This chapter conjures a hypothetical conversation between Alice Walker, Judith Butler, and Octavia E. Butler to address the constructs of feminism and womanism through the lens of “gender trouble” and “science fiction.” Because these discourses pressure the constitution and ratification of “the Law” in its myriad iterations, the chapter queries whether a man can be “womanish” due to his matrilineage having peculiar interactions with “legal” modes. A case study stages this argument: the protagonist of Octavia E. Butler's short story “Bloodchild” is a boy impregnated by a female alien to be an incubator for the proliferation of her people. It claims, then, that blackness, loosely understood, disrupts sociopolitical positions, namely subjects and objects, in legal encounters.
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