Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy – Page 2 – How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?

Final Reflections and Sex Worker Rights

Warning: Gushing ahead I have been watching and waiting for this class since last year, and I am so thankful and so thrilled. I was so invested in the Maddaddam world, and this course was the perfect outlet for speculative fiction, technology, cyborgs, and feminism. I love Slack, and all the conversations we have on it, from Ex Machina to veganism. The way that everyone just throws themselves into conversation, pulling up references from different classes, news articles, and various experiences was probably the most inspiring and unexpected part of this class. What an awe-inspiring and standard-setting semester. Have a great summer!

More specifically to my final reflections for the Twinery, I focused on Katrina Woo Woo, and through her, Oryx. In many ways, this is an extension of my final blog post about the fetishization of Asian (American) women. When thinking about how to interpret the roles of Oryx and Katrina Woo Woo, both sex workers and both typified as “Asian Fusion” by white men (respectively Jimmy and Zeb), I immediately thought of the sex worker movement. Some sex workers see themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, conducting business in a savvy and profitable way. They claim their autonomous and nuanced politics through transnational, feminist, and/or sex-positive analysis and organize around issues such as legalizing sex work and marking this work as distinct from a narrative of trafficking victimhood. This political stance is close to the way Oryx defines herself as an empowered and adaptable businesswoman despite Jimmy’s belief that she is the victim trafficked from Southeast Asia. For Katrina, the entrepreneur behind Scales and Tails, sex work is clearly a business that she shapes into an empire, amassing independence and power. Her origins also have ties to history. We first see Katrina in New New York as Miss Direction. In the 1800s, Chinese Americans residing in New York City were predominantly male, with Chinese American women comprising of wealthy merchant’s wives and sex workers. The role that Katrina creates for herself speaks to the power of reclaiming sex work as a business in the male dominated world of the Maddaddam Trilogy.

Katrina’s pet snake could be a reference to the biblical apple and Eve, particularly in one scene in which Katrina is both costumed as an apple with the snake. There is plenty of other significant folklore and cultural practices that involve young women and snakes, from Medusa to Brittany Spears. There is also a particular dance in rural Indonesia called the dangdut goyang, or snake dance. Recently, Irma Bule, an Indonesian singer who had danced with snakes for an extra five dollars, died from snake venom after performing for 45 minutes after she was bitten. She was a young woman from a rural community who performed in order to attract crowds, primarily during election campaigns, and was paid $20 per performance. The stories about her went viral, and Indonesian journalist Made Supriatma frames her story in the spirit of Katrina and Oryx as one of a fighter who “exploits what she can exploit to go on living.” (Time, 2016)

Recommended Reading

Kwok, Yenni. “Here’s the Real Story Behind the Indonesian Singer Irma Bule, Who Died from a Cobra Bite.” Time. [http://time.com/4286323/irma-bule-snake-bite-cobra-singer-dangdut-indonesia/] 8 April 2016.

This is the article that I reference and quote in my paper.

Katsulis, Yasmina. “Gender, Sex Work, and Social Justice: Sociologists for Women in Society Fact Sheet.” Arizona State University. [http://www.socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fact_sum2008-sexwork.pdf] Summer 2008.

This article is quick because it is a fact sheet, but these are facts distinguishing sex work from trafficking.

Kempadoo, Kamala. “Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights.” Canadian Woman Studies Vol 22, No. 3,4 [http://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/viewFile/6426/5614] 1998.

This article covers sex work through history, situates sex work within the neoliberal framework, and gives an overview of sex worker rights organizing and issues that these workers face. I have seen this article cited in a few other pieces about sex workers, gendered migrant labor, and transnational feminism. The piece is easy to read, and helps us imagine what migrant sex work organizing and empowerment must look like in the Maddaddam world, and the near future.

Final Reflection: Identity in Hierarchy

“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumor for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.” – The Year of the Flood

What made the MaddAddam trilogy so gripping, I feel, is the width of the world. All three books present different slices of pre- and post-apocalyptic human experiences – life through the eyes of Snowman, Ren, and Toby, finally splitting to examine the role of the storyteller in history and fiction alike at the tail end of MaddAddam. The books and their narrative structures lend themselves so easily to being reimagined by another perspective, and that is what propelled me through my part in “Today is the Day of the Flood.”

