“Do You Care That It’s Me?”: Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” and The New Normal in the Age of Posthumanism

Abstract

Since early 2020, the whole humanity has been living the pandemic era of which we have never experienced before. The post-pandemic era will necessarily be entirely different from now and thus we need to define the New Normal with the ultimate and groundbreaking reconceptualization of humanity, environment, and symbiosis. In this paper, I contend that Butler’s symbiosis exercised in “Bloodchild” dismantles sociopolitical hierarchy and power, whatsoever, and calls forth sympoiesis with the genetic and mutual change in interspecies relations. Butler questions the anthropocentric conceptualization of humanity and reconfigures interspecies symbiosis in the framework of posthumanism. Her intertwining of feminist and black writings in and outside the SF genre convention creates the posthuman tropes, and helps us reconsider the New Normal condition and anticipate the post-pandemic era beyond the binary scope of humanist ontology.