Becoming Other than Ourselves: Difference and Hybridity in Species and the Xenogenesis Trilogy

Abstract

This essay explores the way interspecies breeding is used to represent our fear of difference in the film Species and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. The real object of horror in Species is not the alien but the hybrid; Sil is a hybrid creature produced by combining alien and human DNA, and her genetic programming drives her to mate with a human male. The film reflects male fear of female sexuality (explicitly described as "predatory"), but is ambiguous about whether her predatory sex drive is produced by her alien or her human genes. Along with the film's explicit sexual politics, there is an implicit racial politics; difference must be maintained, because without a clearly defined other we cannot define ourselves. The Xenogenesis trilogy, on the other hand, depicts the gradual evolution of human beings into something "other than you were," and argues that our survival as a species depends on learning to embrace difference. The protagonists of the three novels are increasingly hybrid creatures, and Butler asks us to accept the strange as familiar, going from Lilith's experience of "xenophobia" to Akin's human/Oankali duality to Jodahs' (literally) polymorphous sexuality. In Imago, human inbreeding leads to deformity, while Jodahs' hybridity (human/Oankali, male/female) makes it beautiful; our fear of difference is our fatal "Human Contradiction," which we must overcome by becoming something other than ourselves.