Deconstructing

the historical discourses on the black

female body in Kindred

Luana de Souza Queiroz de Carvalho

Matriculation Nr. 35838
luanacqueiroz@gmail.com
Facts of Fiction
Prof. Ilka Saal
University of Erfurt
SS 2014

8th September 2014

Table of contents:
1.Introduction..........................................................................................
..........................2
2.Neo-slave

narratives

and

historical

discourse............................................................4
3.Body, text and history in
Kindred..................................................................................7
4.The

body

as

text...........................................................................................................
..10
5.Body

and

mind.........................................................................................................
......15
6.Representations

of

the

African

American

female

body...........................................17
7.The

dismembered

body................................................................................................20
8.The

deconstruction

of

the

myth

of

wholeness.........................................................23
9.Conclusion............................................................................................
..........................25
10.Works
cited.........................................................................................................
..........27

1-Introduction
Octavia Butler's novel Kindred is a rich mix of genres that defies the boundaries between
fantasy and historical novel. Kindred is, as Christine Levecq describes it, a novel of fantasy
and time travel, a well-documented historical novel, a book of suspense and adventure (and) a
rewriting of the slave narrative(qtd. in Perdigao 107).
It is a slave narrative rewriting with the particularity of rewriting history on a body,
generating what Dubey calls an embodied history. In Kindred boundaries of time and space,
gender and race as well as of narrative linearity are stretched out while the protagonist Dana
wanders back and forth through the different contextual realities of Los angeles in 1976 and
Maryland of the 19th century. She experiences directly on her body that which firstly could
only be read about in historical records and which escaped the interest or the factual scope
that constitute these records: the slaves' perspective and their physically charged experiences
in slavery.
What is made accessible in Butler's novel is a re-interpretation of the relation between
history, text and the body. She displays in Kindred a subjective and corporeal approach to
remembrance and for relating to history writing, by writing on Dana's body as a historical
2

text. Her body becomes this distinguished mode for acquiring knowledge about the
antebellum south and the degrading reality of slavery and for exposing and deconstructing the
historical discourse surrounding the female black body.
Firstly, exploring bodily experiences enables revealing another layer of knowledge about
the past which falls out from historical evidencing and history's precepts of detachment and
objectivity. Kindred reveals this other and so far rejected layer of historical knowledge, the
experience of being a slave and all the perceptions involved in the process of creating black
subjectivity under the extreme conditions of exploitation, repression and objectification.
Through the trope of the body, showing it's pain and scars of the slavery past, Butler
manages to bring up an unheard perspective on slavery while rejecting the prevalent historical
discourse, a historical narrative by a literate white society which stands outside and socially
contrary to the perspective of African Americans.
Secondly, to enable a closer analysis of the historically built discourse on the black
female body, Dana's body becomes the central object of this study. By focusing on Dana's
body and the treatment and values attributed to it, Butler enables an analysis and
deconstruction of the normative historical discourse over the black female body that still lies
underneath the apparently achieved improvements through feminist and civil rights
movements.
Regarding the considerations made above, the novel's approach to history and female
black representation presented and deconstructed in Kindred through the trope of the body
will be analyzed both relating it to the concept of an embodied history (M. Dubey) in its
direct relations (links and opposition) to the tropes of history and text, and enquiring the
particular representation of the female enslaved body in the novel and its determining role in
the creation of African American female subjectivity, to understand what Butler achieves in
the tensional relation of historiography and African American literature.

((Dana (re)presents the body of African American women in the contemporaneity that
carries within it the past. This character's relation to her body and observation of other bodies'
realities reveals the difficulties of African American female assertion over their own
corporeality, or better put, the impossibility of a complete assertion due to cultural discourses
that constructed the imaginary of the black female body.
This (impossibility of) assertion is directly related to physical losses and a manipulated
perception of the black body since the violence and abuse of their slavery past, in the form of
physical or sexual abuse, physical disability or death. These were common episodes of
physical violence that masters inflicted in slaves' lives, intended to reduce them to a body in
pain, and an objectified body. Dea H. Boster on her studies in Slavery and Disability writes
that by attributing labels of 'defective' or 'disabled' to racial Others, (Douglas) Bayton argues,
concepts of disability have been used to represent and/or justify the oppression of entire
groups of people (21).
These episodes and the reduction of black female subjectivity to a corporeal identity, as
shown in Kindred, were supported by a white masculine hegemonic perspective, the same
that inscribes which events are relevant as facts of history. Kindred incites the questioning of
the cultural constructions surrounding African American female bodies as well as of the
construction of historical discourses about the slavery past.))
In this way, this paper aims to analyze how Dana's body is turned by Butler into a female
African American historical text. It examines the relations Kindred establishes between body,
text and history and defends the reading of Butler's work as a deconstruction of the cultural
and historical discourse on the black female body.

2- Neo-slave narratives and historical discourses

A precise genre classification of Kindred remains, as mentioned, multiple and
flexible once the novel reveals material of magical and fantastical nature circulated by very

realistic and plausible elements (verossimilitude) situated on historical background.

