”On a third level, “Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story. I’ve always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions. Could I write a story in which a man chose to become pregnant not through some sort of misplaced competitiveness to prove that a man could do anything a woman could do, not because he was forced to, not even out of curiosity? I wanted to see whether I could write a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love—choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of surrounding difficulties.”
Octavia Butler clearly wanted to write a story that challenged the norms of society, by creating a world where men can be impregnated and choose to do so for the good of their society. Seeing Gan question his role as a carrier clearly parallels the anxieties that women feel while going through pregnancy. Gan only questions what he is doing when he sees another man go through the trials and tribulations of labor, it is then that he becomes afraid of having to “give birth” to the eggs that he is carrying. We see this in the real world with pregnant mothers when they are close to giving birth, they sometimes panic for reasons varying from feeling unready to give birth, to being afraid of labor pains.
As Butler says in her “Afterword”, Gan chose to be pregnant in spite of the difficulties surrounding the role, just as most women do in everyday life. This story portrays pregnancy almost like a parasite, as the eggs are carried and cared for by the carrier until they are ready to be transferred to a the abdomen of a dead animal, most likely to feed on the animal, as a parasite does. Pregnancy is not seen in this way in our society, but this story points out the idea that a fetus is relative to a parasite, and the mother is relative to a host.
”But what if that otherness is enclosed in our bodies, as yet unknown, neither friend nor enemy, growing inside our own flesh and blood? Such monstrous imaginings are the stuff of fairy tales and horror films, and yet, an ontological awareness of the body’s alienation from itself and an emergent new relationship with an unfamiliar being is familiar to many pregnant women…”
This quote from the article ” Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination” again reinforces the fear and questioning that comes with pregnancy that is presented in Bloodchild. This quote also points out the “body’s alienation from itself” which is ironic considering that there are actually alien beings that are being carried by Gan in Bloodchild, which leads you to consider pregnancy as an invasion of the mother’s body. The idea of the “other”, the unknown growing within the mother, is portrayed as a terrifying occurrence in this article and it is reinforced in Bloodchild through the use of alien life forms being carried within a human body.
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