Octavia Butler's Disabled Futures

Prominent theorist in queer disability studies Robert McRuer points to a generic affinity between disability theory (or as he terms it, "crip" theory) and science fiction when he vows, "It's a crip promise that we will always comprehend disability otherwise and that we will, collectively, somehow access other worlds and futures" (208). McRuer's statement suggests that thinking differently and creatively about bodily norms and standard expectations for health and ability is a path to imagining "access to other worlds and futures." Lee Edelman, speaking from a queer perspective, has warned us of the potentially exclusionary nature of politics that rely on the fantasy of better futures, particularly those that come in the form of heteronormative reproduction and the fetishizing of the child as a symbol of innocence who must be protected at all costs. Edelman proposes that "reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasy's promise of continuity" could allow us to see the political conservatism and violence inherent in such ideologies of "reproductive futurism" (39). Edelman and McRuer both gesture toward the possibility of a future that does not promise continuity, security, or assured meaning. A "crip" promise for the future is not about the child as fetishized product of a teleological drive, but rather about broader collective access to resources and alternate understandings of bodies and ability. McRuer's promise crips the logic of reproductive futurism and repositions future-oriented thinking from a political teleological space to a literary speculative space such as that of science fiction, a genre that is already, as Michael Bérubé suggests, "as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact" (568).

Following the logic of these connections between queer futures, disability, and speculative fiction, this essay explores how Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn [1987], Adulthood Rites [1988], and Imago [1989]) offers similar ways of comprehending "otherwise" via access to "other worlds and futures." I choose to focus on the Xenogenesis trilogy not because Butler's other work fails to address issues of disability, gender, sexuality, and race, but because the trilogy deals most directly with medical narratives of cure while resisting a utopian/dystopian dichotomy.¹ I read Butler's science-fiction trilogy through a critical lens of disability that is flexible enough to incorporate, without overshadowing, queer, feminist, and critical-race approaches to the novels. In so doing, I suggest that Butler's trilogy presents what I will call a "disabled futurism" that revalues injury, impurity, and lack and thereby resists "the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism" (Edelman 21) while retaining a feminist narrative that values motherhood (specifically black motherhood) as a historically determined and embodied social identity and political position.

Most critical work on Butler's trilogy argues that the novels provide alternate narratives of, or narrative distance in relation to, womanhood, blackness, sexuality, and social identity. These approaches are generally poststructuralist and read the experiences of the main character, a black American woman named Lilith Iyapo, in relation to the Oankali aliens as rewriting narratives of colonialism, slavery, motherhood, and restrictive ideologies of pure or essentialist identity.² Most critics note, as Donna Haraway puts it, that "catastrophe, survival, and metamorphosis" are "Butler's constant themes" (Simians 226). Given that disability narratives are also often structured in terms of catastrophe, survival, and growth/change, it is striking that not many critics have read Butler through a disability lens.³ A disability focus helps to explain, if not resolve, the paradoxes and contradictions that arise when queer readings of Butler's texts attempt to deal with race, and when critical-race and black-feminist readings attempt to deal with the trilogy's challenges to identifiable and consistent social identities. A disability focus also helps us to revalue the histories of pain and interdependence that constitute minority social identities, as well as to think about how one might narrate race and gender "otherwise" without losing them as sites of identity and identification.

A central concern within disability studies is the issue of accessibility (to physical spaces, employment, and political and cultural representation) for persons with bodies that don't match...