloodchild and
Other Stories, she admitted that there were two more black (male) science fiction writers she was familiar
with, Steven Barnes and Charles R. Saunders (“Positive Obsession” 134).
 Papadimitriou 3

and participated in the Open Door Program of Screen Writers’ Guild of West America (1969-

70), as well as in the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1970. It is clear that from

her childhood, Butler was interested in reading and writing science fiction.

While setting off her career in science fiction, Butler also had to shatter the myth that

the genre was reserved for male authors and readers, and that male characters were basically

the protagonists. In her interview with Larry McCaffery, she recalls that early American

science fiction focused on male space, underwater adventures, gadgetry or scientific ideas.

As she explains, she found herself trapped in following the prevalent type of (masculine)

science fiction: “The short stories I submitted for publication when I was thirteen had nothing

to do with anything I cared about. I wrote the kind of thing I saw being published—stories

about thirty-year-old white men who drank and smoked too much. They were pretty awful”

(McCaffery 57). On the other hand, she admits detesting the stories that were “intended” for

women, since they dealt with “Finding Mr. Right,” marriage, family, and other “boring” for

her issues.2 After the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1970s, there was an

influx of women, who wrote and published pioneering science fiction (Ursula Le Guin,

Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy to mention a few), albeit

all of them were white. Eva Federmayer notes that Butler felt inspired by the feminist science

fiction these women produced and ultimately tried her hand at publishing narratives she was

really fond of (105). After Joanna Russ’s encouragement, Butler also decided “to stop using

her initials, a then-common practice for women who wanted to write science fiction” (See

2
“I didn’t know how to write about women doing anything because while they were waiting for Mr. Right
they weren’t doing anything, they were just waiting to be done unto. Since I didn’t know what else to do, in
those early Patternist stories [1976; 1977; 1978] I more or less copied the boys’ books” (McCaffery 58).
 Papadimitriou 4

51).3 Butler soon found her personal, African American voice in the genre and started

producing her own version of literature.

Over the past three decades, Octavia Butler negotiated successfully a literary terrain

long dominated by white men and established herself as a permanent fixture in the libraries

of science fiction lovers all over the world. As she comments to Sandra Govan, her audience

is divided into “three natural audiences—the black audience, the science fiction audience,

and the feminist audience” (“Going to See the Woman” 20). She wrote thirteen novels4 and a

collection of short stories published under the title Bloodchild and Other Stories (1996). She

received many prestigious and coveted awards: the McArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the

Locus and Hugo (awarded through popular fan vote) and the Nebula (awarded by fellow

professional writers), which are the highest honors in the genre of science fiction. Although

she entered a still-expanding genre in literature, Butler managed to contest the idea that

science fiction is a genre unworthy of literary investigation by producing complex narratives

and deeply philosophical works. According to the Mildred Mickle, Butler also “helped to

enrich the genre by adding to it a previously excluded experience: the African American

female’s” (113).5

Throughout her work, Butler uses the conventions of science fiction (time travel, post-

holocaust life, contact with extra-terrestrial beings) to subvert many long-held beliefs about

race, gender and power. Her narratives create alternative worlds, where evolution is not

robotically or technologically influenced. Self-imposing women of African American or

mixed race are her protagonists or heroines who challenge racist and sexist assumptions.

3
C. L. Moore was a woman science fiction writer, who, in the 1940s chose to keep her female identity
invisible. ‘C’ stands for Catherine (Lefanu 2), while James Tiptree Jr, who emerged in 1977 as a writer,
was also a woman called Alice Sheldon (Roberts 99).
4
Patternmaster (1976), Mind of my Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Kindred (1979), Wild Seed (1980),
Clay’s Ark (1984), Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989), Parable of the Sower (1993),
Parable of the Talents (1998) and Fledgling (2005).
5
In her interviews, Butler characterizes herself as “a black feminist science fiction writer from Southern
California” (McCaffery 54), locating her writing within the particular social and historical experience as a
black woman in the United States.
 Papadimitriou 5

Butler extends or alters the family unit; her multiracial societies promise the balance

humanity has long needed.6 Moreover, in her stories, aliens challenge humanity’s penchant

for destruction and attempt to instill into humans the desire to evolve into beings who

celebrate and explore, rather than distance, the “Other.” Her characters confront issues of

isolation, alienation, slavery, control, change, boundaries, compromise, symbiosis, adaptation

and difference. For her thematics, Butler borrows from social sciences, such as anthropology,

political science and sociobiology, as well as from physical sciences, biology and genetic

engineering (Govan, “Butler, Octavia” 143). Above all, Butler’s fiction is centrally

concerned with difficult but fundamental questions, such as “what will it mean to be human

in the future?”

In one of her two trilogies, Xenogenesis, which has been acclaimed by many scholars

and reviewers as her masterpiece, Butler poses such a question. Dawn, Adulthood Rites and

Imago chronicle the adventures of a small group of human survivors. Discovered while

slowly dying in the aftermath of a nuclear war, which has rendered the Earth uninhabitable,

the Humans of the story are rescued and kept in suspended animation by an alien species

known as the Oankali. The Oankali are gene collectors and traders, who continually augment

themselves with the genetic and cultural diversity of the species they encounter in their

perennial inter-galactic journeys. While keeping the human beings in a state of

unconsciousness, the Oankali make use of their organic ability to alter the bodies of other

creatures genetically: they improve the human memory, strength and longevity. Above all,

the Oankali intervene in the human bodies to curb the Human Contradiction (intelligence at

the service of hierarchical behavior). According to the Oankali, it is a genetic human defect,

which has brought humanity to annihilation. In an act less generous to the human eye, the

6
Discussing with Veronica Mixon the possibilities science fiction offers as a genre of social, cultural and
individual change, Butler asserts that by writing science fiction, “I was free to imagine new ways of
thinking about people and power, free to maneuver my characters into situations that don’t exist. For
example, where is there a society in which men and women are honestly equal? Where do people not
despise each other because of race or religion, class or ethnic origin?” (qtd. in Shinn 10).
 Papadimitriou 6

Oankali also effect an involuntary sterilization among Humans, to ensure that all future

human children will be the product of Human-Oankali matings. Two hundred and fifty years

later, following the Oankali’s restoration of Earth, the human beings are transported back to a

tropical jungle and are expected to begin a new society, learning to fend for themselves by

living off the land. There, Lilith Iyapo, the black matriarch figure, attempts to convince her

fellow survivors to accept the inter-species breeding with the Oankali, even if such genetic

mixing with the aliens means human subservience to another species. Most human characters

finally submit to the aliens’ way of life and accept the hybridity, symbiosis and

interdependence they promote; others, called resisters, refuse to get biologically enslaved by

the Oankali or serve as a breeding stock for a new subspecies of Human-Oankali children.

They desperately hope to overcome the alien-imposed sterility and strive to conceive and

bear human children.

While the Oankali conceive the fusion of biologies and cultures as an utopian

evolution, most Humans experience it traumatically, as a form of extra-terrestrial

colonization. For them, the involuntary partnership with an alien species represents a

devastating loss of identity. Butler presents the aliens in the trilogy as the symbolic

embodiment of difference with which humans are invited to embrace, or else become extinct.

The Human-Oankali inter-breeding results in a xenogenesis, the birth of the first hybrids of

both Oankali and Human origin. These “constructs” unsettle human boundaries on multiple

levels. More importantly, they challenge the way Humans have always defined and

understood themselves. In the dawn of a new, posthuman future, the human beings of the

story have to revise their definitions of subjectivity and organic body and to become more

than human, that is posthuman.

In Xenogenesis, the question what it means to be human leads to dramatic changes.

Butler explores the evolution of the human condition into a posthuman condition. As regards
 Papadimitriou 7

the meaning of the terms “posthuman” or “posthumanism,” there is no standard definition. In

fact, they are hard to define. In the editorial of the special issue Posthumanous of the

electronic journal Reconstruction, Jason Smith, Geoff Klock and Ximena Gallardo state that,

“there is certainly no agreement as to what, exactly, constitutes posthumanism or

posthumanist position beyond the premise that what previously seemed to constitute the

subject position of a ‘human being’ has been threatened, infiltrated, deconstructed,

denatured.” In the same editorial, the writers continue saying that, “posthumanism, like any

other movement or ‘-ism,’ is difficult to introduce, first and foremost, because of this kind of

rhetoric: its first infiltrating tactic is to call the time of death on the current age [humanism].”

In Xenogenesis, Butler drops hints that the posthuman does not emerge through “the

obsolescence of the human” (Halberstam and Livingston 10). Butler avoids marking the

future of humanity by an apocalyptic vocabulary.7 Rather, her approach to posthumanism

anticipates what Neil Badmington and Katherine Hayles call the “‘working through’ of the

humanist assumptions” (Hayles 135), assumptions which have hitherto defined the human

body and subjectivity.

More specifically, Butler seems to welcome the posthuman condition if it entails the

dislocation of Man as/at the center of the universe. Her vision of a posthuman subject

involves the subversion of androcentric, anthropocentric and ethnocentric values and

concepts of liberal humanism. Butler rewrites the humanist subject as “the rational

independent ‘I’ in defense of his supposedly irrational, dependent others—women, animals,

7
As Manuela Rossini informs us, “after the Second World War, an increasing number of scholars from
various disciplines have talked about both homo sapiens and the humanitas [i.e. humanities] in terms of
‘the end,’ ‘death’ … or, in its milder form, about ‘crisis’ of the human” (25). Indeed, Michél Foucault
speculated in 1966 that soon “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (The
Order of Things 387). Postmodernist thinkers like Jean Baudrilliard and Jean-Francois Lyotard reinforced
the attack on humanist ideals. In the next decades, scientists like Hans Moravec (founder of the world’s
largest robotic research program) and Bill Joy (co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems) took
the reaction to humanism a step further. They contended that, with the growing incursion of techno-science
into the natural world, society, every day life and our own bodies, humanity is imploding. Actually, they
hastened to declare that human beings as biological units are already “an endangered species,” who need
technological enhancement, or even “mind uploading” to avoid extinction. (See Moravec, Mind Children
and Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” See also Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines).
 Papadimitriou 8

human beings of non-Western cultures, e.t.c.” (Rossini 25). Her work undermines the model

of a unitary and universal self and refuses the limits imposed by binary definitions of the

human: self and Other (in terms of race, gender and/or species) are united in one, common

struggle for survival. Obviously, for Butler, the tendency of the human subject to create

“Others” and distinguish her/himself from them has always constituted an enactment of

power. As she seems to argue, projecting “otherness” to determine oneself has legitimized

oppression of all forms and accelerated the devastation of life on Earth.8 Alternatively, Butler

envisions a posthuman world, where difference can be embraced rather than used for the

objectification and suppression of the Other. To achieve this, the writer stresses that the

human being should evolve in corporeal interconnectedness to the world and other actors. To

depict a posthuman subject related to other beings and the world, Butler integrates in the

narrative of Xenogenesis an evolutionary theory premised upon symbiotic terms. According

to such a theory, from mitochondria to mammals including human beings, all creatures are

bound in a large, homeostatic system, the “Gaia.” They interact with each other and the

environment on mutually beneficial terms and follow a common evolutionary course. Taking

this for granted, Butler assumes that our next iteration will be similar. The posthuman subject

cannot—and should not—exist in separation from her/his different ones.

Moreover, in Xenogenesis, Butler represents a posthuman subject, who forms

linkages to other beings and allows her/himself to be transformed by them and the natural

surroundings. She envisions a subject that is open to mutation, variation and becoming. More

precisely, Butler denaturalizes the humanist subject as a static, unified, unchanging self and

paves the way for a flexible, diverse posthuman subjectivity. The writer uses the motifs of

hybridity, shape-shifting and nomadism as promising enriching forces, which enable an

8
Conceiving nature as something separate from man and to be dominated by man, combined with the
assumption that human beings are special and hierarchically superior to all beings of the world, reinforced
the excessive individualism of the liberal self. Gradually, this individualism made possible, if not
inevitable, the exploitation and destruction of our natural environment.
 Papadimitriou 9

intersection of conflicting identities. The genetic and cultural variation of the trading partners

in the story, Human and Oankali, result in the creation of a multiple posthuman subjectivity,

an inter-subjectivity of the resulting hybrids. It is a version of subjectivity, which, contrary to

the liberal humanist model, includes rather than excludes many different subjects in the

definition of the “human.” While envisioning a posthuman future, Butler also predicts that

after repeated inter-breeding of beings (from a different race, gender and/or species), the

return to a timeless self, based on a human essence shared by all, will be futile.9 By being

open to change and transformative encounters with the Other, Butler’s posthuman subject

experiences a permanent state of becoming.

Furthermore, Butler’s vision of a posthuman subjectivity counters the heritage of

Cartesian dualism, which equated self with the mind and ignored the relevance and

significance of embodiment. Butler acknowledges that the organic body is quintessential in

the formation and definition of the posthuman subject. Her emphasis on the physicality of the

posthuman characters reveals her interest in embracing corporeal types of identity for the

posthuman subjectivity she designs. In fact, for Butler, the flesh is the medium through

which the posthuman subject understands her/his existence and position in the world.

Through the body, the subject communicates and creates affinities with other agents and

nature on a most intimate, almost placental level. It is an “organic” type of communication

which avoids the ideological infiltrations of human language. In short, as Xenogenesis

shows, the posthuman subject can “know” her/himself and the world around her/him through

this lived body. The writer adopts an ecofeminist point of view, according to which, favoring

an embodied sense of self is a way of realizing that human beings are part of the world,

rather than its masters and controllers.

9
Besides, as Sherryl Vint argues, the emphasis on the universality of human selfhood “ignores the
exclusions of women and non-Europeans (particularly non-whites) from the founding moments of both
humanism and liberalism as theories of society” (12).
 Papadimitriou 10

By drawing her readers’ attention to the human flesh as the neglected part of the

mind/body dualism in humanist discourse, Butler also intends to focus on the significance of

body knowledge. Influenced by socio-biological theory, the writer argues that knowing the

genetic inclinations of the human body toward specific diseases or behaviors may prove a

most useful tool. Based on this knowledge, referred in the trilogy as “certainty of the flesh,”

current practitioners of genetic engineering or biomedicine can intervene in the human

genome and modify it, in order to curb and control a lethal disease or anti-social behavior.

Apart from intervening to produce posthuman bodies through genetic modification,

education to less hierarchical ways of being and acting seems to be Butler’s suggestion for a

successful social amelioration. A major human flaw Butler detects in the human genetic

structure is what she calls in the story the “Human Conflict” or the “Human Contradiction.”

As she explains, human beings have always been prone to violence and (self) destruction,

because they put their intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. Although ambitious

as a project and difficult in practice, the writer hopes that genetic mutation and acculturation

of the human subject into more peaceful models of life would fulfill the promise of social

improvement humanity has heretofore desperately needed. Besides, Butler imagines that in

bringing the human body toward a posthuman state, we would have the opportunity to escape

the masculine/feminine gender division. New genders, less likely to oppress and be

oppressed might emerge. Moreover, for Butler, posthumanity would demolish the boundaries

of race, which the humanist tradition has long struggled to maintain intact; it would bring the

human flesh closer to a desirable rather than despised miscegenation and would shatter the

established (white, masculine, heterosexual) body as the only legitimate one. Therefore,

Butler draws attention to the body and its valuable information as a way of preparing a

posthuman future free of the flaws of our humanist past and present.
 Papadimitriou 11

Like all her stories, Xenogenesis’s narrative is too complex to offer particular

solutions for a livable posthuman future, at least not without dilemmas and compromises on

the part of the human beings. The utopian possibilities of the posthuman condition

(transgression of boundaries, mutation, fluidity, plurality, collectivity) cannot come without

cost. Butler demonstrates clearly that she cannot jump lightheartedly on the bandwagon of

the over-enthusiastic posthumanists.10 As she traces the shortcomings of the humanist

ideology and attempts to overcome them in her designation of the posthuman, at the same

time she has a critical stance toward the posthumanist theory.

More specifically, Butler expresses the anxiety that an endlessly variable self, “whose

boundaries are breached from all sides” (Hurley qtd. in Jacobs 91), may be drained of free

agency and self-ownership. The writer cautions her readers that successive mutations and

metamorphoses of the human subject may entail the loss of her/his integrity. Evidently,

Butler worries that the perpetual configuration of the human genome and its surveillance and

manipulation by those in positions of power may erase the human personhood. Instead of a

self-defining being, the posthuman subject emerging may be fetishized: (s)he may be reduced

to a bunch of microscopic genetic codifications. Additionally, Butler points out that, if access

to one’s genetic data is limited to the scientists who control them, the individual may be

alienated by her/his own body. The ability to decide for her/his own body may be irreparably

10
I mainly refer to the philosophers, scientists and artists, who support posthumanism feverishly and
assume that the posthuman will be an enhanced, closer to immortality, version of the human. Among them,
the self-proclaimed “transhumanists” or “extropians” “fervently embrace science and technology as
positive forces for quantum leaps in human evolution, and seek enhanced minds, bodies, and improved
control over nature” (Best and Kellner 197). In other words, they anticipate the life extension of human
beings with the use of cryonics, cloning, telomerase therapy (endless cell division) and other technologies.
Also, artists like performance artist Stelarc believe that the human body is obsolete and in need of
improvement. Such artists have devoted themselves to the exploration of the augmented, posthuman body
through the application of reconstructive and prosthetic surgery. Moreover, a number of cyber-theorists like
Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo have promoted the image of the cyborg (a short form of cybernetic
organism), as a promising embodiment of posthuman identity. They propose a bionic version of the human
body, modified with the use of non-biological components. Although Butler shares some of the views
Haraway expresses on the type of subjectivity that repudiates the patriarchal images of the past, Butler has
little to do with the thinking of such techno-enthusiasts. Contrary to them, she is particularly cautious in
welcoming the ‘post’ to humanity. The conditions under which she accepts posthumanism are analyzed in
the following chapters of my essay.
 Papadimitriou 12

lost. Besides, Butler finds equally risky the exposure of our genomes to various

interpretations, since they cannot but be politically informed. The plurality of genetic

“readings” may well facilitate the establishment of one body as the representative of the

posthuman form, which, as I have argued, would just repeat humanist norms of body and

subjectivity. In general, Butler seems to believe that, however oppressive the humanist

insistence on autonomy and individuality has proven to be, the posthuman subject should

retain her/his self-determination and free choice in a world that is continually shifting around.

The transition to a posthuman future may be a horrifying possibility if its subjects cannot

decide for their own fates.