Nonetheless, these predominant magical and fantastical elements available are responsible for
the common labeling of Kindred as a magical realist and speculative fictive narrative.
Besides the appearance of unlikely and unexplainable magical elements like the device of
time travel in the case of Kindred, another characteristic of these literary genres is that they
are mainly written by groups considered of marginal social origin. It is possible to reinforce
this affirmative by recognizing the doubly marginalized position of Butler as both a woman
and African American.
The magical aspects presented in these novels work as a systematical escape or more
likely denial of reality, building a new fantastic world order and so refuting consisting aspects
of our world and its hierarchies, besides awakening the awareness towards open possibilities
for change.
As magical realism and speculative fiction help build a subliminal critic of hegemonic
world hierarchies Kindred presents, as Butler herself in her doubly marginalized position, a
double criticism towards hegemony. Not only does it criticize the present reality from the
perspective of African American women but it also criticizes, through its fantastical approach
through time travel, the construction process of historical discourses.
Quoting Walther Mosley, Madhu Dubey suggests that African American authors of
speculative fiction have a distinctive deconstructive relation to history, fighting the lack of
recognition as historical agents they have faced since slavery:
(S)cience fiction and its relatives, including fantasy and speculative
fiction, 'have been a main artery for recasting our imagination' and
consequently resonate most strongly with those who 'are dissatisfied with the
way things are'. People of African descent should have a special stake in these
genres, Mosley says, because they 'have been cut off from their African

ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being

excluded from history (Mosley qtd. in Dubey 1).
Facing historical exclusion, or better said historiographical exclusion, many authors of
neo-slave narratives such as Butler engage in rewriting the slavery past by incorporating
magical elements and a subjective and corporeal mode of narrative, in their attempt to deny
the prevailing version of their slave past dictated by white male perspective. Butler rejects
from her doubly marginalized standpoint this prevailing white masculine perspective that
constitutes what we understand as history as she presents an account of history writing on the
body of a black woman, Kindred's protagonist Dana.
After the historical testimonies of freed slaves had achieved recognition by public
opinion as historical evidence, historical records still fail to incorporate the meaning of their
experiences, both historically and for present reality, as their perspective on oppression and
abuse remains ignored as relevant historical data.
Dea H. Boster's analysis on the relation of history to physical abuse and disability in
slavery points out for instance that although some historians have mentioned disability in
discussions of slave health or the effects of brutal treatment at the hand of masters (), few
have examined constructions of disability in antebellum slave society and that, although
historical records contain marks of slave disability, the meanings of these marks, however,
are far more complex than they appear in the surface (Boster 2).
Even after the Civil Rights Movement arose and African Americans have achieved legal
rights equal to white citizens, the situation of race based social inequality persists, pointing to
the continuance of the effects of slavery in contemporary social relations. In this present
context of attained recognition for past injustices and of present dissatisfaction with the
unceasing repetition of past discriminatory patterns, many African American authors have
turned thematically to the origins of their situation of social inequality, the slavery past, as an

effort to rewrite it and to allow one to know the past as something more or other than
history (Dubey 780).
Differently from the documentary realism of slave narratives, with testimonies of former
slaves and their concern on attesting authenticity to assert historical importance, magical
realist neo-slave narratives like Kindred display a main concern on remaking the past,
recurring to fantastic and unrealistic elements to symbolize a correction in the historical
approach of the dominant discourses and a creation of their own historical discourse as a
newly arising ethnic historiographic power (Morrison qtd. in Dubey 783). The
contemporary African American author Sherley Anne Williams refers to this literary need for
historical correction when she admits rewriting the past because there was no place in the
American past (she) could go and be free (Dubey 784).
In fact, novels like Kindred wanted more than to become a new historiographic power,
they also intended to confront and question historiography's modes for creating knowledge
and the ruling conception of historiography as an indisputable custodian of the past, and to
support an alternative approach to history and the past.
In opposition to historiography's authority to delegate undoubtable coherence to the
constructed discourse over past happenings, strong critique has been made defending a more
subjective and corporeal approach towards history, as represented in Avery Gordon's and
Hershini Young's distinction of an embodied history. This concept stands for an approach to
history based on physical experience instead of historiography's approach to history based
solely on texts and claims of objectivity and detachment.
According to Maddhu Dubey, neo-slave narrative authors like Butler defend this
approach to historical knowledge as a closer and bodily based experience to learn the truth of
the past by feeling the reality of enslavement, as if ...one... had lived it (Dubey 785). History
is thus accessed through a literary mode that narrates the experiences of the body in the place
of historiography's supposedly objective and detached datas. When the reader is granted

access to Dana's physical pains and abuses, the writings on her body, he is granted access to
the writing of history and to historically constructed discourses over the female black body.

3- Body, text and history in Kindred

This focus on the body as a medium for historical knowledge, replacing the sole reliance
on (supposedly) objective historiographic texts is depicted as one of the lessons Kindred's
protagonist Dana learns in her experience in the antebellum south.
In the beginning of Butler's novel, Dana is trying to organize her book collection,
separating them in fiction and nonfiction in order to keep them in some kind of order
(Butler 12), a task she starts and can not finish because she gets pulled into the past through
time-travel. One can say that when Dana is pulled to the past, she becomes physically
restrained to achieve her aim of textual order between fiction and non-fiction (historical facts)
and so from creating a historical record based solely on texts. The historical record she will
accomplish in Kindred will become though a bodily based record.
In order to assure her freedom, she decides also to forge herself a certificate of freedom,
searching every one of her books that could have a picture of it but she finds nothing. After
Dana realized she can be called back by her ancestor Rufus to the 19 th century in Maryland
again and again, she also looks into every book she and her husband had on black history and
Maryland, including road maps, a large atlas and a encyclopedia, hoping that records and
historical knowledge could give her an advantage in surviving in the past. She decides to keep
with her a history book on slavery with maps and informations that could help and guide her
while in the Weylin's plantation. When taken back to the past, she notices the book will not
bring her any help, but indeed even more trouble if her master finds her reading and in
possession of books.
She realizes at last that she can only rely on others and on herself, on what they have
learned through their (physically charged) slave experience to survive. Butler exposes here a

