Redistributions of the Sensible: An Introduction to “Senses with/out Subjects”

Abstract

AcrossOct avia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, touch, chemosensation, and sensitivity to DNA itself offer a basis for building kinship relations that stretch across both species and interplanetar y boundaries.In Dawn (1987), for instance, surviving a planetary apocalypse and centuries of racial capitalist violence and war making requires the reeducation of the senses.When she wakes up on a spaceship after nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable, the protagonist Lilith Iyapo must slowly overcome her conditioned visual responses ("Look at me," insists Lilith's Oankali companion) and then learn to interact with a being whose face is filled with "sensor y tentacles" (Butler [1987] 2000: 15).She is genetically recoded thanks to the preternatural sensitivity of the third gender known as ooloi (who can sense and manipulate DNA) and becomes capable of communicating through chemical cues.Through the transmission of olfactory chemical signals, "Strangers of a different species [are] accepted as family" (196).By challenging the supremacy of vision as a tool and metaphor for knowledge, by centering a Black woman's struggle for survival and reproductive futurity as a site of relationalities that exceed the sensorium of Enlightenment "Man," and by exploring the embodied sensorium (including nonconsensual chemosensation) as a pathway toward more-than-human kinships, Butler's novel offers a generative model for emergent scholarship in sensory studies, an interdisciplinar y field organized around the premise that sensor y perception is a social rather than strictly neurological construct.This special issue hazards the hypothesis that literary criticism and sensor y studies are mutually sustaining fields of inquir y.That the senses and the symbolic are coextensive is a truth so obvious as to be

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