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@article{209352,
        author = {Akshaya S and Kumara Balaji R},
        title = {Melanin and the Margins: Engineering Blackness and the Politics of Belonging in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {5},
        pages = {1488-1494},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=209352},
        abstract = {Octavia E. Butler returned again and again to the body as a place where power is written. Her final novel, Fledgling (2005), carries this concern into a vampire story that is also a story about genetics, race, and kinship. Narrator, Shori Matthews, is a fifty-three-year-old Ina who looks like a young Black girl. Her family has blended human DNA into her body, and the melanin she carries lets her stay awake in daylight and survive the sun far better than another Ina. At first glance, this hybrid body seems to challenge the old idea that race is a fixed biological essence. Yet prejudice does not vanish. Shori’s dark skin becomes a reason for suspicion, hatred, and murder. Drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial formation, Stuart Hall’s account of the racialized “Other,” and Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, this paper argues that Butler presents race as biologically plastic but socially persistent. Genetic engineering can reshape the body, but it cannot, on its own, reshape the structures that give that body political meaning. The paper therefore separates three forms of belonging in the novel: genetic, social, and political. It concludes that Fledgling does not imagine a world without racial difference. Instead, it imagines a world in which difference can no longer justify inequality.},
        keywords = {Octavia E. Butler; Fledgling; racial formation; genetic engineering; posthumanism; Afrofuturism; belonging},
        month = {October},
        }