Most of Butler’s plots circle around symbiotic relationships between human and nonhuman characters. Such preoccupation with otherness and difference often takes the shape of an exploration of posthuman relations.

Butler’s work is populated by posthuman bodies and beings – symbionts, vampires, extraterrestials, genetic constructs, mutants and other figures of hybridity – that question (post)human embodiment and subjectivity, bringing to the fore the instability of what Elaine Graham calls the supposed “ontological hygiene” of humanity, and drawing attention to the fuzziness of the limits between the human/nonhuman.

One of these is the exploration of otherness and difference, which goes hand in hand with a reconsideration of the prevailing dualisms of western thought. A systematic reading of her novels and shorter fiction reveals that at the core lies an underlying and sustained preoccupation with what it is to be human, opening up the scope for a compelling (posthumanist) critique of the humanist subject, as this short essay attempts to prove.Ī reading of Butler’s fiction from the perspective of critical posthumanism reveals a number of underlying currents. Indeed, most of Butler’s works explore the limits between self/other, subject/object, and nature/culture, emphasizing hybridity and its implications. Acknowledging Butler as one of her “theorists for cyborgs”, Donna Haraway argues that “Butler has been consumed with an interrogation into the boundaries of what counts as human and into the limits of the concept”.

More recently, critics have started to pay attention to Butler’s more general concern with the definition of the human. Indeed, despite her insistence that her fiction avoids “all critical theory”, a wide number of commentators have brought to the fore the critical relevance of Butler’s engagement with issues such as race and colonialism, power and agency, consent and oppression, as well as her representation of gender difference, queerness and queer desire. Butler’s rather grim view of humanity as flawed by a drive for hierarchies, her concern with the human body as a site of conflict, and her “insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort” inspired her revolutionary utopian/dystopian approach to race and gender as a feminist African-American author. Butler (1947-2006), often referred to as the “Grand Dame of Science Fiction”, exemplify Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s famous claim that “SF has ceased to be a genre of fiction per se, becoming instead a mode of awareness about the world”.

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