Intro
Sci-fi! Galaxies far, far away; space battles and giant bug creatures; people with ears of every shape you can picture; and infinite universes to explore! What's not to love?
Oh right, the threats to humanity, scary visions of the future, and the fact that the bulk of sci-fi books are written by dudes who don't really care whether the female characters get a voice or not.
Cue Octavia Butler, whose novel Dawn is the first book in a trilogy about the near-extinction of the human species. Uplifting, right? Dawn begins with the story of Lilith Iyapo, an African-American woman who's part of a small population of humans who survive after a group of radicals tries to commit genocide against the entire human species. Yikes!
The only reason they make it through is because an alien race called the Oankali step in to help, and that's who's got Lilith when the novel begins. But as payment for saving the humans, the Oankali want something in return...
Quote
Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why? And what else might be done? She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge.
Analysis
Whoa dude—secret scars? Aliens? Multiple capitalized Awakenings? So at this point we may not even be sure we wanna know what terrifying and totally gross surgeries the Oankali have been doing while Lilith's been asleep…
Relax, Shmoopy readers, it's all good. Turns out that Lilith had cancer, and the Oankali physicians have kindly removed it for her. No weird implants, nothing else missing: just a little saving grace from her friendly neighborhood extraterrestrials. But what do the Oankali want in return for saving the humans?
In short, they want to intermix. Their species survives by combining its genetic materials with those of other creatures, and they're pretty sure that humans will be a great match. What's the catch? The Oankali aren't just talking about a little gene splicing here and there: they're talking about the total mixing of the two species. In a few generations, there won't be any pure humans like Lilith left on Earth, but there won't be any pure Oankali either: both species will survive by becoming one. Is that a Darwin wet dream or what?
So back to feminism. There are lots of great possibilities for giving Dawn a feminist reading: for starters, you could take a look at how Butler re-writes old Hebraic myths about "Lilith," Adam's first wife in the Garden of Eden. Going that route would also mean reading the novel with antiracist and African nationalist perspectives in mind too, because by imagining an African-American woman as the mother of a new human race, Butler is making some pretty serious points about the Western world's habit of acting like it's the cradle of (white, Eurocentric) civilization.
We'll leave those readings to you, because Dawn gives us a really great opportunity to revisit Donna Haraway's "cyborg" brand o' feminism. Remember how we said that Haraway's interested in cyborgs because they aren't hierarchical? Well, hold onto your butts, because the Oankali have some things to say about hierarchies too. When they first tell Lilith about her cancer, they tell her something else about the human species: it's genetically flawed in a really big way.
What's that flaw? That their societies are hierarchical. And humans are predisposed to conflict, oppression, and war. Can't get much more flawed than that.
By intermixing with the Oankali, the humans are going to become cyborgs in Haraway's sense of the term. They'll be breaking down the distinctions that separate what counts as "human" from what counts as "other"—and by doing that, they might just redeem the species as a whole. If only the galaxy where that happened didn't have to be far, far away.