The aim of this project is to explore the way Octavia Butler approaches

posthumanism in the Xenogenesis trilogy and illustrate the revision of the homo sapiens she

proposes for a posthuman future. The first chapter discusses Butler’s representation of a

posthuman subjectivity grounded on hybridity, multiplicity, flexibility, relatedness, and

interdependence. Reading the three novels with the help of postmodern theorists like Donna

Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Gloria Anzaldúa and the posthumanist critic Sherryl Vint, I argue

that Butler promotes a nomadic posthuman subject, who forms a mestizaje (mixing) of

intersecting identities and acknowledges her/himself as materially connected to the rest of the

world. Furthermore, I draw from Lynn Margulis’s symbiotic approach to biology, in order to

illuminate Butler’s views on the biological origins of the human race as well as her

expectations of our posthuman evolution.

The second chapter places the focus on the way Butler portrays the posthuman body

in Xenogenesis and on the role she believes the flesh will/should play in a posthuman future.

Examining Butler’s trilogy through feminist theorists of the body, such as Elizabeth Grosz,

Lynda Birke, Magrit Schildrick and Janet Price, I argue that Butler stresses the importance of

an embodied posthuman existence and the contribution of physicality to the formation of

 Papadimitriou 13

posthuman subjectivity. I also clarify Butler’s position in the perennial debates over the

organic body and trace her influences in the feminist movements of the 1970s. Moreover,

informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of the body, I assert that

Butler favors the lived posthuman body, that is the notion that the individual has a physical

understanding of her/himself and experiences the world through the flesh. Finally, relying on

Michél Foucault’s theory on power, I analyze the power relations Butler intends to expose

regarding the knowledge of the body and the biomedical interventions in its structure. I

conclude with Butler’s insistent suggestion throughout the trilogy that the continuation of

human life should be premised not on technological, but on biological/genetic

reconfigurations of the body. As an alternative to current techno-fantasies, Butler maintains

that immortality may very well be achieved when the substance (that is genes) of organic

bodies is passed on from one creature to another and from one species to another through

time.
 Papadimitriou 14

Chapter One

The Posthuman Subject

Butler’s representation of the posthuman subject in the Xenogenesis series reveals her

keen interest in ambiguity and complexity, since the posthuman subjectivity portrayed in her

narrative is as much post- as is human. Butler enters the debate about the nature of the

posthuman subjectivity with the image of a posthuman hybrid on a species, race and/or

gender level. In Xenogenesis, the posthuman hybridity is embodied by the human characters,

who have received genetic and/or biological intervention by the alien Oankali and by the

construct children of the Human-Oankali inter-breeding. These characters (Lilith, Joseph,

Tino, Akin, Jodahs and Aaor) develop a posthuman subjectivity, which offers utopian

possibilities. It evades fixity, definition and boundaries; it challenges difference; it is open to

mutation, relatedness and interdependence with the environment and other subjects.

However, as the trilogy reveals, Butler fears that in the permeability and fluidity of

the posthuman self lurks the danger of its final dissolution, due to lack of agency,

individuality and self-ownership, which render it “clay” in the hands of those in positions of

power (AR 33). In this respect, the endlessly variable posthuman subjectivity represented by

the construct characters of the trilogy does not appear to Butler promising enough to make

her declare the human subject extinct. The trilogy proves that infinitely permeable

posthuman subjectivities cannot be embraced as entirely progressive. Some of the posthuman

characters in the trilogy display nostalgia for a “pure” modern subjectivity with clear-cut

boundaries and claim their right to decide for their own, their children’s and their planet’s

fate.
 Papadimitriou 15

Despite the fact that Butler seems to acknowledge this human desire to secure

personhood and self-determination, she also exposes the dangers of clinging to “pure” human

identities. She invites her readers to revise the humanist model of the self, which defined the

human subject as separate from—even hierarchically superior to—the other beings of the

universe. She also warns them against labeling as “other” subjects of different species, race,

and/or gender. In other words, Butler recognizes the limitations of both the humanist and the

posthumanist subject, and attempts to expose the power relations involved in both

modernism and postmodernism, with the hope that their weaknesses will not be repeated in a

posthuman future. As Naomi Jacobs notes, “Butler’s extreme depictions of the humanist self,

violently defending its integrity against the threatening other, and of the posthuman self,

struggling to maintain any coherence in the absence of constituting Others, might both be

read as cautionary accounts of the excesses of humanist and posthumanist thought” (109).

Evidently, the situations of complexity Butler weaves for her characters leave readers

skeptical toward both humanist and posthumanist subjectivities, and warn them to be more

cautious about adopting absolutist ways of being.

In this chapter, I will attempt to scrutinize the posthuman subject as Butler portrays it

in Xenogenesis and illustrate the subjectivity she posits for a viable posthuman future.

Relying on a theoretical framework guided by Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Gloria

Anzaldúa, Sherryl Vint and Lynn Margulis’s symbiotic theory of origins, I will also

illuminate Butler’s views on biology and evolution.

First of all, Butler envisions a posthuman subject grounded on an indistinct identity, a

subject becoming. The writer introduces to the story this model of a “subject-in-progress”

through her Oankali characters, who attempt to instill their model of subjectivity to the

human characters as well. The Oankali not only desire change like “chameleon lizards” (AR

264), but they also “mobilize human adaptability to a species that arrives on earth to reform
 Papadimitriou 16

humanity” (Green 185). They premise their immortal lives upon metamorphosis and

boundary-crossing, since they engage in perpetual gene-trading with the life-forms they

encounter while roaming the galaxies for millennia.

The “long, multispecies Oankali history” (Dawn 61) shows that the Oankali craving

for hybridization and diversity is an organic one and thus a matter of survival. Their

encounter with the human species and its unique genetic material gives them the chance not

only to survive, but also to evolve into an even longer-lived species. In Naomi Jacobs’ words,

“for them [the Oankali], restriction to an unchanging shape or fixed identity would mean the

end of life” (96). Jdahya, the ooloi who awakens Lilith after two hundred and fifty years of

suspended animation, and guides her through her peculiar symbiosis with the Oankali,

discusses with her the biological impetus behind the Oankali trade:

JDAHYA. We are committed to the trade, he said, softly implacable. […]

LILITH. No! […]

JDAHYA. Can you hold your breath, Lilith? Can you hold it by an act of will
until you die?
LILITH. Hold my-
JDAHYA. We are committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We

were overdue when we found you. Now it will be done – to the rebirth of your

people and mine. (Dawn 41)

The Oankali commitment to genetic mixture, organically determined like “breathing,”

reforms the human subjectivity. The Oankali characters demonstrate to the human beings that

their insistence in fixity and inbreeding has brought humanity to a dead end. Therefore

through the Oankali, Butler prepares her readers for a more flexible type of subjectivity, open

to the transgression of genetic boundaries, as the only way to survive in a post-holocaust

future.
 Papadimitriou 17

What is remarkable though, is that the diversity the Oankali innately desire and

collect from other species is not only genetic, but also cultural. As Nikanj, the mature ooloi

who mediates the first coupling between the genetically altered Humans, Lilith and Joseph,

admits to the latter, “… you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your

bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We’re interested in those, too. That’s why

we saved as many of you as we could” (Dawn 154). Nikanj has to explain the same thing to

Tino, one of the Human resisters to the Oankali inter-breeding and Lilith’s second human

mate: “we need cultural as well as genetic diversity for a good trade” (AR 40). This “thirst”

for the genetic and cultural material of other species across the universe is what constitutes

the Oankali “nomadic subjects,” who constantly transform themselves and their trading

partners. Butler uses the nomadic nature of her aliens as a metaphor for an ever-changing

posthuman subjectivity. In my opinion, her act echoes Rosi Braidotti’s definition of the

posthuman subject, one that is grounded on the premise of “nomadism”: “[The nomadic

subject is] a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or

nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions,

successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity” (22).

Butler’s nomadic aliens, like Braidotti’s model of a “nomadic subject,” display a serial

identity. In their galactic journeys, they may use many different styles of being or thinking as

needed and then set them aside. Although it is true that not all the human characters of

Xenogenesis adopt the Oankali nomadic subjectivity, Butler uses it as a base for a posthuman

subjectivity, which entails multiplicity, flexibility and adaptability to change as well as

transformative encounters with the other.

Furthermore, the “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination”

(Anzaldúa 765) of the Oankali in the trilogy creates a self, which reminds me of what Gloria

Anzaldúa calls in chicano “the mestiza self” (765). Because of their contact with multiple
 Papadimitriou 18

species, races and cultures, the Oankali develop a selfhood that is open to difference. Like

Anzaldúa’s model of the mestiza self they include rather than exclude divergent thinking, and

by resisting rigidity, they have become plural, flexible and tolerant to contradictions. As I

will show later, Butler welcomes these qualities as promising for a posthuman subjectivity.

For this reason, she weaves for the Human-Oankali constructs a posthuman subjectivity

grounded on both Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity and Anzaldúa’s mestiza self.

In the trilogy, Akin, the first Human-Oankali construct of Lilith’s brood, embodies

the multicultural posthuman subjectivity Butler promotes. First of all, he is born of a

Chinese-American human father, Joseph, a Nigerian-American human mother, Lilith, an

Oankali father Dichaan, an Oankali mother, Ahajas, and an ooloi, Nikanj. Taking into

consideration the already nomadic Oankali subjectivities, the combination of Akin’s

progenitors creates not only a genetic, but also a cultural mosaic for the offspring. Akin

grows near all five parents, as well as in both the Oankali and the Human community, which

gives him the chance to develop a plural personality, an “intersubjectivity” as Bollinger calls

it (340); thus, he is able to understand the points of view of both the Human and the Oankali

species in the book. After spending a period among the resister Humans who abducted him

when he was seventeen months old, and the Human resisters in Phoenix, who bought him,

Akin has come to believe that, with their fertility restored, a group of Humans deserve a

chance to colonize Mars in their original form. In this sense, Akin “adopt[s] as his life’s task

the role of spokesman and leader” (Govan, “Dawn Breaks” 5) for the Humans. Akin believes

that the human colonizers will resemble the “Akjai” group of Oankali, who do not participate

in the Human-Oankali trade, because they wish to keep the Oankali form unchanged in case

the trade of the other two Oankali groups (the Dinso and the Toaht) with Humans fails.

Talking to Amma and Shkaht, two Oankali-born girls, Butler presents Akin convinced that

“There should be a Human Akjai! There should be Humans who don’t change or die—
 Papadimitriou 19

Humans to go on if the Dinso and Toaht unions fail” (AR 133). In the process, Akin finds

Humans unwilling to desert their beloved Earth and live on a Human-only settlement on

Mars, and receives the Oankali persistent indoctrinations that human beings will not

overcome their Human Contradiction (intelligence at the service of hierarchical tendencies).

Nevertheless, Akin hopes that, when in separation from their abject “others” Humans may

curb their fatal evolutionary flaw, and display less destructive tendencies towards each other

and the environment. He also sympathizes with the human desire for procreation, and

respects the human right to freedom of choice. Some critics have noted that “his name itself

[pronounced ‘Ah-keen’] calls attention to his role as ‘kin’ of both races” (Lee 175), as its

meaning in English suggests. Existing on the Human/Oankali border enables Akin to

acknowledge Human flaws, but also, to help Humans out of them. Butler seems to desire this

“border-dwelling” personality (Alzadúa qtd. in Jacobs 95) for the posthuman subject she

designs. In Butler’s version of posthuman subjectivity, the subject is willing to share and

make her/himself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. It is a subject who

works through her/his differences with other races/species, as the only possibility to survive

in a posthuman future.

Of course, Butler’s African American heritage, with its long history of diaspora and

its genetic and cultural exchanges with colonizers or slave traders, is not reminiscent of a

“peaceful” nomadism as is the Oankali’s of her trilogy. African American history is full of

forced miscegenation and cultural coercion in the name of white supremacy. The truth is that

the conditions under which the Oankali mix genetically with Humans, bring to mind

historical slavery, at least in the way humans experience it (captivity, forced sterility and

reproduction only through interbreeding with the Oankali, cloning genetic copies of the

survivors, inaccessibility to reading and writing materials, control of the human body and

memory, impregnation beyond consent). However, as Amanda Boulter points out, even
 Papadimitriou 20

though the narrative representation of the Human-Oankali mixing “is framed by the context

of historical miscegenation … it does not repeat its values” (178). In Butler’s narrative,

“miscegenation seems to reach a new peak” (Kenan 500), since it is “the only available way

for either species to survive” (Federmayer 107). As Roger Luckhurst observes, “Butler

exploits the contradiction of hybridity in order to produce, in one move, narratives that

generate horror at the monstrous hybrid’s departure from the same, but which, in a

simultaneous counter-move, offer the prospect of the new miscegenate as the emergence of

difference” (34). The posthuman future she imagines gives Butler the chance to revise the

identity of the human subject based on more benevolent exchanges with a different species.

Her hybrid creatures are far from the liberal humanist model that defines human beings as

mainly white in race, as distinct from other species due to their intelligence, and as kings of

the universe. Therefore, the posthuman subject Butler creates aspires to be a nomad and is

less likely to oppress or get oppressed by “the others” (s)he encounters.

In addition, the “nomadism” of Butler’s posthuman subject, in Xenogenesis,

presupposes that any return to an “original,” “pure” and unchanging self is merely utopian

and futile. The subject-becoming, embodied by the ever-altering Oankali and their emerging

constructs, cannot hope of returning to its matrix, because after so much crossbreeding and

hybridization its origins have become untraceable. Memory of the Oankali “homeworld” is

becoming more and more distant after so much wandering in the galaxies, and “go[ing]

back” is “the one direction that’s closed to [them]” (Dawn 34). Butler uses “these apostles of

becoming” (White 402), who recall no place of origin, to depict a posthuman subject, who,

according to Donna Haraway, “would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of

mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (Haraway, The Haraway Reader 9). It is not that

Butler’s inter-racial, inter-species Oankali hybrids have rendered themselves simulacra with

their original selves lost through the ages of gene-trading. Producing exact physical copies
 Papadimitriou 21

of themselves or of their trading partners is not enough for the Oankali. If their lives were

grounded simply on the reproduction of genetic material, their world would be a mere

biotechnology lab, and the races with which they mate guinea pigs with their genetic

blueprints available for manipulation. On the contrary, Butler makes the nomadic Oankali

evolve through both biological and cultural transpecies mixing.

The offspring of the cross-breeding do not look the same with either set of parents. In

a conversation with Tino, who has received the Oankali genetic modification though he

slightly remembers it, Nikanj admits:

NIKANJ. … we all took prints of you—read all that your bodies could tell us

about themselves and created a kind of blueprint. I could make a physical

copy of you even if you hadn’t survived.

TINO. A baby?

NIKANJ. Yes, eventually. But we prefer you to any copy. We need cultural

as well as genetic diversity for a good trade. (AR 40, emphasis mine)

In reality, each genetic combination of the Oankali with a member of different species is “a

new throw of the dice” (Shaviro 47) and gives birth to totally new, construct subjects, who

are later exposed to additional mutation and metamorphoses according to their social and

natural surroundings. According to Cathy Peppers, this is exactly the essence of the word

“xenogenesis”: it means “the production of offspring different from either of its parents”

(47). In my point of view, Butler designs for her construct characters a course of life that

resembles the one of insects, with successive mutational levels which lead to a posthuman

self, but whose final form cannot be controlled and determined in advance. The writer seems

to desire a posthuman subjectivity, which will emerge not only from the somewhat

predictable genetic blueprint, but also from its interaction with the environment and other
 Papadimitriou 22

beings. Butler’s model of posthuman subjectivity differentiates from the modern paradigm of

a fixed self. It welcomes rather than fears radical “becomings” and cultural influences.

Butler prepares her readers for the unforeseeable form of the posthuman subjectivity

she designs both with the title she gives to section one of the first book of Xenogenesis and

with the delineation of Jodahs’ and Aaor’s characters in Imago. More precisely, Butler names

“Womb” section one of Dawn, to give readers a clue of the new, unexpected forms of life,

which result from the Human-Oankali genetic/cultural mixing. As Alice Walker writes, the

title “emphasizes a move away from descent-based filiation” and highlights the trilogy’s

emphasis on new ways of life” (109). The genetically modified human characters presented

in Dawn, are the first tokens of these new life forms. Akin and his sibling are the next

construct creatures Butler asks her readers to familiarize with. However, Jodahs and Aaor are

the characters who confound all the readers’ expectations in the third book. Jodahs and Aaor

embody the unpredictability of the Human-Oankali mixing. Their gender comes as a

complete surprise even to the Oankali, after a probably intentional mistake their ooloi parent,

Nikanj, has made: Jodahs and Aaor develop into ooloi, the Oankali third gender, which is a

different sex altogether, because they feel most drawn to Nikanj. Their ultimate form cannot

be foreseen, like every Oankali, since no one can tell what they will look like after each stage

of metamorphosis.

In addition to its multiple metamorphoses, Jodahs, in particular, can change into any

shape, species or gender it likes, according to the memories and fantasies of others. “I can

change myself,” says Jodahs. “… It’s easier to do as water does: allow myself to be

contained, and take on the shape of my containers” (Imago 89). It has no stable self; instead

it allows itself to be “contained,” that is, influenced by its adjacent forces, like water.

Moreover, Jodahs develops the versatility of the animals to adapt to environmental

changes—an ability to breathe under water (Imago 22), a green, scaly body to crawl
 Papadimitriou 23

painlessly in the forest (88, 92) and a quadrepedal form, with clawed forefeet, webbed

fingers and toes like a frog when it needs to cross a river (Imago 69). Jodahs can shift into the

proper gender (male or female) when it wants to attract a human mate sexually (Imago 79,

195), or even into a more “human” shape and appropriate language, in order to assimilate

with a couple of human resisters (Imago 93, 106). As Jae Roe explains, Butler not only

brings us face to face with entirely new, constantly shifting posthuman characters, but,

through a clever narrative device she also asks us to identify with them. In Roe’s words, “it is

fitting that Butler shifts into first person narrative in Imago, because Jodahs [the first human-

born ooloi and narrator of the third volume] is the embodiment of what she asks us to

identify with, which is not an identity but a permanent state of becoming” (Roe 297). In

short, Jodahs appears to be the epitome of the posthuman subjectivity Butler imagines. It is

the character that accumulates all the desirable qualities for the writer: versatility,

unpredictability, adaptability to the natural surroundings and to alien beings.

