Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler

• Wild Seed

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Themes to Be Covered

• Representation as a Political Act
• The Social Construction of Race/Gender/Class
• The Matrix of Domination
• Embodied Characters
• The Traffic in Women
• Pushing the Boundaries of Sexuality

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I began writing about power because I had so
little.
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The Personal is Political

• Her work is political in nature. She likes to
  imagine new ways of thinking about people and
  power.
• a flawed world in which racially and sexually
  oppressed individuals negotiate their way through
  a variety of personal and societal barriers.
  (Salvaggio, 2003)

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• In each of the published novels, the implicit
  struggle for power revolves around explicit
  conflicts of will and the contests of survival a
  heroine endures. (Govan, 1984)

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Representation as a Political Act

• The black science fiction heroine- Butlers
  heroines confront the inter mixing of race and
  sex and consciously negotiate the boundaries.
• The social construction of gender and race.

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Symbolism

• Symbolism- the use of symbols to represent ideas
  or qualities.
• Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make
  the world signify, to render it visible.We are
  not, however, in danger of lacking meaning quite
  the contrary,we are gorged with meaning and it
  is killing us. Jean Baudrillard

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Understanding Representation

• Images how is your group represented? Is your
  group represented?
• Stingy, Cheap- subordinate groups are frequently
  given the same negative set of characteristics.
• Actions are differentially interpreted depending
  on who acts. Stingy v. Frugal, Potent/Prolific
  v. Lascivious- Depends on the social location of
  the individual.

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The Social Construction of Reality

• Reality is achieved through consensus.
• What is accepted as fact, the rules that
  establish fact, and the paradigm that makes
  fact important are socially constructed.
• Certainly there is a material base- but systems
  of knowledge and understanding interpret, make
  use of and manipulate that base in a myriad of
  ways.

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Altering the Paradigm of Difference

• Recognize Social Constructions
• The effort must be made to understand race as an
  unstable and decentered complex of social
  meanings constantly being transformed by
  political struggle. (Omi and Winant, p.25)
• Understanding Social Construction as Process
• Because gender is a process, there is room not
  only for modification and variation by
  individuals and small groups but also for
  institutionalized change. (Lorber p.102)

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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• Racial Formation- refers to the process by which
  social, economic, and political forces determine
  the content and importance of racial categories,
  and by which they are in turn shaped by racial
  meanings. Race is a central axis of social
  relations which cannot be subsumed under or
  reduced to some broader category or conception.
  (Omi and Winant p.21)
• Racial subjection is quintessentially
  ideological. (Omi and Winant p. 22)

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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• Racialization- signifies the extension of racial
  meaning to a previously racially unclassified
  relationship, social practice, or group.
• Racialization is a historically specific
  ideological process.
• Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
  conceptual elements. It emerges from the
  struggles of competing political projects.
• -By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans
  whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani,
  etc. were rendered black by an ideology of
  exploitation based on racial logic - the
  establishment and maintenance of a color line.
  (Omi and Winant P.23)

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Modern Race as a Social Construct

• Phenotypes versus Genotypes
• How does one draw distinctions?
• History of Race as the History of Racial
  Oppression

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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• What types of Expectations/Assumptions are made
  about people of Different Races/Ethnicities (Be
  sure to interrogate Dominant Categories as well
  as subordinate). How does this book exemplify
  this?
• Abilities
• Preferences (Likes and Dislikes)
• Family Life

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The Social Construction of Race

• Doro and Anyanwu can be/take any race.
• How does he symbolize power and oppression? In
  what ways does he demonstrate how
  appropriation/colonialization transcends race?
• In what ways are these ideas radical?

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The Social Construction of Categories Gender

• Doing Gender- Gender is done (West and Zimmerman,
  1987)
• Through repeated enactments of gender norms,
  gender is written on the body and into the psyche.

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The Social Construction of Categories Gender

• Talking about gender for most people is the
  equivalent of fish talking about water. Gender
  is so much the routine ground of everyday
  activities that questioning its
  taken-for-granted assumptions and presuppositions
  is like thinking about whether the sun will come
  up. (Lorber p.99)
• How do Anyanwu and Doro challenge traditional
  conceptions of gender?

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The Social Construction of Reality and Social
Change

• Because categories are constructed, they can be
  changed.
• A continuous process of change occurs as groups
  and ideologies compete and material conditions
  alter.

