Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision

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Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision
Author(s): Jim Miller
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jul., 1998), pp. 336-360
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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336 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 25 (1998)
Jim Miller
Post-Apocalyptic Hoping:
Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision
"The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any
other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was
through the trees. "-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, ?21:235-36.
1. Critical Dystopias/Utopian Pessimism. If Don DeLillo's dystopian vision
is a kind of Baudrillardian negation and Harold Jaffe's work goes a bit further
by seeking to work through the dystopian via "guerrilla" strategies, Octavia
Butler goes further still by working through the dystopian elements of the
culture as Jaffe does and then seeking to create new myths for the postmodern
age. Butler does not offer a full-blown utopian "blueprint" in her work, but
rather a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past. In both
the XENOGENESIS trilogy-Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago
(1989)-and Parable of the Sower (1994), Butler stares into the abyss of the
dystopian future and reinvents the desire for a better world. In doing so, she
places herself firmly within a rich tradition of feminist utopian writing.
In their introduction to Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of
Difference, Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten argue that "utopias
and science fiction by women-women's 'literatures of estrangement'-consti-
tute a continuous literary tradition in the West from the seventeenth century
until the present day" (1). American women's writing is a particularly fertile
site for utopian imaginings. As Jean Pfaelzer claims in "Subjectivity as Femi-
nist Utopia," "early feminists" in 19th-century America, like Rebecca Harding
Davis, wrote critiques of male utopias that "demystify the Western notion of
the self, albeit the utopian self, as separate, bounded, and autonomous. The
feminist notion of utopia projects a dialectical relationship between the individ-
ual and society" (95). In "Texts and Contexts: American Women Envision
Utopia, 1890-1920," Kolmerten notes that "from 1890 to 1919, more than
thirty American women wrote utopian novels depicting their versions of a
better world" when "the mere act of publishing a novel-especially a 'utopian'
novel that criticized aspects of the culture in which they lived-was a subver-
sive act" (107). Donawerth, in "Science Fiction by Women in the Early Pulps,
1926-1930," tells us that "the feminist utopia continued in the pulps even
though it virtually disappeared in the hardback book trade from the 1920s
through the 1950s," making utopian transformations of "domestic spaces and
duties through technology" and revising gender roles (137). By the 1960s and
1970s, a flood of new feminist utopias appeared from writers like Joanna Russ,
Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others that corresponded to the second
wave of the American feminist movement. Studies like Sarah Lefanu's
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OCTAVIA BUTLER'S VISION 337
Feminism and Science Fiction document and discuss second-wave feminist
utopias, while critics like Marleen Barr (in Feminist Fabulation: Space/Post-
modem Fiction and Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Be-
yond) and Jenny Wolmark (in Aliens and Others) deal with the feminist utopias
of the 60s and 70s, as well as postmodern and dystopian writing of the 80s and
90s that is the post-utopian continuation of the feminist utopian tradition.
What is historically unique about the kind of feminist utopian/dystopian
fiction being written today is that it occupies what Jenny Wolmark refers to as
an "intersection" where feminism, science fiction, utopian and dystopian think-
ing, and postmodernism all come together (3). Thus, contemporary utopian/
dystopian postmodern science-fiction narratives are profoundly "intertextual"
in that their striking hybridity defies easy genre categorization and makes them
effective tools with which to "undermine ostensibly clear-cut distinctions
between self and other" and "explore possibilities for alternative and non-
hierarchical definitions of gender and identity within which the difference of
aliens and others can be accommodated rather than repressed" (2). Wolmark
does not cite Darko Suvin, but she clearly sees contemporary feminist utopian/
dystopian writing as performing a function similar to Suvin's "cognitive es-
trangement" in that it undermines "ostensibly clear-cut distinctions" by helping
us see the world in a new way.
In Lost in Space, Marleen Barr also notes the hybridity of many contem-
porary feminist narratives and coins the term "feminist fabulation" as "an
umbrella term that includes science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and
mainstream literature" that is "engaged in the postmodern critique of patri-
archal master narratives" (12). She cites Darko Suvin's term "cognitive es-
trangement" (4) and claims that this is what feminist fabulation undertakes as
it "offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the patriarchal
one we know, yet returns to confront that known patriarchal world in some
cognitive way" (11). I would argue that what Barr calls "feminist fabulation"
is part of a larger literature of estrangement, and that the use of estrangement
as a literary tactic is fundamentally utopian in that estrangement or defamiliar-
ization is rooted in an attempt to push us toward the New, or what Ernst Bloch
would call the Not Yet Conscious. Thus, any form of literature that seeks to
help us see things anew is driven by a utopian impulse-even if the work in
question is dystopian.
