Abstract

Simon de Beauvoir declared that woman is the “other”, contrary to man as the Absolute or self. The other-ization of woman is a recurrent patriarchal discourse, doubly visible when she is sick, vulnerable, and thus discriminated against. This is the gendered application of biopolitics on women by men as a method to subjugate them. Donna Haraway theorizes immunology as “dialectics of Western biopolitics” which requires the immune system to identify demarcations between self and the other. Metaphorically, patriarchal immune system does so by other-izing(autoimmunity) the female gender. Each act such as criminalization of abortion, poor investment in women's health infrastructure or sexual abuse is patriarchal immunological response against women. What men fail to understand isthat women are not outside social system as if like a virus, but within it. When men commit gendered violence it is not an immune but an autoimmune response. Likewise, female immune response to protect them from gendered violence is almost futile in real life, whereas in dystopian science fiction on sick women, the same is reversed. Immunity cells operate under Darwin’s principles where immunity adapts itself to the changing environment. Here women are empowered through sickness as they adapt to patriarchal discourses of subjugation. The aim of this paper is to explore female immunity in reality and literature, and to see how men treat women through the metaphor of immunology. We find that women in The Power and Parable of the Sower are sick and that is what empowers them. In Alderman’s The Power, women need to be sick to subvert gender politics and claim a space of their own. Women develop immunity to attack invaders (men) by their ability to electrocute. They can transfer their electrocution power to newborn girls (similar tovertical immune transfer of microbiota from mothers to infants). Lauren in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, suffers from “hyperempathy” (passive immune transfer), that makes her feel other's pain and thus her compassion and zest to protect her community. She establishes an Earthseed community when her gated community collapses into dystopia. Sick women are discriminated against in reality, where as sickness in dystopian science fiction is used as a trope to empower women.