Dr. Strangelove’s Babies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reproductive Politics
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Lauren Shoemaker
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr. Lothian
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 ENGL 985
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 19 November 2013
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Dr. Strangelove’s Babies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reproductive Politics
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 Last February I prepared for a class presentation on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia/dystopia in Herland, and the eugenics movement that she was a part of in early twentieth century America. I was drawn to the social movements influencing Gilman’s work of early science fiction, which are deeply troubling to the feminist project to which the novel is typically assigned. This was the beginning of my initiation into the discourse on reproduction as the means of influencing and controlling the future of humans. Since then I’ve encountered so many books and articles that take up this thread that a list would be never-ending. I resisted making this a research concentration because I thought I’d hit a wall when one of my sources for the paper in this same class last spring called the fiction I was culling “diaper stories,” implying that the domestic space was not really a place of biting social critique.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 1 One important concept I’ve taken from this course so far is that very few things, especially in domestic spaces, are off limits for social critique. Crafting, animated films, even one’s therapy sessions are ripe with politics that can uphold hegemonic ideology or create space for transformative ways of life because they are the very place that appears out of reach of politics. Sara Ahmed’s book, The Promise of Happiness, proceeds under the premise that the concept of happiness is so unquestioningly basic to humanity (and therefore outside of politics) that it “could even be described as the one philosophical teleology that has not been called into question within philosophy” (15). However, her project follows happiness through its uses and invocations to reveal its political ties to objects, to disciplines like positive psychology, and to its deferral in the hope for future generations. While there are several sections of Ahmed’s book that discuss and critique the family as an object which is supposed to bring happiness, I know I will be returning to chapter 5, “Happy Futures,” not only to help me understand how anxiety and hope are bound together in reproductive futurism, but also to appreciate how Ahmed is able to theorize through the film Children of Men gendered and racialized responses to this hope and anxiety.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Within her scope of rewriting happiness “from the point of view of the wretch,” chapter 5 comes after the discussions of these figures of unhappiness: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, and the melancholic migrant (17). Ahmed uses Theo from Children of Men throughout the chapter to discuss his conversion from the pessimistic has-been activist to the surrogate parent of the child who will guarantee the continuance of the human race. She tracks his journey from indifference to caring through analysis of a few important scenes. Kee’s revealing her pregnancy to Theo and Julian’s reminding Theo of their own dead child are the two that I found most interesting. These scenes make Ahmed’s analysis of anxiety and hope possible:
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 “I want to suggest an intimacy between anxiety and hope. In having hope we become anxious, because hope involves wanting something that might or might not happen…Children of Men is premised on the belief that we are not anxious enough about losing the future, not only showing us that a future can be lost…but also suggesting that we will lose the future if we don’t think of the future as something that can be lost” (183).
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 This argument put forth by the film allows her to theorize in a Lee Edelman style about what it means to have the future taken away if the future is the reason and the purpose of life in the now.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 “As I explored in chapter 1, we have a tendency to endure our struggles in the present by deferring our hope for happiness to some future point. It is not that ‘no children’ simply means ‘no future’ but that ‘no children’ signifies the loss of a fantasy of the future as that which can compensate me for my suffering; it is the very fantasy that there is something or somebody who I suffer for that is threatened” (183).
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The film insists that we become more anxious about this threat, yet the conversion of Theo, rather than make good on the promise that hope provides room for alternatives, portrays just how entrenched the ideas of what should make us happy really are. Ahmed writes that “this failure to offer an alternative that would rescript our narrative of the good life might be telling, not because it suggests that we must disbelieve in alternatives but because it shows how alternatives cannot simply transcend what has already emerged or taken form” (187). That Theo’s new role after conversion to this hope-filled anxiety is largely scripted by gender and race is therefore not surprising. The white male father figure saves the black refugee woman by getting her to the boat named Tomorrow (185). I watched Children of Men last fall, and my eyes were sore from rolling them. Ahmed’s analysis of the film is probably the only reason I’m not mad I watched it. In some ways I think the film is no better written or acted than Idiocracy, a parody of such anxiety about reproductive futurisms that plays on similar scripts of race, class, and gender. Maybe I’m being too harsh on Children of Men; perhaps it’s a personal distaste for action movies that tend to feel like one prolonged car chase informing this critique, though Ahmed seemed to do some eye-rolling of her own in the analysis of Kee revealing her pregnancy that takes place in a barn with its biblical allusion.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 I know I will be returning to this chapter from The Promise of Happiness as I move toward the process of putting lists together for comprehensive exams. While sitting here writing this, I realized that some of what Ahmed says about hope-ridden anxiety is applicable to the paper I wrote for the course at the beginning of this analysis in a section on Dr. Strangelove. Are those men deciding who gets to be saved in the mineshaft from the world’s impending doom not struggling with the threat of losing a losable future? That they want to choose the women based on sexual characteristics falls into the same gendered scripts as Children of Men, though I can be more forgiving of Kubrick since his film is from 1964 and is meant to be satirical. I’m done fighting my own strange love of “diaper stories.” Reproduction and the scripts of happiness as well as unhappiness that follow are always in sight for me.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Last week I had the pleasure of rereading Beloved for a class. The day after finishing it, I watched a recent horror flick, The Conjuring, about a house haunted by a witch who murdered her own child as a gift to Satan and now possesses the mothers who inhabit the house in order to kill their children. With both of these stories of infanticide running through my head, I couldn’t help thinking about the racial contexts surrounding them. It struck me as a very Ahmed-inspired script of family as happiness object in the case of The Conjuring. The white woman had to be possessed by a demon in order to consider infanticide; however, Sethe’s family as happiness object is denied by slavery, an unavailable object of happiness. When her 28 days of family at Baby Suggs’ are threatened by schoolteacher’s arrival, the rational act of preservation is infanticide. There might be more to this comparison, but it will have to wait. I conclude with this anecdote because I think many of you can relate to the inability to watch even popular movies and television without analyzing and making academic connections. It might be when a certain thread finds its way into everything, even silly horror films, that you’ve found your dissertation.
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¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Works Cited
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¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.
In fact, the binary opposition between the domestic sphere and the public sphere as such is the creation of the man-made society to serve its mission of confining women. Despite all the miseries ensuing from this division, history and literature as well prove that women excelled even in the domestic sphere that they were confined to. Many historians and feminist of the 19th century in particular proved that women not only managed the situation, but could master power and agency in the domestic sphere, both in themselves and in the people around them.