Octavia Butler's work is interesting in that it exists within the tradition of
feminist utopian writing and, at the same time, seeks to contest it. As an Afri-
can-American woman writing within a largely white women's tradition, her
work often questions the assumptions shared by many white feminist utopian
writers. Butler is also far more class-conscious than many other utopian femi-
nist science-fiction writers. Thus, her largely dystopian fictions challenge not
only patriarchal myths, but also capitalist myths, racist myths, and feminist-
utopian myths. Her XENOGENESIS trilogy and Parable of the Sower are critical
dystopias motivated out of a utopian pessimism in that they force us to confront
the dystopian elements of postmodern culture so that we can work through
them and begin again.
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338 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 25 (1998)
2. A Theorist For Cyborgs. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway
discusses the need for socialist-feminism to reconstruct a politics that deals
with the "systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations" (163).
More specifically, she is calling for a new "ironic political myth" (149) that
includes "the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gen-
der" (181), as well as other utopian aspirations for a world without racism and
class domination. The new myths must be ironic because "irony is about con-
tradictions" (149), and Haraway does not want to resolve our differences into
a bland, oppressive sameness. Irony is also important as a strategy because it
is about "humor and serious play" (149), qualities which Haraway implies
have been lacking in socialist-feminist politics. In the same essay, Haraway
cites Octavia Butler as one of the writers whom she sees as "theorists for
cyborgs" (173), those who are working to imagine a more just, non-totalizing
(not indebted to the ghost of Stalin) alternative to late capitalism. The cyborg
is a "hybrid" (149), a figure which breaks down the "boundaries" between
"human and animal" (151), "organism and machine" (152), "physical and
non-physical" (153), and self and other with regard to "gender, race, or class"
(155). A cyborg is a construct of "transgressed boundaries," comfortable with
"permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (154). Hara-
way's figure of the cyborg is related to Gloria Anzaldiia's notion of "mestiza
consciousness," a utopian dream of identity formed at the "focal point" where
"the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs," when "She learns to
transform the small 'I' into the total Self" (Anzalduia 379, 382). This transfor-
mation is not achieved by smoothing over differences, but by developing a
"tolerance for ambiguity" and for crossing "borders" (Anzalduia 378).
In "Reading Buchi Emecheta," Haraway claims that Butler's "post-holo-
caust reinvented 'families"' serve "as tropes to guide us through the ravages
of gender, class, imperialism, racism, and nuclear exterminist global culture"
(121). Thus, rather than dismissing Butler's science fiction as a "low" genre
or a form of escapist fantasy, we can more usefully read it as a site of extreme-
ly important political activity. Fiction, according to Haraway, is a tool that can
"reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities" and
"subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture" with their "longing
for fulfillment in apocalypse" (175). Thus, according to Haraway in Primate
Visions, Butler's fictions are "salvation history," an imaginative site of
experimentation where new notions of identity and community are under
construction. One might think of the process of reading Butler's books as a
journey of exploration where the reader is able to try on new narratives about
the future and consider various alternatives. Science fiction like Butler's,
according to Haraway, uses conventions that "require readers radically to
rewrite stories in the act of reading them.. .to find an 'elsewhere' from which
to envision a different and less hostile order and relationships among people,
animals, technologies, and land" (15). For Haraway, Butler's "salvation his-
tory is not utopian," however, for utopian stories are about "reproduction of
the One.. .rooted in fantasies of natural roots and recoverable origins" and "the
sacred image of the same" (379-80).'
