Prof. Kristie Dotson is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Dotson specializes in epistemology, metaphilosophy, and feminist philosophy (particularly, women of color and Black feminisms). Specifically, her works on how knowledge-related concerns play a role in maintaining and obscuring oppression. She has published numerous journal articles in political epistemology, Black feminist philosophy, and metaphilosophy.

 

Abstract: One of Octavia Butler’s common sites of exploration concerned the impact of parenting on her main characters. In her non-fiction and interviews, she appeared to locate child-rearing as a part of life with great potential for transformed futures. From a perspective of intergenerational survival that hope seems perfectly reasonable. In this letter to Butler, I put the goal of intergenerational survival into question as an existential mandate by querying its relationship to gestative capture. Gestative capture, here, refers to the ready capacity to reduce an existent to immanence via their abilities to gestate “human” or “human-like” progeny. The conversation this letter stages with Butler and her work, which is only possible because of how clearly Butler understood gestative capture and how much she built it into her stories, asks the questions: What is “transcendence” for Black women who can bear children? How ought we imagine intergenerational survival? And when, if ever, should we put down “survival at all costs” 

commitments?