Bloodchild Formula + Leads

Leads are underlined

Claim: Octavia Butler is using tactics of de-familiarization and role-reversal to make readers feel uncomfortable and show how absurd our ideas of what normal is are.

Question: Why does the author of Bloodchild make us uncomfortable with normal things like childbirth?

Trouble: Bloodchild changes the context of things and makes normal things seem strange and crazy, which is weird and makes me feel a bit uncomfortable reading the story.

Status Quo: Stories normally don’t make the reader feel uncomfortable or nervous while reading it, they just have a nice story.

Reordered: Stories normally are just that, nice interesting stories that don’t make the reader feel nervous or uncomfortable. However, Octavia Butler changes the context of things and makes normal things seem strange, which makes the reader a bit uncomfortable. This makes me wonder how and why Butler does this with things like childbirth. It seems like Butler is using role-reversal and de-familiarizing to show how crazy what we think of as normal is.