I started off planning what to do as a final project with vague ideas about retelling the mythology of good, kind Oryx and Crake, the benevolent invented deities, and ended up instead crafting a day in the life of a CorpSeCorpsman. Such is the richness of the text; there are so many avenues left unexplored in the narrative, so many stories untold or demanding more telling. The CorpSeCorps looms over Oryx & Crake, obviously vanishing in the wake of the Waterless Flood. But while the world is still spinning, the Corps maintains its iron grip on the populaces of the Compounds and the pleebs alike. Jimmy, before he’s Snowman, lives in constant fear of Corps interrogations about his runaway rebel mother from the time she vanishes into adulthood. But aside from these appearances, the Corps is largely an invisible force that seems to rule by word of mouth more than force of hand in Oryx & Crake. We as readers don’t know who the Corpsmen were before they were Corpsmen, where they come from, or what their lives are like, and those unanswered questions led me to my character, the junior Corpsman Echo-Minus.

The main theme that led me in my writing was the fact that Jimmy, despite his lack of prized scientific genius, never considers the Corps as a career option. Therefore, I could safely assume that enlisting in the CorpSeCorps is not something a child of the Compounds does. Jimmy is unhappy about ending up at Martha Graham and unhappy with his subsequent jobs until he’s recruited by Crake, but that place for him at Martha Graham still exists, and that’s a luxury he has no awareness of. So who becomes a Corpsman? That question took my story out to the pleebs and I began to explore the concepts of choice and identity and how that translates into social classes in an oppressive dystopian society. Echo-Minus leaves his life, his family, and – most importantly – his name behind in the pleebs he grew up in, desperate for upward social mobility and willing to do anything to grasp at it. He repeatedly has to convince himself that he’s in a better place now in comparison to where he was before to justify sacrificing his identity. He has to keep telling himself he made the right choice, but the fact I wanted to emphasize is that he never had a choice, not a real one. Choosing the Corps over a gang or a religious faction was not a “real” choice, but simply the best one available to him due to the strict social hierarchy that exists over him. Snowman reflects on intellectual hierarchies in the Compounds, while Ren and Toby describe their lives outside those walls and the much harsher hierarchies imposed on them. All these characters are forced into corners and forced to make less than ideal choices: Snowman finds his way back to Crake out of desperation for purpose, Toby ends up with the Gardeners for her own self-preservation after losing her parents and spiraling into worse and worse states, and Ren is abandoned by Lucerne and forced to support herself with sex work. (It’s important to note that she chooses sex work and it’s not a negative reflection on her to do so; however, it’s telling that SeksMart offered the best benefits out of any available profession, and Ren’s decision is motivated by money and less than ideal circumstances: “I wasn’t likely to get anything better without a degree.”)

In the same way, Echo-Minus becomes one with the oppressive system that rules his life and, instead of blaming the system, he blames the product of it: the pleebs themselves. He doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the whole picture. He can only see what’s in front of him, and of course a life in the pleebs is infused with desperation and full of dead ends. Thus, he gives up his identity. I found the idea of Corpsmen being given designated identities that change as they move up the ranks both within the realm of possibility and relevant to the themes of my route in the game – it’s an insidious means of dehumanization. If most Corpsmen come from the pleebs, as I let myself assume, then the Corps would likely be very interested in removing them from their previous lives. Taking one’s name is taking one’s identity, and considering the MaddAddam books are full of people using false names or changing their names along with their situations, I think the Corps designations fit right in thematically. I used the NATO phonetic alphabet, both because it’s an international code and therefore ubiquitous and already associated with government usage, and because the NATO letters carry their own meanings when used in the International Code of Signals. I chose “Echo” solely because of Echo-Minus’s fixation on his past, how it lingers with him and keeps “echoing” in his internal monologue, but “Uniform” and “Kilo,” Echo-Minus’s Corpsman coworkers, were names chosen by their International Code of Signals meanings; “Uniform,” as a single-flag signal, means “You are running into danger,” and “Kilo” means “I wish to communicate with you.” In the story, Kilo-Minus imparts bits of information and Uniform’s absence is Echo-Minus’s first signal that something is amiss in-story. The suffixes of plus and minus were my own idea and impart their own hierarchies: plus at the top, with no suffix being neutral, and minus indicating junior status of some variety. Echo-Minus is supposed to be new to the Corps and Kilo-Minus is likely under observation for the way she talks. Uniform’s in good standing, but not the best.

