Abstract

This article intervenes in readings of Cuarón's Children of Men that privilege the psychic and political trajectory of the film's anti-hero, Theo Faron. Inspired by comments about the importance of the cinematic background and the biopolitical order it represents, I engage the material, corporeal dimensions of in/fertility in the film and take the 'race/reproduction bind' (Weinbaum) as central to biopolitical analysis. I interpret the miraculously pregnant illegal immigrant, Kee, in relation to two intersecting strands of fiction and theory: a lineage of dystopian speculative fiction on the one hand, and transatlantic studies on the other. Through a sustained consideration of 'grounds' and 'backgrounds' as they appear in both strands of work, I generate a more elastic conception of 'background'. Such an analysis opens up new angles of approach for biopolitical theorising by foregrounding two figures - the reproductive female and the child - that embody generativity in excess of the now familiar biopolitical category of Homo sacer, or bare life (Agamben). I conclude by showing how the film resonates with Hannah Arendt's enigmatic principle of natality as a possible point of departure for biopolitical analysis.

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