Octavia Butler's Parables and Black African American Hyper-Empathic Neurodivergent Feminists : On Shame and Solidarity

Abstract

As renowned scholar and researcher Sara Ahmed (2004; 2015) reminds us, emotions do things to us because they are relational. This dissertation takes aim at one emotion in particular: shame. By recognizing the similarities between us - that we all feel some degree of shame - we nonetheless inevitably arrive back at our differences: Not all feminists are bombarded with shame equally or in the same way. With a particular emphasis on the ways that shame can obstruct interpersonal relationships within the feminist movement, in this dissertation, I pay close attention to the complexly suppressed shames we encounter when stepping into solidarity with one another, mapping out how negotiating shame can come to represent feminism as a multiplicity. Drawing from shame researchers like Ahmed (2015), Brown (2006), Harris-Perry (2011), and Halberstam (2005b) and Black feminist theorists like Crenshaw (1991), hooks (1992), Lorde (1984), Alexander, (2005), Hill-Collins (2017) and many others, I ask what shame does to feminists in solidarity with one another. To try to answer this question, I rely on Black feminist theory and methodology, focusing on autoethnography as well as a critical discourse analysis of two of Octavia Butler's novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). The following research questions guide my analysis: 1a) How is shame conceptualized in shame research? 1b) How does shame function and why? 2) How does shame hinder our interpersonal relationships with one another? 3a) What does shame do to the mind-body? and 3b) What implications does this have for feminists? Octavia Butler's fiction provides representations of shame that help us to conceptualize harms that result when feminists are affected by an excess accumulation of shame. This study hypothesizes that, to avoid being derailed by difficult emotions like shame, we must explore different conceptions of shame as essential contributions to feminist understandings of solidarity.