Chloe Alexander

I'm find it very interesting that Hopkinson ends "The Glass Bottle Trick" where they do. They're really is no resolution unlike in "Snake." Maybe Hopkinson didn't mean anything with this ending, but I feel that its important to look how the story ends at the climax of the story.
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Im glad there was a positive ending with Binti's survival and her still going to the university, and the peace between the humans and Meduse. Im also glad to know the story doesn't end here, because I'm interested to more about the world, how Okwu adjusts to the university, and the Edan. #BSUENG490

“The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us” (Lorde, 293). #BSUENG490

I know that this is a shorter book, but I did not expect everyone to be dead so quickly. I also find it very interesting that she starts to bond with Okwu. I can't wait to find out what makes her different from the other humans. And can't wait to find out what her mysterious machine is.
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Im glad that Cassie is getting a happy ending with Sam, and that she got to see Abby in the end. It felt like there was a lot of things that Cassie didnt get, closure of her past and feelings of family and her relationship to Lexi, but she did get some closure of her life moving forward.
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“Privilege is not monolithic; it is unevenly distributed. Even among members of one privileged class, other mechanisms of marginalization may mute or reduce privilege based on another status” (Coston and Kimmel, 140). #BSUENG490

I think its really interesting that French reveals what happened to Lexi so far from the end of the story. It makes me question what is going to happen next to both Cassie and her head space/mental health, and the fantastic four.
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“I could have kept on punching forever, I wanted this guy's blood filling my mouth, I wanted to feel his face explode into pulp and splinters under my fist and just keep going” (French, 251). I think this is getting very dangerous for Cassie's mental health. #BSUENG490

I think it's very interesting that there is now an angle of historical events for the motive. As of right now I think this historical motive may be more than one singular event. Perhaps a long line of things that are just now starting to blow up.
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Its interesting how Cassie almost feels as if she lived "Lexi's" life. For example the text states, "...Ive been here before" (French, 108) and "The place Bloody should have looked familiar, all the hours I'd spent staring at photos and video, but it was more than that" (French, 108).
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“Women’s power to contest the terms of political power is substantial and for this reason it is constantly, though often in a behind-the-scenes way, subjected to interventions designed to limit its potential” (McRobbie, 626).
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"The others aren't gone, I got it wrong somehow. They're only hiding; they're still here, for ever and ever" (French, 1). I loved the introduction to the story. It left me wanting more and felt very mysterious and captivating which set up a fantastic tone for the story.
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I agree, Ashugara always seemed so forward, so to have no scenes of hers was a little weird to me. I also thought that Ada's transformation was also a little abrupt considering we only have like 2 sections with her in it, and she seemed more willing to take over her human life before #BSUENG490

I am glad that the Ada takes the incentive to gain control of her own life. With that being said I feel that this was a very quick transition considering we barley get anything from the Ada throughout the book. Im also disappointed that Ashugara seems to just disappear from the story.
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One of the things that I found most interesting in this section is just how much Ashugara is becoming more "human". Its other sections we got a little more emotion from her in the form of pleasure, anger, and happiness, but now we get to see a more "human" side of her with sadness too. #BSUENG490

“The Cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” (Haraway, 345) #BSUENG490

I love the change in the Ada that we get to see throughout this section of the story. In the beginning it was only the Obanje and Asughara, and in the last few chapters she has only talked a little bit. Im glad she is starting to gain her own sense of identity and personality here.
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“The Ada was performing other things, acting the role of a normal girl in college, selling kisses in order to be held.” This pairs well with our performance talk from Friday. Especially when we bring up how Ada changed her hair to fit into one of her groups in college. #BSUENG490

“To be female is…to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “woman,” to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporal project” (483). #BSUENG490

I love the use of point of view in Freshwater. Usually when I see second point of view it is used to connect to the reader in some way, but with this book the use of second point of view is more so to create a very ethereal narrator, and I think the author did really well with this idea.
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I am so glad that Lib got Anna out of this situation she was in with her parents. The arc of her character, starting as an unemotional nurse, to a caring mother of sorts is quite beautiful in my opinion. I also love how it relates back to last week about nurturance and mothers.
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“Where terror and deprivation reduces children to the most basic need for simple survival, they are nonetheless fragile, complicated human creatures who have been so reduced” (Ruddick, 34). This reminds me a lot of Anna's difficulties with her brother's death.
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“Lib suspended her dislike of the woman for a moment and considered what Rosaleen O'Donnell has been through; what hardened her” (161). I love this change in Lib's character. She has drastically changed to an aloof, rude know it all to someone who seems to genuinely care for this family.
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Something I noticed is that the narrator often acts like lib. For example, “Dinner today consisted of three miniscule fish called roach that the master had knitted in the lough" (103). It's very numerical and descriptive. Its like the narrator is doing to Lib what Lib is doing to Anna. ##BSUENG490

One of the things that I felt was interesting was how the use of culturally produced insufficiency towards women creates a focus on self-modification and forces them into a state in which femininity causes such things as “demoralization, debilitation, and even death” (Bordo, 461).
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I noticed that Lib sees Anna as both the ringleader of this heist as well as a victim. She often jumps back and forth asking why a mother wouldn't feed her child, and calling Anna a hustler. Its almost like she has both a disappointment in Anna, but a protectivness over her as well.
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“More and more, as silenced voices speak, the need for different kinds of language is being acknowledged” (Bourke, 306).

The end makes it clear that without history and the stories in them, we cant change, and right the wrongs that may have been long established in our cultures.
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"They had to work from before dawn till after dusk, Sundays and weekdays both, day after day, just to keep up with themselves.” “...anything they couldn't profit and get on in the world and have some sense of security.” (The Merfolk and Music, 107)
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The thing I noticed most about these two stories is that both are reflections of The Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but the thing that really makes both of the females similar is that they get to become their better selves by choosing their own lives and who they themselves get to be.

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“It is by writing, from and towards women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (Cixous, 199).

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