For a choice-based game, Echo-Minus’s route in “Today is the Day of the Flood” is devoid of actual choice to reflect the fact that his own life is devoid of choice as well. My goal was to trick the reader into assuming they’re making choices, but really, each option leads straight to the next. The order can be played with, somewhat, but only in slight and insignificant ways – for example, what order Echo-Minus does his tasks before leaving for the pleebs. He can’t avoid eventually checking his messages at work, nor can he avoid catching Crake’s plague and dying in the Scales and Tails riot. It was funny, but when I set out writing, my sense of empathy for Echo-Minus was limited; he chose to be part of the Corps, I figured. He sold his soul into this oppressive police force in an effort to get ahead, to save himself at the expense of others. But the more I wrote and the more I thought about him and his life, the more empathy I had. He grew his own dimensions as I wrote through him; I felt his frustration, his feeling of futility, his subconscious knowledge that he was making the wrong choices, his suppressed guilt for abandoning his family, the damage dealt to him psychologically by his father’s death. He made an impossible choice, and no matter what he may have done, there would have been negative side effects. My route ends with Echo-Minus’s death in the pleebs, despite his desperation to not die in the pleebs, but the real tragedy is that he can’t remember his real name. He beat his real name out of his mind, and at that last critical moment as he fights to die as himself, not as “Echo-Minus,” he fails. The entire story is wrapped up in this identity crisis, exacerbated by the external world but fought internally. Echo-Minus depersonalized himself (and the people of the pleebs) to separate himself from his past and his family, but in that process of depersonalization, he lost everything that made him human. This is how the Corps operates. They prey on people desperate for a way out, and merely trap them in a different way.

SOURCES/EXTRA READING

A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison (1973) [.pdf], otherwise known as “the Stanford Prison Experiment,” a famous study about tensions between the imprisoned and their imprisoners. Most significant to Echo-Minus’s story was how the students designated as “guards” in the study felt they had to prove their authority through violence and other oppressive tactics; similarly, he truly feels a need to prove himself as different from other pleeblanders to distance himself from them and their lifestyle.

Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent (available in part via Google Books). The chapter about The Year of the Flood contains some analysis of the role of the Corps and contemplates how much power they really hold, as well as asserting that relatively little is known about them, which made me feel better about making things up.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale.” The New York Review (available online). Joyce Carol Oates, another contemporary female novelist, covers a majority of Atwood’s writing in this analysis, but about halfway through she discusses Oryx & Crake exclusively. I liked getting the perspective of a fellow writer.

Crakers for Kids: A Final Project Reflection

Beyond its ecofeminist critique, the Maddaddam trilogy is about language and storytelling (not that these are mutually exclusive concepts). Atwood constantly plays with narrators and narratives within books as well as across books. The stories themselves are about characters and groups of characters (e.g. Snowman to the Crakers, the God’s Gardeners, the Maddaddamites) that are defined by the way in which they interpret the world around them and share their beliefs, a basic form of storytelling. I think that our group’s decision to make a children’s book about the Crakers and their origins is thus a natural one. A children’s book follows the passing on of writing from Toby to Blackbeard at the end of Maddaddam. We imagine that this book would be created a few generations after Blackbeard as a way for Crakers, Craker-human hybrids, and/or humans to explain their origins to their children as well as tell cautionary tales or important lessons.

Each person in our group was responsible for a character to write a story about. I wrote about Snowman/Jimmy, in particular his role in relation to the Crakers. The process raised a lot of questions about what aspects of the story to distort. For instance, I chose to sugarcoat the relationship between Jimmy, Crake, and Oryx and describe them as best friends because this is how the Crakers would have liked to think about them. The story is titled “Snowman’s Sacrifice” because Jimmy/Snowman is portrayed as an endlessly benevolent character, constantly making sacrifices for the Crakers. We know from the book that his feelings towards the Crakers are far more complicated and even negative, but once again the Crakers perceive him to be an intermediary between themselves and Crake and Oryx. His relaying of the words of Crake and Oryx as well as his decision to “look” after the Crakers becomes an act of good will. This process of blurring or even warping the plot felt similar to what Atwood does throughout the novel, particularly in “The Story So Far” section in which Atwood summarizes previous books or the way the narrative changes depending on different focalizers. In many ways, I found this project to be an exercise in focalizing and understanding the function of stories in collective culture. It reminds me of my favorite line from The Year of the Flood, “We’re sitting around the fire…The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too…” How we understand characters differs depending on where the light shines and who it shines for and I think the Atwood meant this line to be about storytelling, especially as its around a fire like people telling campfire stories. I also wanted to note that for the most part our group wrote our stories separately and it was interesting to see motifs emerge across them. Specifically, we all used the “clearing of the chaos”/the flood as a turning point or temporal marker. Events and ideas became defined as pre-chaos and post-chaos for all the characters.