drawn opposition between history and the body, in which historiographic texts must be clearly
rejected and substituted by a bodily experience, by a structure of feeling(Raymond William
qtd. in Dubey 785) to truly understand the past.
Experiencing the pains of slavery on her body, Dana learns to value the endurance that
slaves had to develop in order to survive. She realizes she wouldn't be able to put up with the
suffering of slavery as they did and recognizes their qualities and capability to go on
struggling to survive despite violence and physical abuse (Butler 246).
Dana moves from an spectator role, detached and analytical, to a more empathetic and
understanding perspective on slavery, while she attests the real difficulties slaves had to put
up with. Detachment and objectivity are rejected and replaced by accounts of physical
experiences and subjectivity for a better approach to the past.
Remembering and re-accessing this past is as well a process of the body, a time-traveling
body subjected to the physical pain of remembering. To remember how she had lost her arm,
Dana close(s her) eyes again remembering the way (she) had been hurt remembering the
pain (Butler 10 my emphasis).
If one interprets Dana's time travels also as a metaphor for the process of remembering,
the pain she feels every time she is subjected to these travels depicts remembering as a
strongly physical (and painful) experience. Dana's travels to the past are accompanied by
corporeal sensations of dizziness and nauseas, while her coming back to the present is
described as an even stronger bodily experience, the actual fear of death. Whenever Dana is
physically threatened; with a gun on her head, trying to escape a rape and being whipped (and
again under the threat of being raped), Dana has been able to return to the present, escaping
death but with psychological and physical scars.
Dana becomes a survivor of history, carrying to the present a trauma while a remaining
mark of the slavery past is made visible, or more likely feelable on her body. Butler
describes Dana's whipping by describing the physical feeling of being whipped:

I fell, knocked myself breathless...like a hot iron across my back, burning

into me through my light shirt, searing my skin...I screamed, I convulsed...I kept
trying to crawl away from the blows, but I didn't have the strength or the
coordination to get far. I may have been still screaming or just whimpering, I
couldn't tell. All I was really aware of was the pain...I vomited. And I vomited
again because I couldn't move my face away(107).
This and other episodes of physical violence have left her a scar, a pain that she carries
back with her to 1976. For Ashraf Rushdy, Butler (...) is writing a kind of genealogy in
Kindred (and) literally represents history (or remembrance of the past) in the process of
destroying a body (Rushdy 139). Quoting Foucault's definition of genealogy's task as to
expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of this
body (qtd. in Rushdy 139), Rushdy notes that this process of destroying and marking Dana's
body turns this body into solid historical evidence in Kindred, replacing textual historical
records in the task of delineating historical facts.
Rushdy borrows Ellison's concept of the unwritten history to characterize the status of
African American history within American history, what Ellison describes as the alter-ego of
our recorded history (138). The relevance of such unwritten history is also exposed in
Kindred when Dana tries to find out what happened to the slaves she met in the Weylin's
plantation and she comes to the conclusion that their story remains unwritten. Besides the
information on Rufus' death, all Dana could find in the historical records in Maryland was a
notice of sale with the first names and approximate age and skills (Butler 262) of the Weylin's
slaves, while their treatment and destinies had been rejected as relevant historical information.
All Dana can rely on as a historical fact is her memory and the scars of physical violence
she carries. When confronted by the fact that she has found no records (and) will probably
never know what happened to her relatives (Hagar and ...), Dana touches the scar Tom
Weylin's boot had left on (her) face, touched (her) empty left sleeve(Butler 264), the only

10

available and reliable material evidence of the past. Once again, remembering is also related
to the body.
That 'unwritten history' is revived at a cost, () (f)or Dana, the retrieving of the past in
an act of what Ellison calls 'historical memory' costs her an arm amongst other things
(Rushdy 138). Besides losing her arm in between times, Dana experiences acts of physical
violence with each of her masters. Mr. Weylin's whippes her unconscious, she loses two teeth
on the right side of the mouth (174) when kicked on the face by Rufus and is slapped on the
face by Mrs. Weylin (93), suffering the same acts of violence and abuse that marked the body
and the psyche of slaves.
Another possible relation in Kindred between history and the body is a very critical
perspective the novel offers to approach the past. Dana's body experiences are directly related
to her condition as an African American and a woman, both conditions derived from corporeal
determinants, gender and race, that delineate the hegemonic discourse of history.
The elaboration of Kindred from this chosen perspective (Dana's) presents us a direct
questioning of a normative historical discourse, discarding minorities' perspectives, and
surfaces the importance of searching in historical discourses for the presence of subjective and
corporeal determinants instead of adopting unquestionable claims of objectivity and
detachment. The hegemonic perspective from the position of white masculinity can not be
seen as objective and representative of historical truth as if it were a perspective detached
from political interests.

