“Something Beyond Pain”: Race, Gender, and Hyperempathy in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Abstract

In Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler describes a heightened form of empathy—a hyperempathy—an involuntary, inescapable, and overwhelming wave of empathy amplified to the level of physical experience. The narrative follows Lauren Oya Olamina as her hyperempathy develops from a shameful impairment to an asset that engenders a new and growing community. As an interactional and intra-actional identification, hyperempathy is grounded in a radically relational understanding of subjectivity. As such it initiates a slow and careful dismantling of the humanist subject that is based on the imperative of individualism. This article traces the steps involved in reconceptualizing subjectivity under the auspices of relationality and argues that Butler’s text proposes a distinctive ethics, offering not only a fictional form of relating to the Other but revising the concept of empathy altogether. Distinctly incorporating an emplacement of race and gender, Butler’s text can inform more recent feminist reconsiderations of empathy in relational-cultural theory. Finally, the article argues that Butler’s revision of empathy raises questions regarding deficits and failures in the shared or collective consciousness and demonstrates how speculative fiction can address the violence of liberal conceptions of the human under racial capitalism.