The Domestic Politics of Disability in

Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Todd Comer

Octavia Butler died in late February of 2006 following a fall outside of her
home, the house a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant enabled her to
purchase. This freak accident, a tragedy for anyone touched by her writing,
serves as an appropriate reminder of many of Butler’s most significant
themes. Like any death, hers foregrounds our mortality and by doing so
also foregrounds our relation to others—an ethical connection that is so
central to her writing. Butler wrote of division and violence; of the di-
chotomy between the self and the objective world, home and otherness;
and of what could be gained and lost by decreasing the distance between
others.
In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Butler writes of a young girl,
locked behind neighborhood walls in an apocalyptic world, who is gifted,
and cursed, with empathy; she can experience others’ pain, real or feigned
(11). Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy is a disability as it marks her out as
other and interferes with her ability to easily navigate and succeed in a vi-
olently hierarchized world. Yet Lauren does succeed while retaining her
empathic connection to the world. Lauren has a strong sense of her iden-
tity, yet fosters a connection to others at the same time. Here we have
what appears to be a perfect ethical balance between assuring a certain
level of personal singularity, without the violent hermeneutic assimilation
of others. What more can we ask of any ethics?
I demonstrate how in Butler’s Kindred disability amounts to a sort of

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 48.1 (Winter 2018): 85–109. Copyright © 2018 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
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ideological denaturalization, and thereby an ethical opening beyond the

domesticated walls of an able-bodied self. As I see Butler’s text as a radi-
cal response to W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, their work on the com-
plex nature of African-American experience will help contextualize the
crucial themes of home, health, and subjectivity that are my concern here.
In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois contextualizes the “revelation” of
his difference by referencing his “rollicking boyhood” during which he
first noticed the veil separating him from others. Physically, this difference
leads not to running, but to “plod[ing] darkly on in resignation” (8-9). No-
tice how the experience of black subjectivity is embodied in the following
famous passage:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son,
born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this Ameri-
can world,—a world which yields him no true self-con-
sciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revela-
tion of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and
pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two war-
ring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder. (8–9, emphasis added)

This “torn” or wounded condition forces African-Americans to juggle

two mental registers at the same time. It is physically debilitating, slowing
one down and risking, at every moment, a violent hemorrhage, both men-
tal and physical. While Du Bois is concerned with ontological matters
here, the body carries the weight of his argument. This contrary pull be-
tween America and Africa threatens both the body and mind, which, he
says, have “been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten” (9). Ontologi-
cal confusion (or over extension) equals physical disability: “A people thus
handicapped,” he writes,” ought not to be asked to race with the world, but
rather allowed to give all its time to its own social problems” (12, my em-
phasis).
Du Bois is intent on erasing the “vast veil” (7), and it is worth dwelling
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 87

on this veil for a moment in order to better grasp the modern subject he
would have come into being. A veil separates, yes, but not entirely. It re-
mains porous, torn, if you will, allowing for connection to others, even if
that connection is arduous. The veil, then, is an image of subjection to the
world. Du Bois’s call for a “true self-consciousness” (8), one that brings
together both the “Negro” and “American” experience, is ultimately an ar-
gument for a Cartesian subject, an individual. He desires a self no longer
be torn, but whole and complete. The veil which operates as a porous bor-
der between singularities is replaced by the impermeable border of the
subject. While, yes, the two worlds that he is so interested in may be
(somewhat) happily merged together, this merger immediately creates an
impermeable exclusion at a higher level. At least two themes indicate as
much: First, his emphasis on “those characteristics both [blacks and Amer-
icans] so sadly lack” (14) indicates that Du Bois is after a wholeness, a
sort of subjectival solidity that must be exclusionary by its very nature.
Second, note his emphasis on the domestic. His question, “Why did God
make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” clearly connects
his concerns to the domestic scene (8). To be at home, to be well en-
sconced behind walls, is to eliminate relation to others, as I will show in
detail later. It is to eliminate the veil and regain the ground from which a
new able-bodied individual may rise.
Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks is even more explicit than Du
Bois in connecting disability to the multiple “frames of reference” that
blacks are forced to navigate (110). Fanon opens “The Fact of Blackness”
with a stream of physical tropes, emphasizing “agility” and his desire to
“come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help build it to-
gether” (109) There is a great desire for simplicity, to simply be “nothing
but a man” (113). For Fanon, having to both be black and be “black in re-
lation to the white man” constitutes a disability. He dwells at length on
how being seen by whites leads to an overwhelming “[c]onsciousness of
the body” (110). Suddenly, the body that had been lithe and agile is self-
conscious. There is no longer an ease and first-person consciousness of the
body and its movements. Simple tasks—like reaching for a cigarette—
become awkward. The body falters or, even worse, is paralyzed.
Fanon writes of how a shout, “Look, a Negro!” affects him (111–112):
“On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other,
the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off
88 J N T

