In discussing the end of Mind of My Mind last week, my group was led into a conversation in which we contemplated the reasons we believe what we do and how collective beliefs seem to influence society. Continue reading Collective Beliefs as Method of Mind Control →

I thought Clarissa made a great point in her post from February 26^th about how in Mind of My Mind and in the videos we watched in class about the Mission district in San Francisco the powers possessed by Doro and by the tech workers seem to end up getting used against them. Though the dynamics are slightly different, I got thinking about how technologies get used against their owners in Clay’s Ark too. The specific example I am thinking of has to do with Blake and the automobile.

Continue reading The Automobile and Power in “Clay’s Ark” →

As we discussed Clay’s Ark in class yesterday I kept thinking about similar plots structures. This led me to look up films about viral outbreaks. Most outbreak films such as Contagion often portray people dying of the disease, but in Clay’s Ark it is the opposite. Again we see this similar plot scheme to Fledgling where a group of people gain abilities or enhance themselves by a substance, which one could interpret as either the venom or disease. In both cases each person gains super human abilities, but it comes at a cost and some people do die because of it. However, as I looked as the list of outbreak films a lot of them did not have the same plot as Clay’s Ark. The difference is in Clay’s Ark the disease causes the infected to do immoral actions such as, rape, and incest.

Butler here again is questioning our notions of what makes us human and or what is humanity. I question if when what makes us human is gone do we turn invisible? To further elaborate, in the article “I’m a Black Gentrifier, But My Success Is Invisible” the narrator defines herself as a complex person. She is black, but also a female and a lawyer, but because of her skin color she is categorized differently and sectioned off into an outside sphere, which makes her invisible. In Clay’s Ark the humans section themselves to one place, but in the article people are defined to a certain place. This notion of certain types of people being labeled to live in one place has infected the views of people. The infected notion comes from a view of compulsions or forced actions, which some are really found in the human race. However, some stereotypes are viewed as compulsions, which construe of outlook of a human being. I wonder if this is another trope about race relations that Butler is trying to force us to look at.

As I was reading Theri Pickens article “You’re Supposed to Be a Tall, Handsome, Fully Grown White Man” for my annotated bibliography, I found myself stopping a lot to “scratch my head” at what she was saying. As I was reading her article I found myself rethinking some of my opinions about Fledgling, but at the same time I felt the need to defend the way Butler developed her novel.

One example in this article that had me thinking was Pickens ability to call Shori a protagonist (Pickens 34). Yes I would agree that Shori is probably more of a protagonist then most characters BUT I am not sure how one can call her a protagonist when she is constantly manipulating her symbionts. Shori knows she is stronger then most of her symbionts, where she feels like she can control them. Because of Shori’s ability to control them so easily makes it hard for me to believe that she is the protagonist. I feel as if she is taking advantage of a weaker power which is something a protagonist shouldn’t be doing. The idea of this power struggle within Butler’s work relates back to my previous post, referring to the two videos we watched in class and “Mind of My Mind”.

The point in Pickens article where she was talking about Wright wanting to hide his relationship with Shori was the real “thinker” for me. Pickens’ feels that the relationship is hidden because of the idea that interracial relationships where not acceptable during this time (Pickens 43). This very well may have been Butler’s intention, but at the same time I don’t know how Pickens didn’t argue or bring up the fact Shori’s and Wright’s age  (based on physical appearance) is so different. Throughout her entire article she never mentioned this idea as being wrong. Which when I read Fledgling I got more of the feeling that Butler was more focused on age between Shori and Wright and not race.

Like I previously stated Pickens has created some wonderful arguments within her article that made me rethink some of my opinions on Fledgling but I feel like I was “scratching my head” with some of these arguments, not agreeing with her.

Below you will find the link to Pickens article, which Beth has already provided for us:

“You’re Supposed to Be a Tall, Handsome, Fully Grown White Man”

Connecting the relevance of the two videos we watched in class yesterday  to “Mind of My Mind” brought up interesting points during our groups discussion.   One idea that I brought up during our discussion is the idea of power control within “Mind of My Mind” and the videos. In “Mind of MY Mind” I see Doro as the controller pretty much throughout the entire novel despite the fact he dies at the end. Untimely at the end of the novel Doro has absolutely no more control because of his death. I personally feel the same goes for the “Tech People” in these videos from class. They are clearly more powerful because they are taking over parts of the neighborhood due to their technology and greater amounts of money. They feel they control the people in the neighborhood because they have this stuff they may not, which very well maybe true. But what I find ironic is the fact the “techs” won’t back down until their own technology is used against them. As soon as the kids who have always lived in the neighborhood start recording the “techs” they easily back down from the situation. So the kids are are using the “techs” own “power” against them. I feel that the idea of power is a repetitive theme throughout Butler’s novels. There is always someone of a higher power taking advantage of someone of a lower power, until their own power is used against them. Who’s sorry then?

In my blog post last week I wrote that although Octavia Butler didn’t specifically write about education, her commentary on innocence in Wild Seed is important because of the way perceived innocence manifests in public education. Little did I know that by the end of Mind of My Mind, Mary would create a society of Patternists and top off her reorganization of Palo Verde with her own school for latent children. Although the Patternist school may seem more like Charles Xavier’s school for gifted youngsters—with Rachel searching the pattern for Latents in the same way that Professor X uses cerebro to find mutants—a myriad of connections can be made between the Patternist school and American schools.  Not only do the fictional Palo Verde school and actual American schools both operate as a tool for measuring ability (albeit in their own distinctive ways), but they also function as a venue for the stigmatization and discrimination of status groups and as a medium for the reproduction of cultural inequalities. Continue reading I Spoke Too Soon: Education in the Patternist Society →

What happens when people try to imagine new ways of being? This is something Butler’s fiction asks us when we are reading, as we try to put ourselves in the world of her characters. She also poses this to her characters – for instance, Doro not fully being able to imagine the effects of the pattern until he experiences it himself. In class we spoke about imagining the pattern, and how it was outside of what we could imagine because we ourselves had never experienced it, like Doro. I wanted to take a look at the sociology behind the language aspect of this inability, namely, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Continue reading Relative Linguistics: Our Language as a Cultural Lens →