4- The body as text

In the beginning of the novel Dana's disabled body is depicted followed by the narrative
of how the initially whole body becomes a disabled one. The narrative itself is cut and
retrieved at a previous point when Dana was still unharmed and whole in 1976 and then
Kindred reproduces the systematic destruction of her body in the past until the final act of arm

11

amputation. According to Alicia Selitti, this interrupted narrative linearity stands

metaphorically for a mode of subversion, employing it to rupture the boundaries of black
female normativity (Selitti 10).
Just as Kindred presents the context of dismemberment, it also presents the form of
dismemberment at a textual level, in which the narrative linearity is abruptly and forcedly cut
through time travel. The dominant historical discourse over the black female body becomes
interrupted and deconstructed at two textual levels; the textual content (through the trope of
the dismembered body) and textual form (through the interrupted time linearity and narrative
linearity), presenting metaphorical and textual dismemberment.
Chronological happenings become dismembered from each other as spacial and
temporal notions are restructured, defying the construction of history and textual linearity.
What the reader perceives is an amputated narrative, of separate (textual) body parts, being
re-membered into a new construction of history. These textual cuts or narrative amputation
acts and the inversion of narrative linearity leading back to the scene of Dana's
dismemberment has the purpose of exposing the construction of black female bodies as
culturally disabled (Selitti 10), as a body dismembered by historical and cultural discourse.
As Lisa Perdigao relates, a tension between the materiality of the body and the
incongruity in the discourse of bodily representations has been an ongoing thematic in 20 th
century and contemporary literature theory and linguistic discussions, since poststructuralist
Jacques Derrida's assertion that there is nothing outside the text has raised up questions, such
as where are the limits of the body metaphor and what does it mean to interpret the body as
text.
Many critics have developed a growing distrust of language's ability to represent, a
critical concern involving the possibilities and limitations of language discursivity and the
problematic of signifying the materiality of the body, once acknowledged that material
identity is bound up with signification (text) from the start (Perdigao n3,4).

12

Perdigao defends in her study the idea that bodies can and even should be read as texts,
since they work as signs. She defends this perception in Kindred with the reading of Dana's
body where Butler transforms Dana's bodily experiences into text and translates the nonnarratable into narratability(106).
For Perdigao, Kindred's opening scene with Dana's dismembered body destabilizes the
narrative by inducing an impossibility of metaphorizing and signifying the body. What is left
in the narrative is an incomplete body, a body in pieces and (if even) a collapsed metaphor
(106). After waking up in the hospital, Dana feels a strange throbbing of (her) arm, (o)f
where (her) arm had been (...and) tried to look at the empty space...the stump(Butler 10).
Exactly this ellipsis between the empty space and the stump is the site where Dana can work
against the metaphoric transformation of the body (Perdigao 106).
Aiming to assert the wholeness of her body, Dana tries to feel and look at her wound and
can only read its absence. Perdigao elaborates that this marking of violence in her body
cannot be transformed into a metaphor for the arm itself (and the desire for metaphor) is
gone(106). In this excerpt of Kindred Butler achieves, through the impossibility of reading
Dana's unwhole body as a metaphorized text, the deconstruction of the metaphoric reading of
the body as a sign and consequently, in a cultural perspective, the deconstruction of the
historically imposed reading of the African American female body.
Rushdy points out that Kindred begins with a Prologue about losses (an arm, about
one year and much of the comfort and security) and ends with an Epilogue about partial
recovery. For him, the rest of the novel is the recovery of a coherent story explaining Dana's
various losses. () For (Dana and her husband) to understand their recent experience of loss
and their present condition as historicized beings, both () require a return to the past in the
form of a narrative (Rushdy 137) and this return to the past that gives account of her bodily
experiences and of her process of history writing becomes Kindred.

13

As Dana longs for the member she has lost and in her attempt to piece her body together
again (Perdigao 106), to re-member her lost arm, she engages in the process of
remembrance. She begins working through her loss by going back to the point in the story
when her body was still whole and present. Paradoxically, while attempting a re-membering
of her arm through memory (remembrance) the narrative narrows itself slowly until the scene
of amputation, of inevitable dismemberment.
According to Rushdy, like other neoslave narratives, Kindred draws a relation between
dismembering and remembrance, in which the slave body's with its scarification becomes a
site of historical interpretation and a symbol of how recovering the past involves losing a
grip on the present (Rushdy 138).
Although through writing one can work through their experiences as Dana tried six
times before (she) gave up and threw them all away(116), writing is also trying to locate the
mark that stays in the body and in the text, a violating process and a confrontation with
the theoretical impossibility of the drive to reveal (Perdigao 79). The trope of
dismemberment, as textual content and textual form, serves for Perdigao metaphorically to
make explicit also the violence intrinsic in writing.
In Kindred the violent process of writing could be seen in Dana's attempts of writing
about her experience in order to organize and materialize her feelings, giving them a body of
their own, while committing a violent act of dismembering these feelings from herself. By
then destroying what she writes, she turns also her writings into rejected bodies; or even
seeing it as a process of exorcizing these feelings, she gives them a body and turns them
into abjects, into dead and sacrificed bodies. Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say
them, I couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled up inside me. It
was the kind of writing I always destroyed afterward (Butler 252).
The incongruence between the bodily experience and the textual representation, as in
slave testimonies, represent another problematic relation between the body and the text and

14

become especially relevant in attempting to achieve what Gordon and Young call a embodied
history (qtd. in Dubey 785). Although history is never a disembodied experience, as
Rushdy writes it, the transposition of a bodily experience into a text already incurs a loss, as
the written word is placed at a remove from the body, concentrating its attention on
sensations of the mind unbound to the material corpus () (as) traditional forms of text are
resistant media to bodily experience (Selitti 33).
Selitti refers to Michelle Erica Green's assumption that Dana's body is her magnum opus,
because Butler literally engraves the past onto the present by engraving Dana's body as a
readable text (qtd. in Selitti 35). Her multilated body becomes a slave narrative on its own.
Regarding this incapacity of written texts to convey bodily experiences, Alicia Selitti suggests
the reading of Dana's body as Dana's text in Kindred, although the paradox of a textualization
of her bodily experiences continues to exist in the reader's reception of those experiences, as
Kindred remains itself a written text.
This paradox may seem less disturbing, if one considers the possible interpretation of
Kindred as a text about the writing of Dana's historical text/body. Dana's enslaved black
female body constitutes the instance where brutal experiences of slavery are written as a
historical record and made accessible in her present time, 1976, while Kindred becomes the
text on a process of bodily/history writing. One could see Butler's work it as a making-of of
the main text, the report of the writing of embodied history, of Dana's dismembered black
female body.
As already mentioned, once Dana could not find records on the destiny of Weylin's
slaves (264), she feels the need to touch the marks on her body, bodily writings, in an as
Hertz's says body-as-text metaphor( qtd. in Perdigao 79). By touching the writings on her
body, she reassures herself again of the factuality of her memories. Dana is in this sense not
only a historian, as Dubey defines her, but she becomes memory, and history herself, with an
enslaved black female body as her own text on history.