The trilogy ends with Blackbeard picking up language and I think that if we follow this trajectory, it is not unlikely that generations after him would create books for the purpose of explaining ways of living to their children, especially given the way the Crakers seem to want an explanation for everything. This was the other challenging part about the project- imagining what the future for Crakers/humans. Some questions that we grappled with were what would society look like after the mating of Crakers and humans? Would there be a fine line between Crakers and humans? Would a hierarchy emerge? What technologies would this new society develop? What symbols would they know? We did not jump to any assumptions to this questions, but rather picked up from where the books left off. Even if these stories became dated to new generations of Crakers, there is something about fairy tales and fables that preserves the past and is even otherworldly/othertimely.

Mostly, I really enjoy the different directions that our class took this project in and the variety of digital forms that these three books will now take on. In particular, I am really excited to see how folks constructed a calendar and conceptualized Craker-time because I can see many overlaps with our project and how we defined time (pre-chaos/post-chaos, visually through phases of the moon) and ideas about what does time mean given the Craker lifespan. I feel like this project has been a really tangible way of seeing how creative works lend themselves to one another and build a body of work and knowledge.

Crake vs. Freud

The more I study psychology, and the more I study the MaddAddam trilogy, the more connections I make. In many senses, Crake is very much like Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst.

Sigmund Freud was most known for three things: unconsciousness, stages of sexuality, and psychoanalysis. A big critique against him is that his theories were only based on his traumatic childhood, especially in terms of the stages of sexuality. He was very rigid about his theories – only he could change, edit, or improve on his own work. This led to many disputes with other psychologists that tried to work with him like Carl Jung and Alfred Alder. He even invented a whole new process of analysis, dream analysis, to prevent being psychoanalyzed by someone else. On even creepier levels, he also psychoanalyzed his own daughter, who went on to going against most of her father’s theories anyway. Not only is he rigid in practice, but he’s also rigid in methodology and belief. He believes in science and rationality.

Similarly, Crake’s character is much like Freud is these aspects. Crake too is rigid in belief. Crake only believes in the rational and in science. He went as far as the try to rid the Crakers of religion because he thought it was pointless. (And Ironic because he himself basically became their God). Crake also had a traumatic childhood that influenced his practice and theories.

While I don’t how much love Freud was capable of giving, I am certain that despite Crake’s rigidity, he had a special connection and feeling toward Oryx and in that sense he is separate from Freud. As smart as he was, Freud was disliked by many and opposed by many. As rigid and critical as he was, Crake was actually admired by many, if not all, for his intellect and uniqueness.

Bastardized Biriyani, $7

Food is culturally significant and ultimately reflective of the relationships (social and economic) we have with other people. For example, I have to prevent a destructive relationship when finding out someone is a picky eater (not eating when something looks weird to them), or when they say that they dislike food from a particular region (“Oh, I don’t like Asian food- like from the East”). When making broad statements like the latter, I find it to be somewhat problematic to be placing thousands of years of spice and cooking under one kind of taste. In this way, we can relate how people treat immigrants. Often natives force the latter group to reinvent themselves to be acknowledged and accepted by the community. We can see a result of this process maybe through the naming of the Tex-Mexs and the Asian Fusions in the MaddAddam Trilogy. At the end of this process, natives force these groups to become tasteless and completely different versions of themselves to be appealing.

Food appropriators tend to take a certain culture’s food and change it to make it appealing to certain groups. Basically, they bastardize the original cuisine. Look at Taco Bell, Curry-in-a-Hurry, even Chipotle (oh please, it’s Tex-Mex-Cajun). They have an image of being ethnic but send out food that the respective, typical cooks from the culture would not send out (the women, the mothers, the wives). [My mom has a lewd phrase for people who make terrible chai, she told me that that stuff is what you clean your butt with. If there was an equivalent for crap imitation food I would use it here.]