In any case, “rebirth” or “reproduction” are problematic notions in Butler’s version of

posthuman subjectivity, since they leave no space for chance and creative change. As Donna

Haraway suggests, to distance from Western origin myths, which evoke the anticipation for

“the Second Coming of the sacred image” (“Biopolitics” 223), “cyborgs have more to do

with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing” (The

Haraway Reader 38).11 And in reference to Xenogenesis she says, “from the perspective of

an ontology based on mutation, metamorphosis, and the diaspora, restoring an original sacred

image can be a bad joke. Origins are precisely that to which Butler’s people do not have

access” (“Biopolitics” 223). I have traced in Butler a similar aversion to recreating “sacred

11
Of course, Butler’s use of the regeneration pattern displays an important difference from the ones
Haraway had in mind in “Manifesto.” The regeneration of the Human-Oankali cyborgs in the book depends
on an organic basis, since it is the outcome of the genetic processing that occurs inside the ooloi’s ‘yashi,’
the organelle responsible for the genetic alterations of the Oankali’s trade partners. Haraway, on the other
hand, considers technological modification of the human body as a necessary prerequisite for it to adjust
and survive in a constantly changing environment.
 Papadimitriou 24

images of the past” in a posthuman future. Specifically, Butler places Akin, who encapsulates

the malleability of posthuman subjectivity, to express his disgust for the plastic pictures-

replicas of Christ he and Gabe find in a human church that gets burnt in a raiding by human

resisters from vicinal villages. Akin gets “nauseated” (AR 142) as he inhales the poisonous

gases emitted from the burnt plastic: “Akin went to the door and spat outside several times,

spat away pure pain as his body fought to deal with what he had carelessly taken in” (AR

142). Butler uses the plastic religious icons as a metaphor to convey an aversion to replicas

of past, hierarchical ontologies. Tate, Gabriel’s wife, discusses with Sabina, a female human

resister, the utility of the pictures to Humans, saying, “other people need things like that—

pictures and statues of another time, something to remind them what we were. What we are”

(AR 144). However, what is repeatedly underlined throughout Xenogenesis is that humanity

cannot survive unchanged. The human hierarchical tendencies have brought human beings to

the verge of extinction. Therefore, the human efforts to reproduce themselves “in his own

image, in the image of God” (Genesis, Book 1) and continue to behave as if they were the

superior species on the planet are presented as futile in the trilogy. Akin, almost like Butler’s

mouthpiece, wonders: “Why did people use [this stuff] so much if it killed them?” (AR 144).

Butler obviously juxtaposes the Oankali’s “postmodern anti-origin” subjectivity (Peppers

qtd. in Brataas 85), which is premised upon chance and mutation, to the human attempts to

access their origins through memory, history, culture, and religion. Xenogenesis argues that it

is not worthwhile to preserve the western notion of the Cartesian self intact; it is better to

move on to a posthuman subjectivity which is open to creative change. For Butler, the

emerging posthuman self would be less “poisonous” for the natural environment and the

other life forms in the universe.

In the trilogy, a character that deviates from the original “sacred image” of the

Biblical Eve is Lilith. Lilith’s name, alluding to her demonic, irreverent namesake,
 Papadimitriou 25

“emphasizes the repudiation of the (human) Creator” (Bonner 55). Like “the legendary she-

devil” (Osherow 75) of the apocryphal Bible, Butler endows her heroine, Lilith, with the

desire to resist the image of Eve. The western christian image of Eve—the Mother of the

human race—is white, female, compliant, dependent and devoted to bear children “in the

image of God.” In spite of the fact that Lilith resembles Eve when altruistically sacrifices

herself in the interest of others (Osherow 76), she agrees to desert the Earth for good and

become the scapegoat of Humans by producing Human-Oankali “monsters,” that is “children

born of Lilith-the-animal” (Imago 54). Butler’s African American character, Lilith Iyapo,

unsettles white christian expectations of being another replica of the Biblical Eve.

Like Anyanwu, the black heroine of her Wild Seed, Butler portrays Lilith as

androgynous and dynamic. Butler’s Lilith is extraordinarily powerful, able to heal faster than

an ordinary human, so as to defend herself and those in danger (AR 48-9) and intensely

sexual. She is made into the matriarch of an unexpected, posthuman brood. As Butler has

said to Sandra Govan regarding Lilith’s name, “I would not have named her Eve. Eve is too

wimpy. Lilith is not wimpy” (“Going to See the Woman” 27). Butler prepares us for the

deviant portrait of her female progenitor through the thoughts of another character, Tino:

“Lilith. Unusual name loaded with bad connotations. She should have changed it. Almost

anything would have been better (AR 36).12 Butler’s description of Lilith Iyapo, as observed

by Tino, reinforces her deviation from the Sacred image of the biblical Eve:

She was an amazon of a woman, tall, strong, but with no look of hardness to

her. Fine, dark skin. Breasts high in spite of all the children—breasts full of

milk … The woman was beautiful. Her broad, smooth face was usually set in

an expression of solemnity, even sadness. It made her look—and Tino winced

12
In her discussion with Sandra Govan, Butler relates her editor’s estrangement regarding the name of her
heroine: “I remember my editor saying, ‘Oh God, I hope you didn’t name her that by accident’” (‘Going to
See the Woman” 27).
 Papadimitriou 26

at the thought—saintly. A mother. Very much a mother. And something else.

(AR 36-37)

As Michele Osherow says, Butler colors Lilith’s maternal figure with this “something else,”

that is, with Tino’s voyeuristic attraction to her, which adds a tone of sexual desire to the

exclusively nurturing image of Biblical Eve (78). To reinforce Lilith’s sexual appeal, Butler

shows Lilith mating with two human males (Joseph and Tino), but in fact Lilith is nobody’s

wife throughout the trilogy. Unlike the traditional Eve, Lilith obeys no creator. Throughout

Butler’s narrative, Lilith embodies not a conventional Eve/Madonna figure, but a

revolutionary, “community othermother” (Collins Hill 115).

In addition, Butler complements her portrayal of Lilith’s sexuality with comments

from other human characters: “In Phoenix, people had said things like that—that she was

possessed of the devil, that she had sold first herself, then Humanity, that she was the first to

go willingly to an Oankali bed to become their whore and to seduce other Humans …” (AR

48). These comments resonate slave narratives, in which the black woman who mated with a

white man was often attributed the role of a seductive whore, betraying her race or “true”

womanhood. Butler revises Lilith’s role and rejects the stereotype of the black woman as an

animalistic sexually indulgent whore. In doing so, she “undermines the inherent patriarchy of

Judeo-Christianity and offers imaginative figurations of strong, self-possessed Black women”

(Wood 96-97). In the final analysis, the writer focuses on the importance of changing images

and refuses to recycle to the archetypal models of subjectivity repeatedly produced by

patriarchal discourses of culture and religion through the ages.

Evidently, in her construction of a posthuman subjectivity, Butler avoids the

dominant western iconography, as well as the pitfall of a fixed self. Reading Xenogenesis

along with other works of the writer, I have concluded that regeneration and metamorphosis
 Papadimitriou 27

are more usual patterns in her fiction.13 By definition, according to Merriam-Webster Online

Dictionary, to regenerate means “to generate or produce anew; to replace (a body part) by a

new growth of tissue” and as a process, it entails the element of chance. The bodily part or

the biological system that is regenerated is totally renewed.

Butler uses the pattern of regeneration in Xenogenesis both literally and

metaphorically. On a literal level, the Oankali cause the regeneration of the disfigured or

mutilated human parts, which have resulted from a strong proclivity to cancer after the

nuclear catastrophe on the planet. Taking advantage of the human “talent” for cancer (Dawn

236) and reversing its destructive power into a source of regeneration and growth, the

Oankali are able to generate new, construct subjects. The ooloi who have reached their stage

of maturity can re-program the human cancer cells to save a human life instead of causing its

degeneration. The conversation between Nikanj and Lilith is indicative:

NIKANJ. You’ll live, he said. Your people will live. You’ll have your world

again. We already have much of what we want of you. Your cancer in

particular.

LILITH. What?

NIKANJ. The ooloi are intensely interested in it. It suggests abilities we have

never been able to trade for successfully before.

LILITH. Abilities? From cancer?

NIKANJ. Yes. The ooloi see great potential in it. (Dawn 39)

And as Lilith explains to her second human mate, Tino,

[Oankali] get real pleasure from healing or regenerating, and they share this

pleasure with us. They weren’t as good at repairs before they found us.

Regeneration was limited to wound healing. Now they can grow you a new
13
See, for example, the five novels of Butler’s Patternist saga (Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s
Ark, Wild Seed, and Survivor), where the protagonists with their healing and regenerative abilities live on
the border of self/non-self, and refuse the fixity of race/species/gender boundaries.
 Papadimitriou 28

leg if you lose one. They can even regenerate brain or nervous tissue. They

learned that from us, believe it or not. We had the ability, and they knew how

to use it. They learned by studying our cancers, of all things. It was cancer that

made Humanity such a valuable trading partner. (AR 45)

Like Nikanj, the ooloi, are able to use cancer cells to stimulate latent regenerative abilities of

their own bodies, or to enhance their potential for the healing of others. Nikanj heals Lilith’s

biologically inherited cancers, and uses her proneness to the disease, or “gift” as it calls it

(Dawn 236), to regenerate later part of its arm. It got injured in a conflict with Humans, in

the simulated tropical forest the Oankali have made for their training (Dawn 232-35).

Obviously, Butler engages in a literary experiment, in which she explores the possibility of

turning the deadly properties of cancer into a reformative force promising longevity, if not

immortality.

Using the cancer cells as vehicles of life has long occupied the minds of those

interested in postmodern biology and evolutionary theory. In her interview with Larry

McCaffery, the writer explains that such an idea has been an imaginary scenario, which has

always preoccupied her:

Another idea I wanted to examine in the Xenogenesis trilogy (and elsewhere)

was the notion of cancer as a tool—though I am certainly not the first person

to do that. As a disease, cancer is hideous, but it’s also intriguing because

cancer cells are immortal unless you deliberately kill them. They could be the

key to our immortality. They could be used to replace plastic surgery—that is,

instead of growing scar tissue or grafting something from your thigh or

somewhere else, you could actually grow what you need, if you knew how to

reprogram the cells. (McCaffery 68-69)

 Papadimitriou 29

Of course, in reality, cancer cells are not welcomed as “regenerative” by cancer patients nor

as “vehicles of life.” And no scientist could actually foresee the impact of the reprogrammed

cancer cells on the patient’s future life. However, Butler’s decision to portray them as a

positive force reveals an interest in restoring the remnants of humanity and leading it to a

healthy and striving posthuman future.

On a metaphorical level, I would say that Butler uses the modified and unpredictable

cancer cells in the human characters as the basis for a promising, boundary-free posthuman

subjectivity. More precisely, because of the unpredictability of their “modified” cancer cells,

the genetically processed posthuman subjects actually embody the malleable “other,” and are

thus open to mutation and transformation. Butler’s preoccupation with the potential of cancer

cells seems to stem from the desire to deviate from the biological model of the self that

defines her/himself in defense of her/his boundaries against the “invading” viruses or “non-

selves” threatening her/his integrity (Haraway, “Biopolitics” 219). The alien Oankali are

those who will teach Humans how to accommodate with their intra-organismic “others,” not

only by ceasing to see these others as threats to their human boundaries, but also by letting

themselves be radically transformed by them. Metaphorically, the Oankali ability to

“reprogram” the human cancer cells is Butler’s “tool” to strip her model of the posthuman

subject of the binary thinking of self/non-self, good/evil, or the adherence to a “pure,”

static—mainly WASP—selfhood.14 Furthermore, as Amanda Boulter points out, in

Xenogenesis, “the Oankali orchestration of the structures of cancer becomes the metaphorical

vehicle with which Butler attempts to ‘cure’ a long, painful past” (182) full of horror and

brutality against “the other,” which has been historically associated with blackness.

Accordingly, the posthuman subject she represents in the trilogy will have to rework the past,

14
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
 Papadimitriou 30

which has been marked by “cancerous” xenophobia, not by eliminating but by accomodating

with “the other.”

As it seems, Butler hopes that, by learning to cohabit more harmoniously with the

other, the human subject will become more xeno-philic in her/his next iteration than s(he) has

been up to now. To explore what a xenophilic posthuman subject would be like, Butler

places the human characters of her narrative in the most complex of all situations: she not

only brings them in contact with the repulsive Oankali, and expects them to work through

their differences in terms of species, gender or ideology, but she depicts them perversely

desiring their object of abjection. Both male and female Humans find themselves irresistibly

drawn to the attractive scent ooloi emit, and subconsciously anticipating their mating with

them. After all, one of the meanings of the word “ooloi” in English is “magnet,” because

“people are drawn to ooloi and can’t escape” (Imago 6). Indeed, in Dawn, Lilith expresses

her ambiguous feelings of abjection and desire toward Nikanj, when she says:

Back when I first met my first mature ooloi, Nikanj’s parent Kahguyaht, I

found it alien, arrogant, and terrifying. I hated it. I thought I hated all ooloi …

Now I feel as though I’ve loved Nikanj all my life. Ooloi are dangerously easy

to love. They absorb us, and we don’t mind … An ooloi is probably the

strangest thing any human will come to contact with. We need time alone with

it to realize it’s probably also the best thing. (Imago 147)

Marina Rivas, the Filippina who was raped and beaten by other Humans for her decision to

go to Mars, also finds herself irresistibly attracted to Jodahs, in Imago (62). Moreover,

Jesusa, the Latina Jodahs finds and heals in the forest, works through her revulsion for it

during its subadult stage to the point that she comes to like it. And as soon as Jodahs reaches

adulthood, her liking turns into something deeper, organic: “what she felt … went beyond

liking, beyond loving, into the deep biological attachment of adulthood. Literal, physical
 Papadimitriou 31

addiction to another person, Lilith called it” (Imago 154). Evidently, Butler uses one of the

tropes of the science fiction genre, the coupling with a non-human species, in order to

explore the human fear of difference. Using this “tried-and-true science fiction formula” that

combines “kinship and difference, the alien and the familiar” (Squier 125), Butler designs a

posthuman subject that desires rather than abjects the “xenos.” In Cathy Peppers’ words, “by

putting readers in intimate association with the Oankali, Xenogenesis generates xenophilia in

place of xenophobia” (60).

Butler has expressed her preoccupation with the issues of xenophobia and xenophilia

in her interview with Sandra Govan; she recalls:

Several years ago, when I was beginning the Xenogenesis books, I realized

that I was writing about a group of incredibly xenophilic aliens. I thought

about that and realized that I had never heard the word “xenophilic”… So I

went to the dictionary … but I could not find the word xenophilic even in the

unabridged … I went to the library, looked in the OED, and there it was, of

course. And I thought it was important that dictionaries from that time in

particular couldn’t really cope with a word that meant “a love of strangers.”

What I found instead were words that meant, “a fear of strangers,”

xenophobic, or xenomania, “an unnatural liking of the strangers.” (“Going to

See the Woman” 32)

To bring her readers face to face with the xenophobia of the human subject, Butler places her

human characters in the position of the “other.” Lilith, for example, enters Lo, the organically

grown shuttle-world of the Dinso-Oankali (who have chosen to trade and live with co-

operating Humans), feeling that the “people she walked among were discussing her as though

she were an unusual animal” (Dawn 63). Even though the Oankali community embraces her

as a member of their extended family, in one of her interior monologues we read, “… she
 Papadimitriou 32

was alone again—the alien, the uncomprehending outsider” (Dawn 105). More than that,

Lilith feels an outcast among her own kind, as well. Because of her “super-human” powers as

a modified human by the Oankali engineering the Humans she awakens wonder: “Are you

really human?” (Dawn 180) and accuse her of being “the different one. Nobody knows how

different” (Dawn 214). And when she attempts to infiltrate her human trainees with the

Oankali philosophy of curbing hierarchical domination, “Lilith found herself standing with

aliens, facing hostile, dangerous animals” (Dawn 227).

As it emerges from the above, Butler seems to depict “otherness” as a culturally

constructed idea in the book, which humans project to whatever deviates their norms of

appearance and behavior, in an effort to affirm the supremacy of their ontology. In political

terms, such an act entails power. Ursula Le Guin has said (and I think Butler would agree

with her) that, “if you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare

it to be wholly different from yourself … you have made it into a thing, to which the only

possible relationship is a power relationship” (qtd. in Wolmark 28, emphasis mine).

In Xenogenesis, Butler explores the power relations involved in the classification of

the Oankali as “other” by the human characters. Presenting them as strangers among the

Oankali, she attempts to show how easily the domination/subordination relation may be

reversed, with Humans occupying the uncomfortable position of “otherness.” And by

attaching otherness not to the primatoid Medusa creatures of her narrative but to the human

characters themselves, Butler actually exploits her readers’ emotion of discomfort of

identifying with the “other.” In fact, she “turn[s] our xenophobic gaze back on us, stimulating

a negative mirroring process that scrutinizes our history of violence from an alien

perspective” (Schwab 205). Moreover, regarding the narrative tools Butler uses to achieve

this, Boulter points out that, “In Xenogenesis, Butler uses comfortable conventions of third

person and first person narratives to draw the reader into a series of empathetic relationships
 Papadimitriou 33

with progressively more ‘alien’ identities” (173). I agree with Adam Roberts, when, in his

discussion of the representation of race in the work of black science fiction writers, he claims

that, “difference is a matter of perspective” and suggests that before labeling something/one

as other, we should ask to ourselves, “different to whom?” (121). It seems to me that Butler

shares this view, that we construct difference along our social and/or ideological background.

Besides, in her interviews, Butler has repeatedly admitted being familiar with the feeling of

otherness: “I’m black. I’m solitary. I’ve always been an outsider,” she says (See 50).15 In

Xenogenesis, Butler “confront[s] the ‘terrors’ of the center and the way they are attributed to

the other” (Wolmark 28) and in doing so, she hopes that becoming tolerant of strangers (in

terms of race, species or even gender) will be one of the significant changes the human

subject will undergo in her/his posthuman future.

As I will later argue, Butler’s vision that the human subject can overcome her/his

partly biological xenophobia in a posthuman future remains a distant possibility. According

to her personal comments, such a vision is undermined by the human stubbornness and

insistence on a “pure” essence of humanity. The writer has said to Sandra Govan: “Look how

weird we are about things like gender or race. How dare someone be different! We’re not

very tolerant unless we make an effort to be; and when it’s dealing with people from

somewhere else, we absolutely refuse to make that effort” (“Going to See the Woman” 32).

