Redefining Humanity: Posthumanism in the American Science Fiction Narratives of Octavia Butler's Dawn and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice

Abstract

Science fiction enables us to explore alternative notions of gender, identity, and biotechnological advancements. A potential new futuristic universe may depict societies that might have different social norms. Anthropocentrism limits our imagination in that humanity becomes the vantage point from which we judge other forms of existence. The notion of posthumanism challenges human exceptionalism, thus constructing a narrative based on post-anthropocentrism: “[A]fter gender, sex, race, age … now, species, or ‘speciesism’ has become a new form of inequality or prejudice to be redressed”, hence post-anthropocentrism replaces anthropocentrism (Callus and Herbrechter 150).[1]                                                     

My paper addresses the issue of such displaced discriminatory power structures with special attention to reconfigurations of humanity that challenge the Self/Other dichotomy. The cyborg as a hybrid identity disrupts the traditional dualisms of embodiment (mind/body) and identity (organism/machine). I will be examining Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) in order to show how the protagonists deal with power struggles that are quite different from conventional narratives of power in Western scholarship such as white patriarchal capitalism. The protagonists of both novels become posthuman cyborgs by moving beyond the normative human condition, with gender as a key aspect. Butler’s Lilith biologically transcends her human self by fusing with an alien Other, thus representing biological posthumanism. Leckie’s Breq merges an enhanced human body with an AI consciousness and becomes an exponent of technological posthumanism. I argue that the anthropocentric issues of racism and sexism are not supplanted by post-anthropocentrism, the protagonists rather subvert anthropocentrism in different contexts of posthumanism. This project sheds new light on science fiction narratives written by female authors – especially with focus on Afrofuturism in the case of Butler – and explores how the protagonists are exponents of unique non-binary gender configurations.

[1] Callus, Ivan, and Stefan Herbrechter. “Posthumanism.” The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2^nd ed., edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, Routledge, 2013, pp. 144-53.