After Dr. McCoy mentioned in class that Lil Wayne was raped as a boy as he explained on Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel, I quickly turned to the internet to find out more about it and was shocked at another video wherein Lil Wayne bragged about the incident. To me, he was glorifying ‘rape’ as if it was a good thing. On his show, Kimmel interviewed Lil Wayne and asked him about his virginity. The body language and reluctance of Lil Wayne was to refrain from answering the questions, yet it seemed Kimmel was unable to see that and even to go as far as to compel Lil Wayne with a curious manner as if to say “having sex [involuntarily] at that age is a good thing for a male or a female.” Continue reading Who or what is to be blamed?
Category Archives: ENGL 458 Octavia Butler Spring 2015
Bloodchild: A Love Story
In response to Clarissa’s post that contests the viability of the slavery reading and interpretation of Bloodchild as well as T’Gatoi’s character, whom she describes as “an awful creature with no morals who is ugly on the outside and the inside,” I both agree and disagree. While I agree that the initial character description of T’Gatoi may be at first a tad bit revolting, I disagree with the argument that she should be seen as as an awful creature without morality who instead merely exudes both an internal and external ugliness. I think that in painting T’Gatoi in such a light, it deprives her of her multi-dimensional complexity as a character, instead rendering her a one-dimensional-type-being, which I do not believe was Butler’s illustrative intent.
Slavery in “Bloodchild” is Only Seen if it is Brought to Ones Attention
Today’s class and group discussions brought up many points that are both agreeable and disagreeable in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”. We discussed what Butler wanted “Bloodchild” to represent and what she didn’t want the story to represent. While we were in our groups we discussed both of these aspects and what we personally felt “Bloodchild” represented.
My first time through reading “Bloodchild” I didn’t see the slavery aspect at all. The idea of slavery never crossed my mind. When I read the Afterword and saw “that some people have seen “Bloodchild” as a story of slavery” amazed me (“Bloodchild” 30). I still had a hard time seeing this idea come across within this work. I thought to myself how could one argue this? I don’t see it! Well…today in our group discussion Andre discussed how he personally had seen it to be a possible slave story. Andre brought out parts of the text that would support the idea of it being a story of slavery. One particular passage(s) he pointed out was when T’Gatoi’s body was referred to as a cage. Seeing this point of view through someone else’s opinion opened my eyes and realize the possibility that it could be a story about slavery.
Depending if one reads this story as a slave story or not a slave story could effect ones emotional response to the story. My first time reading it through (not as a slavery story) I sort of chuckled. I found myself thinking it was almost like a “cheesy horror” movie that was poorly made. I think my emotions felt like this for the simple fact that the story wasn’t long enough to unpack even more details. But when Andre brought up the valid points about the story possibly being a story of slavery I reread it. When I read it the second time (as a story of slavery) I developed a whole different set of emotions. When I read the story like this I felt more emotionally attached to T’Gatoi’s victims. I find T’Gatoi as an awful creature with no morals who is ugly on the outside and the inside. Where as before I only looked at T’Gatoi as ugly on the outside. After reading the story from both points of view I now can see how one would easily argue that this is a slavery story, but I think it is only obvious if it is brought to ones attention (Thanks Andre).
Also… here is an interesting article I found by Kristen Lillvis from Marshall University.
The Exposition of the Feminist Issue of Property
Octavia Butler weaves feminist issues into her text. She critically analyzes the objectification of women. In the reading of Bloodchild, I was surprised to find this quote ” you’re not her. You’re just her property” (18). As appalled as I was reading the quote, I understood the theme of property as a common issue within her novels. Fledgling and Seed to Harvest all dealt with what constitutes someone as property. Butler’s use of people as property can be perceived as slavery or the reversal objectification of women. Continue reading The Exposition of the Feminist Issue of Property
Disability and Autonomy as Race Issues in Patternmaster
In Patternmaster, on page 673, there is a quote about mutes born with physical or mental deformities:
“And there was a certain Patternist woman who had made an art form of controlling and changing the development of unborn mute children. Already she had created several misshapen monstrosities that had to be destroyed. She got away with what she did because infants and even older children, Patternist or mute, were considered expendable. Those who were defective in some irreparable way were routinely destroyed.”