Butler seems to acknowledge that the human beings’ urge towards xenophobia is to some

extent innate. This is also illustrated by the statements made by some Oankali characters in

the trilogy, which I think express the writer’s views, as well. More specifically, in Dawn,

Nikanj describes to Joseph the human intolerance to difference: “Different is threatening to

15
In another interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, Butler even refers to her crave for
writing as an act of defense against people’s reactions to her “peculiar” appearance: “… I was an out-kid,
and I assume I was an out-kid because I was ugly. Actually, I was the most socially awkward person you
can imagine, still am to some degree. And I was an only child and never really learned to work with other
people very well. Because of this, because I was ostracized and because I was so shy, the writing was a real
refuge for me. So, in that sense, I guess you could say my body helped to make me a writer” (Mehaffy and
Keating 69).
 Papadimitriou 34

most species … Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal

ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you” (Dawn 186). Evidently,

throughout the trilogy the human beings from generation to generation display their

“intolerance” through violence, in a desperate effort to maintain a clearly essential

“Humanity” and thus assert their power over the threatening “others.” Even in Imago, after

so much mixing between Human and Oankali, Butler has Jodahs say: “… Humans were

genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it

was reality of the Human conflict that they often did not” (Imago 186). In my opinion, Butler

considers inherent in human beings the tendency to create and marginalize “others” and for

her, this is something they ought to eliminate before passing to their next step of evolution.

Nonetheless, Butler seems to maintain the dim hope that the adoption of more

xenophilic ways of being can change the human subject gradually, but positively, in a

posthuman future. Talking to Nikanj about the overtly violent Human-born men, Lilith

suggests, “… you could teach the next generation to love you, no matter who their mothers

are. All you’d have to do is start early. Indoctrinate them before they’re old enough to

develop other opinions” (AR 10). As Jim Miller says, Lilith’s idea that aggressiveness and

xenophobia could be diffused through early indoctrination “would seem to suggest that it was

indoctrination, not biology, which created it” and that, “if anything, the trilogy favors the

view that social construction is just as important as biology” (342). In other words, the

trilogy shows that, in order to escape from the genetic inclination to prejudice and violent

behavior, training in accepting the “xenos” as friend is required. In fact, Butler apparently

implies that it would be more effective if it were focused on each human subject separately.

As Nikanj suggests to Joseph: “it’s safer for you to overcome the feeling [of xenophobia] on

an individual basis than as members of a large group” (186). For this reason, Butler has each

human character who awakens from suspended animation receive personal training from an
 Papadimitriou 35

ooloi (Dawn ch. 12). To achieve this, the ooloi use a variety of methods: from drugs they

produce inside their own bodies to stimulate the human endorphins, and appease the human

terror towards their slimy trainers, to electrochemical connections straight to the human

nervous systems, so as to transmit their xenophilic messages right to the human brain.

Although the process seems strenuous and vain in the next two volumes, and alludes to

conditions of captivity, Butler seems to believe that human beings are worth a try. I find quite

strong Hoda Zaki’s dystopian view that, “for her [Butler] the human propensity to create the

Other can never be transcended” and that “the end of racial discrimination must coincide

with the rise of some kind of similar discrimination based upon biological differences” (241).

In my point of view, Butler considers in any case essential the adaptation of the human

subject to more tolerant ways of thinking, and worthy any efforts to educate the profoundly

xenophobic subjects.

As it seems from the trilogy, Butler’s vision of the posthuman self is informed by

postmodern, symbiotic approaches to biology and evolution, since she envisions this revised

self in relation to other subjects and the environment. Postmodern biology, and postmodern

evolution by extension, are terms which emerged in the 1970s, when marginally acceptable

stories of the origin and evolution of the life of species challenged modern, Darwinian

thinking. In 1969, James Lovelock formed the “Gaia Hypothesis,” according to which the

Earth, with its biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil was “a dynamic, self-regulating,

homeostatic system” (Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts” xii-i). Lynn Margulis, the

microbiologist who collaborated with Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis, extended his theory

stating that, many of the microbiotic components of our cells, like the mitochondria, evolved

from free-living species, which later entered into symbiotic relationships. Her theory actually

posited a revised human identity, suggesting that, “we … are composites, symbionts, living
 Papadimitriou 36

together in intimate association of different kinds of organisms” (Margulis qtd. in Peppers

52). Margulis sees the human species as part of an immense Earth organism, and she states:

… the traditional view of cutthroat Darwinian world, in which the mechanics

of evolution justified exploitation, since it was natural, morally acceptable, is

… an illusion. It becomes a fallacy to think that evolution works at all times

for “the good of the individual;” instead, there is a thin line between

evolutionary competition and cooperation … guests and prisoners can be the

same thing, and the deadliest enemies can be indispensable to survival. (qtd.

in Peppers 52)

Fascinated by the symbiotic approach to biology, Butler admits using the Gaia Hypothesis as

the basis of many of her science fiction stories16 to challenge the humanist view that the

human subject should be at the top of nature’s hierarchy. And because, a great deal of the

world’s injustice (racism, class oppression, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, religious

intolerance and mistreatment of animals) has been premised on the hierarchical structure of

societies, Butler would rather see the posthuman subject defined along more relational,

symbiotic terms.

In Xenogenesis, the alien and construct characters live and evolve in such symbiotic

conditions. Butler depicts them as symbionts in a large living organism, the universe, within

which grow smaller living units, the planets and the Oankali ship-entities. The writer places

her fictional universe in the trilogy within an ecofeminist framework; it is a structure based

on the motif of Gaia as mother of small, self-regulating systems, like organs with “living

tissue” and “flesh” (AR 201) working collaboratively for the balance of the organism. We

understand this mother-offspring relationship when Akin leaves Earth on a shuttle to return

to Chkahichdahk, one of the Oankali ship-organisms: “Akin seemed to drift, utterly naked,

16
See interview with Mike McGonigal.
 Papadimitriou 37

spinning on his own axis, leaving the wet, rocky, sweet-tasting little planet that he had

always enjoyed and going back to the life-source that was wife, mother, sister, haven. He had

news for her of one of their children—of Lo” (AR 197). Butler represents the Human-

Oankali symbiosis, and the symbiogenesis of construct beings that occurs as a result of

interbreeding, as an example of the Gaia model of a self-sustaining system, and depicts these

construct beings in continuation of an evolutionary process, which started a long time ago.

To illustrate this, Nikanj explains to Dichaan:

Examine Tino. Inside his cells, mitochondria, a previously independent form

of life, have found a haven and trade their ability to synthesize proteins and

metabolize fats for room to live and reproduce. We’re in his cells now, and the

cells have accepted us. One Oankali organism within each cell, dividing

within each cell, extending life, resisting disease. Even before we arrived they

had bacteria living in their intestines and protecting them from other bacteria

that would hurt them or kill them. They could not exist without symbiotic

relationships with other creatures … I think we’re as much symbionts as their

mitochondria were originally. They could not have evolved into what they are

without mitochondria. Their Earth would be inhabited only by bacteria and

algae. Not very interesting. (AR 182-3)

Evidently, for Butler, the passage from one evolutionary step to the other is not a linear

process, involving the evolution from primate forms of life to more complex, and

hierarchically “superior” ones, as Darwin’s theory has premised. Rather, her narrative

reminds us of “Margulis’s alternative story of our symbiotic microbiological origins”

(Bollinger 342). And regarding our posthuman future, I agree with Butler when she says to

McGonigal that, “it doesn’t mean that we’re going to travel a straight line” towards what we

might call the “posthuman.” Evidently, in Xenogenesis, the ultimate form of the human or
 Papadimitriou 38

the other subjects of the world cannot be predicted in advance, since a combination of socio-

biological factors as well as the complexity of the Human/non-Human symbiotic

relationships work to produce subjects totally different from their progenitors.

Moreover, Butler may seem to agree with the Darwinian belief that, by evolution,

homo sapiens is biologically and psychologically connected to other, non-human beings.

However, in her representation of evolution, she deviates from the Darwinian model of the

natural selection of the human species because of its rich genetic material, and its destination

towards perfection. Such Darwinian-derived theories have legitimized feelings of human

uniqueness, separateness or even hierarchical supremacy over different species, regardless of

the fact that the human genome displays a slight variation from them.17 Butler’s alternative

evolutionary approach follows lines similar to those Teresa Heffernan traces: “the more one

insists on absolute boundary lines between the human and non-human, the more the two

become entwined in their evolutionary present and future” (Heffernan qtd. in Hayles 135).

The passage, then, to a next evolutionary stage “should not be depicted as an apocalyptic

break with the past” (Hayles 134), the life-forms with which human beings have shared the

universe up to now. Rather, as Donald Worster points out, we were and “we are ‘all netted

together’—‘fellow brethren [or sisters]’ traveling on a single, shared planet” (qtd. in Grewe-

Volpp 162, emphasis mine), all species interdependent in a common struggle for survival.

Consequently, the posthuman subject to come will emerge through “co-evolution and co-

constitution” of different but “associated creatures,” embedded in an extended kinship group,

and living “a kind of obligate confederacy” (Haraway qtd. in Bell 116).

Throughout the trilogy, some human characters seem to be frightened by their

symbiotic relationships with the alien Oankali, which permeate their boundaries on multiple

levels, and prefer to cling to their human identity by struggling to maintain the border

17
Only 1.3% variation from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, for instance (Birke 148).
 Papadimitriou 39

human/non-human intact. In their effort to do so, they repeatedly remind the Oankali of their

subspecies status, by calling them “animals” (Dawn 227-8), “worms” (AR 79, 104),

“leeches” (AR 264) or “slugs” (Imago 159). However, Butler asks us to reevaluate the

symbiosis of Humans with such an abhorrent form of life, and envision the self in a dialectic

process with the subjects that cohabit the universe. She urges us to envision a self whose

autonomy in the strong relational sense is both reciprocal and collaborative. It

is not solely an individual enterprise but involves a dynamic balance among

interdependent people tied to overlapping projects. Moreover, the self-

determining self is continually remaking itself in response to relationships that

are seldom static … the self exists fundamentally in relation to others.

(Donchin 239)

In Xenogenesis, Butler represents the interdependence between the human beings and the

Oankali as essential for the survival of both species, as well as for the ontology of the

posthuman subject that emerges from their interbreeding. The Oankali depend on the human

diversity to go on evolving in their intergalactic journeys, and Humans, on their part, need

the alien assistance in order to resist disease or self-destruction. In this fictional post-nuclear

future, Humans are shown to have two choices; either merge with their extra-terrestrial

symbionts on a genetic and cultural level or face “an evolutionary dead end” (Harris-Fain

126). The Oankali give Humans the opportunity to save much of the substance of the Earth,

as well as of their species, and carry it through their next steps of evolution. Through Akin’s

silent thinking, we read, “The salvaged Earth would finally die. Yet, in another way, it would

live on as single-celled animals lived on after dividing” (AR 119). Therefore, the peculiar

symbiosis of the two utterly alien species becomes a matter of survival and adjustment to a

world that changes like a living organism. As it seems, Butler uses the symbiotic terms of the

Human-Oankali merging to explore the possibilities of a posthuman subject to grow in

 Papadimitriou 40

alliance with the other subjects and the environment itself. As Gabriele Schwab points out,

“Butler’s vision is projected into a distant future after human struggles for identitarian

cultures have succumbed to global nuclear devastation” (214). For Butler, relatedness,

reciprocity and interdependence with other races/species seem to be the key elements in

defining the human subject in her/his next step of evolution.

To emphasize the relational rather than identitarian definition of the human self in a

posthuman future, Butler depicts her alien characters defining themselves through linking

with their exchange partners as well as the other Oankali of the group. Referring to Humans,

Dichaan tells Akin, “they’re more than partners to us … They are us, too, you know” (AR

199, emphasis mine). But, before linking to Humans, the Oankali have already grounded

their existence on intimacy and bonding with each other and their trading partners. Jodahs

even places their need for contact with others on bodily terms: “We’re very tactile. We don’t

just enjoy contact, we need it” (Imago 158). At another point he says, “We called our need

for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. The word had not been chosen

frivolously. One who could hunger could starve” (Imago 158). We can see an instance of this

feeling of “hunger” throughout Imago, when, apart from their own, “close-as-skin” bond,

Jodahs and its closest sibling, Aaor, “become so symbiotically dependent on having human

mates that, without them, they lose their energy and will to live” (Schwab 210). Indeed,

without mates, Jodahs’ body begins to “wander” towards dissolution, growing fur, then

scales and webbed feet. When it has to separate from its human mates, Tomás and Jesusa,

Jodahs admits: “Seeing them walk away was like beginning to dissolve. I feel as though part

of me has walked away with them” (Imago 180). Its sibling, Aaor, has the same feeling. In

Dawn, the ooloi get sick without their human partners (206). On the whole, connection

becomes the life-giving force for the construct subjects.

 Papadimitriou 41

Consistent with such subjectivity, in connection to others, Akin defines himself

through his osmotic and tactile responses to the environment, but mainly, through his bonds

with the subjects around him:

He came to perceive himself as himself—individual, defined, separate from

the touches and smells, all the tastes, sights, and sounds that came to him. He

was Akin. Yet he came to know that he was also part of the people who

touched him—that within them, he could find fragments of himself. He was

himself, and he was those others. (AR 6)

While in separation from the Oankali group, and more importantly from his female sibling

Tiikuchahk, Akin feels solitary, miserable and incomplete. Since Oankali siblings are so

close to each other, and act unanimously “as though they shared the same nervous system”

(AR 150), Akin cannot but feel painfully deprived of a major part of his self when he cuts

himself off from the Oankali community, in order to form the Human group that will

colonize Mars. Nikanj even notices that Akin’s growing obsession with Humans stems from

his desire to complement his ontology with the intimate relation to other subjects, since he

has failed to do so with Tiikuchahk, his closest sibling. “It should be the sibling I grow up

with, bond with” Akin complains to Tate. “We … we won’t be right … We won’t be

complete without each other” (AR 116). In other words, selfhood for the Oankali can only be

realized by maintaining a kind of ying-yang bond with their siblings. Influenced by oriental

philosophy, Butler even has the Oankali siblings acquire the opposite sex, in order to

represent the pair as a perfect match and balancing force of each other when approaching the

stage of maturity (AR 13, 84). Akin’s eldest sister, Ayre, explains the way selfhood is

“distributed” among a pair of Oankali siblings, saying, “… you’re like one pea cut in half”

(AR 191). Evidently, in Xenogenesis, to link to others is to enter into wholeness, and this is

what gives the posthuman subject definition and status. In fact, this is reflected by the
 Papadimitriou 42

Oankali names, as well. They carry the names of their parents—human and Oankali—the

mediating ooloi, its kin group and its home entity (Imago 7). Hence, Butler weaves for her

characters a network of bonding to portray a posthuman subject who reaches wholeness

through symbiosis and relatedness with other subjects.

Along with the relational dimension of the posthuman subject she posits, Butler also

focuses on her/his communal role and function. Obviously affected by the African American

tradition of relying on the dynamics of community for survival, and influenced by the Civil

Rights Movement as well as the feminist movements of the 1970s, which called for collective

political action, Butler cannot but imagine a posthuman self born, raised and maturing within

the safety and support of the community. The East African proverb “I am because we are and

we are because I am” (Hampton and Brooks 73) seems to play significant role in Butler’s

portrayal of a posthuman subjectivity, defined in collective rather than individualist terms.

The potential of a communal posthuman self, as Butler represents it, can be both

empowering and dangerous. Regarding the pleasure of such representation, Butler’s trilogy

places the posthuman subject she designs within a strong, viable, and supporting community,

which she considers vital for her/his existence and development. For instance, when an

Oankali offspring is born, the mates—Oankali and other—who will become her/his parents

are “all interconnected, all united—a network of family into which each child should fall”

(Dawn 83). In order for the child to fully understand her/himself as a member of a

community, and miss none of her/his parents, the ooloi even simulates the missing parents of

the child. For instance, Nikanj simulates Akin’s deceased Human father, Joseph, so that he

does not miss his presence while growing up. In addition, the parents maintain a tactile

contact among themselves, and with the child in the womb, so that the child knows “it [is]

coming into an accepting, welcoming place” (Dawn 84). Knowing in advance that (s)he will

enjoy the support of the community when coming to light, the Human-Oankali construct
 Papadimitriou 43

develops a subjectivity relying on mutuality and sharing, as well as on social responsibility,

even if her/his kinship extends beyond the strict blood bonding.18 Growing in such a

community of intimate bonding and sharing, Akin, for example, “learned an important

lesson: He would share any pain he caused (AR 7). And as we conclude from his

relationship with the human resisters, Akin’s empathic responses are not limited to his close

kinship. When one of his kidnappers is ill, Akin wishes Humans could have an ooloi share

and heal the man’s pain. Through his thoughts, we are told: “It was utterly wrong to allow

such suffering, utterly wrong to throw away a life so unfinished, unbalanced, unshared” (AR

78). Clearly, Akin develops a communal subjectivity, which enables him to display social

responsibility for any community he finds himself in. He understands the Oankali project of

symbiosis with other species for survival, as well as the human need to have a “human-only”

place, and decide their own fates. Sandra Govan writes that weaving strong empathic

relations among her characters is one of the oft-repeating patterns in Butler’s work

(“Connections and Links” 87). In her discussion of Butler’s use of metaphor in her

narratives, Thelma Shinn says that “the unity Butler establishes between people through

empathy and interdependence has sound psychological importance” (5). Seeing that the most

significant struggles against any form of oppression and injustice have been grounded on the

dynamics of the community, Butler expects the same stance from the posthuman subject she

envisions as well.

Of course, as I have mentioned above, Butler’s narrative is too complex to satisfy her

readers with only an array of utopian possibilities of the posthuman future she imagines.

