Children Of Men Research Articles

Fathers and Daughters; or, Social Reproduction in the Anthropocene

Abstract Critics have argued that contemporary literature and culture fail to offer compelling alternatives to a present marred by capitalist overdevelopment and environmental destruction. This essay finds counterevidence to that claim in recent dystopian fictions such as the films Blade Runner 2049, Interstellar, Children of Men, and Train to Busan and the novel The Children of Men, which prominently feature teamwork between fathers (or father surrogates) and daughters in a world where the human species faces possible extinction. Representing care work as heroism, these works not only seek to redefine what counts as professional competence in a crisis but further model the passage of power from an exhausted patriarchy to a younger generation of women more alert to the necessity of creating a world that values reproductive labor as much as, if not more than, productive labor.

Melodrama against the State: Children of Men’s Unimaginable Tomorrow

Melodrama against the State: Children of Men’s Unimaginable Tomorrow

Queer Futures for an Aging Planet

Abstract Associated with disaster metaphors such as floods, avalanches, tsunamis, and icebergs, older people have come to take the symbolic form of the environmental impacts they are imagined causing. Yet even as older people are posited as the cause and imaginatively take the shape of the disaster, they are also registered as especially vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather. While the tendency toward blame and care are not logically incompatible, this tension has resulted in a cultural narrative that fuels a deep sense of unfairness across generations. This article reads the sterility dystopia—a subgenre of science fiction where a global inability to have children results in aging populations and societal collapse—as registering the anxiety that arises at the intersection of age and the environment. Taking The Children of Men as a case study, I suggest that P. D. James's novel expresses the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations—not of a world lacking children, as we might expect, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging. Pushing against the link between climate activism and generational futurity, I draw on queer theory to argue that intergenerational kinship in the present privileges the values of affiliation, contingency, and immediacy that can inspire a more sustainable future.

Community Service for Cianjur Earthquake Victims Through Education and Empowerment

The research aims to discuss community service and concern for earthquake victims that occurred in Cianjur. Want to analyze the process of community service for victims of the Cianjur earthquake and want to know the level of concern from volunteers for the victims of the Cianjur earthquake. The research method uses a qualitative approach that describes the phenomena observed at the research location. The technique of collecting data is through direct field surveys for victims of the Cianjur disaster. Interviews by asking questions of volunteers and disaster victims, who were visited at the service location. Documentation studies of television media and internet media, information from volunteers, officials and other communities. Results and conclusions: (1). In the implementation of community service and concern from community volunteers from West Java, Banten and Jakarta to help and lighten their burden, from various institutions and communities. With various vehicles carrying aid in the form of food supplies, clothes, medicines and in the form of funds for the Cianjur earthquake victims. (2). Implementation of community service through education for school-age children in the form of education on traumatic healing, reading and writing the Koran, giving light questions about learning, singing, giving gifts of toys and food in the form of textbooks, dolls and other toys. Community service in the form of road repairs and lighting for power outages. Distribution of groceries, women's clothing, men's clothing and children's clothing, free medical and health care.

Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Seasonal and spatial variations of bioaerosols and antibiotic resistance bacteria in different wards of the hospital

