Panic at the Discourse

Out on a Limb with Another Penis Metaphor: Amputation and Impotence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Zara Diab

Biography | Notes

Keywords: Intersectionality, Race, Gender, Disability, Psychoanalysis

Octavia Butler begins and ends her neo-slave novel, Kindred, with the image of an amputated arm.^[1] Strikingly, the amputee is her protagonist, Dana Franklin, who is a Black American woman, living in the year 1979, descended from slave and slaveholder. She is powerfully at odds with the demographic most notably associated with the empty sleeve: white, male veterans of the Civil War. Throughout the novel, Dana is repeatedly pulled back in time to the Antebellum south, engaging first-hand with the violent roots of her family tree. With each visit, she strives to keep her white, slaveholding ancestor, Rufus Weylin, alive long enough to ensure her own existence, ultimately facilitating his rape of Alice, her Black enslaved ancestor. Dana’s eventual empty sleeve results from a final battle with Rufus as he attempts to rape Dana, too. In this article, I argue that the limb he takes from her serves as both a physical and phallic reminder that as a Black woman, Dana experiences life as less abled than those whose identities rank higher in the white patriarchal system. She is, in the psychoanalytic and bodily sense, castrated by the system which has yet to be fully abolished in 1979, and even still today. Despite the abolition of slavery and advancements in women’s rights, the foundation of Dana’s home remains oppressive and disabling.

           In true patriarchal fashion, phallic-shaped limbs haunt this text. Images of bodily extremities, trees, and weapons function as subtle reminders that the system to which Dana is confined in the Antebellum period is rigidly patriarchal, and the deeply rooted oppression persists in 1979. Although Rufus seizes her arm in the past, when Dana returns to her own time, Rufus is replaced by the wall of her house, and Dana finds her arm trapped, literally, by the foundation of her home. I argue that Butler’s limb and arm imagery exhibits a pattern of phallic-shaped objects gaining extension among oppressors akin to an erection, and a reduction among the oppressed akin to castration. The association of appendage growth with power, and shrinkage with impotency, emphasizes powerlessness as synonymous with emasculation. Dana realizes she is not free from such a system and is left with a permanent reminder of her limited access to social value.

           My reading of Butler’s novel considers an intersection between psychoanalysis and disability studies. I track the extended penis metaphor using psychoanalytic theory’s castration complex as a marker for both the metaphorical experience of power and lack thereof. I am influenced here by Gayle Rubin’s analysis of the castration complex, which lands somewhere in between the literal and figurative. The more literal American biologistic interpretation of Freud emphasizes the anatomical, Real penis, while the more metaphorical French structuralist interpretation, in the Lacanian sense, is more linguistically minded, placing emphasis on the Symbolic phallus, or the “set of meanings conferred upon the penis.”^[2] I am also interested in the physical experience of ability and disability. In Bodyminds Reimagined, Sami Schalk touches on (dis)ability in Kindred, and argues that rather than focusing strictly on disability in the novel as either figurative or literal, “representations of disability must be read as metaphorical and material in an overlapping fashion,” in order to reveal the connections between slavery and disability, racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression.^[3] I additionally argue that the images of disability in Kindred extend beyond the human characters and are so pervasive that they produce a unifying secondary image that functions as a castration within the white patriarchal system Kindred displays at the roots of the American slavery system. Further building on Schalk’s idea, I treat Kindred’s castration complex as both material and metaphorical, drawing connections to the anatomical functioning of the penis, and its phallic attributes of power.

           As feminist and queer theorist Gayle Rubin writes in her article, “The Traffic in Women,” a critique of psychoanalysis is necessary for the progress of gender and sexual equality, since it is not only “a theory of the mechanisms of the reproduction of sexual arrangements,” but it is also one of those mechanisms itself.^[4] The ideas behind psychoanalysis continue to bear weight on our classification and ordering of sex and gender and their associated social attributes and power. In Freudian psychoanalytic terms, feminine status is acquired through the moment in which a girl discovers she is castrated and subsequently represses the masculine parts of her sexual drive.^[5] Anatomically, a girl’s castration, and inability to compete with her father for her mother, is apparent in the inferiority of the size of her clitoris compared to the penis. The Real presence or absence of the penis denotes the status of male or female, but because these statuses, as Rubin explains, are not equal, the associated Symbolic presence or absence of the phallus “carries a meaning of the dominance of men over women.”^[6] Rubin concludes that the theory remains worth consideration, since “we still live in a ‘phallic’ culture.”^[7] Indeed, while I track most of Kindred’s penis metaphor through Dana’s time in the Antebellum south, the effects of it follow her back to 1979 as permanent disability.

