"Orgies of Breeding and Dying": Unmapping the Politics of Death in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Abstract: This thesis investigates the relationship between necropolitics and spatiality in Octavia E. Butler’s critical dystopian science-fiction novel Parable of the Sower. In the novel, some groups of the population are marked for death, while others are marked for life. I argue that the novel reveals a particularly modern version of necropolitics that runs through not only the narrative, but also, in Butler’s view, the contemporary American society. Further, this thesis analyses the different spatialities in the novel and the bodies allowed or made to occupy them. Particular attention is paid to the gated communities, company towns, shopping malls, and unwalled residential areas and streets, arguing that in the novel intersections of race, class, and gender affect one’s proximity to death. The thesis also explores the nomadic expansion of space and the blurring of the boundaries between survival and homicide, terror and freedom in the novel.