Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

The importance of Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower continues to crystalize, as Butler’s prescient imagining of urban California torn apart by neoliberal divestment comes to fruition. Following in the space opened up by Black feminist scholarship on Butler, the present essay examines her relevance beyond literary and cultural studies. I argue that Parable is a Black feminist crip theorization of political economy that diagnoses the disabling conditions of precarity under neoliberalism and also prescribes collectivity for crip and mad survival. Neoliberalism describes a global stage of advanced capitalism wherein governments are both incentivized and disciplined into enforcing economic policies that include privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. As Jodi Melamed defines it, neoliberalism requires a certain kind of political governance, that puts the interests of business over the well-being of people (2011). Neoliberal governance engenders what I call “disabling contradictions,” yet the blame for conditions of precarity is deflected onto bodyminds themselves. In Parable of the Sower, Butler theorizes these disabling contradictions of neoliberal governance under advanced capitalism, drawing into focus the political economic systems that cause suffering. Parable also depicts strategies for crip and mad survival that are made possible through the conscious creation of community and networks of solidarity that counter the neoliberal state’s devaluation of bodyminds. Gathering to read and discuss the novel, rather than a distraction from the crises, furthers the emergence of crip and mad collectivities. As such, it is an urgent and timely practice for building futures for crip and mad people.

The metaphor of the Vitruvian nurse

Nursing and the crisis of care has become a metaphor for the end of the Anthropocene; ageing populations and global pandemics highlight the fundamental place of care and nursing across the world (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Yet, when it comes to living and working as a nurse, the policies that guide them are restricted to reproducing narrow definitions of what it is to be human (Haraway, 2016). We argue that paradigms of care create idealized patients (Smith and Willis, 2020) and ‘Vitruvian’ nurses using metaphors as modes of regulation. We argue with the concept of the Vitruvian man (Braidotti, 2013) to create the concept of the Vitruvian nurse. As the Vitruvian man is a version of the ideal human, the Vitruvian nurse is established as an axiomatic mechanism to govern care. We argue that this is misogynistic and reproduces restrictive power relations. The metaphor of the Vitruvian nurse is a uniformed woman who goes out of her way to attend to everyone's needs in an unconditional and subservient way where her self-value correlates with her ability to serve others at the detriment of herself. The Vitruvian nurse is achieved when she ceases to exist as a subjective entity, therefore becoming an impossibility. Contemporary nursing systems that maintain ideas such as Florence Nightingale are colonial (Wytenbroek and Vandenberg, 2017), patriarchal and reproduce knowledge production systems which we find troubling i.e. the white European male mutates into the white European female nurse, and is the perfect nurse. This completely unachievable metaphor becomes a mechanism of control and leads to feelings of isolation, boredom and burnout, which again is a metaphor for the epoch advanced capitalism that we live in. Feminine histories are overwritten to create care as a branded commodity. This metaphor is built on assumptions of the liminal human as an individual not a dividual, the individualistic (and neo-liberal) nature of patient centered care and that the care described in nursing codes of practice reveres the ‘autonomous’ practitioner over the material-discursive practices of care. Therefore, an irrefutable future is predetermined by the narrow philosophies of humanistic science - the human as a bound individual is privileged above everything. If we recognize the metaphors of the Vitruvian, and of boredom and burnout - in the times of the posthuman convergence - then what are the affirmative futures that we can produce?