from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else
could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spat-
tered my whole body with black blood?” The black subject is objectified
not only because he or she has more to process, but because the body and
mind are no longer working in sync. Like in an exploded diagram one
finds packaged with a newly purchased commodity, body and mind are
strewn about with large gaps, wounds, in between. Fanon ends the chapter
in a refusal to “accept the amputation,” unwilling to “adopt the humility of
a cripple” (140).
What Du Bois and Fanon have in common in these two texts is their
general concern with how (colonized) black identity depends on the white
other. Black identity depends on the other to such a degree that blacks are
less capable of acting in the world. Black identity, the black body, is “torn
asunder” (Du Bois page number?) and cannot therefore successfully oper-
ate in the world, while whites, for whom blacks do not provide any “onto-
logical resistance,” act with ease (Fanon 110). From the standpoint of dis-
ability theory, both of these writers use disability in quite conservative
ways. Disability serves them as metaphor for an unproductive state that no
one would want to experience. While this reading needs to be expanded,
this much is true: Fanon and Du Bois are interested in therapy, the mend-
ing of black identity to the degree that it can act effortlessly in the world
like a (white) Cartesian subject; in light of their historical moments and
experiences, this viewpoint is understandable. In Kindred, a product of a
much different historical context, Butler revises the efficacy of such an un-
derstanding of black subjectivity, proposing a new model of African-
American experience, which I explain more fully in what follows. At this
point, it is enough to say that Butler’s work appears to critique wholeness,
as described above, and gestures toward an ethics and being in the world
defined by disability or vulnerability.
Kathryn Allan’s work, “Theorizing Vulnerability in Feminist SF,” use-
fully describes the ways in which feminists have theorized the body. Ac-
cording to Allan, feminists rejected the body in the pursuit of social equal-
ity (134), and, eventually, returned to the body, viewing it as essential to
being female. A final position—and here Allan quotes Margrit Shildrick
and Janet Price—emphasizes the “inescapability of embodiment as a dif-
ferential and fluid construct, the site of potential, rather than as a fixed
given” (qtd. 134). This emphasis on potentiality is key in what follows.
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 89

Butler, as Allan shows, is dedicated to seeing the disabled body, not as

merely a problem, but as a site of agency and possibility. Butler rejects a
kind of ableist “transcendence” (Allan 135), which is often the cliché re-
sponse to “vulnerability” in the world of metal-clad or cyborg-laden sci-
ence fiction (and, as we saw above, in the world of Du Bois and Fanon),
and instead, attempts to work through a politics of finite transcendence, of
connecting with the other through and with the vulnerable body; and all
bodies are vulnerable (137). Allan writes, “[i]t is those unquantifiable
qualities—perspective, insight, reflection, desire, and agency—that
uniquely define embodied vulnerable being” (138).
While Kindred is by no means a SF text according to Butler (Crossley
xii), it is intimately interested in the collision of worlds, and in mining the
ethical and ideological possibilities inherent in this collision. Kindred
opens in 1976, the U.S.’s bicentennial year, for good reason. Throughout
the text Butler is interested in issues of freedom on the racial, gender, and
class level. The very fact that the novel’s events are strewn between 1976
and 1815 forces Butler’s reader to consider the national narrative as such,
and then question the project that the framers of the country so “idealisti-
cally” created (Balfour 176). Within the context of 1976 Los Angeles and
nineteenth-century Maryland, we need to consider race. Dana is involved
with a white man, Kevin, in 1976. She is also involved with a white man,
Rufus, in the past. In both time periods, the biracial couple of Dana and
Kevin must navigate through the ontological nets of family members. It is
within Dana’s mirrored relationships with Kevin and Rufus that Butler’s
text also foregrounds the feminist and patriarchal assumptions about gen-
der roles. Lastly, Butler’s text emphasizes class issues, forcing us to con-
sider the resemblance or non-resemblance of the contemporary labor mar-
ket to the slave market of the nineteenth century. All of these frameworks
are important and will be considered below. My first concern, however,
are issues of health and disability which I see as grounding all of the
above.
Butler’s commentary on gender, race, capital, and disability is very
much bound up in the much discussed and vexed concept of domesticity.
Kindred is a novel of many homes. In 1976, Dana and Kevin have just
moved to L.A. to a newly purchased house in Altadena (12). They have
barely begun unpacking when Dana is torn away to the nineteenth century
and to Rufus, a long-forgotten white ancestor. In that sense, the novel has
90 J N T

Dana torn both spatially and temporally between two worlds, or homes.
The ethical impact on the individual of being at home and, contrariwise,
inhabiting the space between homes, is a central issue. Butler signals her
concern with domesticity immediately in her opening sentences, when she
writes, “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I lost about
a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued
until it was gone” (9).
The world of healthy Cartesian subjects is a home of comfort and secu-
rity, familiarity and acceptance. In Kindred it also is the home of Sarah who
has accepted the status quo reality as the only possible reality and says so
explicitly, “Don’t want to hear no more ‘bout it! . . . Things ain’t bad here. I
can get along” (145). In a 1990 interview with Larry McCaffery, Butler at-
tests that Kindred originated in a concern with how and why people reacted
to slavery (65). Her specific idea for the novel followed a discussion with a
“knowledgeable” black man who castigated the older generation for not
fighting back. In response, Butler decided to narrate exactly how such a per-
son might react if transplanted to the antebellum U.S. Kevin eventually joins
Dana in this antebellum past; Dana’s horror at her and her partner’s slow ac-
ceptance of the Weylin household makes sense from this perspective:

Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the house-

hold. Familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too
when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclima-
tize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as
though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this
particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in
the household of a slaveholder.. . . and I was perverse
enough to be bothered by the ease. (97)

In light of Dana’s worry about “adjust[ment],” Du Bois’s comment bears re-

peating, “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own
house?” (8). While we saw Du Bois and Fanon castigating the lack of ease
with which blacks moved through reality, Butler’s text suggests that being at
home, is precisely the problem. To be at home, any home, is to be “acclima-
tize[d]” to injustice (97), and she wants none of that. Dana wants above all
to be at the plantation, while remaining separate from it in order to constitute
some sort of difference that will influence Rufus, among others (68).
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 91

