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Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive

Science fiction author Octavia Butler has been read as an essentialist, a Black feminist philosopher of science, a heteronormative writer, a radical queer thinker, and everything in between. In particular, her late-1980s Xenogenesis trilogy has been the focus of critical debates on genetics, eugenics, sexuality, and medical experimentation on Black women. But beyond discussions of whether Butler’s work endorses or resists biological determinism, new scholarship emerging out of the Octavia E. Butler collection at the Huntington Library is beginning to examine how Butler draws on specific biological theories in the service of social change (Bahng, Jackson). While feminist science fiction and “hard” science fiction (and, more broadly, feminism and biology) have historically been at odds with one another, Butler’s queer alien worlds of the 1980s drew deeply on animal biology—from stories about insectoid beings who impregnate human men with eggs to tentacled invertebrate-like aliens with three genders and natural genetic engineering capabilities. In this essay I turn to Butler’s archival notes about science and the Xenogenesis trilogy in order to position the trilogy as a work of trans futurism. Butler’s work in the 1980s reimagines invertebrate animal biologies as transgender alien universes through paradigms of bodily transformation, particularly insect metamorphosis. In Xenogenesis, all aliens are genderless during childhood, but acquire gender during metamorphosis in puberty. I read Butler’s use of animal biologies as a queer rewriting of science to build an inhuman trans world. This does not mean science is always a positive thing: Butler’s archive and writings explore the toxic pasts of biology while also using biology to postulate multiracial, queer futures. From protists to insects to the exploitative history of the HeLa cell line, Butler engages science in order to transform it. I focus primarily on the third book of the trilogy, Imago, and on the scientific research Butler did while writing the series. I conducted archival research for this project in the Octavia E. Butler collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I examined Butler’s newspaper clippings, research notes, drafts, outlines, and bibliographical notecards relating to science during the 1980s, and also read many of the scientific sources Butler worked with. Butler took her research process for