18
Butler herself has said to Mehaffy and Keating: I don’t try to create communities; I always automatically
create community. This has to do with the way I’ve lived … I’m used to living in areas where there’s real
community. My little court … where I lived for about six or seven years … was a community in the real
sense of the word. We all knew each other and if one of us was going away for a few days, we’d tell the
others. We didn’t all like each other, but … since we were going to be living there, we made an effort to get
along” (60-61). And because she appreciated so much the potential of the community for the existence of
the subject, Butler admitted in the same interview: “All of my characters either are in a community … or
they create one … My own feeling is that human beings need to live that way and we too often don’t”
(Mehaffy and Keating 61).
 Papadimitriou 44

Since she describes herself as “a pessimist if I’m not careful” (Afterword to “Bloodchild”

145), she could not but highlight the risks of defining oneself always in connection with the

other subjects of the community. More specifically, Butler overshadows her vision of a

communal posthuman self with the possibility that, in thinking and functioning collectively,

one may lose her/his individuality and autonomous will. To warn the reader against such a

danger, Butler has her characters “lose themselves” in their mergings with one another, either

on a sexual or simply communicational level. For instance, the relations the Oankali establish

among themselves and with the species they encounter are so much interwoven with the

sharing of either pain or pleasure, that the Oankali come to “drown” into one another, losing

in the process part of their personhood and agency. This sharing to the extent of “drowning”

is illuminated in Imago, where the ooloi Jodahs describes the way it experiences its sexual

union with the siblings Jesusa and Tomás:

Jesusa grew pleasantly weary as I explored her and healed the few bruises and

small wounds she had acquired. Her greatest enjoyment would happen when I

brought her together with Tomás and shared the pleasure of each of them with

the other, mingling with it my own pleasure in them both. When I could make

an ongoing loop of this, we would drown in one another. (Imago 154,

emphasis mine)

As we can deduce from the extract, pleasure is distributed to the mates as water does in two

communicating vessels. To achieve this, the mediating ooloi either use their sensory arms or

release pheromones,19 in order to stimulate the nervous systems of their partners directly, and

force them to retrieve memories of relevant emotions. As a result, they function all as one

19
According to P. H. Raven and G. B. Johnson, pheromones are chemical substances released by the
exocrine glands of one organism that influence the behavior or physiological processes of another organism
of the same species. Some pheromones serve as sex attractants, as trail markers, and as alarm signals. A
pheromonally-controlled hierarchical system, as a paradigm of human relations, then, would emphasize the
associative and relational characteristics of the species rather than the discrete characteristics typically
attributed to DNA-or hormonally-controlled systems (qtd. in Mehaffy and Keating 71).
 Papadimitriou 45

body, feeling one thing: pleasure. However, the neuro-chemical methods the Oankali use to

establish this unity in their matings are Butler’s tool to show the ambivalence of such

intercourse. Even though the almost metaphysical union among the mates seems to promise

an escape from the oppression of the Symbolic, “drugging” mates through “multisensory

images” (AR 12), “tactile, bioelectric, and bioluminiscent signals … pheromones, and …

gestures” (AR 14) alludes to something more than just a form of innocent, “placental

economy” (Bollinger 341) developed between the Oankali and their mates. As Laurel

Bollinger points out, controlling chemically the sensations of the other “renders the

experience all but rape” (341) permitting little agency on the part of the individual to resist or

not the encounter.

Butler shows the same ambivalence in her representation of the communal posthuman

self when she describes the Oankali communication or political system. Alternatively to the

Human, verbal communication, the Oankali use body language and organic

interconnectedness to communicate with each other. In this way, they manage not only to

transmit their messages directly to each other, but also to achieve a consensus among the

community on various controversial subjects. Nevertheless, even though at a first glance the

Oankali “organic” communication appears to be ideal and an alternative from the one which

is pregnant with ideology and phallocentric language, it entails the risk of sacrificing

personal opinion or individual interests for the sake of a community consensus. As Jim

Miller notes in his discussion of the trilogy, “the Oankali’s collectivism neglects the

autonomy of the individual” (346), as it emerges from the narration in Imago: “ooloi treated

individuals as they treated groups of beings. They sought a consensus. If there was none, it

meant the being was confused, ignorant, frightened, or in some other way not yet able to see

its own best interests” (32). Obviously, in favoring the interests of the group over those of the

individual, the Oankali act in a paternalistic way that, at times crosses over into oppression.
 Papadimitriou 46

Experiencing such communication between two Akjai ooloi in Adulthood Rites, Akin

expresses his anxiety that the collectivism valued by the Oankali may be quite restricting for

the freedom and autonomy of the individual:

There was an utter blending of the two ooloi [Taishokaht and Kohj]—greater

than any blending Akin had perceived between paired siblings. This, he

thought, must be what adults achieved when they reached for a consensus on

some controversial subject. But if it was, how did they continue to think at all

as individuals? Taishokaht and Kohj, the Akjai, seemed completely blended,

one nervous system communicating within itself as any nervous system did.

(AR 211, emphasis mine)

The anxiety expressed in this scene, as to whether such collective thinking and acting

overshadows one’s individual needs and desires, reminds me of the feminist debate of the

1970s, when non-white feminists argued that in struggling for an essential (mainly white,

upper-class, heterosexual) female subjectivity, feminists ignored the specific needs and

desires of other, rather marginalized groups of women. As much as she desires the definition

of the human subject through mental or emotional connection with other subjectivities,

Butler also calls for autonomy and personhood. I agree with Laurel Bollinger that “we are

both separate and connected, and any definition of human subjectivity that fails to see both

sides of that identity will be inadequate” (347). Butler seems to recognize this truth, and

“urge us to consider connectedness carefully—both in its dangers and in its pleasures”

(Bollinger 347).

Furthermore, Butler seems to be quite critical of the postmodern definition of a

posthuman self in continual mutation and metamorphosis, always resisting the fixity of

boundaries. As it becomes evident from the narrative, the perennial permeability and fluidity

of such subjectivity may entail the subject’s ultimate dissolution. In the first two volumes of
 Papadimitriou 47

Xenogenesis, Butler celebrates the characters’ malleability and flexibility, as promising

qualities of a posthuman subjectivity, only to alarm her readers against them in the third

volume, Imago. More specifically, when Jodahs explains to its Oankali relatives, Ayodele

and Yedik, how easy it is to change itself, and be shaped by Humans “according to their

memories and fantasies” (Imago 90), Ayodele poses the following question: “When can you

be yourself?” (Imago 91). The question remains unanswered, so that Jodahs—as well as

readers—can have the opportunity to ponder on the risks of endless alteration and confusion

of boundaries. Right after Ayodele’s interrogation, Butler’s narration shifts from the dialogue

to Jodahs’ interior monologue, in order to draw our attention to Jodahs’ concern about his

personhood getting lost in successive mutations: “I thought about that. I understood it

because I remembered being their age and having a strong awareness of the way my face and

body looked, and of that look being me. It never had been really” (Imago 91). After

presenting the many metamorphoses of the construct characters, and their continuous

adjustment to the desires of others, Butler calls her readers to consider the possibility of

losing part of one’s self, or becoming malleable material in the hands of those in power. This

shade of skepticism adds a rather dystopian undertone to the writer’s depiction of the ever-

changing, posthuman self.

To conclude, Butler’s view on posthuman subjectivity echoes Sherryl Vint’s

definition of an ethical posthumanism:

The “post” of posthumanism should be a “post” to the heritage of humanism,

which makes humans the only subjects in a world of objects. An ethical

posthumanism must work against this boundary of the human from the non-

human, refusing this final ground of abjection. An ethical posthumanism

which acknowledges that self is materially connected to the rest of the world,

in affinity with its other subjects, is an accountable posthumanism. It is a

 Papadimitriou 48

posthumanism that can embrace multiplicity and partial perspectives, a

posthumanism that is not threatened by its others. (189)

However, Butler’s exploration of a posthuman future is far more skeptical than Sherryl

Vint’s premise. It proves her intention to caution her readership against all celebratory

attitudes and light-heartedly accepted models of hybrid selfhood. And because she seems to

believe in the complexity of the universe and its subjects, she hesitates to fully embrace

either a modern or a postmodern model of selfhood uncritically. What matters in her trilogy

is not so much which model of subjectivity will dominate our thinking, but the possibility of

all types of subjects to survive and evolve in terms of peace and justice with each other and

the natural world that surrounds them.

 Papadimitriou 49

Chapter Two

The Organic Body in a Posthuman Future

Butler’s thought experiment with posthumanity in the Xenogenesis series gives

special focus on the body. It is a flesh-and-blood body that hosts the posthuman self in

Butler’s vision. Her representation of an embodied posthuman subjectivity highlights the

beauty of the carnal form, which plays a crucial role in the formation of subjectivity, and

even of personhood. Unlike the French philosopher René Descartes, who defined the human

subject in terms of intelligence and perceived the organic body as an inconsequential vessel

containing the transcendent mind,20 Butler seems to insist that the body is an integral

ingredient of selfhood. The writer recognizes the subject as a corporeal being.

Nevertheless, for her, the organic body is not the definitive element of subjectivity;

on the contrary, Butler’s ecofeminist approach in Xenogenesis leads me to conclude that her

posthuman characters are “the result of the interaction of human/cultural and natural

processes” (Grewe-Volpp 151). Far from being “knowable epistemic object[s]” (Grosz,

Volatile Bodies 4) available for scrutiny and manipulation by the natural sciences, bodies in

the trilogy are conceptualized as much more complex than those defined by modernist

thought. Moreover, like the posthuman subjects they sustain, the posthuman bodies are the

products of symbiotic evolution and constant interaction with the environment. As we have

seen in the previous chapter, Butler welcomes the transformative inter-breeding with other

20
In Meditation IV, Descartes has written: “... just because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile
I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a
thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think]. And although possibly (or rather
certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I possess a body, with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet
because, on the one side, I have a very clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am a thinking and
unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch it is only an extended
and unthinking thing, it is certain that I … am entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist
without it” (190).
 Papadimitriou 50

races, species, or/and genders. Furthermore, the body knowledge an ooloi acquires by

reading the body’s desires can be most empowering: this knowledge facilitates the

communication between different species on the cellular level. In the Lacanian sense, non-

verbal communication promises “the return to the maternal, utopic one/wholeness of the

Imaginary” (Brataas 93), and leads the human constructs away from the patriarchal linguistic

signs of the Symbolic.

More importantly, Butler gives a socio-biological dimension to this “certainty of the

flesh” (AR 234), as she calls the ability of the ooloi to scan and reconstruct the microscopic

codifications of the human genome. Butler portrays this ability as a useful tool with which

the Oankali correct the human genetic flaws. Without any technological intervention, and

relying solely on their “yashis,” their organs of genetic manipulation, the ooloi “read” the

human bodies inside and out (Imago 204). In short, they can predict how the human genes

will react, triggering cancers or other genetic anomalies. Butler gives them the ability to

“correct” human genetic flaws, even to control human behavior. Taking into consideration

Butler’s personal comments in some of her interviews, I argue that Butler sees eye to eye

with her alien characters when they claim that the human tendency toward hierarchy coupled

with their intelligence is a biological problem which “programs” them to self-destruct.21 In

my point of view, Butler sees in the ooloi the contemporary genetic engineers, who aspire to

help humans become familiar with their biological fate, in order to overcome their possible

deficiencies, before entering the posthuman condition. In a way, the Oankali project to curb

the human hierarchical tendency by intervening in the human genome seems to be Butler’s

21
Butler has said to Lisa See that she “started the [Xenogenesis] series at a time when Reagan was saying
we could have winnable nuclear wars and how we’d be safer if we had more nuclear weapons. I thought if
people believed this, then there must be something wrong with us as human beings” (51). And in her
conversation with Larry McCaffery, Butler has also stated that her deep concern with the conservative
American political climate of the 1980s, the militant Reaganite politics in particular, “inspired” her to
ground Xenogenesis’ narrative on the premise that “human beings have the two conflicting characteristics
of intelligence and a tendency toward hierarchical behavior—and that hierarchical behavior is too much in
charge, too self-sustaining” (McCaffery 67).
 Papadimitriou 51

wish for a posthuman future free of the flaws of the past. In this respect, the Oankali are

Butler’s spokespeople—at least in the first book, Dawn. Through the aliens she critiques

standard human behavior as not particularly worthy of preservation unless some genetic and

cultural changes take place in the posthuman future. Therefore, the whole trilogy discusses

the possible benefits from the application of genetic knowledge and the route to social

improvement.

Butler’s attitude toward genetic decoding and tampering remains quite ambiguous,

though, since she does not share the Oankali point of view in all three books. Based on

Butler’s personal views on genetic engineering expressed in her interviews, I would argue

that in Adulthood Rites Butler seems to identify with her human characters, especially when

they seek to protect what is left from their human identity, and claim back self-ownership,

agency and control of their bodies. In general, I would say that although Butler seems to

recognize the contribution of the life sciences to the qualitative improvement, even to the

extension, of human life, she remains skeptical towards the technological/mechanical

reconfiguration of human bodies. Butler’s vision of social improvement through the

modification of the human genome has nothing in common with transhumanist fantasies,

which promote the radical transformation of the body (due to its genetic flaws), through

technological intervention. Nor does she welcome the reconfiguration of the human body

with technological supplements as Donna Haraway does in her vision of the technologically

advanced, cyborgian body. The body and mind enhancement offered to Humans by the ooloi

in the trilogy is achieved through exclusively biological means, and the changes which take

place are not so radical; they do not disfigure the original human bodies. In this way,

Xenogenesis gives Butler the opportunity to affirm her view that we should respect the

organic flesh and its vital contribution to the formation of selfhood. Both her aliens and her

constructs are creatures embodied in a biological material soma.

 Papadimitriou 52

In this chapter, I intend to analyze Butler’s representation of posthuman bodies in

Xenogenesis and illuminate her views on the role of the organic body in a posthuman future.

I will rely on the theoretical approaches of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth Grosz, Lynda

Birke, Magrit Schildrick, Janet Price, and Sherryl Vint, as well as on the Foucauldian theory

on power. I will also attempt to clarify Butler’s contribution to the debate over the organic

body, a debate with roots in the feminist movement of the 1970s. After decades of neglect,

feminist theory brought the body as a political issue to the forefront of academic discourse.

First of all, Butler seems to believe that corporeality is significant in the formation of

human subjectivity, and this is reflected in her posthuman characters. Right from the first

book of the trilogy, Dawn, Butler weaves a corporeal identity for both the Oankali, and for

the human characters who reach a posthuman stage due to their modification by their alien

partners. More specifically, Butler is quite meticulous in describing the physical

characteristics and metabolic processes of the Oankali bodies, which are crucial to the

readers’ visualization and familiarization with the Oankali identity. Typical of her writing,

Butler does not provide readers with a ready-made, full description of the alien figures right

from the start; instead, she activates readers’ interest in visualizing the Oankali subjects, by

engaging them in the continuous collection of clues regarding their appearance throughout

the trilogy. After spurring the readers’ imagination with the first alien figure, Jdaya, who

states, “I’m not a human being” (Dawn 10), Butler gives the first detailed portrayal of the

Oankali corporeality:

The lights brightened as she [Lilith] had supposed they would, and what

seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose—no

bulge, no nostrils—just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over—pale gray skin,

darker gray hair on its head that grew down around its eyes and ears and at its

throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the
 Papadimitriou 53

creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears

as well as around them. Above, it joined the eye hair, and below and behind, it

joined the head hair. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly, and it

occurred to her that that might be where the creature breathed—a kind of

natural tracheotomy. (Dawn 11)

While retaining the usual humanoid form of the alien body—the Oankali are bipedal, with

tentacles placed to resemble eyes, ears and hair, with tongues, teeth, and multi-fingered

palms—Butler helps her readers visualize the Oankali corporeal identity, as if they could

come in actual, physical contact with their grotesque figures. And by complementing the

Oankali appearance with the description of their bodily functions (breath, digestion, sexual

intercourse, regeneration of lost limbs and metamorphoses), Butler affirms her interest in

emphasizing the physicality of her characters.

As the writer has admitted in her interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise

Keating, “I go from not paying attention to how my characters look to recognizing that it’s

very important how they look, especially if they’re not supposed to be human. I need to help

my reader visualize them even though what my reader sees won’t be what I had in mind”

(51). In Xenogenesis, the depiction of the Oankali appearance enables readers to “feel” the

alien subjectivities of the story. Avoiding abstractions, Butler’s “flesh-and-bone”

representation of the ugly Oankali brings readers face-to-face with the peculiar posthuman

characters, in an attempt to stretch their minds towards corporeal types of identity.

Butler also associates selfhood with corporeality in her representation of the human

organic bodies. In Dawn, for instance, Butler sets the setting in such a way that all Lilith

knows about herself is her body. Lilith awakes to find herself confined in a dim, doorless and

windowless room, and the only way to recall who she is and what has happened to her is

through tactile contact with her body and her surroundings. After long sleep in organic
 Papadimitriou 54

storage pods, repeated awakenings, and the chemical/genetic manipulation of her body by her

captors, the only thing that helps Lilith define herself is what she actually experiences with

her senses: her confined figure, the texture of her skin, the long scar on her abdomen—a

reminder that she has been modified—the beating of her heart, the circulation in her veins.

Butler evidently places much emphasis on the portrayal of Lilith’s body: it is as if it “spoke”

of who Lilith really is. Discussing with Mehaffy and Keating about her engagement with the

human organic body in Xenogenesis, Butler herself makes an interesting comment on the

significance of human flesh for the definition of human selfhood when she says,

the body is all we really know that we have. We can say that there ’re always

other things that are wonderful. And some are. But all we really know that we

have is the flesh. As a matter of fact in my next book, Parable of the Sower,

there’s a verse about that which begins “self is …,” and the verse goes on to

talk about this concept. (Mehaffy and Keating 59)

And when she is asked what the verse says a self is, she responds: “Pretty much, body”

(Mehaffy and Keating 59, emphasis mine). Therefore, Butler does not seem content with

Western philosophers, who, from Plato to Bacon, have defined selfhood and existence in

terms of cognitive functions, and disparaged bodies in favor of the mind. For Butler,

subjectivity is “marked” on the flesh, and human beings are recognized as living, breathing,

flesh-and-blood organisms, rather than disembodied actors.

Butler’s views on the body and subjectivity collude with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s

theory, and one of his central ideas, that subjectivity is above all physical. Butler’s writing

reminds me of Merleau-Ponty’s statements: “I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that

I possess experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a

provisional sketch of my total being” (Phenomenology of Perception 198); “the subject is its

body” (Sense and Non-Sense 125). Butler’s representation of Lilith in Dawn, and her
 Papadimitriou 55

emphasis on the character’s physical understanding of herself, introduces to the trilogy a

person being her body, and experiencing the world through it. Even if Butler has Lilith say,

“no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain” (Dawn 74), her portrayal of the

character emphasizes Lilith’s corporeal identity. Instead of associating human existence with

exclusively mental capacities and functions, Butler draws attention to “the living moving

experiencing whole human body that one is: the body, so to speak, [one is] co-extensive

with” (Priest, Merleau-Ponty 67). In this way, as I will show later, Butler actually proposes

through the trilogy that humans can “know” themselves better as long as they delve into their

own physicality, and in the way they actually experience it.