Introduction: Transmission of bioaerosols through the air is known as an important route for a wide range of nosocomial infections. Therefore, in the present study, we aimed to evaluate the type and diversity of bioaerosols and antibiotic resistance of bacterial bioaerosols in the indoor environments of Sina educational and treatment hospital, Tabriz, Iran. Methods and materials: 150 samples of bacteria and fungi (75 fungi and 75 bacteria) bioaerosol samples were collected on petri dish containing Sabouraud dextrose agar from February to March and June to July 2020 in three periods of daytime (morning, noon and evening) according to National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH 0-800) standard. After sampling, fungal and bacterial samples were incubated and the disk diffusion agar method (Kirby-Bauer) was used for assessing the antibiotic resistance. Results: The concentration of bioaerosols varied significantly in different wards. In addition, the concentration of bioaerosols in winter was observed to be higher than in summer. The highest and lowest airborne fungal concentrations were found in burns operating room and men's infectious ward (49 CFU/m3) and children's burns ward (28 CFU/m3), respectively. The predominantly isolated bacteria were Streptococcus spp. (38%) and Staphylococcus spp. (37%). Also, the main isolated fungi belonged to the genera Aspergillus (75.9%) and Penicillium (22.5%). The highest rates of antibiotic resistance were observed for colistin (100%) in Gram-negative and penicillin (84.2%) in Gram-positive. Conclusion: Timely and regular disinfection of hospital wards can affect the density of bioaerosols. Owing to the prevalence of COVID-19 epidemic in the world, the staff and patients often were wearing masks, gloves and special clothing as well as using disinfectants to prevent coronavirus infection in wards during the summer sampling.

Nightmares at the End of History

The public intellectual and political theorist Francis Fukuyama is best known for insisting that the end of the twentieth century saw the permanent triumph of the liberal capitalist state, a victory declared in his most famous work, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Yet his writings and subsequent public interventions are burdened by dark thoughts about the future of this system of government, thoughts that are manifest in an engagement with dystopian science fictions such as Blade Runner (1982), Children of Men (2006), and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981). Fukuyama’s engagement with these texts reveals that he holds deep misgivings about the very liberal capitalism he is commonly read as championing. That this celebrated neoliberal thinker is not at peace with the dominant ideology perhaps puts a dent in its armor and, just maybe, provides an opening for a progressive alternative.

“Where Does My Hope Come From?”: P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992) as a Christian Dystopia i

While British dystopian works from the 1930s to the mid-1980s were primarily concerned with the fear of totalitarian regimes and/or nuclear war, by the last years of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War meant that these worries were no longer so prevalent. One result was the appearance of several “demodystopias” or fictions concerned with the demographic crisis which was causing increasing concern in the developed world at the time. Although P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992) has been compared with other demodystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Zoe Fairburns’ Benefits (1979) and described as a feminist work, it is far more of a Christian fable and contains echoes of Christian writers from Dostoevsky to T.S. Eliot. It also takes seriously the concerns of her contemporaries about declining birth-rates, an ageing population and an increasing dependency ratio. James joins in the discussion on these issues, but also asks what can give people hope and a reason to live in this ageing world. Her conclusion is that hope, and a meaningful life, are like happiness, things which are not found by specifically seeking for them, but are by-products of a life based on faith and love.

Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia

This book is an application of the idea of critical dystopia to three understudied novels and the beginning of an argument about utopian desire itself. Emrah Atasoy, a prolific author who reviewed Turkish speculative fiction in a well-received 2021 Utopian Studies article, is modeling a search for hope in dystopian texts. In this book, derived from his dissertation, he examines three British novels written in three different eras of the twentieth century: Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992). In each novel, Atasoy argues, the protagonists move from an ignorance that served the interest of the dystopian forces to a resistant knowledge that should be read as offering hope, both as resistance and as knowledge.The book is organized in a straightforward way, with an introduction, conclusion, and then three analytical chapters, one for each of the novels. The introduction is expansive, offering both brief surveys of the nature of utopia and dystopia and a recounting of a number of themes taken up by dystopian texts: education, politics, gender roles, family life, and more. Layered onto this is a discussion of theorizing around knowledge and power and the transition from ignorance to understanding. The chapters focused on the individual novels are all similarly expansive. Atasoy offers biographical information about the authors along with considerations of the primary social and political events to which the authors might be responding. The analyses of the novels focus primarily on the motivations of the protagonists, but interspersed in the plot summaries are narrative cul-de-sacs explaining particular textual details (for example, the discussion of Theo’s choice of the Greek statue of Diadoumenos as allocation to leave a note for the Warden [James, 37]). These little detours are often interesting but can be distracting from the primary analytic focus.The analyses themselves also cover a lot of territory. The middle section of the chapter on The Children of Men (118–34) includes discussions of power, eugenics, religion, sexuality, punishment, assisted suicide, and immigration. Each of these is used to elucidate modes of social and political control wielded by the Warden, but the sheer number of issues included in the fast-moving analysis left me wanting more. Atasoy’s analysis of Quietus nicely captures the ways in which James has created a world where the elderly are both encouraged and manipulated to end their lives for the good of the whole. This discussion fits especially well with the larger focus of his analysis on modes of social engineering. Fewer themes and more close readings like this one would have deepened the reading experience. But for anyone beginning a project on one of these novels, this book is a good place to start.This book begins and ends with the interesting contention that times of catastrophe diminish the literary production of utopia, and potentially the capacity for hope itself. While the point of this book is not to defend this claim empirically, it is one worth considering for any scholar of utopia, or any person interested in the potential of future change for the better. The book may underplay the fact of twentieth-century literary utopias (there is a brief discussion of the feminist utopias written in the 1970s and 1980s), but it is surely correct that there is an imbalance in the production of utopia in favor of dystopia. Utopias are more challenging to construct and potentially (especially in this day and time) less formulaic than dystopia, which is an increasingly popular (and marketable) genre.Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a recent interview that “[utopias] shape people’s conception of what’s possible that could be good in the future.”1 Atasoy’s book offers the possibility that a close reading of dystopian texts might well help us uncover other ways of finding out what future good is possible. By extolling the value of finding the hopeful in the dystopian text, he is asking utopian scholars to facilitate discovering the ways in which “the utopian enclave does exist in the dystopian world” (151).

난민이라는 장소

This essay attempts to read Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, using as a guiding thread of analysis what Kenneth Reinhard and Eric Santner elaborate with regard to the concept of the neighbor. Reinhard argues that the politics of Carl Schmitt, which brings to the foreground the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy opposition, should be supplemented by the ethical import of the neighbor. To shed a light on the ethical dimension implied in the neighbor, Reinhard redirects our attention to what Jacques Lacan calls the logic of the not-all. Reinhard’s attempt to consider the commandment of neighbor-love in relation to the logic of the not-all takes us a step further in the direction of rethinking the concept of miracle articulated by Santner. Santner insists that a miracle happens when we are addressed by the lack within the socio-symbolic edifice and we, in some fashion, respond to this calling. For both Reinhard and Santner, the concept of the neighbor actually amounts to the interruption or suspension of the state of exception as defined by Schmitt. The topos of the neighbor, as the interruption of the state of exception, is exemplified in the character of Kee in Children of Men. Kee, as a miraculously pregnant refugee, serves as the interstitial space that remains irreducible to the very opposition of British citizen and refugee. This enables us to interpret the encounter between Kee and Theo as the situation where Theo responds to Kee’s uncanny calling. In this connection, the Human Project can be said to have already been put into practice by a series of refugees who, within the Bexhill refugee camp, are answerable to Kee.

Refugees, Extinction, and the Regulation of Death in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

AbstractThis article is an attempt to make sense of the paradox structuring the narrative of extinction in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), which juxtaposes a romanticized image of survival and rebirth and the ugliness of senseless death. Departing from a biopolitical framework, the article argues that Cuarón’s story represents extinction as beyond redemption yet as subject to regulation. Given the fact that the narrative is structured around the citizen/refugee nexus, I read the film as a story about the eschatological value of refugees to both cultural conceptualizations of human extinction and a reproduction of statist political identities. The film is thus not only about unequal access to death but also about how the difference between the citizen and the refugee can still be maintained in the face of climatic extinction when the regulation of life is no longer sufficient.

