Bonnie Gregory

Professor Parker
English 375 - Contemporary Black Women Novelists
October 21st, 2014
Gender, Class, Race, Aliens?
In Elyce Rae Helfords, Would you really rather die than bear my young?, she
discusses the story Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler. She introduces the piece by giving
an excerpt from the story itself then continues on by summarizing the story and then
giving definitions and examples of what she means by class, race, gender, species and
introduces the terms gynesis, ethnesis, and zoomorphesis. After which she talks about
these different points and how they relate to the text.
This reading is difficult to follow at first because she spends a lot of time giving
the definitions of all of her terms and providing the backgrounds as to how these terms
came to be. Then she spends the rest of the article finally talking about Butlers
Bloodchild, however, it is spent mainly summarizing the plot of the story and barely
adding in the points of the terms at the end of the summaries of the terms that she goes
on and on talking about earlier in the piece. She doesnt ever analyze the piece. She
talks about the terms that she defines and how they relate to the text but she does not
analyze the text in the way that she had set it up to do. One of the more pressing topics
that she does intersect into most of the piece was slavery. She talks about slavery as a
power issue; slavery as a class issue; slavery as a gendered issue; etc. The points that
she makes are well put, however, the ending of her article was unsatisfying. She
spends all of this time talking about slavery and how it interacts with the characters in
Bloodchild and then just kind of ends on a well slavery is bad and its in this story but
there was no resolution because thats how the author likes to write vibe going on. The
author may like to write that mean but that does not mean that resolving this issue
should not be a part of Helfords critical analysis. The only real closure is in the last
sentences where she says However, this is where she must leave us if our emotions
are to support critical interpretation. If we are to leave the story with the disturbing
awareness that our understanding of what we label gender, race, and species is
entirely relative to the position from which we are permitted to understand these
categories, we must feel as well as know it intellectually (271). She understands the
authors need to end the story without closure without closing her article.

Citation
Helford, Elyce R. "Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young?": The
Construction of
Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler's
"Bloodchild." Black Women's Culture
Issue 28.2 (1994): 259-71. Print.