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OCTAVIA BUTLER'S VISION 339
Butler herself has also taken issue with the notion that utopian thinking is
a desirable enterprise. In a 1990 interview with Larry McCaffery and Jim
McMenamin, she stated:
I find utopias ridiculous. We're not going to have a perfect society until we get a few
perfect humans, and that seems unlikely. Besides, any true utopia would almost
certainly be incredibly boring, and it would probably be so overspecialized that any
change we might introduce would probably destroy the whole system. As bad as we
humans are sometimes, I have a feeling that we'll never have that problem with the
current system. (69)
But perhaps it all depends on how one defines the utopian impulse. In "There
Goes the Neighborhood: Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias,"
Michelle Erica Green refers to Butler's ambivalence toward utopian thinking,
but claims that "a utopia does not have to be a 'perfect' society" (169). She
notes that utopia "is a Greek pun that can be read as 'nowhere' (utopia) or
'good place' (eutopia)" (169). Thus, Green argues that "literary utopias engage
the paradox between these two meanings, straddling issues of locality, textual-
ity, and ideology in an attempt to bridge the gap between fictional discourse
and everyday life" (169). If this is the case, then utopian fiction has more to
do with social/cultural/economic critique than with imagining perfection. Uto-
pian thinking forces us to engage the discrepancy between what is and what
could be. It seeks to inspire us to desire, 'a la Bloch, but not necessarily for a
predetermined solution.
The impulse to imagine a better world does not necessarily lead, as Hara-
way's comments imply, to the creation of ideal societies whose central charac-
teristic is a bland sameness. Indeed, the utopian impulse may even lead us
through a dystopian nightmare. As Green notes, Butler's works
border on the dystopian because she insists on confronting problems that have
occurred so often in human communities that they seem almost an unavoidable part
of human nature, such as greed, prejudices based on appearances, oppression of
women, and might-makes-right ideologies. Rather than create utopias in which these
problems have simply ceased to exist, Butler demonstrates time and time again in her
fiction that they must be worked through-even if that process involves the use of
dangerous human tendencies like violence. (170)
Hence, as Green suggests here, the utopian element in Butler's work is inter-
twined with dystopian thought. Utopia is the unseen horizon that makes dysto-
pian visions possible. Butler's critical dystopias force us to "work through" the
dystopian before we can begin the effort to imagine a better world. In Butler's
XENOGENESIS trilogy, we are thrust into a post-apocalyptic world from the start
and forced to make our way through it.
3. XENOGENESIS. In her XENOGENESIS trilogy, Butler tells the story of how
the remains of humanity and a ruined earth are "saved" by an alien encounter
after humanity has nearly destroyed itself in a nuclear war. These novels mix
the typical science-fiction "space alien" story with elements of the slave narra-
tive, the Genesis story, the nature/culture debate, utopian/dystopian tales,
captivity narratives, and more. Butler's aliens are both colonizers and a utopian
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340 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 25 (1998)
collective, while the captured/saved humans are both admirable survivors and
ugly xenophobes. Lilith Iyapo, the main character in Dawn, is both the mother
of a new race and a Judas to humanity. In the process of reading the trilogy,
we confront and negotiate these contradictions, as Butler prods us to move
beyond old dilemmas and imagine a different future.
In Dawn, the Oankali, a gene-trading, colonizing alien species, simulta-
neously saves the earth from the aftermath of nuclear devastation and plots its
utter transformation into an alien-human hybrid species. The Oankali are not
human-like aliens such as we might see on Star Trek; their bodies are covered
with " tentacles " (? 1. 2:12) and their " literal unearthliness " (? 1. 2: 1 1) inspires
"a true xenophobia" in Lilith and the other humans whom they first awake
from the suspended animation in which the Oankali have been keeping them.
In addition to their extreme "difference" in appearance, the Oankali are
also a radically "other" culture, a totally harmonious social collective that has
mastered genetic engineering, healing, and a completely organic form of tech-
nology that effaces the line between machine and organism. Thus, their "ship"
and everything in it is a living entity, a being engaged in some form of "trade"
with the Oankali. As one of them tells Lilith: "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" (?1.5:33). The Oankali's com-
munal, totally reciprocal relationship with each other and with other beings
leads them to conclude that humnans are both fascinating and genetically flawed
because they are both "intelligent" and "hierarchical." When human intelli-
gence "serves" hierarchy instead of recognizing it as a "problem," it is "like
ignoring cancer" (?1.5:37). Hence, the Oankali plan to save humanity by
healing and subsuming it, merging humans with themselves. What the Oankali
see as a solution, however, many of the humans they awake see as a threat to
their individual autonomy at best, and as genocide at worst.
