TY - JOUR TI - Mythic fertility, impurity, and creolization in the works of Octavia E. Butler DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-vtgx-cq72 PY - 2020 AB - My dissertation focuses on how Octavia Butler’s work intervenes in dominant conceptions of the human. The dualistic thinking that informs the notion of the human within Western discourse is attached to oppositional dichotomies that the genre of science fiction takes on as a human/nonhuman opposition in alien invasion contagion narratives. I connect Butler’s overturning of binary thinking to the work of Black and women of color feminism. Part of my own intervention in this project is to fully situate Butler’s work within the tradition of black feminist thought. I read her work through a creolizing methodology that brings together themes and discourses that disrupt oppositional binaries. The themes I weave together throughout this project and that I see as Butler herself also interweaving in order to overturn dualistic thinking include those associated with creolization, slavery, incest, black women’s reproductive rights and politics, the retelling of mythical and biblical myths attached to monstrous and damned female archetypes, the altering of the alien with the genre of science fiction, shapeshifting and its reconfiguring of gender, aleatory matter, and the Cartesian mind-body duality. KW - Comparative Literature LA - English ER -