For the past or for a white, patriarchal, classist culture—yes, it is all of

these things and more at once—to remain privileged, an other must be vi-
olently subsumed. Ease, domestication, is had only through violent assim-
ilation of otherness. Early in the text and after Dana has returned home
from her first trip to the river, Kevin is shocked. He is not certain that she
is “real,” a condition linked to domesticity, and grabs Dana so hard that he
hurts her, asking, “What happened?” Finally, when he “recognize[s]” her,
he releases her (15, my emphasis). Only when otherness has been assimi-
lated by the rational mind, will its overt violence subside. By contrast,
Dana, when faced with Kevin’s disbelief over this other world and all that
it represents, points to physical evidence of her body (whose bruises Kevin
does not touch), “I don’t understand how it can be happening, but it’s real.
It hurts too much not to be” (46). She is arguing for a disabled, bodily
knowledge that allows the subject to remain in relation to an undomesti-
cated other, who cannot be knows by the sort of rational, Enlightenment
epistemology that domesticates and assimilates.
While Kindred includes numerous examples of the way that a domesti-
cating ideology works to sideline complexity, this is among the most
telling: Rufus and his slave-son, Joe, are looking at a map and discover
that the local river is not represented. Joe wants to draw it in, but Rufus de-
murs, “we don’t have to draw it in” (232). Joe asks, “Why? Don’t you want
the map to be right?” This passage highlights how representation or narra-
tives limit us, hiding the real from us. The map, Rufus suggests, is simply
too small to provide an accurate representation of the real. Specifically, by
erasing (or, better, eraceing) the river, the map as representation domesti-
cates Rufus’s traumatic exposure to the fact that he is not a god-like sub-
ject, but has his being in and with others (the river is where Dana saves
Rufus, her relative, from drowning). It is telling that at this very moment
Rufus is sharing himself with Joe, a slave, in a fatherly manner that is
atypical for the Weylins and certainly a danger to slavery’s binarial logic. It
is doubly telling that he is embarrassed to be seen doing so by Dana. The
map, like all social relations, must be limited if only to keep Rufus’s house
in order. If it were accurate, relations might develop that undermine an op-
pressive system grounded in neat binary distinctions. Someone might even
escape to freedom with such a map.
Traditional narratives operate similarly to create an ideologically co-
herent picture of reality that sidelines the undomesticated real, i.e., vio-
92 J N T

lence, social exclusion, and so on (Balibar and Macherey 88). This is a fact
that Kindred attests to multiple times when Dana describes her experience
of nineteenth-century Maryland as already “beginning to recede from me
somehow. It’s becoming like something I saw on television or read
about—like something I got second hand” (17, 36). During a beating,
Dana’s “mind was darting from one thought to another, trying [like a tele-
vision] to tune out the whipping” (36). Narrative serves as a form of ratio-
nalization that, in making sense of the traumatic real, domesticates those
within its reach.1
Of course, this all sounds a lot like the work of ideology. Ideology
deals with, to quote Althusser, “a special kind of obviousness” in which
everything is taken to be true and natural—“Yes, that’s how it is, that’s re-
ally true” (108). Ideology wants us to accept the current reality as the only
reality. It assimilates and thereby familiarizes the world. Ideology works to
sideline the constructedness of our relation to reality and eliminate the
possibility of structuring the world in a more ethical manner. Ideology
wants us to be at ease and at home.
In a crucial couple of pages Butler addresses both the possibility of
agency (how to remain separate from an oppressive domestic context) and
the nature of ideological domestication. First, on agency, Dana says:

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted eas-

ily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers
watching a show. We were watching history happen around
us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we
humored the people around us by pretending to be like
them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our
roles. We never forgot that we were acting. (98)

Dana contends that acting, pretending, or playing—i.e., something artifi-

cial—is wholly distinct from a naturalized ideology. Dana first, figura-
tively, places herself and Kevin in the audience only to then place them on
stage as actors, who are not at ease in their roles. In both cases, there is an
implicit argument for distance and borders: there is another world over
there and while it is nearby, Dana and Kevin are not simply in it. The pure
essence of Kevin and Dana, as if there were such a thing, remains separate
and well bordered. But then, a group of children confront Dana with the
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 93

impossibility of this critical distance.

The children are not playing “some game,” as Kevin supposes, but the
most basic slave ritual: the ritual of buying and selling. A boy standing on
a tree stump says, “Now here a likely wench, . . . She cook and wash and
iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you . . . She young and strong” (99,
98). Note the multiple emphases on physicality. Not only are these chil-
dren acting, with all the bodily movements that implies, but the specific
focus of their performance deals with the physical well-being of others.
Capitalism and exclusion are intertwined with ableism.
In a particularly revealing comment, Dana describes the mock auction
and the world before her as “diseased” (99). Able-bodied activity is not the
healthy activity that it seems, but quite the opposite. Dana is reacting to
the following realization in particular, however: these children are acting,
and it is their acting that confronts Dana with the truth of her own situa-
tion. Robert Crossley puts it succinctly, “the more often one plays such a
role, the nearer the pretending comes to reality” (xix). Acting, however
self-conscious, eventually leads to ideological assimilation. Just as chil-
dren’s actions lead to assimilation to a slave ideology, so must Dana’s sup-
posedly self-conscious acting. Dana says, “The ease [with which people
succumbed to slavery] seemed so frightening [. . .] Now I see why [. . .]
The ease. Us, the children . . . I never realized how easily people could be
trained to accept slavery” (100).
According to Althusser, we are all already subjects and do not have any
access to the real because we live and have our being through language,
which communicates ideology to us before we are even born. Althusser
writes that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals
to their real conditions of existence” (123). Rather than presenting the real,
violent, and oppressive system of relations that is now ‘clearly’ in view for
us in the twenty-first century, what ideology did for those like Sarah and
the children in the text is provide an imaginary relationship which alludes
to reality, but more than anything else creates a coherent normative illu-
sion (the world is ordered by God, Nature, the State, or some other cause
and there can be no other way to be ordered).
As we have seen, ideology is communicated through actions in Butler’s
text. To act, however self-consciously, is to be domesticated by a particular
ideological viewpoint, because ideology is materialized in what Althusser
terms Ideological State Apparatuses that compel us to act (125, 127). From
94 J N T

