“We’re Never Trapped by Power”: A Plurality of Feminist Resistance in Octavia Butler’s Dawn

Abstract

Women writers use the feminist dystopian genre as a way to resist gender-based oppression in complex ways. To do so, women writers must first construct bleak worlds that subjugate their female characters before they can craft ways for these characters to resist. This article specifically examines Octavia Butler’s novel, Dawn, because the central female character finds ways to resist through working within the system in order to work against it. Even though she cannot overthrow the government or escape, she exercises substantial resistance through her body, voice, and intelligence. Butler ultimately demonstrates that women are able to resist from the margins in complex ways, which prompts real-world women readers to fight and resist gender-based oppression in their own societies.