I can’t believe I spent a childhood in Pasadena and never read anything by Octavia Butler:
She told him of the messages she had read within the flesh of the fish. “Messages as clear and fine as those in your books,” she told him. Privately she thought her flesh-messages even more specific than the books she (sic) had introduced her to, read to her from. But the books were the only example she could think of that he might understand. “It seems that you could misunderstand your books,” she said. “Other men made them. Other men can lie or make mistakes. But the flesh can only tell me what it is. It has no other story…. My body reads it — reads everything.”
I’ve just finished reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and am in the middle of work by ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel. It’s uncanny — I wonder if Butler ever read any of their work? Her concern with non-scientific, non-abstract, embodied forms of knowledge is so incredibly close to theirs. What she’s saying also seems to me to be akin to some of the basic project in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, but that’s my hammer, and everything looks like its nail to me. The most likely explanation is that Butler read some bell hooks. Or quite possibly she’s working out of the same traditions as hooks.
* * *
For those of us who have been talking gender and science fiction/superheroes lately, Jess recommends these two forum threads at Girl Wonder where artists play around with viewing male superheroes with a sexualizing male gaze. It’s not until way too far into the discussion that they begin to consider that this has already been done… I mean, c’mon, people, s/ash h3nta! fan art wasn’t born yesterday… but it’s still an interesting exercize. The best ones are totally NSFW (look for the one with the reveals-just-enough-of-the-relevant-cleavage cutout on the male superhero, hidden behind a link. Reeeeally funny, and barely appealing at all.)
Comments 2