Althusser’s standpoint, while we might clearly see the slave children as

overtly acting, all human behavior is acting, a kind of repetition of behav-
iors that predate each of us. Ideas do not come first, actions do. Althusser
quotes Pascal, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will be-
lieve” (127). When individuals participate in the rituals or performances
linked to ISA’s, they are ideologically domesticated. Althusser puts this
well, when he writes, “[the subject’s] ideas are his material actions in-
serted into material practices governed by material rituals which are them-
selves governed by the material ideological apparatus from which derive
the ideas of the subject” (127).
As Paul Longmore points out in his essay on “Screen Stereotypes,” dis-
abled people are often identified as less than human (135). Once we view
Dana’s interstitial position as equaling the final physical image of herself
as an amputee—a crucial assumption in my argument—this is certainly
true of how the ruling ideology views Dana. Rufus tells her directly, “You
don’t know your place any better than a wild animal” (164). Tom Weylin
says, “You’re not natural!” (206).2
Knowing one’s place in a system of ideology is to be naturalized; it is
to “fit in” a picture or map of the world that is radically simplified. An
“animal,” of course, cannot “know” such things and is correspondingly
dangerous. Kindred then operates as a critique of a (Western) humanism
that naturalizes the horror of relation, as well as the artificiality inherent in
the manner that subjects are created. Dana, who operates as a reminder of
relation (she is a relative), is put to work constantly as a doctor to Rufus.
Dana’s therapeutic relation to Rufus illustrates how allegedly healthy sub-
jects, such as Rufus, are (artificially) constructed in a relation to others, a
dependence that must be repressed in order to sustain the illusion of the
natural, self-created subject. Despite all of this doctoring, she herself es-
capes domestication. Direct proof of her “agency” is apparent in Tom
Weylin’s fear of her, which is so intense that, as Nigel says, “he’d rather try
to kill [Dana] than admit it” (206).

* * *
Up to this point, I have been concerned with home, health, and ideology.
To be at home, in this narrative at any rate, means to be healthy, at ease,
and untroubled by the violence of the real. It means to exist in a tightly
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 95

controlled world of insides and outsides: those at home are safe behind
walls, which shield them from the otherness on the outside. The rest of this
essay will consider the ways in which home, health, and ideology are com-
plicated, they always are complicated of course; however, at a certain ex-
cessive tipping point this complexity reveals an opening with important
ethical-political possibilities.
As noted above, Butler did not consider Kindred to be a Science Fic-
tion narrative. While it does have a time travel element, time travel is cer-
tainly not the defining SF trope and the novel is unrelentingly realistic in
its depiction of slavery. Even so, Nadine Flagel’s “‘It’s almost like being
there’: Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative and the Crisis of Representa-
tion in Octavia Butler’s Kindred” focuses closely on the ways in which the
speculative and the slavery narratives work together to “allow Butler to in-
terrupt and interrogate the [naturalized] assumptions and expectations held
by the other [genre]” (217–18). In particular, because of the meeting of
these two genres, the “conditions and logic of slavery are made immediate
and jarring” (217–218). Hers is a convincing argument, which I want to
reframe in the following manner: Let’s imagine that the speculative and
the slave narratives are each whole narratives, existing on their own as
seamless organic entities. What happens when two whole genres exist si-
multaneously in the same space? Ruptures, tears, openings, and even am-
putations. Understood in this manner, Butler’s work on a formal level re-
produces the defamiliarizing ontological way of being that interests me
below.
My preference is to sideline literal time travel, and read Dana’s tempo-
ral displacement metaphorically, or ontologically. Dana describes her tem-
poral and spatial movement as the result of a “call” (12). Rufus, who sym-
bolizes her repressed birth, calls her to him during limit experiences in
which his being is endangered. This is one of those moments in which
Butler clearly signals what Allan calls the “shared vulnerability” of all hu-
mans (144). In this case, that shared vulnerability is grounded in our mu-
tual dependency: In light of the manner in which the subject domesticates
(kills) the other as a condition of its being, to save the other from death is
simply to answer this call. If a domesticating subject answers the call of
the other, the subject must immediately withdraw the domesticating nets
that assimilate the other (to forgetfulness in the specific instance of Dana’s
violent, mixed birth). When Dana, from the standpoint of her newly do-
96 J N T

mesticated and newly biracial world, answers the call of Rufus, her flight
from her house is concomitant with the deliverance of Rufus. In a certain
sense, then, there is no literal action. Dana does not throw the burning cur-
tains out of the house; her very non-assimilative (non-repressive) presence
is the extinguishing of the fire. Rufus, to be stable, to be safe, requires her
presence. But, as the text suggests, once his self is safe, his need for her is
repressed.
Obviously, this is not a conscious or rational call. It is a call that speaks
to Dana on an ontological level, forcing a response that is no less uncon-
scious. The call undermines the rational subject, leaving the body dizzy
and with blurred vision. Each of these markers of disability limit the sub-
ject’s ability to remain centered and assimilate otherness (Butler 14). Jean-
Luc Nancy writes of exactly this experience of death, which, he explains,
“exceeds the resources of a metaphysics of the subject” (The Inoperative
Community 14–15). Death is that nothing that subjectival minds cannot ra-
tionalize (domesticate), leading to an un-housing of that which had been
the “subject.” The localized subject who watches the other die “can subsist
only outside itself” (emphasis in original, 15). Christopher Fynsk broadens
the parameters of this experience, arguing that the other’s existence and re-
lation to mortality (disability, for instance), and not necessarily their literal
death, is enough to un-house the subject’s presumptions of immortality
(xvii). The latter experience is what we see between Dana and Rufus. Ad-
ditionally, however, I want to suggest the possibility of a self-exposure,
that is, the possibility that one can be exposed based on one’s own disabled
condition.
To make this spatial logic more concrete, consider the following pas-
sage describing the first few moments in Dana’s second trip:

