Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this article, I begin with a broad question for anthropological philosophy—what is the human?—to turn toward a related question for social analysis: How did the concept of gender become a constitutive part of being human? Octavia Butler's speculative historical novel, Wild Seed (1980), troubles gender's conceptual metaphysics, serving as a precursor for the exploration of an alternative humanism found in Sylvia Wynter's “Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground' of Caliban's ‘Woman’” (1990). By anticipating Wynter's reading of Caliban and his missing, desired “woman,” Butler inverts the demonic grounds of negated progeny, reproduction, and patriarchal authority. In addition to speculating about the ontology of racialized femaleness, Wild Seed situates embodied maleness as an equal ontological problem. While Caliban is overly embodied, lacking patriarchal masculinity and its reproductive trappings, Wild Seed reintroduces the ontological problem of genderless embodiment through the native's/African's masculinity. Butler explores unthinkable human existence through the question of how gender pairs became a constitutive aspect of the human, rather than by focusing on one half of a gender binary over another. “(In)humanism” is conceptually provisional, intended to illustrate the transitional reason that underlies both formation and disappearance of what counts as humanness. [human, gender, Sylvia Wynter, Octavia Butler, embodiment]