           However, it is important to note where the phallic metaphor fails as a theory strictly related to sex. As I will point out, the phallus in Kindred does not automatically pass between men without racial bias or ablest bias. Rubin touches on Lacan’s idea that the phallus is a symbolic object that is part of a network exchange between men, which passes on power as well as other transactional objects, including women: “Women move in one direction, cattle, shells, or mats in the other.”^[8] In the system of slavery, Black bodies are treated as chattel, the property of powerful white folk to exchange. Just as men had rights over women, Black people, despite gender, did not have rights to their bodies either, and therefore could not wield the power of the phallus in the same way white men (particularly of upper class and able bodies) could. Rubin acknowledges that the phallus is “more than a feature which distinguishes the sexes,” but overgeneralizes in her conclusion that “it is the embodiment of the male status, to which men accede, and to which certain rights inhere—among them, the right to a woman. It is an expression of the transmission of male dominance … The tracks which it leaves include gender identity, the division of the sexes,” but she stops short of racial or other divisions that are notable in Kindred and reality.^[9]

           Similarly, the weight of disability is often different for different bodies. While the empty sleeve in white male Civil War veterans is certainly disarming, it means something different in Dana’s Black female body, when framed by the history of bodies like hers, and the diminished social value and access to quality health care in the modern U.S., as suggested in Jasbir Puar’s book, The Right to Maim. Puar contends that under the biopolitics of debility, an able body is not equivalent to capacity, but rather experiences different levels of ability and debility “through circuits of (white) racial and economic privilege, citizenship status, and legal, medical, and social accommodations. Access is theorized not only in terms of infrastructure, work, social services, and public space but also in terms of access to health itself.”^[10] Factors such as race and gender challenge Dana’s access to health and the associated social capacity and value. Kindred’s demand that we face these systems of oppression at their roots is a reminder that biases linger, and the way the image of Dana’s empty sleeve hits differently due to her history and identity underscores this truth.

           Butler’s use of phallic imagery complicates both disability and the castration complex, experimenting with how different gendered and raced bodies are able to access the power of the phallus. As Schalk notes, in her simultaneous consideration of the metaphor and material, “we might also then be able to better understand and trace how disability and blackness continue to be imbricated categories, how ableism and racism continue to collude and work in place of one another in the lives of all black people and all disabled people,” and through the additional lens of the phallic metaphor, we can consider how sexism is also inextricably linked.^[11]

           The most overt physical castration of power in the novel manifests as Dana’s amputated arm, which recalls the emblematic image of the Civil War veteran. In his book, Empty Sleeves, Brian Miller states that “the empty sleeve became an iconic symbol in the aftermath of the Civil War,” citing several examples of amputated soldiers in Civil War history and in Hollywood films following that period.^[12] Miller notes that veterans who were physically broken by the war “remained Empty Sleeves in history and memory.”^[13] The postwar wave of disabled men who had previously been strong white patriarchs, “shattered traditional gender roles,” particularly among Confederate veterans who had lost the war as well as their appendages; for them, emancipation brought with it emasculation.^[14] The breaking of their strong white male bodies performed a kind of castration within the patriarchal system. Miller records the connection between amputation and impotence, referencing the journals of many veteran amputees who expressed concerns with their diminished ability to attract women.^[15] The anxiety that amputation equates to patriarchal and sexual castration prevailed among veterans in history and as a result manifests as a powerful trope in literature, such as it appears throughout Kindred. Dana feels increasing losses of power the more she learns about her roots and experiences a final literal castration of power when she loses an arm, evoking the image of a castrated phallus. Butler specifically describes it as an “empty sleeve,” juxtaposing the image of Dana against Confederate soldier amputees.^[16] Robbed of her appendage, she is left with a souvenir of lack that is symbolic of significant and residual disabling losses that cannot be forgotten. Her identity as a Black woman intensifies the violence of her empty sleeve and serves as a reminder of the Black people in her ancestry, like Alice, whose bodies were forced to endure wars long before they were labelled ‘Civil’.

           Dana’s transplantation in time reduces what power she is accustomed to having in 1979, yet her queered clothing and her mannerisms initially cause confusion around placing her status of power. In the Antebellum South, Dana is mistaken as a man on multiple occasions because she wears pants. Her mistaken gender identity serves as a reminder of the rights and freedoms that women gain from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth, and functions as a symbol of the power that Dana possesses as a woman from 1979. Unfortunately, the power she thinks she has is precarious when she travels back in time and is subject to patriarchy and slavery at its roots. Eventually, Dana stops wearing the pants, both literally and figuratively, and increasingly loses control and power. Similarly, she is told that she speaks like a white person, which also preserves more of her power in interactions with people in the Antebellum South than she would otherwise have as a Black woman. However, what power she does have is still not impenetrable by the white men she encounters. Eventually, as a result of her experiences in the Antebellum South, she is castrated of her power, left amputated, so that even though she returns to 1979, long after the Civil War and abolition of slavery, she deals with metaphorical and material disability due to her roots and identity.

           Dana’s is not the only reference to amputation in the novel, however. The larger textual pattern of equating the reduction of appendage with a reduction of power solidifies through other characters, including Rufus. When he experiences an illness that compromises his strength as a patriarch earlier in the story, his slave Nigel refers to the medical practice of amputation. He speaks of a doctor for Rufus, commenting: “I heard he was good and quick when it comes to cutting off legs or arms.”^[17] Evidently, the amputation of the weak and vulnerable is common enough that a doctor at that time would be “good and quick” at such a procedure. That Nigel heard of his amputation talents also suggests the high frequency of the practice. Dana insists that they “keep that butcher away” intending to preserve Rufus’s limbs, his viability and potency, for the sake of her lineage.^[18] However, Rufus already feels the threat of his sickness weakening him, expressing his worry to Dana: “My leg feels like it’s coming off.”^[19] In his state of vulnerability, Rufus feels unsteady about his control over the situation and feels a resulting anxiety about the possibility of losing a limb and consequently some of his power.

           Among the novel’s already established patriarchal characters, however, like Jake Edwards and Tom Weylin, limbs grow with the threat or assertion of violence. Edwards, the overseer on the Weylin plantation, declares and maintains his power through violence against the enslaved. Dana describes Edwards following an instance of his verbal violence toward her: “He carried his whip around with him. It was like part of his arm — long and black with its lead-weighted butt. He dropped the coil of it free.”^[20] Edwards is granted the description of an extended appendage through his violence. His weapon — the whip — and his arm become one phallic-shaped super-limb that threatens and enacts assault to keep the oppressed in line. The long weapon that he frees to emphasize his threats, and which acts as an extended appendage, is reminiscent of another bodily extremity that can grow larger to be used as a weapon in patriarchal violence: the penis. The phallic implication is further exacerbated by the fact that whips have additional sexual connotations, which I will expand on later in this article. It is worth noting, too, that the whip is distinctly described as black. Edwards’ use of a long, black weapon against the enslaved Black bodies is perhaps another layer of emasculation against them.

           Tom Weylin, Rufus’ father and the plantation owner, also exhibits appendage growth in an instance of hostility toward Dana. Weylin shouts obscenities and commands at Dana, threatening to “flay [her] alive,” and all the while, “He shook his cane at [her] like an extended forefinger.”^[21] Here, similar to Edwards, Weylin’s arm and weaponized cane become one large — again, phallic-shaped — violent appendage. Also notable is the way he addresses Dana to begin this confrontation: “You damned black bitch!”^[22] The words Weylin chooses to degrade Dana point to her race and gender, and suggest that these identities are inherently insulting, inherently “damned,” and therefore worthless. Dana goes on to recall: “My aunt used to say things like that to me when I was little and did something to annoy her — ‘Girl, I’m going to skin you alive!’ And she’d get my uncle’s belt and use it on me. But it had never occurred to me that anyone could make such a threat and mean it literally,” as she recognizes Weylin does.^[23] Although such violence is enacted to a far lesser degree, Dana’s aunt still subscribes to the pattern of extending a limb to become a weapon by using her husband’s belt, knowing nothing outside the power dynamics of the patriarchal system in which she, too, is entrapped.