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Matrix of Domination

• Interlocking axes of oppression that stem from
  societal configurations including (but not
  limited to) race, class, gender, and sexual
  orientation.
• It demonstrates the interconnectedness of systems
  of privilege/oppression across social categories.
• Heterosexism reinforces male privilege and vice
  versa.
• One can be simultaneously oppressed and an
  oppressor.

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The Changes of Anyanwu and the Matrix

• How is the matrix revealed through the characters
  in this book?
• How do her self-conscious negotiations of her
  position reflect the complexity of the matrix?

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Social Theory and the Body

• The Great Divide- Body and Mind
• Dualism- Cartesian interactionist - The view
  that (1) the mental and the material comprise
  two different classes of substance and (2) each
  can have causal effects on the other.
• Current Thinking
• We both have and are bodies. Relations of power
  and privilege need to be understood from an
  embodied standpoint.
• Part of embodied privilege is the freedom to not
  consider embodiment.

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The Politics of Embodiment

• The body as battlefield-
• All points of view are embodied. Anyanwu can
  inhabit multiple spaces.
• How does this change her experience?
• -Struggle is represented as embodied throughout
  the book. Discuss.

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The Traffic In Women (People)

• Gayle Rubin describes what she calls the traffic
  in women
• Combines Freud and Levi-Strauss to discuss how
  the domestication of women operates to create "a
  systematic social apparatus which uses females as
  raw materials and products."

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• Rubin feels that Marxism explains the usefulness
  of women to capitalism as a labor force, but
  fails to explain anything about the oppression of
  women.
• The sex-gender system- Rubin pursues Engels' view
  that the subordination of women is located in the
  mode of production in a theory Engels called
  kinship systems. A kinship system is described as
  a socially defined kinship group that is not
  biologically defined. The complexities of kinship
  systems are vast and varied among cultures around
  the world, but always involves the exchanges
  between males and females and recognizes the
  importance of sexuality and gender.

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• Rubin argues that the traffic of women is
  actually more pronounced and commercialized in
  more civilized societies, and it is in this
  traffic that we can find the center of women's
  oppression, rather than within the traffic in
  merchandise. It is within these kinship systems
  that women do not have full rights to themselves.
  
• Rubin bases her understanding of Kinship on
  Levi-Strauss's theory of kinship. She argues
  that the incest taboo, obligatory
  heterosexuality, and the asymmetry of gender
  entails the constraint of female sexuality.

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• Rubin goes on to propose that psychoanalysis
  describes the mechanisms by which "children are
  engraved with the conventions of sex and gender."
  (p183)
• Kinship systems require a division of the sexes.
  Kinship systems include sets of rules governing
  sexuality.
• The Oedipal crisis is the assimilation of these
  rules and taboos. Compulsory heterosexuality is
  the product of kinship. "Gender is not only an
  identification with one sex it also entails that
  sexual desire be directed toward the other sex."
  The Oedipal phase constitutes heterosexual
  desire. Kinship rests on a radical difference
  between the rights of men and women. The Oedipal
  complex confers male rights upon the boy, and
  forces the girl to accommodate herself to her
  lesser rights." (p198)

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• Rubin feels that women are oppressed as women,
  and also oppressed in having to be like women or
  men. Rubin finds a solution of androgyny and the
  lack of gender most appealing. In order for a
  complete analysis of women, theory must take into
  account everything "the evolution of commodity
  forms in women, systems of land tenure, political
  arrangements, subsistence technology,...and
  women, marriage, and sexuality."

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• Women are property, exchanged through these
  kinship systems.
• In what ways do the vestiges of this relationship
  exist today.

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The Boundaries of Sexuality

• Is Sex a Natural Act?
• Sexual diversity in practices, fetishized body
  parts and objects, taboos world wide would
  suggest that the natural and the social are
  inextricably linked. (There is no missionary
  position gene).

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Sexuality as a Modern Phenomenon

• Sexuality as central to identity is a
  Industrial/Post-Industrial Phenomenon
• Freud- The Sexual self as central to the self.
• Foucault and the Deployment of Sexuality
• The system of sexuality reinforces relations of
  privilege/oppression

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• The Sexuality Continuum
• How do Doro and Anyanwu represent the continuum?
  How do they destablize dichotomous sex
  difference/desire?

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Thoughts for Discussion

• 1) Discuss Anyanwus social position at
  different points in the story. How do her
  options change as her location changes?
• 2) How are social relations of power and
  privilege presented as social constructions?