Comparing Bloodchild, By Octavia Butler And James Tiptree Jr.

Science and speculative fiction (SF) have the ability to create unimaginable realities filled with unfamiliar worlds with magical technologies and advanced alien races. Both science and speculative fiction are difficult to define. The only thing typical about the SF genre is its rather atypical nature. Storyworlds presented by the genre tend to challenge our normative values and views. One shift the genre facilitates is the subversion of normative gender roles. The very nature of SF allows gender identities to be challenged and redefined. The authors, Octavia Butler and James Tiptree Jr. have created texts, which accomplish this. Butler’s Bloodchild, reverses male and female reproductive roles in order to bring light to current gender roles

Furthermore, several societies persist in viewing women as inferiors and correspondingly these women have few to no rights. One of the valuable traits of science fiction is its ability to teleport its reader into a different world. The SF genre often sets stories in temporally or spatially different places. This difference is typically enough to provide “elements of instability and uncertainty” (Wolmark 55) where “reconstruction of gender can take place…‘elsewhere’” (Wolmark 55). The removal from a familiar world is known as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance takes an unfamiliar idea, known as a novum, to “rupture… the world as we understand it” (Mendlesohn 10). Several common SF motifs such as aliens, robots, disease, social structure disruptions are all manifestations of cognitive dissonance (Mendelsohn 10). Similarly, Darko Suvin uses the term “cognitive estrangement” to describe the SF genre’s ability to take the familiar and make it unfamiliar (Nodelman 24). Cognitive estrangement “moves away from reality without becoming an escape from it” (Nodelman 24). Narratives utilizing cognitive estrangement in the SF genre describe “unreal worlds realistically” (Nodelman

It is difficult to come by a text in the genre that does not offer some sort of unfamiliarity. This notion is incredibly important in facilitating the subversion of gender norms in SF. However, it is vital that some form of familiarity does exist in texts. In other words, in order to effectively alter gender roles and relations, an SF work must maintain some form of a recognizable element. That recognizable element may be temporal, spatial, or social. If a text creator effectively manages this, gender roles may be effectually explored and