UCL STS Seminar series: Dr Amy Chambers

Sophia Barthes’ and Claire Denis’ most recent English-language films explore futures of female fertility. Barthes’ Pod Generation (2023) probes the possibilities of ectogenesis and Denis’ High Life (2018) is framed by fertility experiments in space necessary for exosolar colonisation. Both feature unwilling women hosts, discussion of bioethics and humans as bio-objects, and maintain that no body that can give birth can ever be truly free. 

Pod Generation imagines a near-future where pregnancies are (still) considered a hindrance to birthing parents’ aspirations. Here reproduction has been ‘optimised’ and pregnant people are liberated by the Womb Centre where fetuses gestate in digitally monitored artificial wombs. AI exec Rachel (Emilia Clarke) can sidestep the ‘trauma’ (biologically and professionally) of being a birthing parent through ectogenesis, but Boyse (Mia Goth) in High Life is impregnated against her will and traumatised by the perinatal experience. In High Life, death row inmates are sent to space on a one-way mission/death sentence to collect data on harvesting energy from black holes, but the onboard medic Dr Dibbs (Juliette Binoche) also harvests sex cells from her cellmates. Dibbs uses her clinical focus on exo-solar reproduction to justify rape and forced insemination. 

In Pod Generation and High Life, procreation is central to discussions of bodily autonomy (maternal, professional, incarcerated) and the misogyny surrounding maternal experiences. Pregnancy is medicalised, assisted, controlled and/or commodified. Boyse’s body is not free as both prisoner and impregnated and, despite the commercial promise of ‘freeing’ Rachel from the literal weight of pregnancy, Pod Generation questions whether technological innovation can offer liberation or just a different form of oppression.

This paper will be framed through a discussion of women-directed science-based fiction (SF) and consider women’s perspectives on issues of science, society and the future of humanity. Childbirth is a global experience and yet, on film, it often remains hidden behind careful framing and a stereotypical and often inaccurate imagination of this experience. The majority of popular representations of pregnancy and childbirth from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) to Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024) have been directed by men (see Chambers, 2020). Reality birthing TV and woman-directed documentary films (e.g. Birth Time [Zoe Naylor, Jo Hunter and Jerusha Sutton, 2018]) have developed the spectrum of the visual of childbirth but it is one that continues to enhance and promote the medical model of childbirth. In SF, where there are relatively few women directors able to contribute to this conversation, new approaches focus on the bioethics of reproduction futures. 

Alternative modes of bioethics can, and perhaps should, only be imagined in practice through fictionalised spaces and ideally ones that enable an intersectional outlook. As this paper will argue, no model of bioethics, especially in the reproductive arena, can ever be politically neutral. In a charged political space, entertainment media allows for the exploration of alternative reproductive futures placing the perspectives of marginalised bodies at the heart of the conversation. 

Content warning: discussion of rape, pregnancy resulting from rape, and suicide.