“We Aren’t Human”: The Superwoman Schema and N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Using Cheryl L. Woods-Giscombé’s “Superwoman Schema” as a theoretical framework, this paper investigates N. K. Jemisin’s reclamation and expansion of what bell hooks calls “the strong, superhuman black woman” stereotype. Her reworking of this stereotype exemplifies the Black fantastic’s capacity to use the unreal to reflect the real. In The Fifth Season, the superpowered orogenes are racialized as subhuman Others despite being vital to their supercontinent’s survival of climate disasters. Through the orogene Essun, Jemisin demonstrates how this inequitable world order mirrors the real exploitation of Black women’s labor at the expense of their physical and emotional wellbeing. In other words, Essun’s powers and her relationship to them are analogous to the “operative myths” of superhuman ability, as hooks says, that strip Black women of our humanity. In keeping with the Superwoman Schema, Essun suppresses her emotions while projecting strength, and this multi-perspective novel’s very structure—in which Jemisin treats each phase of Essun’s life as a distinct character—replicates the fracturing effects of this habituation.