As it seems, Butler envisions the posthuman subject as an embodied being, who

recognizes her/his existence through her/his body lived experiences and special physical

characteristics. However, what Butler avoids in her exploration of the corporeal, posthuman

identity are the stereotypic loads that accompany body-based definitions of the subject. In

other words, Butler draws attention to the embodied existence of the posthuman subjects in

the trilogy, without falling into the trap of marking their bodies by ethnicity or race, as they

are often stereotypically depicted in science fiction narratives. In Xenogenesis, Butler

deliberately delays mentioning the color of the flesh she describes, so as not to pre-determine

the readers’ perceptions of the character. Lilith’s skin color is initially invisible, and only

hinted at when Butler narrates: “Once they put a child in with her—a small boy with long,

straight black hair and smoky-brown skin, paler than her own” (Dawn 8). Later, Lilith

compares her own color with that of the surroundings: “There had been little color in her

world since her capture. Her own skin, her blood—within the pale walls of her prison, that

was all. Everything else was some shade of white or gray” (Dawn 28). Lilith’s nationality is

even more displaced and delayed than skin color in narration (Dawn 76). In this way, Butler

encourages readers to initially imagine Lilith’s body particularities as well as her lived
 Papadimitriou 56

experience of confinement, and subsequently, to visualize her corporeal identity. Much later

readers are invited to ‘color’ Lilith’s physical appearance with nationality or race. Butler

calls this ‘radio imagination.’ It is her artistic aesthetics of inviting the corporeal visualization

of characters, as it happens with radio narrations. Above all, as Marilyn Mehaffy and

AnaLouise Keating point out, Butler’s narrative tool “intensifies, for readers, the irreducible

significance of corporeal identity … but without the initial optical instruction, and therefore

without the stereotypical associations, of legibly inscribed bodies” (48). Evidently, Butler

embraces corporeal appearance as a defining element of posthuman subjectivity, but she

strips it of the racist clothes social constructionism enrobes it with.

Apparently, in Xenogenesis, Butler attempts to restore the value of the organic body

for human selfhood. Nevertheless, in her effort to do so, she does not validate the postmodern

view of the body as discourse, as a “thing” brought to life by language and narrative, thus

open to linguistic deconstruction and reconstruction. For Butler, the organic body does not

constitute an object for discourse analysis. On the contrary, the body itself becomes the

central communicator among different subjects in the universe. For instance, the Oankali

repeatedly attempt to persuade the human characters that organic bodies have a “voice” of

their own, and that communication through them can be direct, vital, and devoid of the

hierarchical thinking human language is burdened with. The bodily communication they use,

and attempt to familiarize the Humans with, is grounded on gestures, tactile and olfactory

interaction, as well as on neurological linkages; such contact allows neither deceit nor

ambiguity. As Christa Grew-Volpp points out, “in her [Butler’s] trilogy, body knowledge

deprivileges the dominance of rationality in Western discourse, it also shows that language is

not the only creator of meaning and significance” (163). In Dawn, for example, Butler gives

us a token of such an “organic” type of communication among the members of an Oankali

group:
 Papadimitriou 57

It was nearly dark when they [Lilith, Nikanj, Ahajas and Dichaan] reached the

settlement. People were gathered around the fires, talking, eating. Nikanj and

its mates were welcomed by the Oankali in a kind of gleeful silence—a

confusion of sensory arms and tentacles, a relating of experience by direct

neural stimulation. They could give each other whole experiences, then

discuss the experience in nonverbal conversation. They had a whole language

of sensory images and accepted signals that took the place of words. (Dawn

237)

Communication through the Oankali bodies enables them to become so much involved in

each other and in the world around them, that it finally unites the “interlocutors” in one

person. They coexist, according to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body, as one incarnate

subject.22 And as Akin notes in Adulthood Rites, this “organic” communication gives “the

feel of intensity and truth” (AR 133) qualities absent from human interaction.

To juxtapose the role of the organic body as principal communicator among the

Oankali to its degraded status for Humans, Butler has Nikanj comment on the nature of

human communication and the discrepancies occurring when hierarchical thinking affects

what Humans actually utter to each other:

Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and

everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.

And once you did understand them, the Humans got angry, and acted as

though you had stolen thoughts from their minds. Nikanj, on the other hand,

meant what it said. Its body and mouth said the same things. (Imago 27)

22
The term belongs to Merleau-Ponty and his theory on the phenomenology of perception. In his
discussion of the role bodies play in the subject’s communion with the world and the other subjects, he
states: “It is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive
‘things’.” And he adds: “I become involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate
subject” (Phenomenology of Perception 185-86).
 Papadimitriou 58

As it emerges from the extract, because they place the kernel of their existence and selfhood

in their minds, Humans have always denied the “truths” their bodies speak. In the trilogy,

Butler has the Oankali offer to the human characters a lesson, which she seems to consider

important: they must learn to trust their bodies, because not only they convey meaning but

they also express selfhood on a deep, almost subconscious level. On this level, Butler’s

narrative shows that human beings can communicate and transact outside the sphere of the

Symbolic, free from the hierarchical tendencies that infiltrate their language and conduct. As

Butler seems to argue, the inter-bodily communication proposed through the Oankali will

actually help Humans achieve the oneness they need, in order to survive in the posthuman

universe.

To address the human subconscious, the Oankali often use chemical technology: they

inject organically produced drugs into human bodies with their sensory arms, or they

stimulate human nerves electrochemically, so as to share the same sensations with them.23 In

my point of view, apart from a reference to telepathy and psionic powers, which Butler so

much favors in her science fiction works,24 the body as major communicator in Xenogenesis

is the writer’s tool to revive the readers’ interest in the organic body and its neglected

powers. The dualistic thought of modern philosophy, which gave priority to the infinite

potential of the mind, and still validated disparaging views on the body at the time

Xenogenesis was written, had created a “somatophobia” that Butler would rather not see

repeated in a posthuman future. According to Merja Makinen’s analysis of Xenogenesis, with

the idealized language of the body that Butler fashions in the trilogy, she actually re-

23
Butler, for instance, narrates from Lilith’s point of view that, “Ahajas and Dichaan stood together and
made their contacts with Tediin and Jdaya … The Oankali could communicate this way, could pass
messages from one another almost at the speed of thought—or so Nikanj had said. Controlled multisensory
stimulation. Lilith suspected it was the closest thing to telepathy she would ever see practiced” (Dawn 105).
Apparently, to illustrate this inter-bodily communication of messages and sensations, Butler draws
evidence from neuroscience, which, according to Daniel Goleman, “reveals that our psychological
experiences emerge from connection not separation. In relating to other people, we undergo a remarkable
neural event: the formation of two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-
skull barrier between bodies … forming what amounts to an interbrain circuit” (Goleman 39-40).
24
See interview with Larry McCaffery.
 Papadimitriou 59

conceives the mind/body, nature/culture binary oppositions; such distinctions are eradicated,

and body and mind are fully integrated (163). In general, Butler’s trilogy clearly encourages

the return to the human organic body and its powers, so much disregarded by Western way of

thinking.

Furthermore, I would argue that the “organic” communication prevailing in the

trilogy draws the readers’ attention to the organic body as a lived body, that is, the body that

expresses human subjectivity in its everyday experiences and interactions with other bodies,

and the world around. I think that Kathy Davis’ phenomenological view that “bodies are not

simply abstractions ... but are embedded in the immediacies of everyday, lived experience”

(15) could be applied in Butler’s trilogy. This is most evident in the sympathetic relations the

Oankali develop with their surroundings. The relationship, for instance, that the Oankali

maintain with their ship, Lo, and the tilio, the “animals” they have assembled to serve as

transports, reveals an almost “placental” communion between them. The Oankali use their

bodies to communicate with Lo, and through it with the rest of the universe. In fact, as Butler

narrates in Adulthood Rites, the ships and shuttles the Oankali use for transportation and

accommodation are living and growing organisms, capable of communicating and of

receiving pleasure from the exchange of sensory information that occurs with any contact

with the Oankali. In Adulthood Rites we read that “the Oankali controlled [the ship entities]

with their body chemistry” in such a way, that they “were like extensions of the Oankali

bodies” (181). The Oankali use their flesh to communicate with the ship and the tilio, and

through them with the other adult Oankali and constructs, as if they transmitted messages

through their veins to the various parts of their bodies. To call for Nikanj’s help, for example,

Dichaan, Akin’s Oankali father,

went to the edge of Lo to one of the larger buttresses of a pseudotree and

struck it several times in the code of pressures he would have used to

 Papadimitriou 60

supplement exchanged sensory impressions. The pressures would normally be

used very rapidly, soundlessly, against another person’s flesh. It would take a

moment for this drumming to be perceived as communication. But it would be

noticed. Even if no Oankali or construct heard it, the Lo entity would alert the

community the next time someone opened a wall or raised a platform. (AR

65)

As it seems, unlike human beings, the Oankali maintain a meaningful communication with

the natural world, since they believe that every little part of it has a life of its own, and is thus

capable of interaction with the assumably more intelligent beings, human, or humanoid as in

the case of Oankali.

In Adulthood Rites, Akin notices the different way Humans have regarded their

communication with the other life forms of the universe in comparison to the Oankali:

“Human beings talked to trees and rivers and boats and insects the way they talked to babies.

They talked to be talking, but they believed they were talking to uncomprehending things. It

upset and frightened them when something that should have been mute answered

intelligently (AR 78). Evidently, Butler uses the symbol of the ship, to talk about the

immediate, biological communication the posthuman subject can maintain through the

organic body with the living beings of the universe. Thus, instead of abstract “containers” of

posthuman subjectivity, organic bodies in Xenogenesis are the lived flesh, through which the

subject interacts and shares her/his experiences with the world and other life forms, in a

perfect, symbiotic relationship.

Butler’s representation of the body in “biogenetic attunement” (Schwab 208) with the

environment echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view that, “our own body is in the world as

the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into

it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system” (PP 203). In Xenogenesis, organic
 Papadimitriou 61

bodies and natural environment are shown to form such a system, in which the one

“breathes” life into the other. As Jdaya, the extraterrestrial assigned the task of acclimating

Lilith informs her in Dawn, “there is an affinity, but it’s biological—a strong, symbiotic

relationship. We serve the ship’s needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we

would be planetbound without it. For us, that would eventually mean death” (33). For Butler,

the ship entities, homeostatic systems themselves, are in symbiosis with the Oankali. This

biological bond between subject and environment, through the organic body, not only

supports the long evolutionary history of symbiotic relationships among various living

creatures (Butler has admitted to believe in symbiotic evolution), but it also constitutes the

only way to survive in a posthuman future. Furthermore, as Naomi Jacobs notes in her

discussion of the trilogy, Butler persistently avoids using any mechanical form, even for the

inter-galactic transportation of her alien characters (103-4). In fact, “Butler envisions

machines being replaced by organic, self-aware entities” (Jacobs 104), in an attempt to

highlight the biological interconnectedness of subjects, bodies and environment. Butler’s

goal is to “stretch minds” through her works (Mehaffy and Keating 53). In this trilogy Butler

stretches the readers’ imagination toward a posthuman future, in which biology not

technology binds many life forms into one, large, living organism.

It becomes clear that Butler in Xenogenesis privileges the “ecological idea that life on

earth is an interconnected web” (Grewe-Volpp 150). The human subjects must learn to

communicate with each other and the natural environment based on the knowledge of their

organic bodies. This body knowledge is the first step outside the hierarchical dualisms

(mind/body, human/non-human, nature/culture), which historically have led to human

dominance over the planet and over other species. In other words, communication among

species and their living surroundings, should be rooted in deep knowledge of biology and not

technology, a form of power minus hierarchization and violence.

 Papadimitriou 62

In my reading of the trilogy, I argue that the motif of the “certainty of the flesh”25

serves the writer’s need to experiment with the scenario of intervening in the human body,

either on a physical or a genetic level, in order to ensure the human subject’s survival in a

posthuman future. The biological intervention Butler imagines works to weed out an inborn

tendency to hierarchize and dominate. Furthermore, as Butler shows, genetic manipulation

and control of human conduct will ultimately create a posthuman community able to survive

peacefully in a post-apocalyptic universe. Taking into consideration the writer’s interest in

socio-biology as expressed in her interviews, I see the trilogy as Butler’s response to a

speculative inquiry: “what if we use the knowledge of our genetic make-up, and with the help

of biology and genetic engineering facilitate social progress?”

The Oankali’s diagnosis of what is wrong with humanity seems to be Butler’s as well.

Intelligence and hierarchical behavior (which she considers inborn) is a potentially lethal

combination. In the trilogy, this “Human Contradiction” as she calls it, leads the human

species to racist, sexist, xenophobic, “speciesist,” violent, militarist, and/or self-destructive

behavior. And since Butler considers hierarchical behavior as a hereditary defect, she turns to

socio-biology and genetics to curb human destructive tendencies, and guarantee social

improvement. Discussing, for example, the possible uses of socio-biology in her interview

with Larry McCaffery, Butler argues that the tendency toward hierarchical behavior seems to

be a genetic one; therefore, it could be controlled with the aid of biogenetic engineering.

More specifically, in the interview she states that,

whenever we look at the degree to which our behavior is predetermined

genetically—and this is where socio-biology comes into play—we get hung

up on who’s got the biggest or the best or the most, on who’s inferior and

25
This is how Butler calls the Oankali’s profound knowledge of the body on a physical or genetic level,
which presupposes the ability to manipulate genotypes as well as to control their “lethal” phenotypical
expression.
 Papadimitriou 63

who’s superior. We might be able to stop ourselves from behaving in certain

ways if we could learn to curb some of our biological urges. (McCaffery 63)

In an attempt to explore this idea of “correcting” the flaws of humanity in a posthuman

future, Butler devotes much of her narration in the book Dawn to the development of the

Oankali plan to work out the biological destiny of Humans. During their contact with the

human species, the alien characters of the story display a remarkable “certainty of the human

flesh”; every time they intervene to alter the human genome and cure a disease, they also

curb human aggressive conduct by producing the proper pheromones. Moreover, Butler

admits that physical characteristics or behaviors do not necessarily kill you or save you;

nevertheless, knowing them enables you to make the best instead of the worst of them.26 In

this sense, Xenogenesis promotes body knowledge as an empowering tool, based on which

the posthuman characters rescue their communities from the destructive struggle for

domination and ensure their survival in a post-holocaust world.

The Oankali project of creating non-hierarchical human communities is Butler’s

dream of a viable posthuman future. Nevertheless, what seems important to Butler is not to

provide her readers with a clear, feasible plan of genetic “catharsis” from the Human

Contradiction, but to present her futuristic vision of changing social structures by changing

the genetic program of the human body, and of eliminating lethal diseases as well as anti-

social behavior. In other words, Butler focuses on biology to provide a second chance for

homo sapiens and our dying planet.

26
“… several years ago one of my friends became really annoyed with my interest in socio-biology. I said,
‘Wait a minute. If you, for instance, are suffering from PMS and you know that you have PMS, there are
going to be certain things that you don’t do because you know that you will do them badly or that you will
hurt yourself or hurt someone else. But if you don’t know that this is a biological thing that’s going on with
you, maybe you’ll try to just bull your way through. You’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m just being self indulgent,’ and try
to push through with it and may really hurt yourself. Another friend should not use sharp objects during
that time because she will really hurt herself, and she has stitches to prove it. Before she realized this, she
often did hurt herself because those were the times when she wanted to do something with the sharp object,
cut up salad or meat or whatever, or even go out and whack limbs off a tree” (Mehaffy and Keating 57). Of
course, I would say that what is important is what use you make of body knowledge produced by socio-
biology, and who will determine the amount of genetic control and manipulation based on this knowledge,
issues which I intend to discuss later in the chapter.
 Papadimitriou 64

As it emerges from Xenogenesis, Butler appears to be an essentialist in that she

claims that our biological nature determines our cultural structures and behaviors to a

significant extent. For instance, she shows that violence, weapon-making and breadwinning

are genetically-defined male characteristics, while nurturing, teaching, healing, caring, and

engaging in symbiotic relationships are typically female traits. I would argue that, in the

trilogy, these traits are definitely presented as innate; the phenotypical expression is so

predictable that the human race is portrayed as almost unable to overcome its biological

destiny. Long before the Oankali landed on their planet the human species has led itself to

the verge of extinction. Butler depicts the human males as more prone to violence and other

forms of domination; they repeatedly resort to coercion, they fight, rape, destroy, and trade

kidnapped children for women. As Lilith says in Adulthood Rites, “Human-born males were

an unsolved problem” (4). Discussing the way she dealt with this “unsolved problem” in

Xenogenesis, Butler has said:

What I intended to do when I began the novels [the three books of

Xenogenesis], what I really wanted to do, was change males enough so that

the hierarchical behavior would no longer be a big problem … Not that

women aren’t hierarchical, but we don’t tend toward mass murder. (Mehaffy

and Keating 54)

Like expert geneticists, the Oankali manipulate the human bodies by changing the patterns of

specific genes, which they associate with human anti-social behavior. In other words, without

genetic intervention, Butler does not expect the Human Contradiction to vanish in a

posthuman future. Unchanged, men will continue to act like “cavemen” and humanity will

most likely “extinguish itself in boredom, hopelessness, bitterness” (Adulthood Rites 258).27

27
As Sherryl Vint notes, although men are portrayed as more hierarchical than women in the trilogy,
“Butler suggests that the entire human genome is flawed” and that “in engaging with the world of Butler’s
novel, no human is able to consider his or her self … as the privileged possessor or ‘normal’ genes.
Xenogenesis helps everyone empathize with the perspective of the genetically flawed” (68). I concede that,
 Papadimitriou 65

Taking this genetic determinism for granted, the writer proceeds to experiment with not only

a project of genetic amelioration developed by her alien characters, but also with the cultural

indoctrination of Humans toward less aggressive ways of behavior. The genetic tampering is

carried out by the ooloi of the Oankali species, while the cultural part is left to Lilith.

Appointed by the Oankali, Lilith altruistically undertakes to teach a group of re-animated

Humans how to avoid violence by instilling in them the Oankali “non-violence” stance.28 The

fact that Butler also chooses a “naturalized” maternal figure to turn the human bodies and

subjectivities into posthuman ones, and to breed a new generation of posthuman constructs in

a monitored social environment, proves once again her reliance on biological determinants.