I Just Don’t Think about It: Engaging Students with Critical Heritage Discourse through Science Fiction

What does sci fi have to say about and to the people who collect and preserve? Using a scene from Cuarón’s Children of Men as a starting point, the author explores some popular representations of heritage professionals and their spaces in science fiction. These chime with critically engaged museological theory and practice in recognizing the role of museums in past and present injustices. The author asks whether popular sci fi representations can be used as a starting point for discussion and debate in professional training. Can sci fi change the way we work and create different futures for museums?

할리우드 재난영화와 미국적 이데올로기 그리고 〈클로버필드〉의 장르 전복

This essay has twin foci. First, it reviews some of the 2000’s disaster movies—particularly, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006) and Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) along with a 1988’s hit movie Die Hard—from the perspective of American cultural archetype moulded and developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and later R.W.B. Lewis. Then it argues that all the Hollywood disaster movies are likely to reinforce American ideologies such as American dream and American exceptionalism by repeating and recreating American founding myth. Such a reading would possibly provide a new perspective through which we can read Hollywood disaster films prevailing these days after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Second, this essay demonstrates how Matt Reeves’s 2008 film Cloverfield revises the codes and conventions of those Hollywood disaster movies through a strategic use of subjective camera. Its peculiar use of first-person camera not only effectively debunks the metaphysical center of the film hallucinatorily created by third-person omniscient viewpoint; it also strips white male heroes—especially, father figures as saviors of the world from disasters—of American cultural authority. Furthermore, the film’s telling representation of unlimited and relentless violence that exceeds the subjective camera angle makes it difficult to imagine what the post-disaster America would be like. In this sense, Cloverfield expands the ideological and political possibility of the disaster genre, although we could hardly say that the film is an outright avant-garde film that provides a new vision about disasters and America.

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

Hollywood’s Viral Outbreaks and Pandemics: Horror, Fantasy, and the Political Entertainment of Film Genres

Films revolving around big natural catastrophes, the end of the world, and global pandemics are viral in Hollywood. Some authors claim that 9/11 enticed the proliferation of disasters, zombies, and apocalyptical narratives. Will the coronavirus further increase these narrative tropes? A cinematic apocalypse takes many shapes, including zombie infestation, nuclear war devastation, and aliens’ attack. Watching films such as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Children of Men (2006), or Contagion (2011) during a real-life global pandemic creates a much different viewing experience than when these films were released. Certain films kill humans with a deadly virus and turn them into zombies emphasizing and pushing forward to a cinema of genre its entertainment features, such as I Am Legend (2007), Train to Busan (2016), or Blood Quantum (2020). However, they also use horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres to portray a realistic compelling family drama or discuss structural racism and systemic colonialism against America’s indigenous peoples. In all these films, scientific ambition, political greed, and economic power intermingle, becoming the unknown forces and real detractors behind these catastrophes. Whether or not the end of the world is an appropriate story for entertainment attracts most viewers to Hollywood cinema. Conventional postapocalyptic tropes create a film riddled with relevant political concerns. Every year, hundreds of films transpose to the screen compelling narratives related to pandemics and their effects. In Coronavirus’s times, I analyze and contextualize several of Hollywood’s viral outbreaks to situate their narratives to current political subjects and understand how disaster and pandemic films have become entertaining.
 
 Keywords
 Hollywood cinema, Film Genres, Pandemics, Coronavirus, Racism, Indigenous, Covid19, Politics, Film Aesthetic, Disaster Films.

