MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For poet and philosopher Audre Lorde, the erotic was a resource and source of power for women. In the “Use of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” she asserts, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.” Using Lorde’s theory of the erotic as a source of political power for women and black women in particular, this paper will examine the ways that Octavia Butler’s black female protagonists create communal and kinship bonds with other individuals across cultural and even species differences through the experience of sensual pleasure or shared pain. In Butler’s speculative novels, the sense of touch is privileged over sight. Furthermore, as scholars have argued, touch is an important trope in her exploration of spectacular embodiment elaborated through symbiosis. Placing her work in the current critical conversation about the posthuman, this paper will look most closely at Parable of the Sower and Fledgling to argue that depictions of bio-empathy create an ethics of compassion and healing based in the universe of the body. In each of these novels, touch is complicated by terror and self-preservation in an apocalyptic or catastrophic setting, and symbiotic relationships come with profound costs for an individual. I will think briefly about how the Science Fiction genre allows Butler the ability to focus on the female body in pain in a literary tradition that does not make room for representations of black women’s experiences alongside her peers making similar literary arguments in the 1970s and 80s, including Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall. Finally, this paper reads the thematic framework of possession as an erotic and speculative rewriting of forms of power that delimit the black, female body in the twentieth century.