           The need to exhibit such erectile extensions in violence in part stems from a castration anxiety and fear for a loss of power. Anne Greenfield, in her essay, “Unmanning,” connects ideas of emasculation, castration, and impotence with the loss or destruction of phallic-like objects in literature. She argues that this “nearly ubiquitous trope […] of unmanning” stems from the anxiety regarding unmanned men as a threat to patriarchy.^[24] Like the perceived emasculation among amputated Civil War veterans that Miller discusses, Greenfield notes a preoccupation with the sexually abled male body, which patriarchal institutions depend upon. The “metaphorical and symbolic power of the potent phallus” that Greenfield examines is a literary concern interdependent on real-world matters.^[25] She notes that male sexual failure “could also inhibit the desired flow of wealth, power, property, and descendants in a patrilineal society that requires male sexual potency in order to keep stable its structures of inheritance.”^[26] With the inability to pass on titles and estates to descendants, therefore, male impotency results in concrete and lasting losses of power. Greenfield concludes that “castrated and impotent men become unfit,” and specifically as ill-suited for power.^[27] Her connections reinforce the anxieties felt on a wider scale by communities coming to terms with their amputated patriarchs, as described by Miller, no longer embodiments of the epitome of strength and power that is the abled white male body. It is for such a reason that these anxieties also manifest in literature and in a novel like Kindred, which deals with the violent persistence of patriarchal practices.

           It is useful to examine how else the phallic motif appears in Kindred. The limbs and stumps of full and amputated appendages are also terms connected with trees. Miller recognizes the patriarchal symbol of the tree through the well-known parable of the oak and the vine. He contends that “the white male physique was the defining marker of manhood,” and the “female body, perceived as frail, remained dependant on the strong masculine body for survival” before turning to the proof in the parable:

           This parable suggests not only that the large, hard, phallic, tree, which is unbendable and supportive, is emblematic of what manhood should be, but it also suggests the frailty, bendability, and inferiority of women, reinforcing the gender hierarchy through natural metaphors. Miller goes on to note that Black bodies were also seen as inferior, because unlike white male bodies, which are as sturdy as oak trees, Black bodies were bendable, breakable, damaged, and disabled by the labour and violence they were made to endure in slavery, which left permanent scars on their bodies. Miller also writes that sometimes “slaves mutilated their own bodies as a form of resistance, to slow down work patterns or prevent them from performing a specific duty while enslaved.”^[29] Their forced position within the patriarchy hardly allowed for enslaved bodies to be sturdy, phallic oaks. Even methods of resistance included bodily mutilation. Black bodies were forced to bend or break and wore their histories in scars, while white bodies, especially white male bodies, were afforded sturdy health and perfection.

           Kindred plays on the connections between trees and patriarchs. Throughout Butler’s text, trees occupy a liminal position as dangers and havens, just as patriarchal figures have the power and potential to be either. Dana illustrates this dual potential well when she saves Rufus during the storm: “I grabbed him and pulled him out of the water and over to a tree that would shelter us a little from the rain. A moment later, there was thunder and a flash of lightning, and I dragged him away from the tree again.”^[30] The strong, masculine tree holds power that must be handled with caution and can be both shelter and danger, dependant on context. Furthermore, another character, a Black slave, is killed when “a tree he was cutting fell on him,” exhibiting an oppressed person being overpowered in the act of trying to chop down the strong tree.^[31] After his death, Tom Weylin proceeds to take advantage of his patriarchal power to sell all of the deceased slave’s children away from his widow (except the disabled Carrie, who is seen as less valuable because of her muteness). Rufus also has his own incident with a tree, from which he emerges alive but not unscathed after falling out of it.^[32] As a white male, Rufus is high up in the patriarchal system, but at this point in his life, he is still a boy, and his vulnerability is illustrated when he simultaneously breaks the tree limb and his own limb (his leg) in the fall, still not well-trained enough to handle his power. Tom Weylin subsequently hires Rufus a tutor, because he says that Rufus “doesn’t read or write any better than he climbs trees.”^[33] Weylin wants to adequately equip his son to grow to take his position, and he is unimpressed by Rufus’ inability to handle himself in a tree.

