Abstract
The Oankali are responsible for rescuing the humans who have survived an apocalypse of human manufacture. The drive of the Oankali to constantly acquire new genetic material motivates this rescue. Humans are triply attractive: not only do they possess new material to trade for human survival, but both the Contradiction, as the Oankali term it, and the capacity for cancer make human genetic material seductive to them.(8) The Contradiction is the combination, in humans, of hierarchical behavior and the capacity for great intelligence; the two inevitably combine, in Oankali belief, to form lethal self-destructive behavior, evidenced in our almost complete annihilation.(9) Since self-destructive behavior is incomprehensible to them, the Contradiction fascinates them. That which represents an untenable danger draws them even as it repulses them; to them, all humans are abject, regardless of race or gender.(10) The Oankali turn the tide on those humans who have assumed that they are the pinnacle of advanced life-forms. The humans' smaller numbers; the destruction of human technology; the proclivity of the humans for violence, hatred, and an intolerance of difference; and the high levels of technology, intelligence, and bodily strength which the Oankali possess place the humans in a position subordinate to that of the Oankali. Butler places that which humans deem monstrous and abject -- difference, the Other -- in tension with that which the aliens find monstrous and abject -- the Contradiction of humanity -- thereby questioning human constructions of norms, power, and identity.(11) She forces humans to confront difference as well through the person chosen by the Oankali to awaken them to their new reality and train them: Lilith.(12) Rather than maintaining a position of superiority from which to judge other humans and other life-forms, humans must rethink themselves, their construction of the monstrous and abject, their reproduction, and their uses of civilization. The Oankali go so far as to sterilize humans who refuse to mate with them in order to curtail full expression of the Contradiction and the death and violence which results.(13) The Oankali believe that it would be cruel to allow the continued full expression of the Contradiction because humanity would simply try to extinguish itself again. However, they reverse sterilization if humans agree to enter into sexual and reproductive liaisons with the Oankali. Humans who do not agree to a human-Oankali liaison become resisters, building their own communities and, in some cases, launching attacks against the Oankali and human communities known as trade villages. The human liaisons with the Kohn and the Oankali and the responses they generate constitute clear examples of Judith Butler's and Julia Kristeva's descriptions of the process of repudiation, exclusion, and foreclosure through which the abject is produced. The normative represents complex relations among those who possess economic, political, and social power and those who do not. Those who are able to control and influence the image-making process inhabit the "constitutive inside," in Judith Butler's phrasing, which repudiates and excludes that which does not fit within the normative ideal. Those aspects which do not fit within the ideal constitute foreclosed pathways. They become the abject, the degraded, the monstrous, that which one does not want to enact because it is dangerous, taboo, and disempowering. However, since the normative is an "ideal" and carries a multitude of overlapping constructions of identity, people constantly exceed it; the ideal constantly moves beyond possible grasp because it is both impossible and contains contradictions. These moments of excess contain the possibility of rupture, disrupting the construction of normativity and marginalization. (8). Through her depiction of cancer, Butler illustrates the subjective quality to naming any given thing "monstrous" and the mutable nature of monstrosity. The Oankali have managed to control the negative effects of cancer and explore the potential for regrowth and mutability inherent with cancer's multiplying cells. It is this mutability, for instance, which gives Jodahs his shape-shifting ability. While cancer is loathed by humans, "[t]o the Oankali, it was treasure. It was beauty beyond Human comprehension" (Imago 30). This difference in reaction to the same element reveals the constructedness and mutability of abjection and beauty.