15

5- Body and mind

To think the relation of text and body, one can translate to that of mind and body
dichotomy, an especially problematic topic when thinking existing discourses on slave
subjectivity. The value of the objectified slave for his owner was based solely on his bodily
aptitudes. A male slave should show strength and fastness in the field work and ability to
handle any other physical labor designated to him, while a female slave was expected
alongside to be fertile, providing her master more labor force and promising profits in the
slave market. The reduction of slave identity to their body reflects his objectivization as a
labor tool and profitable (re)producer.
In slavery, while the body had a strong importance for stipulating the value and price of a
slave, his mental functions were subdued and discredited. Slaves were considered less capable
of proper reasoning, less intelligent than whites and sometimes even thought as an
intermediate category between humans and animals. When talking about his father's whip,
Rufus states it is the kind he whips niggers and horses with (26), revealing inhuman
treatment designated for black people.
To support and justify this demeaned picture, they were discouraged and actually
threatened of corporeal punishment if caught trying to develop mental functions. Reading and
writing were forbidden activities, that in the eyes of slave holders kept slaves away from their
productive purposes of existence, meaning physical labor, to increase their master's property
and guarantee him a comfortable privileged life while ruling theirs.
Those two activities were specially denied to them, both because in this time they could
be occupied with another activity that his master considered more appropriate and profitable
and because the flow of liberal ideas they could engage in was considered a menace to the
proper functioning of the plantation. As the slave boy Luke says that Mr. Weylin don't want
no niggers 'round here talking better than him, putting freedom ideas in our heads(Butler ?).

16

The solely physical and automatized occupations of slaves could then be substituted by
thinking, a dangerous activity for its freeing and physically counterproductive aspects; besides
the fact that slaves could theoretically write their own free papers. In this sense is literacy
directly opposed to slavery, in the master's eyes a misappropriation of productive time which
enabled and freed slave bodies instead of subduing and controlling them.
The slaves' desire to attain literacy equals directly their desire to acquire a better social
position. Or, as Selitti puts it, literacy meant to attain bodily freedom, as the desire for one
necessarily translated in the desire for the other (30). When Dana gets caught by Mr. Weylin
trying to teach Nigel to read in the kitchen, she is immediately accused of stealing. 'I treated
you good,' said Weylin quietly, and you pay me back by stealing from me! Stealing my
books! Reading!(Butler 106). Dana is subjected then to a brutal punitive whipping that
attempted to reduce her to being a mere body by making her feel her its pain. (p.105-107).
The accusation has a second possible reading, taking away his property (book) from
where it belonged but also considering an emphasis on the last word, reading, as being this
the worst assault she commits. Stealing becomes, as Selitti suggests it, stealing Weylin's
productive time and profit by not working and keeping another slave from working.
Although the main focus of this paper for thematizing the enslaved black female body is
set on Dana, another episode in Kindred shows how physical punishment was applied to
slaves for the audacious desire of literacy. There was a woman on Weylin's plantation whose
former master had cut three fingers from her right hand when he caught her writing (Butler
191).
Dana's literacy and dominion of language sets her apart from other slaves, she is accused
by Nigel of talk(ing) like white folks(74) and by Alice called a Doctor-nigger (),
reading nigger! White nigger!(160). This distinction has an effect of acknowledgement and
rejection, both from white and black characters. Dana becomes something between blacks and

17

whites, her body couldn't deny her race while her skills could only belong to a white literate at
this time.
This cultural capability inverted certainly the power relations between white and black
representation and between Dana and the Weylins, and generated both interest and distrust
towards her, for she possessed a tool that no slave should have but Weylin could see that this
tool could be profitable.
Dana begins reading for Rufus and later writing his letters, once the boy had serious
difficulty in reading and even in spelling of his own name (Butler 27). Rufus is sure to
remind Dana that he is the master, giving her the orders to read, endangering so her safety, but
the notion of intellectual supremacy of whites over blacks is in this sense denied and reversed
in Kindred. Although still seen as property, actually a valuable (and dangerous) device, her
literacy makes Mr. Weylin want Dana to take Kevin's position as a teacher and be the one to
give Rufus' lessons, trusting her a task considered usually inappropriate for any slave.