The Oankali choose Lilith, an African American whom they physically alter
so that she is stronger and can interact with the ship, to awaken the first human
colony from their induced sleep-stasis in order to repopulate the earth and mate
with the Oankali. Lilith's name, as Cathy Peppers reminds us, is the same as
"Adam's first wife" who was cast out of the Garden of Eden for refusing to lie
with him and whose fate "was to couple with 'demons' and give birth to a
monstrous brood of children" (?2.2:49). This parallel is an interesting one as
the Lilith in XENOGENESIS is labeled a "Judas goat" (?2.4:65), not for refusing
to lie with the aliens, but rather for mating with them. Her act is both a
betrayal of humanity and a "genesis" for a new species. Lilith serves as a
frequently unwilling intermediary between the Oankali and their human
captives, whose forced stay aboard the ship reminds Donna Haraway of "the
middle passage" of slaves on their way to America (Primate Visions 378).
Thus, the Oankali are both healing saviors and masters of the humans with
whom they seek to join. They are both generous and condescending, admiring
and dismissive, of the compelling and destructive beings called humans.
In the process of waking and training the captive humans, Lilith meets and
falls in love with Joseph, a Chinese-American man who is eventually killed by
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OCTAVIA BUTLER'S VISION 341
other humans for siding with Lilith, but not before the Oankali are able to store
enough of him to later impregnate Lilith with her/their first son. Cross-
breeding itself is a complicated process involving five beings: a male and a
female human, a male and a female Oankali, and an ooloi (who are the neuter
Oankali responsible both for healing and for genetically engineering the new
species "constructs"). This new sexual act gives humans a never-before-experi-
enced total pleasure that involves both body and mind, but this pleasure comes
at the cost of the loss of human intimacy-the ooloi literally lies between the
man and woman and shares the results of this union with the Oankali pair.
Early on, this transgression of human sexual and gender boundaries and the
resulting new hybrid "constructs" it brings horrifies and disgusts most of the
humans. Hence, the "resisters" are born along with the recolonization of the
earth, despite the Oankali's best efforts. Even Lilith, whom the Oankali think
they have won over, is secretly in sympathy with the rebels.
Adulthood Rites takes place several years after Damm ends, and it deals with
the efforts of Lilith's construct son, Akin, who is half-human and half-Oankali,
to agitate on behalf of the resisters who refuse to join with the aliens. As a
baby, Akin is kidnapped by a roving band of male resisters (male humans, it
seems, are more prone to violence and other forms of domination than women)
and sold to Gabriel and Tate, former friends of Lilith's and residents of the
Phoenix Colony. Because they would not mate with the Oankali, resister
humans have been sterilized. Still, they build a village that closely resembles
a North American small-town community, except that there are no children,
and, as time passes, people become more desperate, competitive, and violent.
Brutal bands of roving human males raid the Phoenix Colony and other villages
to abduct and rape women, or to trade kidnapped children for women. It seems
that humans are intent on living down to the Oankalis' vision of them as
"dangerous," fatally flawed beings prone to destructive behavior in the service
of hierarchy (?1.5:30).
Akin is kidnapped because he looks human, even though later, when he
reaches "metamorphosis," he changes into a human-Oankali hybrid complete
with tentacles. Tate and Gabriel protect Akin from other villagers, some of
whom would cut his tentacles off to make him look human again. Despite the
violence and stupidity Akin sees, his time with the resisters shows him that not
all humans are fatally flawed, and he becomes convinced that it is wrong to
force them to either join with the Oankali or become extinct. Instead of hating
his captors, Akin "made them all his teachers" (?2.2:162). Thus, the human-
Oankali construct does not share his alien parents' paternalistic attitudes and
disdain for individual autonomy. Once he is rescued, returns to the human-
Oankali colony Lo, and reaches adulthood, Akin becomes an advocate for the
resisters. He argues the humans' case with the Oankali and is allowed to help
the resisters establish a human-only colony on Mars.
Finally, in Imnago, Butler deals with issues of profound difference through
the character of Jodahs, Lilith's last child, who turns out to be a half-human
and half-Oankali ooloi. The result of this new mixture is a hybrid being that
is neither female nor male. Rather than embodying a set gender, Jodahs is a
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342 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 25 (1998)
shape-shifter who can take on the appearance of whichever gender s/he prefers
(?2.4:89-90). Like its brother, Akin, Jodahs becomes involved with a colony
of humans who survived the nuclear holocaust and remained undiscovered by
the Oankali. They have been living an isolated existence, hidden away in a
South American mountain range. Hence, these humans are both fertile and
deformed from inbreeding (?2.6:105). Jodahs ends up healing and mating with
a brother and sister pair from this group, convincing their community to end
its isolation, and mediating an arrangement between them and the Oankali.
