Hybridity in fiction models a future where mixed identity is the new norm

Evidence

Dracula provides a model, replicated in later works, for the emergence of hybridity as the character of the future and of modern experience. In this regard, the mixed blood of Mina Harker’s child at the book’s end is comparable to the mixed character of the foetus carried by Lilith Lyapo, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Dawn (1987), after her sexual encounters with an alien. It is an open question whether the cultural anxieties that underlie both Dracula and Dawn have altered or abated significantly in the past hundred years. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 559

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s existing library: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler—the author cites Butler’s Dawn explicitly.
• BMF: The hybrid-foetus-against-fears-of-miscegenation thread resonates obliquely with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower in this library, which also explores alien/Other boundaries and how hybrid identity becomes a survival strategy.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: has the hybridity anxiety actually shifted in a hundred years, or just changed costume?
• FICTION: Seed question for story: what does a child born of the monster’s blood inherit, culturally and morally, a century after the monster dies?