Thursday, June 7, 2018

Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster


(link)

Stomach tentacle impregnation sci-fi oviposition auto-immunity colonization fur, eggs. "There are different perspectives of everything, and Ovipositors are no exception. Many like to envision an alien creature that wants its eggs inside you. It can be a little intimidating or off-putting to those who do not fantasize about being the willing or unwilling host of alien beings inside them. It blurs the line of our own humanity to find sexual pleasure with something that is so far from human, and for some, just talking about it gets them."-LoneWolf

"How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity" - Carolyn Lazard "This begins with the last meal I ate without being afraid. I remember it vividly. My friend Buyong was visiting me in Paris." "The experience of sickness is profoundly alienating. The difficulty of communicating illness is evident in the poverty of language available to us to describe our physical ailments. We express by simile: it feels like someone is stabbing me repeatedly with a sharp knife. It feels like someone is grabbing my intestines and squeezing them. It feels like I’m trapped in my own body."

"Finally, there is the very difficulty of finding a grammar and vocabulary to discuss shit and its metaphoric place within Disability Studies. Identity categories are notoriously liminal, and though standpoint theory offers some strategies for articulating one's situated knowledge, there is still a tendency to locate one's self within artificially rigid boundaries. Thus, Eve Kofosky Sedgwick can identify herself as a straight woman doing queer studies, and Robert Young can identify himself as a white man working in postcolonial studies. But I cannot identify either as "PWD" or as a "TAB" (person who is temporarily able-bodied). I am neither or both, depending on the moment and my state of health. Do I thus revise and articulate my identity category on an ongoing basis? Like shit, which disturbs so many cultural norms, people with Crohn's diases (and "disease" is itself a medical and existential category which often resists stable definitions), can disturb identity categories and raise complex questions of power, transgression, and the damning issue of the imposter syndrome which are hard to critically deconstruct."-Dr. Cindy LaCom

"the "oral invasion" functions as "payback" for the many horror films in which sexually vulnerable women are attacked by male monsters. On one level it's about an intriguing threat. On one level it's about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important it's about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it's about this happening to a man."[112] He notes how the film plays on men's fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.[113] Film analyst Lina Badley has written that the design, with strong Freudian sexual undertones, multiple phallic symbols, and overall feminine figure, provides an androgynous image conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines.[114] O'Bannon himself later described the sexual imagery as overt and intentional: "One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number."

"In several interviews as well as in her afterword to "Bloodchild," Butler explains the different situations that led her to write the story. To begin with, she wanted to "write out" her fear of her body being invaded by a parasitic insect, specifically the bot-fly. She also wanted to write about a human male becoming pregnant; about the risks to his body as well as what it would take for him to have maternal feelings towards his alien brood, and so she ended crafting a story about a symbiotic, loving relationship between two very different species. This is why, she insists again and again, critics read "Bloodchild" wrongly when they argue it is about slavery. Lastly, she wanted to write a story about "paying the rent"—of how a realistic depiction of human immigration into space would not just repeat the colonialist tropes of traditional science fiction but rather require some quid pro quo or "accommodation" from the part of humanity.[2][3][4][5]

Themes[edit]

Imposition of female experience on a male narrator
Critic Jane Donawerth observes that " [i]n this short story...the conventional adolescent male narrator/hero is punished by rape, incest, reproductive exploitation by the dominant race, and anticipation of a painful caesarean birth--and he is expected to like it, as women in many cultures have been expected to comply with their oppression." Specifically, the narrator takes on the role of black females slaves in the United States, who were "forced to carry the offspring of an alien race." [6] Kristen Lillvis further argues that this reference to historical reproductive slavery allows the male narrator to have "access to the power of maternal love" that follows the "tradition of nonphallic maternal authority that developed out of black women’s experiences during slavery."[7]
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"Like Brancusi's bird in space both phallus and colon."

See too: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi