Utopian Studies articles

Recent articles from Utopian Studies

Editorial.
June 22, 2008... Octavia Butler died in February of 2006; she left behind a body of work exploring the impulse toward utopia and the potential for dystopia. This special issue of Utopian Studies is devoted to her work, which is still too little studied--especially by scholars of utopia. (Ritch Calvin's...

The certainty of the flesh: Octavia Butler's use of the erotic in the Xenogenesis trilogy.
June 22, 2008... Personally, I find utopias ridiculous. We're not going to have a perfect human society until we get a few perfect humans, and that seems unlikely. Octavia Butler Introduction In the great Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and a dozen or so friends set out to change the world, one...

"Every age has the vampire it needs": Octavia Butler's vampiric vision in Fledgling.
June 22, 2008... In both movies and novels, the "traditional" vampire is often presented as the "other" who threatens humanity. A white male who penetrates both society and the bodies of his victims, this vampire represents the "queered" or Othered because he embodies the fears and anxieties of the society he...

Theorizing fear: Octavia Butler and the realist utopia.
June 22, 2008... "Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all." (Hobbes 75) "It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose...

Diversity, change, violence: Octavia Butler's pedagogical philosophy.
June 22, 2008... The deliberate and relentless depiction of violence in Octavia Butler's science fiction is striking. Her books are full of conflict that ranges from nuclear war to suburban looting, child abuse to concentration-camp slavery, self-defense to deliberate genocide. Within this violent world, her...