Questions for November 8 responses:

In short essays of 150-200 words, respond to five of the following seven questions:

(1) In Chapter 3, pp. 31-42 of Who is Black? James Davis describes the development of racial categorization of oppression in the upper south, including the Chesapeake region (where the "plantation" scenes of Kindred are set) and the deep south, including South Carolina and Louisiana. Identify some of the conditions described by Davis that are represented in Kindred and briefly discuss how the fictional examples from Kindred compare to Davis's historical account.

(2) Discuss the ending of Kindred. Why might it be argued that Rufus deserves to be killed, or that it's a good thing for him to die? Why might it be argued that he doesn't deserve to be killed, or that it's an unfortunate thing that he dies? For example, what does his death mean, probably for the people on the plantation? What emotional effect might it have on Dana? etc. What kind of evidence from the text might be invoked to support your responses to this ending?

(3) Although rape is typically associated in the popular imagination with acts of sexual violence committed upon women by strangers, experts agree that it is more commonly committed by acquaintances and family members of the victims. Octavia Butler develops this latter understanding of rape in various ways, thematically, in Kindred. Describe one or more examples of this theme and discuss its/their implications for understanding family relations, gender and marriage relations and/or social relations between men and women and white people and black people in American society.

(4) Octavia Butler presents the relationship of subordinated women to dominating men in patriarchal societies as one of mutual interdependence, mixtures of respect and disrespect, of love and hatred, of protective maternal love and sexual desire, etc. Describe and discuss some of the ways these ambivalent relationships are articulated in implied comparisons between Dana's relationships to the two most prominet men in her life--her husband, Kevin, and her great-great-great-etc.-grandfather, Rufus.

(5) In Chapter One of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are co-opted into participation in their own enslavement by their willingness to take on the responsiblities of motherhood. In her article, "Blood, Genes and Gender" Nancy Jesser seems to me to suggest that Octavia Butler concedes de Beauvoir's point about motherhood, and that Butler even sees maternal instincts as biologically overdetermined--as something that women can't escape without serious effort of the will and without probable emotional and psychological sacrifice. However, Jesser, argues, Butler's strong female characters, like Dana in Kindred, find ways to negotiate successfully with masculine power from within the constraints of this biological definition of what it is to be a women. Jesser writes:

Co-optation, in Kindred and Dawn, almost always means a woman crossing racial or species boundaries emotionally, sexually and reproductively in the name of the future. It does not mean a woman performing her way out of a discursively constructed female body. These "co-optations" are powerfully counter stereotyped gendered behavior with women taking on powerful systems and institutions to manipulate them into ceding the future. Butler's heroines act, however, according to biologically coded imperatives and in line with recent evolutionary biological theories of gender.

(Jesser, p. 51)

Identify one or more examples in which Dana, in Kindred, "takes on" the system of slavery or the institution of patriarchal authority in an attempt to change the future.

(7) Describe and discuss any questions you have in response to these readings and films that remain unanswered after our discussions or any elements of the texts and films that you find particularly interesting.