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ABSTRACT: Octavia E. Butler articulates a complex conception of power in
her last three novels that can provide new insights into lasting debates about theusefulness of a Foucauldian framework for feminist theorists. The author arguesthat Butler’s approach to power both coincides with Foucault’s critique of it andmoves beyond that critique into concrete responses that answer to dominantdiscourses, producing viable alternatives. Parable of the Sower, Parable of the
Talents, and Fledgling respond to power by working to demystify damaging
discourses, resurrect subjugated knowledges, revise dominant discourses, createalternative communities, and emphasize a strategy of becoming over stagnation.

Keywords: becoming, Octavia E. Butler, dystopia, feminist criticism, Michel Foucault, vampire

ower has always been a central concern in Octavia E. Butler’s fiction.
Her early Patternist series (1976 to 1984) focuses on mind control,
代写英语论文Kindred (1979) confronts slavery and slavery’s legacy, “Bloodchild”
(1984) interrogates the power-laden symbiotic relationship between aliens andhuman settlers, and the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987 to 1989) examines both theproblem of the human propensity for creating hierarchies and the possibilityof an alien alternative that has its own imperialistic tendencies. Butler’s narrativesemphasize the complexities of power; they explore both its productiveand destructive potential and rarely flinch from portraying power disparities asinescapable realities of existence. In Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the
Talents (1998), and Fledgling (2005), Butler continues to offer intricate analyses
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of the nature of power, focusing on possible responses to power, what it means toseek or to require power, and how to handle power once it is achieved. Butler’slast three novels work through the complexities of power in ways that offerpossibilities for contemporary feminists—and others—to cope with and even toprofit from the power formations that surround us. Specifically, Butler uses thefigures of the hyperempath in Sower and Talents and the vampire-human hybridin Fledgling to explore the relationships individuals can have with power. To
work with power rather than be controlled by it, Butler’s protagonists engage ina constant process of adapting and becoming. For those protagonists, Olaminaand Shori, gaining power means first coming to terms with forces that impedethem. They have to learn to read and understand the power fields that surroundthem before they can begin to respond to them in productive ways. Oncetheyhave begun to understand how power operates, they find ways to respond to itthat include demystifying dominant discourses, answering to those dominantdiscourses with subjugated knowledges, revising aspects of the prevailing structuresand myths that do not suit them, building communities that offer alternativemodels to traditional hierarchies, and embracing becoming over stagnation.Parable of the Sower, which is told via journal entries and verses by its protagonist,Lauren Olamina, begins in 2024 in a small, multiracial, walled-in communitynorth of Los Angeles. Olamina (most characters in the two novels call her by hersurname) suffers from “hyperempathy syndrome,” which causes her to feel thepain an本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。