This provides an interesting (and terrifying) look into how disability is treated in their world, while also showing more of the racial/disabled dichotomy between mutes and Patternists: disability is essentially turned into a race.
Continue reading Disability and Autonomy as Race Issues in Patternmaster
1 in 3
Recently, I found a study conducted in which concluded “one in three men would rape if they could get away with it and so long as it wasn’t referred to as rape” (Schow). Octavia Butler freely instills sexuality into her characters within her texts. We have seen the portrayal of her dominant characters sexuality in Fledling with Shori’s relationship with her symbionts, and in Wild Seed with Doro’s and Anyanwu’s relationship. Butler switches who the dominant sexual being in her texts, from male or female. However, there is always a use of force in the sexual relationships between two characters. Continue reading 1 in 3
Eugenics and Reproductive Violence
Tala Khanmalek’s article in the Feminist Wire, “Slavery: The Haunting Legacy of Sterilization Abuse in California State Prisons,” begins by reporting that between 2006 and 2010 around 150 women were sterilized in California prisons without their consent. Khanmalek cites this statistic from an article in the Huffington post by Alex Stem (“Sterilization Abuse in State Prisons: Time to Break with California’s Long Eugenic Patterns”) which focuses on the general context of such eugenic programs and makes the claim: “What current and past [eugenic] practices share is the assumption that some women by virtue of their class position, sexual behavior, or ethnic identity are socially unfit to reproduce and parent.” Khanmalek has a slightly different central argument and instead of framing the incident in California in the general context of eugenics she frames it within a history of, “state-sanctioned reproductive regulation targeting women of color.” I think this framework is particularly useful in developing our understanding of Butler as it allows us to link a few instances of violence that I at least found very troubling, which provides a new way to understand them. Continue reading Eugenics and Reproductive Violence
A Very Troubling & Allegorical Parallelism
The other day, I happened to be glancing over the schedule and I noticed that we’d be talking about Survivor this Friday. And just at that moment, I immediately remembered that I had wanted to right a very brief but contemplative blog post about that one time that we read a few pages of Survivor together as a class. I remember Beth saying that Survivor is the most allegorical novel of Butler’s Patternist Series which makes it so much easier (and fun) to infer parallelisms. Yet, the parallel that came to me troubles me more than anything else, even if I find it very intriguing. On page 36, in the Survivor packet that we were given before Spring Break, there is a short scene in which Jules, Alanna, and Neila come across a distorted corpse in a sealed compartment on the very ship that they had flown in on, “It was the body of a young man, dressed in the bright-colored style of the city of Forsyth. His body was short and squat and his head large. His forehead bulged strangely on one side and seemed almost sunken on the other. His mouth was slack and half open, drooling…To Neila and Alanna, he said, ‘There are all kinds of slaves.'” Continue reading A Very Troubling & Allegorical Parallelism
Thoughts on Vint’s Article
I found Sherryl Vint’s article “Becoming Other: Animals, Kinship, And Butler’s ‘Clay’s Ark'” to be intriguing because I really wasn’t familiar with any of the ideas regarding the species boundary, thus I didn’t have the capacity to think about Clay’s Ark or judge Butler’s intentions using the terms and theories explained in the article while reading the book. Continue reading Thoughts on Vint’s Article
Advantage, Evolution, and Connection in the works of Octavia Butler
While reading Govan’s article “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction,” I was struck by the following passage:
“In each story, a physical, psychic, or attitudinal difference associated with the heroine sets her apart from society and often places her in jeopardy; each survives because her ‘difference’ brings with it a greater faculty for constructive change” (84).
It struck me that this true without exception in every one of Butler’s novels we have read so far: Shori had the ability to walk in the daylight, Anyanwu had the unprecedented power to control every cell in her body, Mary created the Pattern, the disease spread in Clay’s Ark and the infected survived because of heightened physical abilities and their symbiotic relationship with a micro-organism that utterly hijacks all forms of terrestrial life, and Teray had almost all of Coransee’s psionic strength plus extremely fine perception and control over biological matter. Virtually every protagonist in Octavia Butler’s novels is more evolved and ultimately more adaptable than those around them. Continue reading Advantage, Evolution, and Connection in the works of Octavia Butler