In this paper, I examine the potential space of resistance created by literature that draws on and transforms genealogies of gender- and race-based monstrosity. Over the past twenty years or so, Monster Studies has arguably emerged as a fledgling academic field, enabled especially by explorations of difference, bodies, and power in gender studies. Donna Haraway’s “Promises of Monsters” (1992) set off the investigation of monsters as figures of promise – of what, we cannot be completely sure – in differently imagined futures. In a good feminist theory of science tradition, and with a science-fiction inflection, she wanted her theory to “produce not effects of distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here” (295). According to Haraway, monsters, such as the cyborg, can be approached as boundary figures, “others” that do not fit the category of “human”.
The classification of monster has its roots in various kinds of hybridity that challenge any and all ideas of “pure” humanness. Black people, foreigners, animals, the congenitally disabled, and women have all been considered monstrous at one time or another, argues Shildrick (2001). As such, monstrosity is by nature an intersectional category: it shapeshifts between every kind of imagined difference and creates the nonhuman – and the posthuman – based on disability, animality, race, gender, or technological flesh.
The vengeful hero Phoenix in Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix (2015) embodies such a posthuman, monstrous promise. Challenging the white, male hegemony in sci-fi (complicated, of course, by the timely arrivals of the works by writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin), Okorafor’s Afrofuturist tale of a monstrous, wondrous, Black female-presenting “speciMen” – grown in a lab as a biological weapon – negotiates long histories of monstrosity, but also weaves disability, gender, and race into narratives of extraordinary bodies in ways that recast monstrosity as powerful, if complicated.
Starting from Okorafor’s novel, I ask, how does the extraordinary posthuman body refigure disability and animality? And what is at stake in the representation of a Black, posthuman, artificial woman as a violent savior?

Sara Orning is a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Norwegian Research Council-funded project BIODIAL: The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness, and Animality in the Department of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo. Her academic interests center on the body in its many incarnations: as lived, experienced, embodied; as site for conflicting ideological interests; and as symbolic entity in which we invest our fears, anxieties, and hopes regarding what it means to be human. As such, perspectives of gender, disability, monstrosity, and animality are crucial to her research. She researches early modern, Victorian, and contemporary extraordinary bodies, and is interested in how norms of similarity and difference emerge and transform over periods of time.
She has published or has forthcoming publications in Excursions, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, and Føniks on gendered robots in science-fiction, human-animal hybrids in art, early modern monstrous births and transhumanism, and posthuman feminist theory and literature.

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