Summary Of Consent By Octavia Butler

Consent is now, more than ever, a hot-button topic of conversation. The questions of what is consent, who can give it, and when is it necessary are being played out in courtrooms, the legislature, and the news. The cost of public opinion is loud, fractured, and far from the consensus needed to come reach a verdict. Part of the problem with discussions about topics like consent, are that they are spoken about in a vacuum. When consent is discussed, it is almost exclusively talked about in the context of sex and sexual assault, however, sex is not the only interpersonal interaction around which issues of consent exist. One of the difficulties with discussing consent is that everyone comes to the metaphorical table with preconceived ideas already
Just opening this dialogue, forcing people to open their minds to the possibility that there is a perspective other than their own or a situation that does not fit into the clearly marked boxes they have laid out. Octavia Butler succeeds where so many activists, journalists, and angry social media users have failed; in her fiction, she turns the very idea of consent so on its head that she forces readers to look, not only outwards, but in at themselves, forcing them to reengage in a personal dialogue about what is or is not consent that they thought they had long since put to bed. “Bloodchild” has appeared to many readers as a story about slavery, in fact, that reading has been so prevalent that Butler felt the need to address it in her afterward. I admit to being one of those readers, it was not until I read Butler’s words that I went back and say a more layered
We are introduced to the world through the eyes of a traumatized child who cannot remember who she is or where she comes from. She is picked up on the side of the road be a man named Wright who brings him home with her. He remarks that “[she] can’t be any more than ten or eleven” (Fledgling 27). However, once they are back at his house this does not stop him from having sex with her. She tells him it’s ok and “he was very careful at first, afraid of hurting [her], still afraid that [she] might be too young for this, too small” (58). As a reader it does not matter that she ‘consented’, that she told Wright it was ok. We see her has a child and how could we not, this is how Butler has introduced her to us. Wright initially seemed like a good guy, intent on bringing this young child to safety—the Hospital or Police. Despite this, his actions instantly turn him into a predator. No matter how strange the circumstances, what other explanation other than that he is a pedophile are there for choosing to have sex with a child. He must be the predator and Shori the victim, socialized in the world that we live in it is the only conclusion we can come to, but this is a trap that Butler has set for