Shifting Realities and Sowing the Seeds of a Better Future: Mestiza Consciousness and Conocimiento in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Year 2010, Issue: 31, 37 - 55, 01.04.2010

Ceylan Ertung

Abstract

Gloria Evagelina Anzaldúa and Octavia Estelle Butler were two extraordinary women whose exemplary lives and visionary work have been a source of life-changing inspiration for many people across cultures. Both writers through their work advocated the eradication of rigid hierarchical binaries that divided people/s on the basis of race, class, age and sexual orientation. As lesbian women of color and working-class feminists living in the dominantly white, heteronormative, patriarchal United States, both emphasized the need for, in Anzaldúa’s words, “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness . . . that would bring . . . the end of rape, of violence, of war” Borderlands 80 .

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