6- Representations of the African American female body

Butler deconstructs not only the historically stipulated image of submission and
intellectual incapability of African Americans, but especially the image of black women.
Dana's aesthetical appearance was referred to many times as unfeminine, dressed like a man
(Butler 60,71,118). For her initial inability to do housework, when she had to learn everything
from Sarah, because you come in here not knowing how to do nothing (Butler 95), Dana
becomes, aside from a walking and talking anachronism (Dubey) and a walking and talking
hybrid of white and black, not reducible to a body, also an androgynous being, not feminine,
submissive or capable of housework enough for (black) female standards of the antebellum
past.
In order to develop an analysis of how Dana symbolizes deconstructing the black female
image, it is important first to briefly inquire the cultural construct of black femininity

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inherited from a diminished image created in slavery. The dominant discourse of male white
superiority implied to black femininity, by being it's direct opposite in gender and race, as
already said, a doubly marginalized position.
Physically able but culturally disabled, black women have been designated as a lascivious
and malicious sexual pole since slavery, an object of visual enjoyment and corporeal pleasure
for their masters, even forcedly. Rufus' fathers say he would have to whip (Alice) sick again
to get what he want(s)(161). Black women symbolized also a threat to their mistress'
religious and moral standards. When Mrs. Weylin finds out that Dana has been sleeping in
Kevin's room she condemns her of promiscuity and attacks her saying this is a Christian
house! (Butler 93).
For centuries the body has been the defining aspect of black femininity within cultural
imagination, trapping then in the position of sexual object and pre-justifying any abuse of
their bodies. Once the black enslaved body was an extra locus for the disembodied
universality of the white master (Hartman qtd. Selitti 26), so was the black female body
essentially an extension of her masters sexual desire and potency as well.
Besides being portrayed as a figure of sexual deviance, the prevailing image of black
women in the antebellum society was constructed following a mandate of productivity of
slavery and the female task of reproductivity. As both a productive and a reproductive device,
being a young and fertile looking female slave implicate(d) black women in an eternal cycle
of forced labor (Selitti 2). The same slave woman mentioned in Kindred ,who had lost 3
fingers for being caught reading, had a privileged treatment in Weylin's plantation for her high
fertility. She had a baby nearly every year, that woman. Nine so far, seven surviving. Weylin
called her a good breeder, and he never whipped her (Butler 192).
Regarded as a physically strong and resistant body, the female slave was destined to labor
and serve and still breed and nurture. This preconceived imagery has imposed in the black

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female body marks of prejudice and objectification and were also a ground for lacerating
violence, whippings and sexual abuse that have left profound scars until present generations.
Dana's character is a deconstruction of the conception of black women as strong sexual
and reproductive beings. Being already 26 years old and not having any children of her own
was something unimaginable in antebellum time. Mr. Weylin concludes that the only
explanation why Dana hasn't born any children so far is that she must be barren then (Butler
90). The concept of a hvpersexual, breeding and nurturing strong black female nature
continues to haunt the imagination evolving black womanhood, although the differences
contemplated between Dana's and Alice's relation to the body delineates the historical
progress for black women in gaining more autonomy and assertion over their body.
In 1976, Dana says her aunt accepted her marriage to a white man because any children
we have will be light. Lighter than I am, anyway. She always said I was a little too 'highly
visible'(Butler 111). This assertion relocates Dana to a position of a breeder, a reproductive
device for lighter children. It also reveals the underlying expectations Dana and other
contemporary black women have to bear, even within black community.
This progress is also questioned as Dana slowly fits more and more in the antebellum
reality and demands. Through Dana's experiences and the (to herself disturbing) easy
adaptation in the conditions of slavery, one can speculate how contemporary emancipatory
ideologies and the supposedly attained racial equality constitutes actually a superficially based
attest, while the deep reaching main concerns with the body, such as cultural equality and
disruption of sexual cliches still lay unchanged.
The physical similarities between Dana and Alice bring them closer and provide a
common ground for analyzing differences and similarities. Though differences in personality,
the recognized similarities seem to have a strong effect. Rufus says you are one woman(,)
you and her(,) one woman(,) two halves of a whole (Butler 257) and reinforces a feeling of
identification.

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When Alice is found dead, Dana analyzes for a while her dead body and once again
attests their physical similarities, metaphorically standing also for similarities that have
pervaded through the centuries. Her head was bare and her hair loose and short like mine.
She had never liked to tie it up the way other women did. It was one of the things that had
made us look even more alike the only two consistently bareheaded women on the
place(248).
The writings on the black female body are mainly depicted on Dana's body, but
considering her other half, as Rufus puts it, her ancestor Alice becomes also a text of how
slavery reduces a person to their body, dismembers this body to its parts and at last turns this
body into an abject, a dead body. She was born as a free woman and could never think about
becoming property and losing her freedom, but when she gets caught with a run away, her
husband, she is captured and bought by Rufus as a slave, to become his object of sexual
satisfaction. Alice's capture was so violent that it look(ed) like they just let the dogs chew on
her(Butler 148), again reducing a black female of their body by inducing physical pain.
As Rufus' slave, Alice is again reduced to her body, to a reproductive function, bearing
for Rufus two slave children, and to the sexual function of offering pleasure for her master.
Finally Alice turns to suicide as the only possibility for her to attain her freedom again,
escaping both the reduction to being an objectified and abused body and the pain of
dismemberment caused when her children were taken away from her.
African American female cultural identity can not be separated from its physical
attributions and cultural representations in the past. These representations since slavery have
dismembered their body in its parts and its utility for white men's interest, reducing it to
laboring and sexual body parts. They show a body that is not a culturally able body, but a
disabled body by historical discourse and a compound of abused body parts.
For this reason, authors such as Angelyn Mitchell consider Butler's work as a
bicentennial conversation with slavery, not only reveal(ing) inherent contradictions in

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American history but also forc(ing) the reader to consider the relation of the past in
constructing the future and challenging history in order to revise 19th century female
emancipatory narrative (Mitchell qtd in Selitti 14).