I think this is strongly related to how PoC are put together in the series. Tex-Mex exists for natives. Asian Fusion is probably a group made of people from different ethnicities, but it was probably easier to combine everyone into group, and have one name. If these groups chose their names for themselves, they are internalizing how they are being seen by society and are thus making themselves digestable and acceptable for others. People in the series are there to be consumed- sometimes literally, since it is rumored human carbon is used in burgers. Even for characters who are “needed”, they are treated as objects. Companies literally bid on high school graduates, and buy them to work. Even if Crake is bought by the most prestigious corporation, he was still objectified. MaddAddamites were weaponized.

In the books, we don’t even have distinct characteristic for any PoC group mentioned, which sheds light on how useless it is to categorize them are. The only thing we know about the Asian Fusions is that they are vicious, which we would assume that all the gangs are like. The Tex-Mex migrate. These names are meaningless when they are used by others in society.

I recently read an article going over how people don’t really love ethnic food. They love what is specifically prepared for them. The over-spiciness of “Indian” food, which for them, is the distinct (and only) characteristic of that kind of cuisine. This is usually prepared by Indian men here who don’t understand the nuances of cooking those dishes, and then package it for natives specifically (fattier and spicier than normal). The sweetened pad thai dish. People think they love these ethnic foods, but they’ll only eat it when it’s not an authentic dish, and most of the time, they’ve only had a few of these dishes. I can literally list the Indian and Thai dishes most people typically have, on one hand: chicken tikki masala, paneer, naan (Indian); pad thai, drunken noodles (thai). I typically feel incredulous when people say they love a certain culture’s food with little experience, and feel more strongly this way when people say they dislike it.

A particular culture’s cuisine has an array of dishes. This is not to say there may not be an underlying connection, but it is a little messed up to dislike a whole region’s food based on a dish or two. If anything, a lot of frequented “ethnic” places serve trash food, as do fusions. I had biriyani from an Indian place on W4th for my friend to try, and it was bland (somehow it was popular, though??). I went to Japan this past winter, and they seriously bastardize French culture and food. Most of their appropriated food, called yoshoku, is terrible. If any of you go there, don’t try “american dogs”.

Often, immigrants package their food here in a way to be accepted my natives, much like they do with their behavior and character. It’s assimilation, instead of integration.

Gender Roles & Reproductive Choice after the Apocalypse

Many post-apocalyptic visions of the future do not recognize the existence of women’s reproductive autonomy. When the continued propagation of the human race is at stake, pregnancy seems to become both unavoidable and newly desirable to female characters. Carrying children becomes the fictional woman’s obligatory biological occupation, and it does not matter whether her pre-apocalypse-self was characterized as wanting, or even thinking about children. The pregnant woman, or the mother with a young child, is a symbol of hope for the survival of humanity – whether she has a say in the matter or not. In many cases, this serves as a cover of sorts for hetero-masculine power fantasy: before the apocalypse, the beautiful woman might have denied the male access to her body, but now she is super pumped to have his babies.

Post-apocalyptic narratives are typically characterized as a vehicle for dismantling contemporary societal structures and norms, but so often they seem used instead to reinforce traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, and patriarchal family constructs. Perhaps as if to say that if an apocalyptic event occurred, it would restore what was ‘supposed’ to be the ‘natural’ order of things. In Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand, pregnant heroine Frannie makes depressing commentary on this phenomenon when she says, “Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath” (King 648). Men in such narratives are glorified for being violent, emotionally-callous survivalists; women become vulnerable vessels who require protection, and must bear and raise the next generation as their duty to the human race.