           Meanwhile, the text employs tree stumps in instances of oppression. The term stump refers simultaneously to the useless remnant of a tree, the useless remnant of an amputation, and a challenge or hurdle that inhibits progress. Dana works exhaustively in the kitchen, spending “God knows how long beating biscuit dough with a hatchet on a well-worn tree stump.”^[34] Tree stumps, the sad remainders of what were once grand and strong phallic-shaped protrusions, are the result of a kind of castration. Dana uses the stump for feminine, domestic labour, effectively emasculating it. In another scene, the slave children use a tree stump to role play slave auctions, standing atop it to pretend to sell each other.^[35] The tree stumps in these two instances, like the stump of an amputated limb or of castration, illustrate a tone of defeat and powerlessness. Similarly, Weylin uses a dead tree trunk to humiliate, torture, and emasculate one of his slaves as he orders other slaves to tie him up naked against it to be whipped. As Dana details, Weylin “stood whirling his whip and biting his thin lips. Suddenly, he brought the whip down across the slave’s back. The slave’s body jerked and strained against its ropes … The whip was heavy and at least six feet long, and I wouldn’t have used it on anything living.”^[36] Dana’s description of the whip as something she would not use on anything living, pronounces the slave as good as dead, and links his body to the dead tree trunk, both representative of a defeated, dead masculinity. Additionally, as intimated earlier with Edwards’ whip, the language in this scene evokes sexual connotations entangled with the assertion of power. Weylin, in anticipation of enacting this violence, waits for his naked victim to be bound up while he whirls his whip and bites his lips. His whip, weighty and long, is a powerful phallic object. This undertone of sexual violence that recurs throughout the text is especially evident when framed by Dana’s overarching aim to facilitate Rufus’ rape of Alice, which leads to the continuation of Dana’s ancestral line but also white patriarchal power.

           In keeping with the wordplay and limb extension motif, it is worth acknowledging that weapons are also commonly referred to as arms. In Kindred, arms (as appendages) unite with arms (as weapons) in instances of violent limb growth, but the text plays with the image of arms as patriarchal weaponry in other ways, as well. The first weapon Rufus uses is, significantly, a stick. Dana comes upon Rufus with a “stick of wood in one hand … charred and smoking. Its fire had apparently been transferred to the draperies at the window. Now the boy stood watching as the flames ate their way up the heavy cloth.”^[37] Rufus inflicts damage, and though he is armed with a weapon which extends his arm in the patriarchal fashion, it is a sapling of a weapon. As Rufus grows into his patriarchal position, he trades the stick in for a rifle resembling that of his father’s, illustrating Greenfield’s noted importance of male potency for inheritance. When Dana saves Rufus the first time, she finds herself “looking down the barrel of the longest rifle [she] had ever seen,” the rifle handled by Tom Weylin, who arms himself, extending his appendage, to violently assert his power.^[38] Later in the novel, Rufus takes his turn to point his rifle at Dana. She describes his weapon as “a long slender Kentucky rifle. He had even let me fire it a couple of times… before. And I had looked down the barrel of one like it for his sake. This one, however, was aimed more at Kevin.”^[39] Dana references the resemblance between the father and son’s firearms, having been under the threat of both men’s long weapons. She also describes how her intimacy with Rufus has allowed her close access to his firearm in the past. Rufus now aims more at Kevin, Dana’s white husband and his direct threat in sexual competition over her. To emphasize the sexualization and phallic nature of his firearm further, Rufus’ body is described as “sort of crouched around the gun, clearly on the verge of firing,” resembling potential impending ejaculation.^[40] Rufus punctuates the sexual connotations by shouting at Dana while he threatens her with the firearm: “you’re not leaving me!” which later prompts Kevin to inquire whether Rufus had ever raped Dana.^[41] Shortly before Rufus does later attempt to rape Dana, she finds him alone “at his desk in the library fondling a hand gun.”^[42] The overtly sexual connotation of the word fondling is paired here with a dangerous, phallic shaped weapon, perhaps foreshadowing Rufus’ impending intention to rape Dana.

           Dana’s power is difficult to pin down as she travels back and forth in time; it seems to fluctuate. She seems less restricted by gendered roles, or at least more able to use them to her advantage, due to her knowledge of the patriarchal systems, which is advanced by a century. Therefore, in the moments when she is threatened by patriarchal penetration, she finds successful ways to fight back. When the patroller has her pinned down on the ground, about to use his appendage to violently advance his patriarchal agenda, Dana employs her own limb extension to fight back: “I was only able to move a few inches before he pinned me down, but that was far enough for me to discover that the thing I had hit my head on was a heavy stick — a tree limb, perhaps. I grasped it with both hands and brought it down as hard as I could on his head.”^[43] She employs extension and the use of the phallic tree limb to combat the threat of rape. The second time rape threatens Dana, she is again able to get away, though not unscathed. Rufus tries to rape Dana, and in a gendered inversion, Dana escapes by penetrating Rufus by stabbing him with a knife, but Rufus simultaneously castrates Dana through the amputation of her arm:

