How we were never autonomous: Reproduction, disability, and interdependence in Lilith’s Brood

This essay is about the dynamic tension between reproduction, autonomy, and (dis)ability in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. In conversation with theorists and critics of Afrofuturism who argue that technology often brings the hope of a release from the violences of the past, while having the effect only of altering the ways in which those violences function, Butler asks us how to create a future in which the Human Conflict—hierarchy and intelligence—does not structure our world, in which, for example, anti-Blackness does not scaffold our ways of living, loving, and reproducing. Lilith’s Brood seeks, in other words, to break the chain of the “more of the same.” In Lilith’s Brood, this project involves the always unfinished project of opening up, and being open to, the possibility of interdependence and to the terrifying thrill of difference—“dangerous and frightening and intriguing.” However, as the seed’s “tiny positioning movements of independent life” at the end of the trilogy indicates, this is not an endpoint, but rather a horizon, an always unfinished and always difficult project. Butler’s speculative world charts the irresolvably ambivalent tension between autonomy (humans wanting their own Akjai colony, wanting to reproduce on their own) and interdependence (Oankali reproducing with numerous mates, birthing and raising children with the whole community), between having ones own body and sharing worlds with others, between the “more of the same” and the “always already.” While honoring struggles for autonomy (and documenting not only the pleasures, but also the terrors, of interdependence), Butler uses the framework of a “new” world and an “alien” species biologically impelled to be interdependent in order to show what was always already true: we are not autonomous, we have never been autonomous

Expanding Opportunity Structures: Parental Investments in Education, Migration, and Extrinsic Risk Reduction among Indo-Fijians

Parental investment strategies are contingent on parental capacities and ecology. Parental embodied capital may be important in aspiration construction and investments in children’s human capital, which is especially important in urban environments where skills are directly tied to wage income. For Indo-Fijians, rural ecology strongly limits opportunities. Here this limitation is conceptualized as extrinsic risk and immune to reduction through enhanced parental investment. Urban migration is interpreted as a risk reduction strategy, given an expanded urban opportunity structure (lower extrinsic risk). Qualitative and quantitative data from 678 Indo-Fijian children suggest that, contingent on parental capacities, parents migrate in response to their perceptions of decreased opportunities that manifest as high levels of extrinsic risk in rural environments. Parental investment in quality and quantity corresponds to parental perceptions of extrinsic risk, which in turn correspond to migration status, indicating that parental strategies do respond to perceived limits on investment payoffs

Urbanization and Daughter-Biased Parental Investment in Fiji

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but not boys. This pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization

Discovery of a Magnetic DZ White Dwarf with Zeeman-Split Lines of Heavy Elements

A spectroscopic survey of previously-unstudied Luyten Half Second proper motion stars has resulted in the discoveries of two new cool magnetic white dwarfs. One (LHS 2273) is a routine DA star, T= 6,500K, with Zeeman-split H alpha and H beta, for which a simple model suggests a polar field strength of 18.5 MG viewed close to equator-on. However, the white dwarf LHS 2534 proves to be the first magnetic DZ showing Zeeman-split Na I and Mg I components, as well as Ca I and Ca II lines for which Zeeman components are blended. The Na I splittings result in a mean surface field strength estimate of 1.92 MG. Apart from the magnetic field, LHS 2534 is one of the most heavily-blanketed and coolest DZ white dwarfs at T ~ 6,000K.Comment: 7 pages, Astrophysical Journal (Letters), in pres