Into this longstanding tradition comes Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam. It makes little commentary on it, and in some ways, I felt, really reinforced this played-out reinforcement of gender roles in post-apocalyptic fiction. She plays the trope straight: all female characters who can get pregnant, do get pregnant. The characters are paired off into heterosexual, monogamous family units – unless, of course, they are killed off. Worse, Amanda expresses repeatedly that she does not want to carry her pregnancy to term, and Toby pretty much ignores her, and then the situation is simply dropped, and never addressed again within the narrative. The next time it’s brought up is to say that Amanda gave birth and apparently this is a happy ending. No matter that we never see any indication of her changing her mind, that she doesn’t want the child. No matter that it is an especially dangerous pregnancy (with a Craker baby!) that could easily have killed her in childbirth – an early-term, plant-induced (the “herbs” Toby mentions knowing about) abortion might have been LESS dangerous, without modern medicine so many women die in childbirth in the best of circumstances! Amanda is never allowed a decision other than giving birth, and the question of abortion is placed entirely in Toby’s hands, excluding Amanda entirely. And when Toby decides to do nothing (not even to discuss it with Amanda, to run down her options!), there is never any discourse about it in the text. This makes it all too clear that in Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world, like so many others, reproductive choice no longer exists.

Katrina Woo Woo and Oryx: Asian American Film Tropes and Fetishization

I cannot get over the fact that there are two love triangles: Zeb/Katrina Woo Woo/Adam One and Jimmy/Oryx/Crake. This is disappointing in so many ways. Where to begin? The fact that Adam One and Crake both had such huge egos that they created their own cults based on their worldviews; Zeb/Jimmy are the same annoyingly misogynistic trope of man that becomes our narrator; Katrina Woo Woo and Oryx are mysterious (read: racialized) tropes and plot devices and used both as the object of devotion and also for their sexual prowess. Oh, Margaret Atwood! This is a transgression that just seems, frankly, overtly racist in a way that I didn’t want Asian Fusion to be. There better be an explanation for this! I wish to call upon the Crakers’ flying deity!

I’ve been doing a little bit of research on East Asian American (“Oriental”) film tropes, and I wanted to share some thoughts with a side of rant. There are two basic types of film tropes: Lotus Blossom Baby and the Dragon Lady. The Lotus Blossom Baby is submissive, “utterly feminine, delicate, and welcome respites from their often loud, independent American counterparts…often spoils from the last three wars fought in Asia.” [1] The Dragon Lady is often overtly sexual, using her appearance to seduce and manipulate to aid evil men. Is this familiar yet? These tropes are often tied to other gendered stereotypes, such as the mail order bride, or the evil seductress. These controlling images shape the way that the general public imagines the Asian American (often imagined and constructed to mean East Asian American) women. One of the most common reasons why scriptwriters would make these sexist, racialized characters is so that they are expendable. As in, thank you Oryx for becoming a vector for this deadly disease, and now I will use you to manipulate my friend into killing me so that I do not have to live this horrible nightmare that I created. And while we’re at it, thank you Katrina Woo Woo, you were great with the hideouts, and it would’ve been cool if you were Eve One but for my inability to prevent your death even though I (Adam One) has all of these seemingly powerful connections.

What is particularly interesting is that the “Lotus Blossom,” Oryx, is aiding Crake in spreading a deadly vector while Katrina, the Dragon Lady, is helping Adam One spread pacifist resistance. I wonder if we are supposed to read Crake or Adam One as an imperialist technocrat, mirroring the U.S. military forces and their paternalistic treatment of indigenous people while invading a country like Vietnam or imagining “Oriental” mail order brides. I would love to know what other people make of these tropes. It seems too perfect (dragon lady, lotus blossom) to be a coincidence. What I want to know if whether Atwood unconsciously internalized these tropes to give her main guys more texture and love interests at the expense of the objectification and fetishization of Asian American women, or whether there is another plan here.

Is this another use of a variable (still not okay if it is) to show nuanced contrast between Crake (technocratic, controlled development) and Adam One (pacifist, spontaneous development)? For example, Katrina Woo Woo opened her own business and freely (it seems) used her power to help Adam One. On the other hand, it seemed like Crake specifically employed Oryx under him, and her economic independence comes from doing his work. The other variable that I reflected on was gaming and how Maddaddam/Crake and God’s Gardeners used games to make up the rules/learn the game. Also, I am reading on world development theory as it formed in China under Sun Yat-Sen (autocratic, nationalist). The Maddaddam and God’s Gardeners eerily mirror the factions in development theory, although in this case there are no countries or imagined race wars. This would be great to chat about!

[1] Tajima, Renee E. “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” pub. Making Waves: An anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. [http://www.samfeder.com/PDF/Making Waves_ Renee E. Tajima.pdf] 26 February 2010.

“That just makes me a dumb human like you.”

OK FIRST OFF I’M SO SAD. I kind of cannot believe all of these characters died? This feels like the Deathly Hallows all over again.