Moreover, in the trilogy there is the implication that a posthuman world guided by

naturally self-sacrificing, nurturing females rather than self-centered, hegemonic men could

possibly rescue the human community from the brutality of the past. In Dawn, Butler has

Lilith “deliberately awaken a few more women than men in the hope of minimizing

violence” (145) while in Imago, Jodahs says that “Human-born male [constructs] were still

considered experimental and potentially dangerous” and for this reason, “a few males from

other towns had been sterilized and exiled to the ship” (16). The incidents reinforce the

writer’s essentialist views, at least in terms of gender. Besides, although extreme as an idea,

the “feminization” of a posthuman future seems to coincide with some of the writer’s visions

instead of representing social improvement as a male issue, Butler makes clear that humans cannot expect
to survive in a posthuman future, unless they perceive social improvement as a personal matter.
28
In Imago, Butler juxtaposes the Oankali attitude toward violence with that of the humans: “The Oankali
do not suggest violence. Humans said violence was against the Oankali beliefs. Actually it was against their
flesh and bone, against every cell of them. Humans evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing
other life. Oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. To kill was
simply wasteful to the Oankali. It was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs. They fought
only to save their lives and the lives of others. Even then they fought to subdue, not to kill … When they
killed even to save life, they died a little themselves” (43). That the Oankali deliberately choose to protect
rather than kill other species is also evident by their nutrition, which, like the traditional Yoruba diet
Lilith’s ancestors followed, excludes meat and dairy products, which shows that the Oankali have a special
reverence for the animals of the universe. In general, Butler’s references to the Oankali non-violent way of
life gives us some clues on how she envisions a pacifist, infinitely accepting and thriving type of
posthuman community, which according to Christa Grewe-Volpp, “is reminiscent of utopian ecofeminist
values such as a non-hierarchical way of life, communalism and body knowledge” (155).
 Papadimitriou 66

for a more “purified” and creative posthuman world, if it were at least governed by less

violent subjects, mainly females.29

More importantly, Butler’s speculation on a least violent posthuman future is

materialized in Imago, through the siblings Jodahs and Aaor. These are the first-generation

Human-born constructs, who, from male and female respectively become neuter oolois, that

is, beings beyond gender. After reaching successfully the imago stage, their “final, adult,

sexually mature” stage of metamorphosis,30 Jodahs and Aaor become the perfect posthuman

characters in Butler’s trilogy. Endowed with the ability to shapeshift, to heal the maimed, to

cure cancer and create contact with every breath, they bend the most tenacious human

resistance to the Oankali plan for a livable posthuman future. Children of both the Earth and

the stars, Jodahs and Aaor become the bridges of peace between Humans and the Oankali;

they persuade the remaining human beings that their construct children will inherit the

universe, as long as they agree to lose all that makes them human and interbreed with the

Oankali. They also encompass the hopes of the Oankali for a next evolutionary step in their

long, nomadic lives. In short, the future of both Humans and Oankali depends on these

gender-less posthuman characters. The fact that Butler chooses one of the two siblings,

Jodahs, to “plant” the new Human-Oankali city at the end of the trilogy, demonstrates that

29
Talking about scientific “truths” and popular expectations of gender with Marilyn Mehaffy and
AnaLouise Keating, Butler admits that the “body-knowledge” expressed by scientific logos is quite
powerful, but that “it isn’t science that makes the sociological connections” (58). And when Marilyn
Mehaffy refers to the popular “pseudo-scientific belief” that women “have their periods, and so they’re
dangerous,” Butler argues that “that doesn’t make sense when you notice how men behave toward one
another,” and she adds that, “it’s not women with their periods who were out there starting shooting wars”
(59). Thus, Butler grounds her vision of a posthuman future on the supposition that, with benevolent
matriarchal communities, humanity would be less likely to engage in wars and environmental disasters, and
to start anew in a post-apocalyptic world. Apparently, the writer believes that what matters is what use is
made of body knowledge in a sociological discourse. Regardless of whether socio-biology is true or not,
she says, denying it is certainly not going to help. Thus, it would be better if we learned to work with it
[socio-biological knowledge] and against the people who see it as a good reason to impose the “social
Darwinism,” the hierarchical classification of humans, “subhuman” or non-human, and commit atrocities in
the name of it. In this sense, according to Butler, body knowledge could be possibly used to de-hierarchize,
or maybe re-hierachize, social and political relations, by encouraging the least violent subjectivities to
decide for the fate of the planet.
30
According to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, “imago” means “an insect in its final, adult, sexually
mature, and typically winged state.”
 Papadimitriou 67

the writer deposits her hope for a less hierarchical posthuman future on the first generation of

neuter, posthuman beings. This “genetically-enhanced” creatures will herald the beginning of

social change and thus embody the ideal posthumanity. Therefore, genetic manipulation for

Butler is a major determining factor for the elimination of hierarchical behavior and the

eradication of hierarchical types of community. In Xenogenesis the manipulation of human

genes is represented as the catalyst for social change, since, in Amanda Boulter’s words, “the

trilogy envisages a biological transformation mapped out upon and within the body” (171).31

However, unlike many critics who stress Butler’s essentialism in their reading of her

books,32 I personally do not take issue with the writer’s deterministic views. I concede that,

although genetic information—and the social conclusions based on it—can offer us clues to

our identity and potential, genetic predispositions cannot find one exact, foreseeable

phenotypical translation in the development and behavior of a human being. In reality, there

is no one-to-one correspondence between genotypes and phenotypes, since multiple

environmental factors, social experiences in particular, work to activate, or mitigate

respectively, the inborn tendencies of human nature. Besides, as Dorothy Nelkin and Susan

Lindee point out, and I agree with them, genetic reductionism ideologically “reduces the self

to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical and moral

complexity with their genes” (2). Moreover, deterministic assumptions like Richard

Dawkins’ theory of selfish genes, intent on pursuing their own ends, render the body

“entirely irrelevant except as temporary home for the genes” (Birke 139).

31
As Amanda Boulter informs us, “the 1980s [when Xenogenesis was written] witnessed a cultural and
scientific optimism about the role of biotechnology in treating ‘anti-social’ behavior. Daniel Koshland,
editor of Science magazine, stated in 1989 that the massive project to identify the three billion nucleotides
of the human genome promised to reveal the causes of those diseases ‘that are the root of many current
societal problems’” (171). In other words, unlike 1970s feminists, who argued that biology did not equal
destiny, because society and technology could overcome nature, Butler seems to have been influenced
more by the 1980s scientists, who reinstated the primacy of that biological equation to insist that biology is
destiny, but that the social and not the natural world is its ultimate programmer.
32
See, for example, Nancy Jesser, “Blood, Genes and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Dawn” and
Hoda Zaki, “Utopia, Dystopia and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler.”
 Papadimitriou 68

In addition, I do not necessarily find disappointing Butler’s claim that the tendency to

hierarchical behavior is a fatal evolutionary flaw, and thus biologically “inevitable” in the

trilogy, nor that the narrative is replete with definitive gender descriptions. More importantly,

I do not think that the Xenogenesis’ plot aims to show how humanity can have a chance to

progress socially with a little socio-biology and genetic engineering “magic.” Rather, as I

have mentioned before, Butler’s objective in Xenogenesis is far from writing a utopian

scenario. Butler weaves so many strenuous dilemmas and anxieties around the theme of

“knowing” the flesh, that one would miss a great deal of her problematic if one focused only

on whether her assumptions about the human body and subjectivity are essentialist. In my

reading of the trilogy, Butler complicates her basic theme of body knowledge by having her

characters debate the relationship among identity, genes, free choice, and destiny. Besides,

(as the writer has said to Scott Simon during the 2001 UN Conference on racism in Durban,

South Africa, in which Butler participated with an essay), Butler’s writing has little to do

with utopias, and with the plots that smoothly avoid special conflicts and dilemmas. In her

interview as posted on the National Public Radio website, Butler states that, “in literature

there needs to be conflict.” And continues saying, “I don’t think that humans can live without

some sort of conflict. Not that we enjoy it particularly but I think it’s inevitable.”

The major conflict in Xenogenesis is staged between the Humans and the Oankali. On

the one hand, the Oankali insist on their certainty that the human race is genetically flawed,

and thus doomed to annihilation unless human beings embrace posthumanity by merging

with them. Humans, on the other hand, deny the “all-knowing” Oankali position that they are

the products of their genes, at least in the way the Oankali interpret them. Adulthood Rites

traces this human reaction to the Oankali “certainty of the flesh,” and their statements, like

the one Yori, a human resister, hears from an Oankali: “Human purpose isn’t what you say it

is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is” (AR 261).
 Papadimitriou 69

To human eyes, the Oankali insistence on the information flow, rather than on a holistic view

of an organism reduces people to objects for study and processing. Rightfully the human

characters protest for being treated as “mere artifacts of their genes” (Birke 145).33 Humans

persistently desire to retain their bodily integrity as well as their right to self-determination.

Adulthood Rites highlights the rationale behind the human desire “to be left alone,” a right

which Butler herself considers “a precious commodity.”34 In this way, Butler feeds the

Human-Oankali conflict in a post-apocalyptic world: the Oankali define humanity according

to the “truths” their bodies speak, whereas for the human characters, being human

presupposes—at all costs—self-ownership, agency and control of one’s body and

reproduction.

In her analysis of the trilogy, Christa Grewe-Volpp encompasses the human

characters’ definition of themselves in one statement: “to be human means to be not only

biologically determined but to have the right to decide one’s own future, even if that involves

war and ecocide” (165). Although both Humans and Oankali defend their “models”

throughout Xenogenesis, and struggle to impose them to one another, their conflict is not

resolved. Instead, Butler deliberately intensifies it by having the majority of human

characters cling to what they define as “human” identity, the freedom to decide for one’s own

future, even if the latter appears to be threateningly short.

Butler actually translates the debate of the benevolent Oankali with the human

characters into a power relations game, with the knowledge of the human DNA as the kernel

of their conflict. As Michél Foucault has rightfully argued, there cannot be “any knowledge

33
Lynda Birke argues that, “insisting on information flows rather than organisms supports the reductionist
view of organisms as mere artefacts of the genes. Information and fluidity,” she continues, “seem to deny
the fleshly boundaries of the organism, as bits of information (coded in DNA or in the action potentials of
neural functioning) flow in and out” (145). Abby Lippman refers to the process as the “geneticization” of
the individuals. It is “the ongoing process by which differences between individuals are reduced to their
DNA codes, with most disorders, behaviors and physiological variations defined at least in part, as genetic
in origin” (qtd. in Hubbard and Wald 2).
34
See interview with Scott Simon.
 Papadimitriou 70

that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Discipline and

Punish 27). Butler adopts a similar position in the trilogy. In Adulthood Rites, Butler

chronicles how the Oankali’s omniscience of the human genome can generate its own power,

providing the aliens with absolute control over the human bodies and their fates. In this way,

Butler attempts to expose the power inherent in claiming the certainty of “reading” the

human body as a text, a process, which by definition allows for multiple interpretations.

Human characters in Xenogenesis are not only denied access to the resulting meaning of such

“readings,” since the information deriving from the decodified human genomes are stored in

the oolois’ organic memories, but they also realize that their DNAs are being “rewritten”

along to the Oankali definition of the “proper” human genetic structure. As Butler narrates

early in the trilogy, “it [Nikanj, the ooloi that modified Lilith’s genome] had studied her

[Lilith] as she might have studied a book—and it had done a certain amount of rewriting”

(Dawn 135). Even when the changes are to her advantage, Lilith feels that the tampering of

her body constitutes a violation of herself, which limits her sense of self-control and

ownership. For example, despite the cure of her genetic predisposition to cancer, Lilith felt

that, “she did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched” (Dawn

97). And although she agrees to “betray” her own race by undertaking to persuade a group of

Humans to participate in the Oankali gene-trade, Lilith continues to think of ways that may

allow her to escape the Oankali power of surveillance and biomanipulation as soon as she is

taken back to Earth.

Evidently, as much as the writer identifies with the Oankali view that it is utterly vain

to remain loyal to a highly competitive and violent human identity, she evokes our feelings of

horror for the oppressive hegemony of DNA experts, who, like “benevolent tyrants” (Jacobs

97) believe that their knowledge of our genomes gives them the right to decide for the fate of

our own bodies. The trilogy is replete with examples of resistance by human characters to the
 Papadimitriou 71

coercive power of their alien “colonizers,” in an attempt to illustrate that the human

accommodation with posthumanity entails an unbearable cost: humans can no longer claim

property of their own genomes, much less of their bodies. Therefore, by focusing on the

Book of Life, and by using the Oankali genetic engineers to stand symbolically for real

genetic experts with the power to “read” and “edit” the human genetic script, Butler initiates

a debate over whose property the human genome is, and whether its manipulation beyond

human consent entails a new form of colonization in the future. Without fully embracing

either the beneficial genetic engineering of the Oankali, or the human liberal but violent acts

of resistance, Butler writes a critical dystopia, which demonstrates that access to genetic

structures can turn into an instrument of both empowerment and domination in a posthuman

world.

In short, I would argue that through the conflicts in Xenogenesis, Butler enters the

1980s debates over the possible risks of postmodern biology. On the one hand, she questions

the liberal views of impenetrability and prestige-integrity of the human body and subject. She

obviously rejects the position voiced by modern biologists, that there is a single type of body

which functions as the representative of the human form. In my opinion, Butler seems to

agree with a statement made by the feminist critic Elizabeth Grosz, who has said that “there

is no one mode representing the ‘human’ in all its richness and variability” (22). On the other

hand, Butler does not fully embrace postmodern biology and the multiplicity of

interpretations of the human genome it allows. The writer worries about the permeability of

the human body and self such interpretations enable and clearly points to their vulnerability.

Using the alien characters of the trilogy to stand metaphorically for contemporary readers

and “keepers” of the Book of Life, Butler comments on the dangers inherent in postmodern

genetics. The postmodern interpretations of the human genetic structure, as coded

information, reduces the human body to a mere text to be read and edited according to
 Papadimitriou 72

dominant scientific values. Although the postmodern approach to biology allows for multiple

conclusions deriving from the reading of the human genome, these conclusions are always

mediated by the geneticist’s logos, which may very well be colored by his/her ideology. As

Magrit Shildrick and Janet Price write in their introduction to Vital Signs: Feminist

Reconfigurations of the Bio/logical Body, (postmodern or post-conventional) biomedicine

actively and continuously constructs the body as a focus of what Foucault

calls power/knowledge. Rather than there being any foundational pre-existing

corpus which is then variously interpreted and experienced through

differential cultural forces—of which biomedicine is pre-eminent—the claim

derived from postconventional theory is that the body is materialized only

insofar as it is always/already mediated. (6)

Thus, under the authority of the scientific knowledge and its ideological load, the human

body is “constructed” along the power politics that influence contemporary biomedicine. It

seems to me that, although Butler predicts that biomedical intervention constitutes a useful

tool for our survival in a posthuman future, she also discerns the potential dangers of

regarding the human body as text. The power relations, which may affect the various

definitions and descriptions of corporeality in terms of health and disease, normality and

abnormality, may leave the human body open to constant modification and adjustment to

prevalent scientific “truths.”

To raise her readers’ concern over “powerful” readings of the human body, Butler

places her human characters in front of a most strenuous dilemma: should they succumb to

the Oankali’s powerful knowledge of the human body in order to hope for a better, less

hierarchical posthuman future, or should they defend their free choice on matters of body and

selfhood, simply following the course of evolution? I would say that it is not clear whether

the dilemmas posed by the writer are resolved at the end of the trilogy. Butler places her
 Papadimitriou 73

human characters into such harsh psychological and physical conditions, that even deserting

the dying Earth and forming a colony on Mars appears to be a compromise the human

characters cannot easily make. Humans feel the burden of the Oankali constant surveillance

and control, they resent forced infertility and harbor a nostalgia for the planet they have to

leave in alien hands. However, what is definitely clear is Butler’s skepticism towards both

liberal and postmodern “readings” of the human body. If body knowledge is used for the

enactment of power, she seems to suggest, both types of reading can be equally oppressive.

To intensify the human anxiety of losing the control of their bodies due to the

Oankali’s extensive biological knowledge, Butler represents her human resisters as terrified

beings because they no longer control their own reproduction. In an act reminiscent of

colonization practices, the Oankali deprive human beings of their ability to reproduce

human-only offspring, limiting them to an exclusive inter-species reproduction. On one level,

Butler locates the human horror in being forced to bear monstrous, “not human” or so called

“Medusa children” (Dawn 41). This is clear in Lilith’s reaction in the first book, Dawn: “‘It

won’t be a daughter … It will be a thing—not human.’ She stared down at her own body in

horror. ‘It’s inside me, and it isn’t human!’” (246). It becomes obvious that human beings are

reluctant to give up the natural reproduction of their species, an experience much valued in a

pre-apocalyptic world. On another level, Butler exposes the horrified human characters to the

alternative reproductive method of the Oankali and to the promise of survival it extends. In

an almost instantaneous process, the ooloi, after mediating the mating between a human

female and male, collects the necessary genetic information from its mates, and manipulates

it to produce a “good, viable gene mix” inside its “yashi,” free from hereditary “deadly

conflicts.” Then it implants the embryo into the female’s womb. Finally, instead of the usual

parenting by a heterosexual couple, Human-Oankali constructs are raised by five parents, two

Humans, a male and a female, and three Oankali, a male, a female and an ooloi. In other
 Papadimitriou 74

words, both genetic mixing and insemination do not take place in lab tubes, but in an organic

environment, that is the body of an ooloi. The participation of a gender-less ooloi as a sexual

partner and a catalyst in the reproduction of offspring radically revises the heterosexual

framework, even if the gestation and the bearing burdens the females, either Human or

Oankali. In keeping the Human-Oankali reproduction process close to “normal,” Butler

intends both to draw our attention to the horror human characters feel for not being able to

control baby-making, and to contest the nuclear heterosexual family as the only model for the

biological continuation of the species.

To evoke the readers’ discomfort over the idea of losing control of the human body,

of the reproduction process and consequently of one’s self-determination, Butler draws from

the narratives of slavery and colonialism. Some Humans are forced to sterilization. Those

willing to cooperate cannot decide either the time or the place of impregnation, not even the

sex of their offspring. Nikanj, for example, impregnates Lilith with Joseph’s sperm without

her consent, and when Lilith gets furious after she finds out, it explains that it relied on its

knowledge of Lilith’s body to do so: “You’ll have a daughter,” it said. “And you are ready to

be her mother. You could never have said so. Just as Joseph could never have invited me into

his bed—no matter how much he wanted me there. Nothing about you but your words reject

this child” (Dawn 246). Evidently, the Oankali certainty of the human flesh produces an

inordinate power over the human body and reproduction. The Oankali cross the body

boundaries on multiple levels, genetically, sexually, physically; this transgression reduces

human beings to personal properties of the aliens, and reinforces their sense of being

dominated rather than having a “partnership” with the Oankali.

