Maternal back/grounds inChildren of MenNotes toward an Arendtian biopolitics

Abstract

This article intervenes in readings of Cuaron'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. I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future. - M argaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale , 84 In this sense, in its need for beginners that it may be begun anew, the world is always a desert. - H annah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203 In his response to the film adaptation of P.D. James's story of a childless and dystopian Britain, Slavoj Žižek observes that Children of Men (Cuaron US/UK 2006) is a film in which 'the background persists' ('Clash'). Zahid Chaudhary, too, argues that the film's 'structure of visibility (is one) in which the back- ground of the frame, rather than the putative object of cinematic focus, carries the weight of signification' (80). Both thinkers are interested in how the film's background coheres into a violent, uncannily familiar biopolitical order - one in which camps and cages are symptoms of national lockdown and the words 'homeland security' justify the forcible confinement of refugees. My aim here is to extend critical discussion of Children's cinematic background by focusing on