(Also, can we talk about how Amanda partially names her child after Ren? No, I’m not giving up on them.)

The idea that the Crakers are “post-human” sits wrong with me. While reading this trilogy, I cannot help but want to relate to these pseudo-human-hybrid-humanoid-homo sapiens sapiens. They have the innocence of a child–both the adults and the actual children–, the natural curiosity of the human mind, and seemingly look like humans, albeit more perfect, uniform humans. Though Crake intended them to be a replacement for mankind after the Waterless Flood, I cannot help but see them as unfortunate survivors, just as with the Gardeners and the MaddAddamites.

In MaddAddam, the question of the Crakers’ humanity is often brought up, and the question of what is humanity even more so. Is their ability to reproduce the sole aspect that makes them human? Ivory Bill says yes, “If they can crossbreed with us, then case made. Same species. If not, then not.” Is their naivety and innocence not satisfactory of being a suffering human? Does their ill knowledge of simple concepts make them not human?

Though Crake made them out to be free of faults, at least what he considered faults, the Crakers have progressed, or regressed, into another entity. Even Toby anticipates what will become of society if the Crakers live long enough to see it happen, asking “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?” They see Crake and Oryx as their gods, their parents. They see Jimmy’s Red Sox hat as a sacred object, one that a storyteller can put on but not themselves; it’s taboo. Crake could not even remove singing from their biology. Ivory Bill says that “Their brains are more malleable than Crake intended. They’ve been doing several things we didn’t anticipate during the construction phase.”

Do the others have a Buddhist view on life–that suffering is what makes a human a human? Some are adamant on not giving the Crakers any weapons, as there is “No point in giving sprayguns to the Crakers, since you could never teach them about shooting and killing people. They just aren’t capable, not being human as such.” Is that what it means to be human–being able to shoot and kill? Or is it the Crakers abilities to grieve, to mourn, to sense pain, and to want to heal that make them human?

If being human meant being able to kill, then what would explain most of the survivors’ denial that the Painballers were people? They committed awful, horrific acts, so “Who cares what we call them…So long as it’s not people.” With the logic that handling weapons meant being human, then the Painballers are human, while the Crakers are not. It is said that “Crakers are nonviolent by nature. They don’t fight, they can’t fight. They’re incapable of it. That’s how they’re made.” This really just sounds like a pacifist human to me.

The Crakers’ names, ranging from Marie Antoinette to Sojourner Truth, are inherently human, because they belonged to real human people. Their singing seems to be another language, maybe even a certain dialect. However, Blackbeard’s voice is considered a “thin boy’s voice. His Craker voice, not human.” Well what is the difference?

It is also kind of amusing that the pigoons are so human-like, what with their ritualistic funerals and their swimming in pools, whereas the humanity of Crakers, who are actual people, is questioned. Is having human tissue all it takes to be human?

I think that what makes a human is the want for knowledge and the ability to pass on that knowledge. As we see at the end, Blackbeard is now an adult, writing down the Story of Toby, for all those who will live after these “original” survivors are gone. “Funny old thing, the human race,” says Zeb.

Now we will sing.

Understanding the Circular Narrative in Atwood’s MaddAddam

I’m going to return to our many discussions about choices in narrator/narrative to open up a general discussion about what Atwood’s ending means. The narrator in “MaddAddam,” particularly towards the end of the novel, is constantly shifting and being handed off and picked up. We go from Zeb telling his story to Toby to Toby telling it to the Crakers to Blackbeard telling it to the Crakers. In a story which ultimately ends in mating between Crakers and humans and the recreation of “civilization” post apocalypse, this narrative style mimics the way in which one generation leads to the next and one society gives way to the next as mapped out in the novel. In fact, many aspects of the story itself are come full circle in this way, such as how the Crakers and humans return to “Egg” they were created in for a final battle which decides how they will continue existing in this world.