Some of these humans choose to mate with the Oankali, and others choose to
go to the Mars Colony, but all of them are given a choice. Thus, by the end
of the trilogy, the humans have lost the worst elements of their xenophobia,
and the Oankali have come to recognize the importance of individual autono-
my. The seeds of a community based on collective cooperation that respects
"independent life" have been planted (?3.1:220).
Perhaps the harshest critic of the XENOGENESIS trilogy is Hoda M. Zaki
who, in "Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia
Butler," claims that Butler's novels make "unmediated connections between
biology and behavior" (242). Thus, according to Zaki, despite the fact that
Butler's work introduces racial difference into a mostly white feminist tradition
(239) and displays some utopian impulses (243), it is primarily dystopian be-
cause "Butler believes that human nature is fundamentally violent," "men are
intrinsically more violent than women," and "the human propensity to create
the Other can never be transcended" (241). Zaki cites S0ren Baggesen's dis-
tinction between utopian and dystopian pessimism and puts Butler in the latter
category because her work, like the work of essentialist feminists, leads one
to the conclusion that change is impossible by suggesting that the causes of
dystopia are to be found in biology rather than history.
The problem with Zaki's reading of the XENOGENESIS trilogy is that, in an
effort to make theoretical points against essentialism, she confuses Butler's
position with that of the biologistic Oankali. While Butler clearly presents the
Oankali in a positive light with regard to their non-hierarchical society and
their respect for healing, diversity, and guilt-free pleasure, she does not en-
dorse their determinist views about humans. Indeed, characters throughout the
series voice opposition to the view that the "human contradiction" is unaltera-
ble. In Adulthood Rites, Lilith argues that "Human-born men" should not be
a problem for the Oankali because "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"
(?1.2:10). Here Lilith's claim that indoctrination might be a solution to human-
male violence and xenophobia would seem to suggest that it was indoctrination,
not biology, which created it. Hence, rather than a deterministic monologue,
the XENOGENESIS trilogy is a dialogue between opposing views. If one
considers the fact that Lilith's children, Akin and Jodahs, go on to fight for and
win freedom for the resister-humans, it would seem that, if anything, the
trilogy favors the view that social construction is just as important as biology.
In "The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode," Dorothy Alli-
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OCTAVIA BUTLER'S VISION 343
son is critical of Butler not for being a dystopian determinist, but for being
"too hopeful" and for resolving the conflict between the Oankali and the hu-
mans in a way that is "not very convincing" (476). What is more compelling
in Butler's work, for Allison, is the way it illustrates that "The nigger... is the
one who's made slave/victim/child. It is the concept of nigger, the need for a
victim, and the desire to profit by the abuse or misuse of others that corrupts
and destroys" (474). As a result of this, Allison privileges Dawn over the fmal
two books because of the way it develops the character of Lilith who, like
many of Butler's femnale characters, "submit[s] and bear[s] children rather than
die or murder the rapists/masters/aliens" in order to preserve the family (475).
Thus, for Allison, Butler's "essential vision" has to do with "the mother mak-
ing possible her children's lives and freeing them to choose their own desti-
nies" (478), a traditional message of survival rather than transcendence.
Allison's claim that Adulthood Rites and Imago are not convincing because
"Butler seems to lose interest... even before we do" is probably not just a bad
attempt at mind reading, but an indication that Allison has an aversion to
utopian thinking, a suspicion that it will attempt to smooth over the racial and
gender conflicts she finds that Butler's work addresses so well. But Allison's
inclusion of the Oankali in the "masters/rapists/aliens" triad reveals that her
reading of them is perhaps a bit too reductionist. Butler does show the Oankali
as having colonialist tendencies, but it is too easy to write them off as such
without acknowledging the way XENOGENESIS defamiliarizes the victim/victi-
mizer paradigm and shows it to be an inadequate way of understanding oppres-
sion. There are no "bad guys" in the XENOGENESIS trilogy, only bad ways of
thinking. The Oankali, human-males, and others interested in domination are
not shown as inherently bad but as ignorant or ideologically deluded. What the
"unconvincing" last two books of XENOGENESIS argue is that everyone is re-
deemable, even "oppressors"-whether they be violent human-males or coloni-
alist aliens. Butler's novels do not suggest that the process of redemption is
easy, only that it is possible and necessary for survival. As one of the humans
says of accepting union with the alien others: "It's the thing we've been taught
against all our lives" (Imago ?2.9:124). Still, it is possible. The fact that
Allison finds this idea uncompelling might say more about her own ideological
predilections than Butler's skill as a writer.