As Gabriele Schwab points out in discussing personhood, agency and power in

Xenogenesis,
 Papadimitriou 75

reproductive politics as a site for the enactment of power and domination

between species recalls … the history of slavery and colonialism. In the

process of colonial invasions, for example, forced sterilization, genocide, and

deicide were often the most radical manifestation of a pervasive politics of

reproduction aimed at the destruction of the other’s culture, language and

means of reproduction. In a master and slave economy, the reduction of

human beings to personal property granted the exploitation of their labor as

well as sexual and reproductive powers. In their imagined transspecies

encounters with aliens, fantasies of transspecies reproduction stage a related

form of power politics. (214)

Butler’s narrative registers the experience of an oppressive colonization by the Oankali. The

human beings are abducted, are confined in suspended animation on Oankali organic ships,

and are denied the control of their reproduction. The human body experiences multiple

sexual “penetrations” by the ooloi throughout the trilogy, even though the ooloi enact these

penetrations with their sensory tentacles instead of phallic organs, and for distributing

pleasure among themselves and two human partners. The fact that human characters in the

story are denied access to any written material, thus the history of their race, and are banned

from writing down their experience of captivity, also invokes slavery and colonization

practices. To achieve submission, the dominant culture controls and manipulates the memory

and representation of personal and cultural history.

Besides, the double jeopardy Butler’s black heroine, Lilith, faces in trying to defend

to her peers her dubious liaisons with her captors is typical of a slavery narrative, where

black women are often considered as objects of mistrust by their own race in their attempt to
 Papadimitriou 76

assimilate in communities of different race and values.35 Moreover, in Amanda Boulter’s

words, Lilith’s abhorrence for her pregnancy “echoes the ambivalent feelings of those

women slaves whose pregnancies were the result of forced matings and rape, and whose

children represented an increase in the white man’s property” (177). In Xenogenesis Butler

not only places her black heroine in the painful situation of giving birth to a non-human

child, and being despised as her maternity confirms her species treachery, but she also

describes her as a heroic mediator between her species and the extraterrestrial colonizers: she

struggles to persuade Humans that such posthuman births will actually herald a new

generation of non-hierarchical constructs. However, in their contact with the Oankali, the

human characters cannot help recalling slavery conditions, since they experience the Oankali

monitoring and biomanipulation as a disowning of the self, and persistently refuse to trade

their genes with the alien visitors of their planet. They feel they serve as a “breeding stock”

for the new Human/Oankali subspecies, and this is something they cannot easily

accommodate with.36 Although Butler complicates the Oankali biogenetic colonization by

the fact that they only want to help Humans, heal them of diseases and prolong their lives, for

the human characters, it is a form of colonization nonetheless.

Rather than reading Xenogenesis as a story of “cowboys and Indians,” or as a

master/slave narrative in a posthuman setting, I would argue that behind this conflict of her

characters over the “breeding” of humans lies the writer’s wish to suggest that recent

35
In Adele S. Newson’s words, with Lilith’s marginal representation in Dawn and Adulthood Rites “we see
Butler’s signature: a black heroine thrust into unusual circumstances and compelled to survive” (393). As
Sandra Govan comments in relation to Butler’s stories as a whole, “throughout her differing, largely
dystopian, futures, several characteristics remain virtual constants,” like the fact that “strong women of
African American or racially mixed heritage are protagonists or heroines” (“Connections and Links” 143).
36
Debra Ratterman reports from Octavia Butler’s talk on 30, January 1991, “An Evening of Science Fiction
with Octavia Butler,” which was sponsored by the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program as part of its
Afro-American Studies series, that one of her inspirations for the Xenogenesis series was captive breeding
programs for endangered species. Butler had read about the Whooping Crane and the California condor, in
particular, and had been horrified by the harsh techniques used. “Not only have we almost wiped out these
species but we are abusing the survivors to ‘save’ them,” Ratterman says that Butler mentioned in her talk.
And she continues, recalling that Butler wondered how humans would react if they were forced to breed
under the same conditions. If it was “for our own good,” as she said (Ratterman 27).
 Papadimitriou 77

scientific developments such as the “reading” of the human genome and the practice of the

ARTs37 raise questions of ownership in relation to genetic material. More specifically,

although genetic research has offered valuable insights into the human genetic

predispositions and has paved the way for the treatment of genetic diseases, the patenting of

genes has come with a new threat to self-ownership. In capitalist cultures genes have become

commodities and property, which is a new form of power. For instance, as Steven Best and

Douglas Kellner inform us, the results of the mapping of the entire human genome are

currently owned by Celera Genomics, who profit from licensing fees and patents whenever

any of this data leads to medical applications (115). The company reaps lucrative financial

benefits from the supply of cells for the manufacture of substances such as synthetic insulin,

growth hormones, interferon, as well as software to assist the production of commercial

diagnostic tests for screening and testing (Hubbard and Wald 124).38 Donna Haraway has

referred to this commodification of genes as the “fetishization of the genes,” because more

often than not “genes displace not only organisms but people … as generators of liveliness”

(Oncomouse 135). Therefore, access and rights to the processing of genetic structures may

become a new form of oppression, robbing their subjects of personhood and self-

determination.

As the option of escaping the consequences of genetic tendencies is often available

only to the wealthy, genetic therapy marks a new class division. The rich may benefit, the

poor will not. In contrast to current practices, in the trilogy, as Gabriele Schwab notes, the

Oankali gene trading “resembles a pre-capitalist exchange of goods, in which genes have

pure use value. They are, in other words, free from commodification and fetishization” (211).

37
Assisted Reproductive Technologies.
38
Elaine Graham reports that the Human Genome Project is massively funded, especially in the USA. For
instance, $ 300 million was invested on the project between 1990 and 1998, an investment, according to its
supporters, that is well spent (118). Graham estimates that “the financial rewards will more than repay the
research investment” (118) and that they may exceed the amount of $ 20 billion by the completion of the
project (119).
 Papadimitriou 78

However, because the novels were written during the 1980s, when genetic engineering and

ARTs had already been developed in human communities and raised relevant dilemmas,

Butler presents the human characters as quite skeptical toward the manipulation of their

genes by the Oankali, even if it aims at their actual salvation.

Apart from questions linked to the Human Genome Project, Xenogenesis raises the

issue of who exerts agency in reproduction, and whether such agency may signal the

beginning of a new era of eugenics and gene discrimination. More precisely, Butler warns

her readers that genetics and the reproductive technologies grounded on its development may

prove highly oppressive in the hands of those who care for the accumulation of power but

mask it as benevolence. In the trilogy, Joseph, Lilith’s Asian-American mate, remembers

that, there was a lot of work being done in genetics before the war. That may have devolved

into some kind of eugenics program afterward. Hitler might have done something like that

after World War Two if he had the technology and if he had survived (Dawn 144). Joseph

parallels the power of geneticists to discriminate between “normal” and “abnormal” genes to

the practices of dictatorial regimes before the nuclear catastrophe, in which one or more

powerful individuals decided which life was worthy of preservation and which was not.

Through Joseph, Butler suggests that by exerting their power through their evaluation of the

prenatal genetic screenings, genetic experts can influence the quality control of fetuses in a

future not so distant, after all. Informed by the advances of genetics and ARTs, such

discriminatory approach may pave the way for the establishment of a singular, essential,

universal version of body as the delegate of the posthuman form by which all the other

bodies could be judged.

Because Butler is aware of the fact that, up to now, in American culture humanity has

been defined along the WASP model, and many moral decisions regarding human bodies and

subjects have been made according to this model, she warns her readers against the
 Papadimitriou 79

possibility of such an oppressive approach to genetics in a posthuman future. As Sherryl Vint

suggests, and I think Butler would agree,

to avoid the dangers of abstraction, it is important to give representation to the

full range of human embodiment. There is no “the body”: there are only

various bodies differentiated by endless permutations of race, class, age,

gender, sexual orientation, geographical location, and any other category we

use to discipline and value bodies. (184)

To raise her readers’ awareness of the possible discriminatory power of genetics and ARTs,

and urge them to adopt a more inclusive definition of posthuman bodies and subjectivities,

Butler avoids the WASP model for the human characters she represents in the trilogy.

Instead, as Boulter writes,

the human characters in the Xenogenesis trilogy have been rescued from the

Southern Hemisphere, recreating a human community in which the white

Euro-American peoples are no longer dominant. Butler’s male and female

human protagonists are black [Lilith], Chinese [Joseph], Hispanic [Tomás and

Jesusa] and white [Tino, Gabriel, Curt]. (173)39

Thus, by avoiding the homogenization of humanity, Butler shows once again her own

commitment to representing diversity and progressive hybridity.40 Without rejecting genetic

engineering and ARTs completely, and “without resurrecting the ghost of ‘the’ body,

39
Amanda Boulter quotes from Octavia Butler’s essay “Future Forum” part of her criticism on those science
fiction writers who identify the universal (WASP) Man as the essence of humanity: “Many of the same
science fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make
us think about here-at-home human variation—women, blacks, Indians, Asians, Hispanics e.t.c. In science
fiction of not too many years ago, such people either did not exist, existed only occasionally as oddities, or
existed as stereotypes” (173). In Xenogenesis, Butler “constructs” the notion “human” along more inclusive
models of humanity, elevating rather than eliminating the social and cultural diversity of her posthuman
characters.
40
Butler’s celebration of human diversity in Xenogenesis is obviously rooted in the fact that she “was
raised by her mother and grandmother in a racially integrated and culturally diverse community in
Pasadena, whose inhabitants were African American, Asian-American, Hispanic, and white.” And
“because her mother frequently took in older people as boarders to supplement the family income, a certain
social and cultural diversity was also present in her home” (Govan, “Going to See the Woman” 142).
 Papadimitriou 80

undifferentiated, unlocalized, dehistoricized, the body as a retrievable origin” (Detsi-

Diamanti, Kitsi-Mitakou and Yannopoulou 6), in the posthuman future she imagines, Butler

distances herself from exemplary, normative models of subjectivity and flesh. She clearly

celebrates the beauty of cultural and genetic variation.

In conclusion, Butler’s representation of the organic body in Xenogenesis, plays a

crucial role in her definition of posthuman subjectivity. According to Butler, the posthuman

subject cannot be separated from biological embodiment. Rather, through the organic body,

the posthuman subject defines and expresses selfhood; (s)he communicates with other

subjects of different race, gender or species and the natural environment on a placental,

oppression-free level, and evolves with interaction and progressive symbiosis with all living

beings of the universe. Furthermore, the posthuman subjects Butler imagines read the body’s

desires and genetic tendencies, and with the aid of biological knowledge are willing to cross

their body boundaries, in order to correct genetic deficiencies and improve the structure of

their communities. Thus, the profound body knowledge stored in an ooloi allows the

construct to conduct body modifications through the demolition of race/species and/or gender

boundaries, as long as these take place on the genetic level, and are entirely friendly to the

ecosphere that surrounds them. Moreover, Butler’s version of the posthuman subject as a

hero and agent of biomedical intervention has the noble cause of ameliorating human social

conditions. In general, the writer embraces the organic body regardless of its form as a

primary life-giving force. She clearly favors the biological reproduction as a privilege of

female bodies. Throughout Xenogenesis, it is the Oankali females and the human women

who give birth to new beings. Butler also implies that human immortality cannot rely on the

technological modification of the human flesh or on the replacement of its organs by

mechanical prostheses. For Butler, humans fulfill the vision of immortality by passing on

their genetic characteristics from one generation to the other. As regards the dream of a
 Papadimitriou 81

human afterlife, Butler insists that, despite the decay of organic bodies through time, part of

their substance continues to live in the form of single cells in other living creatures of the

universe. Therefore, the writer adopts an evolutionary approach to immortality and values the

biological/genetic intervention in human bodies as the only legitimate path to longevity and

for the continuation of life in the universe.

 Papadimitriou 82

EPILOGUE

Book reviewer Carol Cooper has written that, “there are two schools of thought these

days about sequels and trilogies in science fiction. Cynics dismiss them as transparent

attempts to commandeer bookstore shelves and reader dollars,” while “for others the trilogy

still ranks as a preferred vehicle for Big Speculative ideas” (60).41 After scrutinizing Butler’s

rich dramatic textures and profound psychological insights in Xenogenesis, I would argue

that its narrative was certainly worthy of sequential installments. Each book of the trilogy

provides a different place from which readers can explore a vast array of concerns involving

posthumanity, difference, adaptability, change and survival. Suffused with ambiguity, all

three complicate the decision of the human characters between death and survival at the cost

of subservience. Each from a different angle, the books “describe how truly wise, heroic,

difficult, and ultimately successful accomodationist politics can be” (Cooper 60).

Above all, I would say that Butler’s trilogy occupies a prominent place among the

legendary multi-volume works of American literature for opening up a new territory:

drawing upon the African American experience during slavery (kidnapping, forced

impregnation and involuntary genetic transformation being its basic reference points),

Xenogenesis imagines a future, which transcends the oppressor/oppressed dualism. The

human beings of the trilogy are forcefully reminded that the difference between black and

white skin is of minor importance compared to the difference between humans and sluggish

aliens. Butler renders human differences (in terms of physical appearance, race, culture as

well as gender) irrelevant by dramatizing the conflict between the Humans and the Oankali.

With ingenious narrative techniques, Butler also brings her human characters (and through

41
Carol Cooper wrote a review of the repackaged Xenogenesis trilogy, released under the title Lilith’s
Brood in 2000.
 Papadimitriou 83

them the readers) into direct confrontation with the otherness among themselves. She

deliberately places them in the position of the outsider, so that they can experience

marginalization and alienation firsthand. By presenting difference as an arbitrary marker,

attributed according to cultural or political expectations, Butler invites her human characters

and her readers to realize and reconsider the power relations involved in creating “others.”

Her emphasis on hybridity and symbiosis ultimately encourages us to espouse alien ways of

thinking and acting. In this way, Butler constructs a posthuman future, which revises the

racial past of Western culture. It is a future, in which cultural and genetic diversity mobilizes

the desire of all beings to survive and evolve in partnership, rather than clash and lead each

other to extinction. Consequently, Butler dismantles the common-held belief among

members of the black community that science fiction does not constitute a locale of political

struggle for African Americans. Besides, as she admits to Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise

Keating, all her texts have political undertones in one way or another, because she has always

felt that “to be human is to be political” (65).42 Butler’s African American heritage infiltrates

her fiction and renders the assumedly ‘white’ genre of science fiction the new frontier for

African American literature.43

Xenogenesis gives Butler the opportunity to be political in another way: the trilogy

offers a playground of imagination, where she can present her feminist views on the body. As

I have mentioned above, in her youth Butler experienced a major transition in the social,

political and economic conditions of the West. In the 1960s and 1970s Europe and the United

States witnessed massive reactions to established political power, the most important of

42
Butler has said to Larry McCaffery that, “fiction writers can’t be too pedagogical or too polemical. If
people want to be lectured to, they’ll take a class; if they want to hear a sermon, they’ll go to church” (69).
Nevertheless, Butler cannot avoid studying the past and using its strengths and weaknesses as guides for the
worlds she creates in her novels. Butler’s writing often feels didactic, just because she cannot help being
political.
43
Paralleling Butler’s work to other African writers of the 20th century, Christa Grewe-Volpp observes that
these writers have reinvented African American identity and at the same time they have fundamentally
revised the self-image of the American nation (153).
 Papadimitriou 84

which were the Civil Rights Movement and the second wave Feminist Movement. Supported

by a powerful philosophical current, which demanded respect for difference and self-

determination, these movements challenged the universalizing politics on issues of race,

gender and class. More often than not, the body as a political issue was a top priority in their

agendas. As Kathy Davis reports, soon the body became “an ideal starting point for a critique

of universality, objectivity or moral absolutism” (4). For the next decades, the impartiality of

scientific knowledge was questioned and a lot of discussion over the power enacted on the

body took place. The “return to the flesh” (Detsi-Diamanti, Kitsi-Mitakou, and Yiannopoulou

2), that is, the shift of focus on the organic body and its political usefulness, encompassed the

potential to liberate from old, repressive ideologies grounded on abstraction. Also, the

Human Genome Project, starting with the “reading” of the human DNA in 1993, fueled

concerns over the reduction of the body to a text to be read and edited for political ends, and

the power relations involved in life sciences (biology, genetic engineering).

Growing as a writer and producing science fiction during a time of invigorated

interest in the body, Butler could not but centralize it in her thinking and writing. She

followed other feminists, who believed that the body is “the ground of human action,” rather

than “part of a passive nature ruled over by an active mind” (Gatens qtd. in Birke 43). Even

in the post-apocalyptic universe Xenogenesis is set, corporeality is “seen as the material

condition of subjectivity” (Grosz, “Bodies-Cities” 381). In other words, in Butler’s trilogy

the subject is portrayed as a being, who defines her/himself and lives the world through

her/his body. Informed by advances in various disciplines, the physical and social sciences

being her favorites, Butler examines the possibilities they offer for the human body: profound

body knowledge, exploration of the potential of the flesh as a communicative tool,

transgression of body boundaries and biological/genetic modification to achieve social

improvement, extension of the life span and continuation of human life. However, as a
 Papadimitriou 85

careful observer of power relations of all kind, Butler does not omit to caution against the

stakes these sciences entail for the human flesh: permeability, loss of agency and self-

ownership, alienation, textualization and fetishization. To help her readership escape such

risks, she develops a feminist critique, which, according to Sherryl Vint’s theory of ethical

posthumanism, enlarges the range of bodies that matter in a posthuman future. The

posthuman bodies Butler imagines know no single standards or norms. They are the

embodiment of diversity she desires for our posthuman condition.

More importantly, Butler repeatedly reminds us that, the philosophical and existential

question of what it means to be human will inevitably change in the near future, but this is

not necessarily a cause of despair. The critical posthumanism Butler promotes signals the end

not of humanity, but the end of the Cartesian conception of the human, the one which has

legitimized and perpetuated the powerful/powerless binary of mind/body. Butler predicts a

posthuman future, which may prove a promising one, as long as we revise our oppressive

past and present perspective. In fact, this is her reason for writing science fiction. As she

says:

Why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible?

Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see

ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way

of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the

child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of

influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to

think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do

that for any child. (“A Few Rules for Predicting the Future” 264)
 Papadimitriou 86

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