Eliciting Care from the Structure of Soft Domination in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild"

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay examines care in Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild” as both a mechanism of oppression and a site of potential transformation. Drawing on anthropologist Bo Kyeong Seo’s concept of elicited care—a seemingly passive but potent form of agency through which subjects in precarious positions draw others into relations of mutuality and obligation— alongside Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, particularly regarding the soft form of domination exercised through gift exchange, I argue that care in the story operates not only as a tool of domination but also as a force capable of reshaping the very relations it sustains. Seo’s concept of elicitation is particularly salient for examining a fragile connection or the presence of vulnerability that eventually calls forth care and potentiality. Therefore, this essay first shows how the Tlic-Terran relationship operates through gift exchange that naturalizes reproductive hierarchy.
Then, the article demonstrates that Butler disrupts this self-perpetuating system through an unfolding logic of elicited care. In so doing, this research examines Lien’s seemingly passive withdrawals as her potent investments, eliciting in Gan the longing and recognition that will eventually become his own demand on T’Gatoi. Ultimately, the protagonist Gan transforms care from a mechanism of soft domination into a site of mutual vulnerability and shared risk. By intervening in the slavery-symbiosis debate, this essay proposes elicitation as an analytic hinge that reframes the binary of consent and coercion as a contested site from which uneven coexistence can be renegotiated.