Alien Sex: Octavia Butler and Deleuze and Guattari's Polysexuality

• Published in: Deleuze and Sex pp. 30 - 49
• Main Author: Bogue, Ronald
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 07.07.2011
• Subjects: 20th-Century Philosophy; Alien; Anatomy; Animal behavior; Animal social behavior; Animals; Behavioral sciences; Biological sciences; Biology; Continental Philosophy; Divine attributes; Doctrinal theology; Ethology; Families; Family members; Gender identity; Gender studies; Genetics; Genitalia; Human behavior; Human genetics; Human physiology; Human reproduction; Human societies; Humans; Male animals; Mammals; Mating behavior; Medical genetics; Octavia Butler; Oneness; Philosophy; Physiology; Polysexuality; Primates; Psychology of gender; Religion; Reproductive system; Siblings; Social and Political Philosophy; Social behavior; Social institutions; Social interaction; Social sciences; Sociology; Systematic theology; Theology; Twentieth-century philosophy; Western philosophy, from c 1900; Zoology; Butler, Octavia; Desire; Freud; Libido; Non-human; Gender; Erotics; Orgasm; Reproduction; Desiring-machine; Genitals/genitality; Psychoanalysis; Margulis and Sagan
• ISBN: 9780748642618; 0748642617; 9780748642601; 0748642609
• DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748642618.003.0002

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that sexuality involves ‘not one or even two sexes, but n sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 296), a thesis they reiterate in A Thousand Plateaus. This concept of polysexuality is provocative, but Deleuze and Guattari offer only limited indications of what it might entail. One means of exploring the implications of the concept would be to imagine a world in which human sexuality literally involves more than two, and possibly an unlimited number of sexes. Such a world, it happens, is what Octavia Butler offers in her masterpiece, The Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987–89). Butler (1947–2006) was the first African-American female writer of science fiction to gain prominence in the genre, and throughout her works she was especially concerned with sexual relations between humans and aliens, both in the more immediate sense of the actual, physical experiences of having sex and in the larger sense of the emotional dimensions of personal bonds formed and sustained through regular sexual interaction. For Butler, sexuality is always a becoming-other (becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular), and in the Xenogenesis Trilogy that becoming-other entails an expansion of sexes involved in sexual reproduction and interaction from two to five, with the limits of sexual relations implicitly extending to embrace all living entities in a general becoming-molecular.A close juxtaposition of Butler and Deleuze and Guattari, I believe, can significantly expand our sense of the ramifications of Deleuze and Guattari's thought in the area of sexuality. In some ways, Butler’s novels present a utopian view of interspecies sex, in which humans, by engaging in a becoming-other, escape the limitations of gender categories, prejudices and pathologies, but in other regards, such interspecies sex merely reconfigures human problems.