Bloodchild

Bloodchild is a short story by Octavia Butler about a group of humans that have become the hosts for a number of more powerful aliens. The story as a whole creeped me out a little, because one of my biggest fears is becoming a host for something foreign, like a tapeworm. But I loved how many underlying themes were there. Butler chose to portray the main alien creature as female, which I thought was interesting. The aliens were already higher than the humans, and Butler painted the society as being rather matriarchal. I was also intrigued by the theme of divorce, or unfaithfulness in a marriage. T'Gatoi specifically tells the main character, Gan, that “[she] won't leave [him] as Lomas was left”, Lomas being the man who was nearly killed because of the parasitic alien children left inside his body for too long. The story also talks, fairly obviously, about the concept of male pregnancy. Paired with this dominant role that the female aliens have over humans, I took this to be a complete reversal of the roles that most of us are used to. I'm not exactly a feminist, but, for years, it has always been the women that stay inside and have children, while the men go out and provide for them. Butler talks about how Gan's father was also “pregnant”, and three times at that. She also suggests that Gan was chosen to bear T'Gatoi's children from the start, and there is also Lomar, the abandoned pregnant man. To have every role that many of us are used to completely inverted is pretty eye-opening. Maybe even more so than the idea of parasitic worm-babies in our bodies.