Somatography of the Future. Monstrous Motherhood and Oddkinship in “Xenogenesis”

In Xenogenesis, Octavia Butler tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, an Afro-descendant woman who survived a devastating nuclear war—that completely ravaged the earth and decimated its inhabitants—thanks to the intervention of an extraterrestrial species, the Oankali. These creatures engage in intergalactic gene trafficking with other sentient species with whom they interbreed and live symbiotically. In this article, I explore the ways in which feminism has historically conceptualised motherhood to illuminate how Lillith’s monstrous motherhood articulates a new relational order (oddkinship) that escapes the logic of domination and points to possible forms of resistance to ecosocial contemporary crisis in the polyform register of prefigurative imagination.