Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

"Bodyminds Reimagined is by disability studies scholar, Sami Schalk, who’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve admired her work for a long time and I’ve assigned a lot of her readings in classes that I’ve taught. As we talked about before, the big picture meaning of my book is this idea that we should be imagining different futures. Black feminist speculative fiction is where we can get some of the best and most hopeful ideas for what our future could be. I’ve been a fan of the Parable of the Sower for a really long time and Octavia Butler is one of the main authors that Sami works on in this book. We should be paying more attention to reading and learning from and lifting up the voices of Black feminist speculative fiction writers and folks like Professor Schalk, who are so brilliant in their analysis of this work. What’s so important about this is that it’s pushing back against the idea that we’re going to fix gender injustice or sexism by saying, ‘This group can now do everything this other group can do.’ What that often requires is making invisible what makes us different, or hiding or concealing things that might challenge us to exist in a world that wasn’t made for us. Schalk really insists that you can’t get rid of sexism by suppressing periods indefinitely and creating womb incubators. You can’t just take reproduction and put it away and that’s how you solve the problem. The future is going to be messy. The future is going to include real bodies. How are we going to manage that? We can’t just all sit in a cubicle and sip Soylent all day, as much as some tech bro in Silicon Valley might want that. The main one is Kindred by Octavia Butler and then Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry . She also does some work analyzing N.K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison and Nalo Hopkinson. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any N.K. Jemisin or Nalo Hopkinson but they’re amazing. A lot of what she does is show that disability is going to exist in the future. You can’t disappear ableism by just saying, ‘We’re going to have a medicine for that one day.’ A lot of these works reckon with, ‘What will it be like when these bodies actually have to manage?’ In some ways, you could read the main character’s experiences in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy that way. She has these powers, but she also has a disability associated with them. There’s a lot of mental strain associated with her powers. Certain children, if they’re very powerful when young, have a lot of mental strain that goes with it. She resists the idea that we can just fix things—that we can fix an oppressive system within our culture by erasing a difference. Which is a good segue to the next book."