Off the old hobbyhorse

Okay, enough about that. Now that I'm back again teaching comp, I'm getting ideas for critical books on lit. I have always been interested in authorship; that's why I wrote a dissertation on Nabokov, one of the most controlling authorial figures around. But now, since I've been teaching Butler's story "Bloodchild," a science fiction story , I have some other ideas, or at least other branches of the same concerns.
The story examines the plight of a handful of humans of various races (unspecified) at some time in the dystopic future, Butler's customary place in her stories. These individuals have been driven off of earth and landed up some generations past on another planet inhabited by insectoid intelligent life that isn't all that welcoming, particularly at first. But at the point at which the story takes place, the two species have arrived at a trade of sorts:
the insect race protects the humans in their own little preserve, where they can form family groups, reproduce, and build a relatively normal human life. In return, the matriarchal insects will give up one male member of their family to serve repeatedly as host for the larvae of one of the insect race, a painful and potentially deadly process, since the larvae, once hatched, have a thirst for mammalian blood, and will eat the host alive if they are not removed in time.
Butler ups the ante by writing an afterward saying that despite critics' insistance, the story is not about slavery, but about "male pregnancy" and coming of age.
I asked my students to tackle this conundrum, defining slavery, and arguing one way or another: is it about slavery or not? And if so, why would Butler claim this, particularly since she has written several books that she openly admits investigate the relationship between master and slave.
I find Butler's claims to be part of a tradition of authorship begun perhaps by Henry James. James famously wrote volumes of prefaces for the various editions of his stories and novels in which he elliptically made various claims for them. James famously obscured and mystified the process by which he created his works by seeming to lay it bare. Like a magician, he wrote prefaces that performed acts of prestidigitation that leave us gaping and puzzled, wondering what he might be saying in all those entangled clauses.
Nabokov carries this tradition into the 20th century, warring opening with critics and Freudians with teasing hints that manipulate the hapless reader and potential critic. He even published a book of "interviews," Strong Opinions, in which he more or less interviews himself, asking the questions, editing the answers, editing the resulting interviews.
Butler, while not seeming to belong in the company of these modernist male mouthpieces, obscures her own purposes as well, though not for the same reasons, I would argue. We need to remember who Butler was writing to. It was mostly male, adolescent audiences who read science fiction in the 70s. They weren't too open to political themes or politically marginal ones anyhow. And they weren't interested in race or gender at all. So how could Butler maintain and grow her audience? She needed to obscure what she was doing by infiltrating these themes and concerns in under the guise of the personal and the familiar.
It's an interesting issue, and one worthy of a book, if someone hasn't already written it. There are probably lots of other writers I haven't even thought of who build hedges around their work to protect it or to ward readers off in various ways.
It would be interesting to write that book.