Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2006. 109 minutes.
No Men Beyond This Point. Directed by Mark Sawers. Culver City, CA: Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2015. 80 minutes.
Fruitless Elsewheres in Elsewhen: Dystopian Depictions of Reproduction
The two films under review unveil new opportunities—especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturn—to discuss the contemporary politics of reproduction in the feminist classroom.
Political fiction, Amy Atchison and Shauna Shames write, helps us to “parse the political world, with frightening futuristic visions serving to amplify, explain, or warn us about current trends” (2019, 1).
Based on the 1992 novel by P. D. (Phyllis Dorothy) James, The Children of Men depicts a dystopian future in which a global virus plagues women’s fertility. Fascist England, amid a world ridden with pollution and saturated with violence, is the sole remaining regime. While immigrants (“fugees”) seek access to the only surviving state and are violently policed, pregnant woman, Key, seeks escape. The protagonist, Theo, is sought by a human-rights group, to escort Key across a barbarous landscape—contending with both military and rebel forces—to the harbor, where she can be transported to a humanitarian society that exists beyond the parameters of a nation-state called the Human Project. If detected, Key would face forcible reproduction until menopause, and her baby placed in state custody. Within this stratified society, divided along political, racial, and ethnonationalist lines, Key’s identity as a fugee and a black woman takes central importance in interpretation; the escape of a black woman from England, seeking freedom at the coast, with the threat of forced state control of her body and broken kinship, demands comparison with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In contrast, the self-described mockumentary, No Men Beyond This Point postulates a utopian/dystopian present, in which women, by means of parthenogenesis, acquire the ability to reproduce independently. As only female children are born, men face obsolescence and extinction, relegated to underpaid domestic work or life in a male-only sanctuary. Led by a female-dominated global governance, peace and domestic partnership between women is ubiquitous. Some women advocate for the continuance of the status quo, stating it is nature’s path, while men and sympathetic women demand gender equality—resulting in social unrest and, ultimately, the equity they’re seeking. In the classroom, this film can springboard student engagement to parse the meaning of sexual, romantic, and domestic parity in contemporary society—the elision of which, in the interest of heterosexual reproduction, has persisted in the. Moreover, it can be instrumentalized to destabilize the role of “nature” and “biology” as grounds for the patriarchal hierarchy that designates women as having lower social value and as better suited for reproductive and domestic roles. Centrally, the film postulates that a shift in reproductive abilities has the power to remedy the subordinate social position of women.
When brought to bear upon one another, these two films can catalyze students to interrogate gendered and racialized social roles, the nation-state, and evaluative reproduction.1 When screening them as part of a class, instructors can assign Survive and Resist (Atchison and Shames 2019) to facilitate discussions about the ideological framing of dystopia, and “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies” by Dorothy Roberts (2015) can help students analyze the racialized differences of reproduction—both between the two films and in the extent the films reflect the real world.
Works Cited
Atchison, Amy L., and Shauna L. Shames. 2019. Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Octavia. 1995. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage.
Goodwin, Michele. 2020. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
James, P. D. 1992. The Children of Men. London: Faber and Faber.
Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon.
—. 2015. “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?” In Feminist Surveillance Studies, edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, 169-86. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sparling, Nicole L. 2014. “Without a Conceivable Future: Figuring the Mother in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 35, no. 1 (January): 160-80.
1 “Evaluative reproduction” refers to the idea that some reproduction is preferred, encouraged, and/or promoted over others.