페미니스트 SF 소설에 재현된 남성 임신: 옥타비아 버틀러의 「블러드차일드」를 중심으로

Male Pregnancy in Feminist SF: Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.”

In spite of its remarkable literary achievement, Octavia Butler’s feminist SF “Bloodchild”(1984) has not been discussed much by literary critics. As Butler says about the story which deals with male pregnancy, “Bloodchild” can be read not as a “a story of slavery” but as “a love story” where humans and aliens pursue co-evolution and symbiosis(interspecies cooperation) under mutual equality. Butler, who shares the same idea of cyborg feminist epistemology with Donna Haraway, embraces the differences between the heterogeneous beings by blurring the binary opposition of man/woman, nature/culture, human/alien, self/other, and colonizer/colonized. Compared to a traditional space travel narrative, “Bloodchild” takes neither an imperialistic standpoint that humans exploit colony and oppress aliens in space, nor an anthropocentric one that humans deliver peace and civilization to aliens with superior perspectives. Thus, “Bloodchild” aims at an ethical dimension where humans and non-humans care for each other based on “communication,” “connection,” and “respect.”