Octavia E. Butler was undiagnosed with dyslexia. Teachers said she was ‘lazy and did not try hard enough.’.. She reframed the narrative of disability by believing herself to be a genius & highly capable and began to create richly speculative narratives to reimagine race, disability, and gender.
Katie Heffner is a PhD candidate in the School of History researching the social and cultural history of women in science fiction fandoms. Her work explores how women in science fiction communities articulated and fabulated science and technology in the early Cold War.
In the article linked below, Prof. Sami Schalk, PhD, uses evidence from Octavia Butler's personal papers, public interviews, and publications to position Butler as an author of disability literature due to her lived experiences, her research, and her writing. bsky.app/profile/prop...
Scholars such as Professors Therì Pickens, PhD and Sami Schalk,PhD, both disabled Black women in academia, have written extensively on Octavia Butler via the lens of race, gender, and disability. Therì Pickens, PhD: bsky.app/profile/prop...
"In all of Octavia Butler's work, she depicts the protagonist, usually a black woman, with physical or mental disability, or with chronic illness. Scholarship has been slow to discuss her work in terms that give full voice to the intersection of race, gender, and disability." - THERÍ A. PICKENS 1/
THERÍ A. PICKENS, Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel, Hypatia, Vol. 30, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies (WINTER 2015), pp. 167-180
She *was* a genius, too.