7- The dismembered body

In Dana's wandering through the boundaries of time, gender and race normativities,
Butler dismembers both the past and the black female body in order to rewrite the future
(Selitti 12). Dana confides her justified fear to her husband that she might wind up coming
home in pieces after her second time travel (Butler 51), a fear based on her experiences and
her readings of other slaves' bodies, disabled, tortured or dead.
Physical or sexual abuse, physical disability or death were common episodes of physical
violence that masters inflicted in slaves' lives, intended to reduce them to a body in pain, and
an objectified body. Dea H. Boster on her studies in Slavery and Disability writes that by
attributing labels of 'defective' or 'disabled' to racial Others, (Douglas) Bayton argues,
concepts of disability have been used to represent and/or justify the oppression of entire
groups of people (21).
Thinking more about the trope of disability in Kindred, the thematization of
dismemberment exposes not only the construction of a culturally disabled African American
female body but actually engenders this body in an attempt for cultural re-memberment of its
parts through an inverse relation to the trope of (metaphorical and textual) amputation. The
text is dismembered in its form, as already mentioned, and the dismembering of Dana's body
is narrated, while the process of historical dismemberment of black women in historical
discourse is revealed, enabling a re-appropriation of these parts as their own.
Referring to Lennard Davis' study on the black female body, Selitti suggests the
following critical reading of Dana's amputated arm concerning the cultural construction of the
body:

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The disability a black female body experiences manifests itself somewhat

differently from how it imposes itself upon other races and genders. () (F)or a
marginalized minority group like African American women, the physically
capable body is anything but free, for historically, able-bodiedness has only
consigned black women to perpetual exploitation. Suppose, however, that the
ideological schema entwining physical ability with cultural disability were
reversed; would physical disability confer cultural capability? (16)
Dana's amputated arm metaphorically stands in this interpretation for the acquiring of
cultural capability through physical disability. As she is brought back to the present by Butler,
Dana has lost her left arm, a disabling experience, especially for her occupation in the
temporary work in a warehouse, her former work as a secretary or as a helping tipper for her
husband's work. This physical disability keeps her from unwanted work though, disrupting the
entrapping productive role of the black female body.
What seems to be at first disabling becomes indirectly an enabling opportunity for
reasserting one's intellectual value in the dichotomy between mind and body and, especially
for a black woman, it is an opportunity for escaping the historical reduction that turned her
into a mere physical being. By showing Dana's arm amputated, Kindred completes the
deconstruction of black female normativity.
The fact that the amputated member trapped in the slavery past is an arm, an essential
tool for a writer, can be seen as a metaphor built to signify both the sacrifice involved in remembering the black female body in cultural and historical discourse, and the losses and
inflicted cultural disabilities that can not be undone or separated from the present African
American feminine cultural construction.
As confirmed by Butler's statement that she couldn't have let Dana return whole to the
present, because antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole (Butler 267), Dana's
arm trapped in the past may also symbolize the permanence of past losses and inflictions in

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the present black female subjectivity. Ruth Salvaggio has suggested, that the loss of Dana's
arm becomes () a kind of birthmark, the emblem of a disfigured heritage (Readers guide
Butler 266).
Another possible reading of the trope of dismembered body in Kindred can be seen in the
forced separation of family members, drawing reference to another female slave, Sarah,
whose children were all sold away from her but the one disabled. By denying Sarah her
maternal bounds, the Weylins intensify the bodily separations of birth by irrevocably tearing
her children away from her, dismembering the part of her identity as a mother. For a mother
whose role is denied, being torn apart from her children and family members and the brutality
of this psychological and physical pain makes this fatality comparable to an amputation,
following the same emptiness as in physical dismemberment.
Interesting is also the fact that disability is the factor that makes family union possible for
Carrie and Sarah. Because her daughter Carrie can't talk(, p)eople think she ain't got good
sense(Butler 76), and exactly this birth defect provides her the security of not being sold
away. This reinforces Selitti's suggestion of the cultural, in this case actually social, enabling
effects of physical disability for black women.

8- The deconstruction of the myth of wholeness

The notion of wholeness, psychic and corporeal wholeness in the process of creating
black subjectivity is a main question in (neo)slave narratives. Arlene Keizer writes that
neoslave narrratives show how one can change one's notion of identity by changing one's
relationship to these narratives, and, conversely, how certain aspects of narratives of slavery
can prove inescapable and profoundly determinative of subjectivity (164).
How to deal with the past of scattered subjectivities and families and the abused and
mutilated slave body in order to remember and re-member the amputated parts of this body
has been thematized by many critics. Barbara Christian, for instance, arguments that we are to

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recall the past, those parts we want to remember, those parts we want to forget in order to
achieve wholeness (qtd. in Rushdy 139).
Alicia Selitti questions the real attainability of wholeness for marginalized subjects. She
compellingly arguments that the basic understanding of wholeness is based on premises that
are actually only available for the dominant discourse, exactly the same discourse that
establishes these single premises as indispensable components for the concept of wholeness.
She criticizes this understanding as potentially counterproductive, falling into the
essentializing pattern set by the dominant discourse (Selitti 32,33).
What it really comes to in addressing the (im)possibility of black female wholeness is the
recognition of a myth of wholeness (Selitti 33), an unreachable set of standards to which
only white male subjects have access and which they have set as ideal to ensure their
permanence in power position.
Quoting Sayidia Hartman, Selitti defends the importance of redress(ing) the breach of
slavery, not to pursue the ideal of wholeness but to remember the pained body (qtd. in
Selitti 33) and to acknowledge the absence embedded in black female history (Selitti 33).
Even when Butler enables the re-appropriation of the dismembered parts as their own by
revealing the process of historical dismemberment of black women; the concept of achieving
wholeness, a body with no cracks and scars, is not attainable as the past is not reversible.
Butler enables the acknowledgement of absence in the black female subjectivity by
taking Dana back to the past and writing on her contemporary body the violence of the past.
Butler exposes this absence, by the empty space (Butler 10) where was her arm used to be.
Other scars of enslavement she carries under her skin, made invisible by the illusion history
renders that present and past are completely separated realities, surfaces in the narrative.
Butler exposes the impossibility of wholeness for contemporary black women because of
a past that didn't leave people quite whole as she refers to Dana's lost arm as an important
symbol that she couldn't let her come back whole (267 kindred readers guide). As

