Alien Evolution(s)

Race, Cyber-Sex and Genetic Engineering in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy

Abstract

Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989) offers the reader a far-sighted vision of a shocking encounter between humanity and a bio-technologically advanced race of aliens called Oankali. This article analyses how the aliens modify the established modalities of sexual coupling with the aim of mixing with humans and giving birth to a new, queer and multiracial species that is explicitly echoed in Donna Haraway’s theorization of the “cyborg”. The figure of the cyborg was, for Haraway, strongly intertwined with the history of women of colour, who can be themselves seen as cyborg identities. In this respect, Haraway stresses how cyborg writing is, for women of colour, strongly related to the action of “seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 1991).

Specifically, Butler’s cyborg trilogy focuses on the Oankali, who introduce a completely new modality of mating akin to bacterial and cyber-sex, all by operating from the standpoint of an anti-racist evolutionary science. By drawing on Luciana Parisi’s notion of “abstract sex” (2004) and by referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s figure of the “mestiza” (1987), this article examines how Butler’s futuristic world gives posthumanism an anti-racist founding myth. In the post-human universe invented by Butler bodies are able to connect to one another and exchange flows of genetic information. Furthermore, mates are united by strong, indissoluble chemical bonds that, ironically, prove to be much stronger than traditional marriages: this article especially focuses on how the new, post-human hybrid race changes the given modalities of sex in order to create a utopian, feminist and antiracist vision of sexual pleasure. This article examines how the Oankali create a new world in which a post-human race can develop and how the Ooloi, special genetic engineers, challenge any idea of racial purity. The article focuses on how the new modalities of sex they introduce mobilizes a feminist, queer desire, also by exploring the interrelation among natural and sexual selection as analysed by Elizabeth Grosz (2004), placing a special attention to the relation existing between technology, science and race.