[The fire from a stick] had apparently been transferred to

the draperies of the window. Now the boy stood watching
as the flames ate their way up the heavy cloth.
For a moment, I watched too. Then I woke up, pushed
the boy aside, caught the unburned upper part of the
draperies and pulled them down. As they fell, they smoth-
ered some of the flames within themselves, and they ex-
posed a half-open window. I picked them up quickly and
threw them out the window. (20)
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 97

This passage is useful for a number of reasons. First, it concerns the do-
mestic sphere and all that is associated to it. Home, as I have shown, is
linked to an exclusionary, able-bodied subject. To be at home is to fall into
what Nancy calls the “metaphysics of the subject.” Rufus, in a certain
sense, is this house as his pet name implies. Rufe is a homonym of roof
(Troy 166). Let’s think of this spatially: the subject to be a subject must
have impermeable borders, or walls in this case. There must be a distinct
inside and a distinct outside. There can be no impurity, no miscegenation
within the walls of the subject. The well-bordered home is concomitant
with the violent subject.
In this scene we see Dana preserving the home of an other (or of one
who would appear to be radically other from her position as a domesti-
cated future subject). The fire, which has the capacity to undermine the vi-
olence of the slave-holding subject and the subject himself, Rufus, is ti-
died up, and thrown to the outside. That which endangers the subject is
immediately marginalized, while at the same time giving us a peek at the
illusion of the subject for behind the curtains a “half-open” window is “ex-
pose[d]” (Butler 20). This opening indicates the impossibility of a com-
pletely domesticated subject, especially since Dana, from an unimaginable
outside, has just materialized within the structure.
Nancy speaks of the subject, who experiences the other’s relation to
death, as ex-posed, that is, somehow positioned (posed) outside (ex)
of him or her self (18–21). The subject, Dana, who had been so self-
confident (submerged in a naturalizing ideology, setting up home, and re-
pressing her own violent mixed birth: Rufus), now finds herself dependent
on the outside, with others. Dana’s temporal and spatial movement needs
to be understood in this manner: in the face of the call of the other, she
finds herself outside of herself—she finds herself outside of her newly
purchased home in 1976 U.S. and with, or dependant, on the other.
Clearly, the text’s title, Kindred, speaks to the dread of relation to oth-
ers. But who are these others? Birth should not be read as merely a matter
of biology. In accordance with what I have written above about identity
creation, birth needs to be understood as artificial performance. This arbi-
trary, groundless performance is naturalized. To be taken for natural, this
artificial birth must be repressed. Linked to this notion of performance is
the relational character of identity. The slave children who play at being
sold are influenced by others. They and we have our being with and
98 J N T

through others. And, not surprisingly, this birth—the birth that we all par-
take in—is violent, messy, horrifying, and hard to grasp; if it were not, we
would not desire the simplicity of ideology so deeply. Dana’s parents died
before she really knew them and, as Carlyle Van Thompson points out,
such a “natal alienation” is typical of slave narratives and clearly a trau-
matic fact that Dana has repressed along with her miscegenated past (110–
111, 114). The nature of birth is that, as we act and become the selves that
we are, our performances are still porous: our actions are not perfect rep-
resentations of who we are and, as such, hybridity (vulnerability, anxiety)
remains a part of our being. It is only when our (representational) perfor-
mance is perfected that a semblance of a pure state of being becomes pos-
sible. In her excellent essay on “Octavia Butler and Political Memories of
Slavery,” Lawrie Balfour writes that the novel also forces its readers to
confront a repressed past that they (for the sake of the U.S. national narra-
tive) would prefer to forget (174).
Dana’s birth is for this reason always receding into the background as if
encountered “second hand” (17) as we saw earlier in my analysis of her
beating. When Dana is first called by Rufus, it is her birthday. Kevin is
writing a story about another birth, that of Christ, and, of course, Dana
lands near a river—water being a traditional image of birth. In order to get
married, they flee to Las Vegas and “pretend [they] haven’t got relatives”
(112). At the very moment that Dana and Kevin have bought a house and
are unpacking—at the very moment that they become subjects—they are
drawn back to a world of relations, a lineage that had been repressed.3
In the context of domestic ideology, the Weylins harness birth as a tool
of control. Rufus privileges marriage because, “Man marries, has children,
he’s more likely to stay where he is” (139, 259). The Weylins constantly
threaten relations in order to secure compliance. In the book’s final sen-
tence Kevin references the adult Rufus who has just died as a “boy” and
affirms his death. The security of the subject, as Nancy reminds us, exists
only through the elimination of birth. He writes, “to the degree that it oc-
curs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself indefinitely back. Birth is this
slipping away of presence through which everything comes to presence”
(Birth to Presence 4, emphasis in original). Power, ideology, and health are
constantly linked in the text through the repression of birth. It is only by
interrupting this domestication of birth that an ethics that operates other-
wise can be found.
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 99

