The Domestic Politics of Disability in Octavia Butler's Kindred

Abstract

Octavia Butler died in late February of 2006 following a fall outside of her home, the house a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant enabled her to purchase. This freak accident, a tragedy for anyone touched by her writing, serves as an appropriate reminder of many of Butler’s most significant themes. Like any death, hers foregrounds our mortality and by doing so also foregrounds our relation to others—an ethical connection that is so central to her writing. Butler wrote of division and violence; of the dichotomy between the self and the objective world, home and otherness; and of what could be gained and lost by decreasing the distance between others. In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Butler writes of a young girl, locked behind neighborhood walls in an apocalyptic world, who is gifted, and cursed, with empathy; she can experience others’ pain, real or feigned (11). Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy is a disability as it marks her out as other and interferes with her ability to easily navigate and succeed in a violently hierarchized world. Yet Lauren does succeed while retaining her empathic connection to the world. Lauren has a strong sense of her identity, yet fosters a connection to others at the same time. Here we have what appears to be a perfect ethical balance between assuring a certain level of personal singularity, without the violent hermeneutic assimilation of others. What more can we ask of any ethics? I demonstrate how in Butler’s Kindred disability amounts to a sort of