By the end of the novel, we see the Crakers and humans rebuilding many of the fundamental aspects of our society. They are using religion, commemorative rites, and other cultural symbols. They are using language and writing to record. They even practice law in the form of the trial. What does Atwood mean by all of this? Why is the choice to reinhabit the earth, and with so many of the same cultural practices and institutions? Is this cycle of destruction and restoration hopeless? I am hesitant to say it is human nature to turn to these ways of living and meaning making and to center our lives around institutions like gender and religion. But, I am confused as to why Atwood would present all of the problems and violence that comes from a society which has taken it too far just to create a society that looks like it might head down the same path. Even as Blackbeard is recording written history, he is choosing the narratives that are the happiest and the most hopeful, which is not particularly useful for learning from the past which is so often painful, as Toby makes clear (“Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably,” 451.) I’m curious as to how others made sense of the end of the trilogy!

Minecraft, Blood and Roses, and Gamifying Genocide

Last year, my eleven-year-old cousin showed me the wonders of Minecraft. I was bamboozled. I even have the Facebook Status (a rarity) to prove it:

My eleven year old cousin introduced me to Minecraft tonight and took me through the world she literally created. She taught me how to shear wool, build a home, and mine for materials. She even had some analysis of the app economics (“It’s worth the seven dollars”). Can’t tell if it’s impressive or terrifying. Are we connected to things by the money we spend on them? Or by the virtual pickaxe we used to make it?

Minecraft, a world-building game with such a large fandom that I have seen this videogame in MoMA, obviously made it to the New York Times earlier last week. The piece shaped the game as not only a product of our culture, but as a producer of it. Minecraft is given credit for molding a child’s sense of logic, discovery, 3D imagination, and even the basics of coding. All things that the next generation needs to survive the impending takeover of Google compounds. Different from easy to manipulate computers and programs, Minecraft is refreshingly full of bugs and problems. In fact, these intentional blips reportedly end up encouraging players to fix the problem themselves.

With the advent of websites that literally allow you to gamify your life (see link below), we have to face an added dimension to the virtualization of everything. Online gaming and computer games are usually best in moderation, as practice or for leisure. It’s all fun and games until it’s not. When we tie gaming and games with social development, in place of or prioritized over social interaction, or rely so heavily on gaming that our relationship becomes one of addiction, something scary happens. And increasingly, as children (at least most of my cousins) are growing up weaned off of the iPad, the first point of contact to the technology is often in the form of a distracting video game.

While there is undoubtedly much research into the psychology and neurology of such a dependency, I will leave it to speculation in this blog post. Just something to think about the next time your sibling/child/parent fails to respond to your attempts at conversation in favor of a riveting RPG or perhaps SimsCity, needing “just five more minutes.”

In Maddaddam, we see Crake as young Glenn, who is shaped by the traumatic events of his family and species, but is given one of his first tastes of autonomy through gaming. Specifically, through Zeb’s life lessons and idle Blood and Roses gaming. There is no other way that Glenn can technically take control of his life, especially as Zeb leaves him. Although this fixation on extreme environmentalism to the point of brushing off individual human lives could have come first from the “real world” and was reflective onto the games, it was definitely magnified and honed by playing games like Blood and Roses. On the other hand, the Maddaddam group manipulated Extinctathon to create their own web of communications. It is worth thinking about their specific differences in using these games.

While I am writing about excessive gaming from a negatively biased point of view, we can also think about the relationship between humankind and online gaming in the context of our readings this week. Tsing names fungi as the ultimate metaphor for resistance, evading domestication for years, and Harroway talks about the blurring of lines between human and nature, and debunking human exceptionalism so we cannot point to a single enemy for our social woes. Glenn almost merges with the videogame, letting his worldview intertwine tightly with that of the game (trade you 1,000 babies on fire for an Eiffel Tower). Maddaddam resists “domestication” under the videogame, twisting it instead to work for them. There is no negative or positive connotation here, and in some ways, Tsing and Harroway describe similar phenomena. Humankind still interacts with and eats fungi even if we have not domesticated it, and perhaps blurring this line and resisting exceptionalism is it’s own form of resistance.

I would like to start the conversation here: About a reflection of not only how we use literal online gaming but “make up rules” of games in daily life, or even how dependent we are on our devices to tell us how to see the world. And what filter are we forced to screen our perceptions through? For example, someone may store their entire calendar in their phone, or be unable to look away from the screen, even during a conversation with someone in the “real world.”

And finally, with regards to Maddaddam and Crake: There is a difference between living by the rules of the game, and making up the rules of the game to suit your lifestyle. And that difference is the one between powerlessness and direct autonomy over your own time.

Links:

The Minecraft Generation: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0

Gamify Your Life: https://habitica.com/