Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis

Abstract

Although science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler claims to avoid “all critical theory” (Potts 331), the issues at play in her Xenogenesis trilogy are essentially those of the postmodern critique of the humanist subject: the critique of the individual as a rationally self-determining, self-defining being, and of individual identity as the source of agency.1 In these novels, Butler confronts humanity with an impossible choice: either extinction, or transformation through a genetic “trade” with an alien species, the Oankali. In this context, the human race stands for the human being as we once knew it, facing a seemingly horrifying posthuman future. Like those films that Kelly Hurley classifies as “body horror,” Butler’s narrative tells of a “human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose integrity is violated, a human identity whose boundaries are breached from all sides” (205). Yet Butler’s critical dystopia suggests a resource for hope in these very violations and ruptures-indeed, in the evolution of the human toward a posthuman body, posthuman subjectivity, and posthuman form of agency.

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