An interesting example of biopower in Children of Men is the character of Jasper’s wife. Because she was at one time an unruly, uncooperative citizen, her life was determined through biopower. In the first pole of biopower, the individual body, Jasper’s wife was using her body to fight against the government. The government then viewed her body as a machine fighting against them, so she was tortured until she became like a machine put into hibernation. She was beaten so badly that she was put into a catatonic state where she was unresponsive to the world. The government regulated the population by getting rid of the people who were doing supposed harm to the social body. Jasper’s wife was reduced to a mere body that could neither harm nor help the social body.
Kee, the mother of the unborn baby, has somehow managed to escape the bio politics that have resulted in human infertility. While it is obviously common that a woman is the sex that will bring the baby into the world, the storyline of the film takes away the power of man when Kee admits that she doesn’t know who the father of the baby is. This reminds us that despite man’s influence, women have the sovereign power to let the baby live inside them.
This brings me to the idea of sovereign power versus biopower. According to Michel Foucault, sovereign power is the power to “make” live and “let” die and bipower is the power to “let” live and “make” die. (Foucault, 241). The British government in Children of Men used biopower, the medical advances that can supersede nature, to practice their sovereign power by killing those who are immigrants or disobedient. The audience sees sovereign power at work again when Theo narrowly escapes an explosion in the café. At first, the Fishes are suspected to be behind the bombing, but it is later speculated that the government set off the blast to instill fear among the people. This is the government showing off their ability to decide in an instant who gets to live and who has to die.
I think it is interesting that the provider of the “savior” baby is a young, black woman. In the film, Kee is an illegal immigrant seeking refuge, who the government is trying to keep out. Visually, if the bringer of the savior of the human race had been a white refugee, it probably would not have had such a startling impact. The disheveled appearance of Kee reminds the audience that she is a refugee, specifically of a gender and race that are deemed subordinate.
One view of the difference in power today is through contraception.An example of biopower vs. sovereign power is the Duggar family of TLC’s “Eighteen Kids and Counting”. The FDA is constantly changing laws about contraception and making it easier and more accessible for women. There is even a pill to take after unprotected sex to prevent a baby. However, the Duggar’s live by a religious code in which they have decided to have as many children as God allows them to have. Science has the biopower to let an embryo live or make it die. The Duggar’s God, on the other hand, as the sovereign power to take the life of an unborn baby or let it live. Some critics have argued that perhaps the Duggar’s God is not practicing his sovereign power enough. The Duggar’s most recent child was born prematurely and its life was supported by machines that made her live rather than nature’s plan to make her die. The following is a link from http://www.youtube.com/ in which the Duggars explain their views on having more children:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6WRJOL0_X0
Foucault, Michel. "17 March 1976." Society Must be Defended. 238-263.
Children of Men. Universal City, CA: Distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007.
I think you make a beautiful point in saying that women hold sovereign power over the life inside them. I feel that this is a critical point in the abortion fight. Whatever a person's feeling about it, they seem to forget that the individual decision that a woman makes about her body will be her own; I am glad that you made that point.
ReplyDeleteI also like your contrast between science as biopower and religion as sovereign. I feel that, especially in the Duggar's case, some biopower should intervene in their situation, as their childbearing is no longer safe, and from watching the show, they seem to have trouble with the children they have. I take the opinion in Davin's piece that you shouldn't put yourself in a situation where your older children have to take care of the younger ones for you. While I don't think it makes the children look bad, I do feel that, on some level, it makes the parents seem irresponsible.
I was going to comment on the same thing!!!! Excellent point on women holdinh sovereign power over life inside them. This is a point of contingency in the abortion dilemma/drama, or whatever you want to call it. We can see how the State, or the Church, for example have been and are currently trying to exert their own biopower over the bodies of women, in the name of CHILDREN (or the figure). Many countries still consider abortion illegal and do not legitimize or authorize the statement you made. Many people also affirm that only God has the write to decide what happens to your body and your child, you have no power over it.
ReplyDeleteI also read somewhere that the director of the movie decided to make Kee from Africa because that is where humanity started and so he wanted to be where humanity could be reborn from as well.
The point was made that Plan B or other post-unprotected sex birth control would be biopower versus the Duggar's God having sovereign power. I think that science when letting a child live versus making it die (via drugs) would actually force the science to have the same sovereign power possessed by the Duggar's God--which has actually created a lot of tension in religious communities where there is a split between those who see the positive affects of birth control and those who only believe that man should not hold power which belongs to g-d. It is when science takes the pre-mature baby of the Duggers and keeps it alive when in nature it ought to have died that science's power switches to that of biopower.
ReplyDeleteYou raise some interesting questions here regarding the ways that sovereign power and biopower are at work in Children of Men, and I like the way you call attention to the role of race and gender in how such power is deployed in the film. Your explanation of pregnant women having sovereign power in the film needs a bit more clarity--I'm not quite sure what you mean by this or how it does or does not conflict with Foucault (or Anna Davin's) definition of the term. You offer a rich visual text to analyze with the video you link to, and I wonder how Anna Davin's article "Imperialism and Motherhood" might help parse out the ways race and sexuality are at work in which bodies, sexual practices, and reproductive practices are considered valuable to an imperialistic state and which are not (consider, for example, the largely condemnatory representations of Nadya Suleman versus the largely validating representations of Kate Gosselin on TLC's Kate Plus 8).
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