Racial And Gender Discriminations In Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

Octavia Estelle Butler is the first widely recognized African-American female science fiction writer.She breaks the tradition of science fiction that was dominated by white and male writer and readers,and focuses on living experience of marginalized black and women.Using the genre of science-fiction,Butler explores subjects about interrelationships between humans,and human with aliens in the present and future society.Kindred,as the best-seller among her books,is a representation of gender and racial relationships under historical context and modern society.From the perspective of a modern independent black woman Dana with first person narrative,the typical neo-slave narrative novel connects two epochs with space and time travel.With the structure of neo-slave narrative,it portrays the power struggle between men and women,whites and blacks in modern American society of 1976 and American in the first half of 20th century under slavery.This thesis,by referring to Feminist theory and the Knowledge-Discourse-Power theory and Panopticism theory of Foucault,illustrates both how women in Kindred are being objectified and being deprived of their discourse power by patriarchal values,and women's never-stopped struggles for independent power;it also discusses how white discourse in both epochs continuously takes advantage of racial power to maintain white supremacist,with the way of discipline and punishment to supervise both races to confine their thoughts and behaviors to racial hierarchal orders,thus to achieve the aim of oppressing blacks to reinforce their superiority.Besides that,this paper analyzed how blacks construct their own counter-discourse through rebelling authorities,hence producing new knowledge,and to some extent gain their power to reshape racial relationships to constitute power struggle of whites and blacks.At the end of the paper,it demonstrates the interdependent and symbiotic relationship between gender and races,and deconstructs the historical origin and indivisible genetic relationship between whites and blacks.