"Adult Things:" Butler's Bloodchild

"This was going too fast. My sister Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still too close to her-not like Qui. She could want T'Gatoi and still love me.

"Wait! Gatoi!"

She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned to face me. "These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!"

"But she's...my sister."" (Butler 25)

 there are a lot of themes being explored in Octavia Butler's Bloodchild, including but not limited to gender roles, racism and imperialism. Gan, as a human  under Tlic authority, is given very little autonomy, and is often treated like a child by T'Gatoi. Despite being much younger than her, it is evident that Gan is coming of age, and these issues matter just as much to him as they do to her, if not moreso. T'Gatoi exclaims "These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!" when really, these things are at stake for Gan. His life is threatened by the Tlic growing inside him, and his family is incredibly tangled up in the situation. Still, T'Gatoi insists on treating him like child, despite the very mature situation which they have entered.

 For me, this relationship has a lot of parallels to a marriage as concieved pre-feminism, with the gender roles reversed. Gan views T'Gatoi as something of a betrothed or husband-his attachment is evident from not wanting to let her go to his sister. This "husband", as many people and the law treated women in a time before they had legal rights, treats him like a child. His opinion has little weight within the marriage, and even less outside of it. He fears the consequences of this childbirth, as many women did before the advent of modern medicine, because it can lead to his death. Still, he pressed into it by the dominant figures need to produce heirs. Butler's analysis of these themes is veiled, but shrewd.

"Deflate:" Blorts, by Andrew Holleran

“Eventually Joshua stopped going to the baths; and we settled into a comfortable, even happy, routine, broken only by his trips to other cities-as if he could find there what he could not in New York. Only San Francisco merited more than one journey; but even there he went straight to a gym from the airport, as if he was afraid he would deflate while flying cross-country. In fact, that was the word he used once while lying on his futon, with one pump dangling from his foot, and the cat raised high in the air above his chest: “I’m looking for someone I can deflate with,” he said. But no such person materialized.” (Holleran 148)

In Blorts, by Andrew Holleran, when the character Joshua says that he is looking for someone who he can deflate with, I think that he means someone who he doesn’t have to impress- someone who will love him even he doesn’t go to the gym or keep up with the gay community and all of its intricacies. And for him, I think that this person is Red, the story’s narrator. It’s implied at the end of the story that Joshua is romantically interested in him, and we see time and again that though the narrator seems drawn to Joshua, he doesn’t really care how in shape he is, or about the gossip Joshua brings home from the gym. Joshua can be at ease around Red,  be himself, and vice versa. The two can “deflate” around each other, and have over the course of a decade. They have even settled into a domestic lifestyle, much like a married couple, complete with a cat to take care of.  They are each other’s partners, despite how long it takes Red, and perhaps Joshua, too, to realize it.

Mirror: Perpetuation of American Cultural Norms in Gay Subculture in Lorde's Zami

“There was constant competition among butches to have the most “gorgeous femme” on their arm. And “gorgeous” was defined by a white male world’s standards.

For me, going into the Bag alone was like entering an anomalous no-woman’s land. I wasn't cute or passive enough to be “femme,” and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be “butch.” I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.” (Lorde 224)

This passage is very interesting to me because it highlights the ways in which the gay culture of 1950’s New York City mirrors that of the rest of contemporary society. However different lesbians may have been from mainstream straight society, and however much they may have identified themselves as “outcasts,” they had outcasts of their own that did not fit their particular mold. In a later passage, Lorde goes into more detail about this within groups of unconventional thinkers at large that existed during this time, writing “the bars and the coffee-shops and the streets of the Village in the 1950s were full of non-conformists who were deathly afraid of going against their hard-won group” (Lorde 226). In a time when mainstream American society shunned all that was different from itself, “non-conventional people [could] be dangerous, even in the gay community” (Lorde 224).

Here, we even see this subculture operating by the same standards of beauty as mainstream American culture, and this “femme” ideal being treated as more submissive than the masculine “butch”, further perpetuating the gender roles and sexism of this society with its condemnation of femininity.

"life on other stars:" Gennie's death in Zami

“I did not know why. Only that for my beloved Gennie, pain had become enough of a reason not to stay. And our friendship had not been able to alter that. I remembered Gennie’s favorite lines in one of my poems. I had found them doodled and scrawled along the margins of page after page of the notebooks which she had entrusted to my care in the movies that Friday afternoon.

and in the brief moment that is today

wild hope this dreamer jars

for I have heard in whispers talk

of life on other stars

 None of us had given her a good enough reason to stay here, not even me. I could not escape that. (Lorde 100)

Audre’s experience here is an incredibly interesting one to explore. Gennie seems to be the person whom she cares the most about out of anyone in this narrative so far, and her loss affects Audre deeply. There are many suggestions of a romantic attachment on Audre’s part (her “beloved Gennie”), which only seems to sharpen the pain. Here, we see that death is not about the dying. Even though Gennie is acting on her own part and it is she who is passing on, it is the people who she leaves behind who experience her death and are affected by it because their lives have to go on without her. Audre is left wondering why she wasn’t enough of a reason for her best friend to keep on living and this has a huge impact on her. Gennie’s death is a part of why she later leaves home.

Her poem also says a lot about Gennie. Gennie, like Audre, was a “dreamer,” and both of them dreamed of “life on other stars.” Both girls wanted an escape from their home lives, and Audre was reasonably satisfied with her jaunts with Gennie. But Gennie sought an escape that was far more permanent. In a way, it makes sense that these were her favorite lines by Audre.