Race, ethnicity, sexuality, and blood in contemporary black women´s speculative fiction

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how the issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are discussed in the novel 'Fledgling' (2006) by Octavia Butler, in the novel 'Brown Girl in the Ring' (1998) and in the short story 'Greedy Choke Puppy' (2001) by Nalo Hopkinson, and in the novel 'The Living Blood' (2001) by Tananarive Due. These works are examples of speculative fiction, an umbrella genre that encompasses others such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the gothic, and that comments on social constructions and current society by creating alternative beings and ways of life. Written by black women in in the United States and Canada at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, the works analyzed here show that race, ethnicity, and sexuality are common concerns for the three writers. This is so because these issues, which are constructed by social and cultural discourses that often result in discrimination and marginalization, are interconnected, especially in the lives and identities of black women. This investigation also analyzes how Butler, Hopkinson, and Due use the symbolism of blood in their speculative representations of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. More specifically, the reference to blood in their works often points to racial and sexual abjection, to the black ancestry, the family line, and the ethnic bonds of the protagonists, as well as to a transgressive sexuality and a possibility of nurturance, providing specific discussions about race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the perspective of black women in a contemporary context. Their works imagine a world in which the black race, the ethnicities of African origin, female sexuality, and maternity have a fundamental role for the future of humanity, contradicting, therefore, age-old and prejudiced racist and sexist discourses.