* * *
In Kindred, to remain in relation means to be between homes, not quite at
home (or born). This ex-position defamiliarizes all domesticated spaces: to
be connected to the other is to feel alienated from all realities that have
been constructed by representation and ideology. It is to be, not at home,
but in the space of double-consciousness that Du Bois described as the es-
sential African-American experience. Dana juggles the worlds of 1976 and
1815 at the same time. And, as Du Bois and Fanon foresaw, her position
between these two homes slows her down dramatically.
Flagel very much argues against this sort of equivocation. Her essay
reads Dana as defiantly “dismissing any effort to nurture” (222–223). In-
stead, Dana’s “mission has never been to nurture Rufus but to control his
life, and this includes eliminating him when necessary” (223). Flagel ar-
gues that this is important if we are to fully grasp how the speculative nar-
rative (she mentions, e.g., Brave New World) revises the slave narrative,
and if we are to resist the tendency to “mother” Dana (223). The time
travel narrative makes possible this revision of Dana as something other
than a mother. While Flagel agrees that there is some waffling in this re-
spect, she finally takes a firm position on the nurturing question. But,
from my point of view, the two options, nurture and control, are deeply
vexed. To begin with, in what simple sense is Dana a “mother” of a man
who is her distant grandfather? Ultimately, Dana’s position is neither one
nor the other: it is both. She is continually oscillating between nurture and
control and it is in this opening, this hesitant movement between control
and nurture, that Butler’s narrative imagines another way of being.
In Dana’s hesitation, however, one can see Butler revising double-
consciousness, foregrounding the dissonance and ethical necessity of mul-
tiple frames of reference. The most obvious benefit inherent in this inter-
stitial positioning is that of defamiliarization. Dana stands back from the
world and sees it anew, recognizing its pliability, and not taking it or its in-
habitants for granted. If the world of 1976 is constructed in a more equi-
table manner than the world of 1815—and Butler’s text suggests it is,
somewhat—then clearly the world is open to revision, a revision that must
occur slowly in view of the increased complexity of reality.
In Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, to be exposed is to be inopera-
tive. It is not to work, representationally or literally. This is the opposite of
100 J N T

the ease of healthy bodies and their domesticated intellects. While not a
Nancian exposure, here is a passage that dramatizes the dangers of non-
action:

I had only to move my fingers a little and jab them into

the soft tissues, gouge away his sight and give him more
agony than he was giving me.
But I couldn’t do it. The thought sickened me, froze my
hands where they were. I have to do it! But I couldn’t. . . .
The man knocked my hands from his face and moved
back from me—and I cursed myself for my utter stupidity.
My chance was gone, and I’d done nothing. My squeamish-
ness belonged to another age, but I had brought it along
with me. Now I would be sold into slavery because I didn’t
have the stomach to defend myself [. . .]. (42)

Dana describes her inability to act in physical terms: she has no “stomach”
for the violence; she feels “sick;” her hands become “froze[n].” She con-
nects her general “squeamishness” to her traversal of time—if she were
fully at home in the 19th century, she would not have hesitated to protect
herself (of course, later in this passage she does act, knocking the patroller
unconscious).
Total incapacitation is a problem, but I would suggest that in world of
violent subjects, a little squeamishness might not be a bad thing. In a pas-
sage discussing how wounds keep her from being domesticated, Dana also
comments, “Some part of me had apparently given up on time-distorted
reality and smoothed things out. Well, that was all right, as long as it didn’t
go too far” (127 my emphasis). Dana wants, in other words, to be at home
(active), but not fully at home (non-active). She seeks a middle ground be-
tween absolutist activity and a relativistic paralysis. Squeamishness then
does not have to equal non-action. The above passage operates as a foil to
the attempted rape scene during which much the same happens. Dana,
who has spent so long preserving the life of the other, finally kills Rufus
as, she says, he was “trying not to hurt me”—as always, there is a strange
relation and non-relation occurring simultaneously between them (Butler
260). Had Dana been totally within the ideological context of nineteenth-
century America, she would have succumbed, as Alice did, to repeated
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 101

rape. Had she been totally within her own context, she might not have hes-
itated in her killing at all.
At the end of Kindred, Dana, a new amputee, persists in worrying
about the cost of her actions and about those she left behind. She cannot
retreat from the past and domesticate it into some optimistic narrative
circa 1976. Butler’s text consistently links disability with sensitivity to oth-
erness, as Dana’s comments on the mute Carrie indicate: “Her sensitivity
surprised me. I would have thought she would be used to hearing people
scream in pain” (74). Disability becomes an apt figure for both having
one’s identity (with all the domestic violence that that implies) and not
having it (with all the hospitality that that implies). Somehow, and here is
where I depart from Nancy, disability constitutes an oscillating exposure:
the amputated Dana is neither inoperative nor overly agential, but some-
where in the middle.
The same cannot be said of her husband. Kevin, white and male,
spends much longer in the nineteenth century than Dana. He returns
scarred, but not in a way that impedes his domestication. Kindred finds vi-
olent closure with Kevin’s comment, “And now that the boy is dead, we
have some chance of staying that way [sane]” (264, 262). Health, home,
and ideology are affirmed by the elimination of the other. In these final
pages, Kevin “is driving again,” and is both active and assertive. He is the
epitome of the healthy subject that appears so very dangerous in Kindred.
In the conventional master-slave dialectic, the master is able to put to
work ‘his’ encounter with the other. The master uses this encounter to bol-
ster his subjectivity, while repressing or domesticating his dependence on
the other for his support (Derrida, Writing and Difference 254). The goal
is wholeness, the assimilation of otherness from the outside to a domestic
inside—all for an increase of self. To reappear at home less physically
whole, disabled, is to fail in that ingestion. It means to fail at being at
home. Part of Dana’s arm rematerializes in a wall in her 1976 home, leav-
ing the rest of her arm on the other side of that wall, that is, at home in the
19th century. Her arm is torn open, a literal and visceral reminder of her
exposure to Rufus. Physically strewn between two times, she will never be
at home. Dana’s amputation at the end of the novel, following her killing
of Rufus, is not a simple excision of the other that would lead to an en-
largement of the self, so much as a reminder of a birth, a performance, a
102 J N T

