ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Octavia E. Butler, a feminist thinker, who is an award-winning speculative fiction writer whose feminism is rooted in her working class origins. Butler redefined what feminism and heroism look like through her characters. Butler is regarded as the mother of Afrofuturism, and the most widely recognized and honored black female science fiction writer in history, a distinction that remains nearly a decade after her sudden death. She was awarded the Hugo and Nebula awards, the highest honors in the genre of science fiction, and was the only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. The ooloi represent Butler's thematic penchant for rejecting binary oppositions generally while specifically rejecting the male/female, heterosexual/homosexual binaries, problematizing the primacy of hetero-patriarchal masculinity. In particular, members of social justice movements can look to Butler's work as models for sustainable communities rather than exhausting individual health and emotional resources in the process of advocating for a better world.
