For this week, I read Octavia Butler's Bloodchild with the rest of the class and I actually quite enjoyed it. Octavia Butler puts a nice spin on a very different kind of future where it's the men who are bearing children, and not human children either, but the children of a species that we've never heard of before.
At first I thought this might have been a slave narrative in the form of an alien co-habitation story but Octavia Butler has said in a few interviews that this is not about that at all. It's been explicitly stated that this story is about love, symbiosis, and male pregnancy. As unsettling as the narrative is, I think it really is a beautiful story from start to finish. The humans (or Terrans) as they're called have come to this planet and have eased into a very specific life with the Tlic. They are very good at incubating Tlic eggs, raising the young within them until they're ready to be taken out (through a graphic surgery performed by the Tlic, themselves.
Bloodchild was written and published around the same time as Bell Hooks' Feminist Theory so we can interpret this story from a feminist point of view. We see an interesting role reversal in Bloodchild where men are the ones tasked to bear children (even if they're not human children) and the women are pretty much left alone to continue the human race for the Tlic. We could see how this story affects people just by reading it and discussing it in class. Some were visibly uncomfortable by the graphic description of the Tlic infant birth, simply because it's not "normal" for men to give birth, but some of us in class were interested in the turn of events.
I think Octavia Butler does a great job of exploring gender role reversal (in terms of who bears the children) and I think the story works very well within its context.
Monsters, directed by Gareth Edwards, is a movie about large, octopus-like aliens who've piggybacked on a NASA probe and fell to earth (around the Mexican-USA border) and are now roaming (and multiplying) within both countries. Andrew Kaulder, a photographer, is tasked with going to Mexico and retrieving his employer's daughter, Sam (although why would they send a photographer? I don't know).
Overall, I enjoyed the movie. One of my favorite tropes in movies (especially monster/alien movies) is to not show the threat until the very last (or even not at all) and this movie did that really really well.
In keeping with the topic for this week and whether or not the movie reflected the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture, that's hard to say. Most of the movie took place in Mexico, but I often found myself forgetting that, because both of our characters were white and they were alone for a good chunk of time. It was nice to see how the outer Mexican towns were faring against living with these large alien creatures, and how it seemed that daily life just kept going on like normal because "where are we gonna go?" as one man responded when asked why he and his family didn't just relocate.
I actually liked that not everybody was trying to relocate to the United States or flee further south. The aliens were pretty predictable, having specific migratory seasons that could be tracked and counted on time and again, so the people of these smaller towns, and even a larger port city, just made it work with their daily lives.
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