series of relations, that will never be wholly repressed. The absent member
becomes an ever-present reminder of this birth.
To save the last “kernel” of her self (which need not be an individualis-
tic self), Dana must kill the other. Kindred leaves no doubt that to kill the
other is to harm one’s self. Disability allows us to see that we have our
being with others and any action that we take against others is invariably
an action against ourselves; to deny this fact, as able-bodied individuals
often do, is to be amputated ontologically and diseased, as Dana puts it,
even while looking whole. To be ontologically whole is to remain con-
nected to others in the face of mortality—to keep the “house” and all that
it implies at some distance.
Dana confronts her past when Rufus’s life and home is endangered.
She returns to the future when her being is in danger of total eradication.
Once home, she quickly begins to heal, though, in truth, her healing begins
the moment that she withdraws from Rufus. Given enough time and the
absence of an exposure to mortality, either world can become domesti-
cated. What Butler points to in the disabled Dana is mortality as the origin
of her oscillation between present and past, self and other. Elsewhere, I
have used Heidegger’s argument about the broken hammer to discuss this
sort of relationality. It is only when something breaks—an able body, for
instance—that the tool’s relation to and dependence on the world is seen in
all of its profundity (Heidegger 68–69). As a disabled person, Dana em-
bodies this brokenness, this exposure. Her self-evidently mortal being will
never allow her simply to heal and be at home in a world designed for
able-bodied subjects. She will always be brought face to face with her re-
lationality and all that it entails.
Marleen Barr argues in Lost in Space that “Kindred asserts that the
achievement of integration might best be realized by the example of Dana,
as a positive mulata: reciprocal darkening and lightening of races” (103).
As the efficacy of the one-drop rule attests, white patriarchy has had little
trouble reinvigorating racial categories in the face of racial mixing. It is
true that a recognition of Dana’s mixed past is essential as it allows this
particular argument about ability and ideology to be mapped onto the pol-
itics of racism. Prior to that recognition, however, there must be an expo-
sure grounded in mortality, which will open up the house of ideology and
interrupt the purifying, assimilative subject. Since the work of ideology is
one of purification, only its interruption can prepare the ground for Barr’s
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 103

“indifferentiation resulting in equality.” To put this more concretely: it is

the house that symbolizes individualistic purity. If we expose the house—
erase a wall, for instance—we end up with an originary image of impurity
or difference; in the absence of the wall, the subject mixes with the out-
side. We are, in other words, mixed with others at our origin, and repre-
sentations (houses, maps, narratives, etc.) are mere illusions that conceal
this disconcerting fact.

* * *
Tobin Sieber’s work on architecture provides a concrete example of how
the disabled body experiences standardized spaces, including houses. Pub-
lic buildings are designed (via ideology) with an ideal norm in mind. As
we have seen above, homes are places of easeful work. Architecture serves
(and creates) a norm in order to promote (violent) action that is deter-
mined through the naturalizing work of ideology. This norm is interrupted
and defamiliarized the moment that a disabled person enters the space. He
writes, “The social body is the standard—presupposed but invisible—until
a nonstandard body makes an appearance. Then the standard becomes im-
mediately apparent, as the inflexible structures of furniture, rooms, and
streets reveal their intolerance for anyone unlike the people for whom they
were built” (20).4
Homes, then, created within a normalizing ideological context must be
similarly estranged in view of a disabled body. To be spatially exposed in
this context is for a disabled person to be in a building and yet outside it at
the same time, violating the simple Manichean world that ideology de-
sires; the architecture of ideology is incapable of domesticating disability
in light of this sort of exposure. Rufus says that disabled people, like
Dana, simply do not know their place. It is more accurate to say that dis-
ability, like mortality generally, brings a smug establishment face to face
with all that it cannot domesticate.
As we have seen, individuals are ideologically interpolated through
acting. Ideology substantiates a status quo and uses actions (defined by a
physical norm, and limited by architectural spaces grounded in similar
norms) to interpolate its subjects. If identity is established through acts,
then do not those of us who are disabled, experience a life of constant de-
familiarization? Ideology is concerned with stability and power and the
104 J N T

marginalization of anything that would hamper the perpetuation of such

power. Ideology wants to normalize, domesticate, the world. To be dis-
abled, embodying an exposure to mortality, is surely to constitute an end-
less, impossible project for ideology. Are not the disabled, who embody
mortality, the greatest horror for an ideology that grounds itself in divine
acts? Are not the disabled, whose less “formed” actions embody the un-
practiced movement of birth and youth, the greatest horror to an ideology
that conveys itself in coherent, mature representations?
Pascal writes, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will be-
lieve” (Althussuer 127). What if one is incapable of kneeling, or only
kneels with great difficulty (the standardized house not quite fitting the
non-standard body)? Dana speaks of “almost welcom[ing] the hard work.
It kept me from thinking” (Butler 162). Work “almost” domesticates her to
19th century slavery. But what if the disabled person cannot work and
enact the ritual of the domesticating ideology with ease? The disabled per-
son must then dwell in a different ontological position than healthy indi-
viduals. Ideology wants us to work, and via work to become subjects. Ide-
ology depends on each of us as tools and, following Heidegger (68–69), if
one of us is broken (in terms of ideology’s norms), then the entire ideolog-
ical context is forced into relief. Once made self-conscious, ideology is de-
naturalized and our relation to others foregrounded.
Fanon writes that whites do not encounter any “ontological resistance”
in the face of blacks (110). On its face, this appears to be true in Kindred.
Rufus does not free his slaves or stop violating Alice. However, Rufus
moderates his actions in small ways, and Dana’s knifing of Rufus is an in-
stance of “ontological resistance” (Fanon 110). Dana, a black relation, will
not be ontologically domesticated. She is endlessly resistant, troubling the
system by limping hesitantly along. Some thing—most directly figured in
the disabled body—remains outside of Rufus’s control. Rufus, like the
white men who control the publishing houses, has enormous discursive
power. Walter Benn Michaels critiques Butler’s emphasis on embodiment
and the “disarticulation of difference from disagreement” (qtd. in Robert-
son 364). Rather than Butler’s emphasis on embodiment leading away
from history and the contestation of Truths as Benn Michaels maintains,
Benjamin Robertson argues that the body, marked by slavery and history,
is agential in “refus[ing] to account for identity as reducible to the texts
produced by political and cultural power for the purposes of oppressing
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 105