Üreme Kâbusu Distopyaları: The Ice People ve The Children of Men

Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and Phyllis Dorothy James’s The Children of Men (1992) are two dystopian novels introducing societies afflicted with infertility because of scientific advancements that have spun out of control. In the novels, science gives way to countless innovations that provide help and comfort in daily life. However, it falls short of determining the exact reason and finding any solution for the problem of infertility. The root cause for this calamity is suggested to be the anthropogenic activities deteriorating nonhuman environments and causing reproductive health problems. Set in Britain in 2050, Gee’s The Ice People portrays a world at the onset of a new ice age. Picturing a world after the global warming during which fertility rates decline dramatically, the novel presents a new type of human, techfixes, the children born through artificial conception, owing to the developments in science and technology. P. D. James describes a world where people abruptly become infertile in1995, which she calls the Year Omega in the novel. Mass infertility which threatens the existence of the humankind results in cruelty against the remaining aging population inflicted by the tyrannical government that never faces resistance from people. In line with this, the aim of this study is to analyze The Ice People and The Children of Men as works of dystopian fiction describing the ramifications of the misuse of science and technology, and the anthropogenic imprint on the nonhuman environment, which comes out as reproductive inability in human beings.

Effects of Testosterone Suppression on Desire, Hypersexuality, and Sexual Interest in Children in Men with Pedophilic Disorder

Effects of testosterone withdrawal on significant correlates of pedophilic disorder (PeD) are largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to explore in detail the effects of testosterone suppression from degarelix as compared to placebo on desire, hypersexuality, and subjectively experienced sexual interest in participants with PeD. We compared the sexual effects of degarelix, a GnRH antagonist, on men with PeD assigned to degarelix (n =26) or placebo (n = 26) in a double-blind randomized clinical trial. Sexual Desire Inventory scores decreased significantly at two weeks (between-group difference p = 0.001, d = -0.96 [-0.38 to -1.55) and ten weeks (p < 0.001, d = -1.30 [-0.69 to -1.91) in participants assigned degarelix, whereas HBI ratings did not differ significantly at two weeks (p = 0.07, d = -0.52 [0.05 to -1.08) , but did so at ten weeks (p = 0.01, d = -0.72 [-0.15 to -1.29). Fifteen out of 26 (58%) individuals in the group assigned degarelix and 3 out of 26 (12%) in the group assigned to placebo reported no further sexual interest in children at ten weeks (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001), an effect unmodified by autistic, antisocial, or impulsive traits, age, age at onset of, or duration of pedophilic attraction.

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

Utopia as a Cosmopolitan Method in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men as an illustrative contemporary example of cinematic cosmopolitan utopianism. Departing from the anti-utopian bias that pervaded modes of being, cultural texts and sociology in the late twentieth century, the film rearticulates utopia as a cosmopolitan method necessary to transform nonsustainable paradigms of progress and individualist worldviews. Against an apocalyptic eco-social backdrop, the evolution of the narrative and the protagonists conveys a stressed sense of directionality forward and elsewhere in search of hope. The film's use of spaces and formal choices argues against social exclusion and bigotry, prompting viewers to expand their utopian horizons outside the borders of the national. Daring to envision the end of dystopia, the film ultimately hopes for a cosmopolitan remapping of the global beyond the frameworks provided by anti-utopia, nation, risk and neoliberalism.

The AI Creation Meme: A Case Study of the New Visibility of Religion in Artificial Intelligence Discourse

Through a consideration of examples of the AI Creation Meme, a remix of Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo featuring a human hand and a machine hand nearly touching, fingertip to fingertip, this article will tackle the religious continuities and resonances that still emerge in AI discourse in an allegedly ‘secular age’. The AI Creation Meme, as a highly visible cultural artefact appearing in a variety of forms and locations, will be analyzed and discussed for its religious, apocalyptic, and post-humanist narratives, along with reference to earlier work on the New Visibility of Religion—specifically, Alexander Darius Ornella’s consideration of the New Visibility of Religion and religious imagery of the 2006 film, Children of Men. Work that outlines the aspects of critical post-humanism, speculative post-humanism, and transhumanism in relation to the contemporary post-secular age will also be addressed to expand on the implicit apocalyptic messages of the AI Creation Meme. Such a consideration of repeating and remixed imagery will add to the scholarly conversation around AI narratives and the entanglements of religion and technology in our imaginaries of the future.