Utopian Possibilities: Disability, Norms, and Eugenics in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis

TLDR: In this paper, the authors argue that the Xenogenesis trilogy is ambiguous about the idea of better bodies while also articulating the foundation for fruitful community, arguing that the Oankali are neither saviors nor demons, and the humans in the narrative are neither victims nor heroes.

Abstract: Octavia Butler's trilogy Xenogenesis is a useful text for opening a conversation between scholars of utopia and scholars of disability. By reading Xenogenesis as a critical utopia, the article argues that the trilogy is ambiguous about the idea of better bodies while also articulating the foundation for fruitful community. The argument is that the Oankali are neither saviors nor demons, and the humans in the narrative are neither victims nor heroes. Instead, the main characters in each of the three novels-Lilith in the first, Akin in the second, and Jodahs in the third-think through the ways in which their identities intersect with their bodies, their abilities, their families, and their desires.IntroductionAs a political theorist I am interested in the utopian effort of imagining better ways of living together. Utopian and dystopian accounts provide useful experimental spaces for these imaginings and bringing them into conversation with disability studies scholarship reveals spaces for new imaginative possibilities. And just as utopian scholars are working through how to find "better" and more "hopeful" spaces of living together, so too it seems to me that disability studies is in its own moment of wrestling with the ideas of "better" and "hopeful."Utopia,1 as a genre, is animated by a desire to bring about productive change. Utopias and dystopias diagnose current social problems and prescribe potentially "better" futures, from the standpoint of the author and (often) from that of the reader. Utopian accounts can describe better systems of government or economics, better organizations of education or family life, better relationships with the natural world or with religion. Some utopias2 seek to better humanity itself. A spirit of eugenics3 thus animates many utopian accounts. This eugenic spirit is not uniform. It runs the gamut from Plato's technologically crude, negative eugenic call for infanticide of "defective" infants in the Republic (380 BCE) to the positive eugenics that purportedly would follow the free choice of marriage in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Even utopian novels written in the latter half of the twentieth century include clear eugenic messages; for instance, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) includes a system for the production of genetically engineered children.4Utopian accounts have relied on eugenic practices and some dystopias critique the idea of eugenics by presenting eugenic practices as a sign of dystopia.5 But the mere presence of eugenic dystopias is not sufficient evidence that we as a society are ready to reject what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls "eugenic logic," which she defines as "a utopian effort to improve the social order" ("The Case" 240). I contend that scholars need to give more attention to utopian accounts that celebrate a wide variety of bodies and minds,6 and must begin to analyze how bodily improvement in utopian and dystopian accounts can confirm stereotypical notions of eugenic cure and challenge the foundation of cure and improvement itself. This article focuses on the latter issue. Can we begin to imagine a better world without creating that world out of seemingly improved human bodies? What is the place of "cure" in this better world? I recognize that utopian accounts, and thus utopian effort itself, is implicated in eugenic logic. However, I disagree with Garland-Thompson's sweeping dismissal of utopian effort. A utopian "logic" need not be eugenic. Instead, the effort invoked in this utopian logic imagines ways to improve the world in which we live while questioning how we value different kinds of bodies and minds. Disability studies is itself a utopian effort, one that seeks not just to explain and analyze the idea of disability but also to change the way people in our society think about disability.This article argues that we can maintain a utopian logic, necessary to imagine a world different than our own, by wrestling with a critical utopian text that is filled with the potentially problematic language of cure. …