Octavia Butler's Kindred As A Feminist

One traumatic moment. One horrifying event. That is all it takes to alter a life. Trauma is when the mind’s coping mechanism becomes too overwhelmed by shocking events, to be able to process anything else (Walker 317). In Kindred, by Octavia Butler, the female, Black, protagonist, Dana, undergoes a series of traumatic events as she travels back in time to the 1800s – a period of slavery in America.

Relationships in which there is not mutual respect are destined to fail. Relationships in which one person’s autonomy is not valued are destructive. For example, when Dana travels back to the Antebellum South for the fourth time, she finds Rufus being beaten by a man as a woman watches from a distance, wearing a torn dress. Dana learns that the woman is Alice, and the man beating Rufus is Isaac, Alice’s husband. She convinces them to leave, and when nursing Rufus back to consciousness, learns that Rufus was beaten because he tried to rape Alice after she refused to marry him.

Celie Finds a Voice A fiction novel that is often harshly criticized for its obscene, yet realistic view of a poor, illiterate, African American woman and her escape from the grasps of her abusive husband would be Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. This novel creates a global message that is portrayed by a multitude of literary devices and may be thoroughly analyzed by high school students to gain various aspects of societal injustice over race, power, and gender. The book is written solely in letters, whether to God, or from one sister to the other.

The Neo-Slave Narrative and the Master Narrative Kindred is a clear instance of the neo-slave narrative, an Afro- American genre of writing that recounts the personal experiences of slaves that examines the past of African-American slaves and represent the nineteenth-century slave narrative tradition, that was first published in 1979. Ashraf argues "that there are three types of neo slave narrative: the third person historical novel of slavery, the first person narration of the life story of a slave, and the recounting of the traumatic legacy of slavery of slavery on later generations. This genre identifies historical narrations from those that follow the effects of slavery in the present. According to Ashraf Rushdy's definition of neo slave narrative in the oxford companion to African American Literature that defines a neo-slave narrative as: modern or contemporary fictional works substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of new world

Kindred and “None of Us are Free” “None of Us are Free” can be connected to Octavia E. Butler 's Kindred through the slaves´ teamwork. In the novel, characters such as Alice and Sarah show the themes of unity and compassion that are in the song. Since “None of Us are Free”calls on its audience to stand as one, there are many similarities that can be found within Kindred, a novel about Dana´s struggle to help her kin and the slaves. The slaves care for each other, feel the same hopelessness, and can empathize. The song “None of Us are Free” and Kindred by Octavia E. Butler both convey a message of solidarity for the oppressed to urge them to look out for each other through their hardships.

We are all born with a natural curiosity about the world around us. We are constantly asking questions and hypothesizing situations to better ourselves. It is only a natural reaction to take interest in ones’ origins and debate the rule of society. The movie, The Secret Life of Bees, focuses on the United States during the time of the Civil Rights Act. It paints a picture of a girl, Lily Owens, navigating life in a world divided.

Hope for a Sexually Egalitarian Society According to Gayle Rubin, literature on women often focuses on the nature and origin of female oppression and social subordination. By understanding many authors intent when writing female literature, one can infer that the novel Herland, by Charlotte Perkins, is an attempt to question the male role in female oppression. Understanding Rubin Perks and other writers who choose to speak in favor of female equality; one begins questions if equality is possible. Rubin states that “if innate male aggression and dominance are at root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require the extermination of the offending sex”.

Lilith as a Challenge to the Stereotypical Notions of Motherhood In Octavia Butler’s “Dawn” the protagonist Lilith serves as a mother figure in a variety of ways. Lilith is one of the few humans that have survived a nuclear war, and has been rescued by an alien race named the “Oankali.” These mysterious aliens have elected Lilith to lead the first group of humans in their return to Earth. In “Dawn” Lilith is both a literal mother to a deceased son Ayre, and a metaphorical mother to both a young boy named Sharad, and the group of humans.

Introduction Feminism is both an academic commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women. Feminists inquiry a wide range of standpoints on social, cultural, economic, and political events. In the assigned reading, most feminist critiques of human rights focus on the androcentrism and argue that, ostensibly, human rights are in actuality men’s rights. As a consequence, exclusions, constraints and abuses more typical of woman’s lives are neither recognized nor protected by human rights instruments. This means that everything in humanity has approximately been gender-biased in favor of men.

Having watched the three videos, I realized that there were a myriad of elements from the Six Stumbling Blocks. The six stumbling blocks she stated are assumption of similarities, language differences, nonverbal misinterpretations, tendency to evaluate, stress and culture shock. I believe intercultural communication is as complex and a severe issue as it is now. It is because we are never able to understand what “someone else” is, as Barna mentioned in the article. Although we assume we understand what someone else is thinking, we never know if we actually understand the concept, because there is no way to confirm that.