those who do not merit representation” (366). In Kindred, because of its

focus on U.S. history and embodiment, Butler demonstrates how the
marked body, rather than eliding larger socio-cultural concerns, is in actu-
ality deeply implicated in the contestation of truth.
Dana’s response, however, to entirely disable Rufus is not a simple ex-
tinguishing of the other, a repetition of the erasure which so many texts
written by white men have enacted on the African-American experience.
Like Lauren in Parable of the Sower, the violence she commits against the
world is committed against her self. Ontological resistance is there for
everyone because we are all related ontologically. We are with one another
in the river, in birth, in relation, prior to all of the walls, representations or
maps that we construct to create the mirage of subjectival wholeness.5
Kindred reveals to us this illusion and its violence. It is the healthy subject
who is diseased—ontologically foreshortened, misshapened, and, yes,
dreadful.
DuBois and Fanon framed their notion of black subjectivity as a dis-
ability, an abject thing that simply must be erased on the way to equality
with whites. In terms of the argument briefly glossed above, one could
place Walter Benn Michaels and Benjamin Robertson, due to this erasure
of the body, on the side of ahistorical truth, the place where Truths are bat-
tled over. By emphasizing embodiment, Butler does not deny those battles;
instead, in a material sense, she denies any Truth the ability to write the
black body out of existence: the body reveals its history and will not be
erased (Robertson 372). Douglas Baynton has written cogently about this
erasure and points out that progressive movements tend to disavow race
and gender disability as they argue for equality; “[r]arely,” he writes, “have
oppressed groups denied that disability is an adequate justification for so-
cial and political inequality” (17). Progressive groups, unexpectedly, often
will argue for diversity, i.e., for their own equality, by demonstrating that
they deserve it because they are not disabled (ironically, it is often on the
basis of the body that whites and men will marginalize women and non-
whites). Disability becomes a kind of hidden kernel of conservatism.
What this suggests is that bodies must be managed in the pursuit of an
equality framed by Enlightenment thinking. A ‘real’ democracy, by con-
trast, must be founded on a proper awareness of our own mutual mortality,
and of the birth that each of us represses as we become domesticated sub-
jects. DuBois and Fanon are not of course to be cast aside. As many schol-
106 J N T

ars have shown, oppressed groups work through stages as they move to-
ward empowerment. The first moments of empowerment often begin to
with the unthinking appropriation of the oppressor’s ideology (Ashcroft et
al.). That, to some degree, is what we see in DuBois and Fanon with regard
to disability. Decades later, Butler shows up on the scene questioning the
privileging of wholeness, normative bodies, and domestic boundaries,
whether political, theoretical, or bodily. Butler, rather than dismissing the
body in the pursuit of power and transcendence, goes the other direction.
She embraces the body, its messiness, its finitude, its non-domesticity, and
by so doing gestures toward another way of being.

Notes
1. I leave aside the formal issue of Butler’s narrative. Suffice it to say, for Kindred to also
expose its readers, it would have to be disabled in a formal sense. It would have to fore-
ground gaps, incoherencies, defeating the typical ideological work of novels. It would
make sense to look for this narratival wound in Dana’s temporal dislocation which she
admits is “paradox[ical],” or non-sense (29). By comparison to sf, Dana’s time travel
never finds a scientific explanation. Perhaps the best place to locate this formal wound
is the manner in which Butler’s narrative defies genre boundaries. Her mixing of
boundaries is a mixing of worlds and where these worlds overlap one could locate a
wound. See Baccolini (“Gender and Genre in Feminist Critical Dystopias”) on this
issue of “genre purity” (18, 29).

2. See Michelle Erica Green’s “’There Goes the Neighborhood:’ Octavia Butler’s De-
mand for Diversity in Utopias” on the issue of humanism in general in Butler (168).

3. In her In the First Person and in the House, Maria Holmgren Troy links this modern
house to the plantation house and sees it “as a materialization or residue of familial
and historical conflicts . . .” (156). She reads the house as a time machine that “cata-
pults Dana into a confrontation with personal and national history.” She also writes
that the “move into the house is literally a way into slavery since it is when they move
in that Dana is thrown back into the past where she is considered a slave” (158). While
I would disagree with her reading of the house as a time machine, she is absolutely
right to link being in the house with a kind of ideological slavery for all of the reasons
above.

4. In an interview with Mehaffy and Keating, Butler discusses how her own abnormally
tall body affected her in a somewhat similar manner. Since she did not fit social norms
 Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 107

physically, it led toward greater introspection. She says, “Part of what I’m saying is
that my body really got in the way of any social life that I was likely to have had. But,
on the other hand, it did push me more into the writing because I was in the habit of
thinking about things” (70).

5. Balfour writes extensively and insightfully on issues of wholeness and dismemberment

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