25

previously analyzed, Dana had to sacrifice her arm in Kindred in order to acquire coherent
historical identity revisiting the past and to detach herself from cultural discourse on African
American femininity. Rushdy writes that Butler explicits through this incident of amputation
the genuine physical danger of loss inherent to the quest of wholeness (139), being
wholeness in the case of Kindred directly related to reviving her past.
Two halves of a whole is also how Rufus describes the relationship between Alice and
Dana. This passage determines a whole as composed of two black female identities
chronologically unreconcilable as Butler points out an impossibility of wholeness for
contemporary black women. They can only 'glue' their dismembered parts together by
acknowledging breaches and bruises inflicted in the past to black female subjectivity.
Butler deconstructs the myth of wholeness at another level as well, by deconstructing
textual linearity. If one interprets metaphorically the ruptures inflicted to narrative
temporality, meaning the dismemberment of the text in parts through time-travel, Kindred can
be interpreted as the process of (con)textualizing the dismembered female black body. By
deconstructing the linearity of the text in Kindred, the deconstruction of the discourse
surrounding black femininity is again reinforced.

9- conclusion
Body and text acquire an equality of meaning and importance in Butler's work for
reassessing the slavery past and the origins of american cultural discourse over the black
female body. Despite many incongruences between the reading of a body in comparison to a
text reading, which at first seem to create an opposition than to point out to possible
similarities, since the first refers to processes of feeling and the second to mental processes of
signifying, or as analyzed in this paper, respectively to the mind and the body; Kindred shows
how a body can be read as a text, specifically said, an African American female
historiographical text.

26

On Dana's body one can read the writings of slavery that have a restraining and
demeaning effect on black female subjectivity and aimed to reduce them to the cultural image
of productive, reproductive and hypersexual beings. Suffering the threats and acts of violence
of slavery that generated and justified this image and the repetition of abusive treatment and
the diminishing accusations of lascivious behavior, Dana experiences the historical origins of
prejudices and injustices concerning the black body against which women have to fight until
present time.
Through these experiences, Dana becomes herself part of history as her body becomes
the only trustable and accessible historical evidence available to depict the African American
female perspective on the past in the novel. The historical records that Dana tried to make use
of can't offer her any new information to help her survive in the past or to attest that this past
really existed.
Only through her physical experiences, she can learn about the slavery past from the
perspective of slaves, and only the marks of violence on her body can verify the factuality and
truthfulness of this past. When Dana looks at the empty space where her arm used to be to
recall the authenticity of her memories, she accesses history through her body and engages in
an embodied history.
The trope of dismemberment both at a textual level as ruptures in the narrative linearity,
and in the plot when Dana's arm is amputated and left in the past, metaphorizes the
deconstruction of historical discourse. As presented here, Dana's body and qualities are in
many ways the place of deconstruction of the black female normativity in Kindred and the act
of dismemberment completes this metaphor. By allowing Dana to acknowledge the
dismemberment of her body, she can loosen herself from corporeal entrapment, the
historically constructed roles of black servitude and brings so visibility to the otherwise
underlying continuance of these roles nowadays.

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Dismemberment becomes also a metaphor for acknowledging the breaches in slavery

past and accepting a historically unwhole body. Symbolical wholeness is not a possible goal
for the marginalized black femininity, and this is symbolized in Kindred among other things
by Butler bringing Dana back to the present unwhole, denying any possibility of entrapment
in a quest for physical and cultural wholeness after precepts made socially unaccessible to
black women since slavery.
Concluding, in Kindred Butler creates a relation of semantic equality between official
historiography and ignored counterhistories through the African American female body.
Kindred gives account to alternative processes of approaching history and counterhistories
through the experiences of body. Butler contests in this sense historiographical discourses of
detachment and objectivity, especially in the context of slave history, makes clear the
permanences of discourses of the past in the present and through the trope of the dismembered
body metaphorizes the possible deconstruction of these dominant historical discourses that
have reduced African American women to objectified unwhole bodies, writing an embodied
African American female history.

4.Works Cited:
Boster, Dea H. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Porperty and Power in
the Antebellum South, 1800-1860.New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Print.
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
Dubey, Madhu. Speculative Fiction of Slavery. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of

Slavery. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Print.
Perdigao, Lisa K. From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation: Dead
Bodies in Twentieth-Century American Fiction.Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler's
Kindred. College English: Vol. 55, N. 2.(1993): 135-157. Web.
Selitti, Alicia Dawn. Re-membering the Normative black female body: A critical
investigation of race, gender and disability in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Toni Morrison's
Sula. Washington University: Georgetown University, 2005. Web.

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Hiermit versichere ich an Eides statt, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbststndig und ohne
fremde Hilfe verfasst und keine andere als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt
habe, alle Ausfhrungen, die anderen Schriften wrtlich oder sinngemss entnommen wurden,
gekennzeichnet sind und die Arbeit in gleicher oder hnlicher Form noch kein Bestandteil
einer Studien- oder Prfungsleistung war.

Luana de Souza Queiroz de Carvalho

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