Dana arms herself with the phallic-shaped weapon of the knife, extending her own appendage to become a weapon and use it to defeat the threat of white male patriarch penetration. As she does this, Rufus latches onto her arm. This scene connects audibly with the amputation scene back in Dana’s present day with Rufus’s scream: “he screamed […] he screamed again” turning into Dana’s “and I screamed and screamed” as she realizes that her arm “was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though [her] arm were growing out of it — or into to it.”^[45] In this last instance of time travel, although Dana physically leaves the past, her arm remains trapped “in the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped,” unable to abandon the past fully.^[46] Thus, Rufus’ hold on Dana is inescapable and he castrates the power she once thought she held within the still patriarchal system of 1979. Rufus’ seizure of Dana turns into the wall of her house, emphasizing that Dana becomes disabled as a result of the foundation of her own home. Not only is she birthed from a familial lineage that has its roots in slavery and sexual violence, but the country she lives in is built on foundations that are also rooted in oppression, emerging from systems of slavery, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

           In the end of the novel, Kevin takes comfort in the fact that “now that the boy is dead,” they can move on with their lives, but Rufus was dead before Dana’s time-travelling adventure began.^[47] The past had always been passed, but they will have to continue to grapple with its effects in their present and future, because the legacy of violence prevails. Dana’s altered body, her scar and empty sleeve, reinforce that they cannot ever fully move on and will always be impacted by their roots.

           Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s book, Touching Liberty, states that “The relation of the … ‘body politic’ to … embodied identities has generally been masked behind the constitutional language of abstracted and implicitly bodiless ‘persons.’”^[48] The constitutional language is so dehumanizing that The Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as less than whole humans in state populations, did not seem illogical, for “To fraction an abstract ‘person’ does not require amputations.”^[49] Butler’s literal amputation of her Black protagonist highlights the absurdity of past U.S. politics to fraction human beings. Kindred offers the critique that although progress has been made, still not all identities are seen as whole enough to be considered equally valuable persons. Slavery was abolished, but the systems it was part of were not.

           Such continued oppression can also be exemplified through the resulting symptoms Dana will likely experience due to her lost limb: phantom limb syndrome and phantom limb pain. Miller discusses these challenges facing amputees as “pain [that] continued long after the wound had healed … [or] in a part of the body that has been removed.”^[50] Like other amputees, Dana’s stump is likely to stump her by causing pain in the limb that is no longer physically there, pain which is not easily addressed. Phantom limb symptoms occur because the brain still has that lost part of the body mapped within it. Similarly, the systemic brain of society has biases related to oppressive practices still mapped within its foundations, and its phantom symptoms are more covert and difficult to address. Slavery is no longer physically in place, but racialized bodies still feel the effects engrained in U.S. sociopolitical systems. As Sánchez-Eppler puts it, “the human body has always served as an emblem for conceptions of the body politic. The bodily biases of the state are evident in the white male privilege that has pertained within American society.”^[51] White, male, able bodies are the blueprint these systems were created by and for. The resulting biases continue to exist.

           The decision to disable the already oppressed female Black body and juxtapose her against the image of Civil War veterans and patriarchal castration frames Kindred as a text that concerns multiple intersecting identities. Through lenses of gender, race, and disability, Butler reveals that the able-bodied white male’s power is built upon a violent legacy that still needs to be dismantled, and which is also precarious and unhealthy even to its white male able bodied participants, who exist under toxic expectations and scripts. Although progress has been made and continues to be made, the phantom pain persists, and its origins still require addressing.

           However, it is equally true that while Butler leaves Dana as physically less than whole, the novel does not end with Dana’s disabling castration. As Schalk points out, the novel ends with Dana, as a disabled woman, continuing on. The final scene depicts Dana as both “healed and disabled” simultaneously, and although Dana “has clearly been impacted by her experience of slavery … [she] continues on past the moment of disablement,” and she continues past the moment of castration.^[52] Puar writes that the body is “always bound up in the lived past of the body but always in passage to a changed future … not wedded to the dialectic of hope and hopelessness but rather a porous affirmation of what could or might be.”^[53] Dana’s time travelling collapses the distance between the roots of oppression and its contemporary effects, both revealing the longevity of oppression and the hopes for continued progression. The disablement in the novel stands as a castration of power, but the extension of Dana’s story beyond the moment of her bodily reduction is proof of that porous affirmation of what could be, simultaneously carrying the weight of history forward as we collectively learn from the past and grow toward a better, more equitable future. Even with the phantom symptoms of a racist, sexist, ablest home, Dana exists and carries on, signifying hope that we will continue to move away from the oppressive roots as we learn to face them.

Notes

Biography