With regard to Allison's claim that Butler valorizes self-sacrificing mother-
hood, I agree with Michelle Green who argues that, in Butler's work, "Women
make such sacrifices more often than men" not because they are wedded to
traditional notions of womanhood but because "They refuse the consequences
of not being the ones to take action: the deaths of their children and their
future" (182). Furthermore, the family Lilith joins is, by the end of Imago,
neither the traditional bourgeois nuclear family nor a master/slave arrangement
but, as Green puts it, an extended "'family' that includes not only humans and
Oankali, but animals, plants, and sentient spaceships as well" (189). That
family is a potentially utopian collectivity. And it is not only women who make
"motherly" sacrifices for a better future, as Akin and Jodahs' "selfless"
advocacy of the human cause illustrates. Both of them endure bad treatment at
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344 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 25 (1998)
the hands of humans and are able to forgive them and move beyond recrimina-
tion. Thus, perhaps the point Butler is making is that everyone needs to make
sacrifices if we all are to survive and transcend the dystopian elements in the
culture. Perhaps the conventional "women's" values of healing, teaching, and
sharing are worth upholding, in a non-essentialist manner, as tools to help us
work through dystopia.
One area where Allison does approve of the utopianism in XENOGENESIS
is with regard to sex/gender. Allison notes that in the midst of the rape and
other forms of sexual domination in the novels, "the Oankali's benign attitude
toward sex and sexual variation is vitally important in understanding what
Butler sees as the answer to sexual violence-not abstinence or enforced celi-
bacy, but a redefinition of sex and a rapprochement between the genders"
(477). What Allison likes is the Oankalis' "genuine sense of joy" and their
attitude that "Nothing is sinful, nothing is forced. Everything is permitted
except violence" (477). As Allison observes, the Oankali "enjoy sex so much"
and so "honestly" it appalls the "kidnapped humans" (477).
Interestingly, Donna Haraway, who otherwise praises XENOGENESIS as a
"salvation history" (Haraway 379), is critical of Butler because "heterosexu-
ality remains unquestioned, if more complexly mediated" in the novels (Pri-
mate Visions 380). It is my contention that this critique misses the fact that the
inter-species sex in XENOGENESIS goes beyond traditional notions of sex and
gender. First of all, sex with the ooloi puts the male in a passive position, a
fact not missed by Joseph who finds himself struggling against his desire to be
"taken" by an ooloi (Dawn ?3.12:190). Secondly, sex with the Oankali in-
volves more than two people and gives a kind of pleasure that was previously
unimaginable for humans. As one ooloi says to Joseph: "I offer a oneness that
your people strive for, dream of, but can't truly attain alone" (Dawn ?3.12:
189). And this undreamed of pleasure is not limited to mere bodily feeling, as
Lilith and Joseph discover when they first lie with an ooloi:
Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together sustaining
an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation,
lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to
drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.
(?3.7:163)
This letting go, this loss of selfhood is a kind of polymorphously perverse
transcendent moment that is not only beyond the "natural" heterosexual experi-
ence, but beyond the human. It entails a utopian loss of the ego in the process
of blissfully merging with a larger self that includes the alien other. If any-
thing, the non-gendered ooloi who bring pleasure to all are the ultimate cy-
borgs, existing at the boundary between/beyond gender.
Perhaps the best reading of the XENOGENESIS trilogy is Cathy Peppers'
"Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler's XENOGENESIS," in which she
discusses how "XENOGENESIS contests our culture's most powerful originary
discourses (Biblical, biological, anthropological).. .by keeping each one in
dialogue with the others" (61). Hence, Butler's genesis story both evokes and
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