Abstract
This article engages with both queer theories of temporality and new materialist theories of kinship in order to analyse the reproductive politics of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. It does so in order to speculate on what happens to the concept of reproductive choice when time is in a loop. Arrival uses time travel to disrupt the linearity of reproduction by allowing its protagonist, Louise, to see that a future child will die an early, horrible death, yet still having her choose to become pregnant. It is my contention that this narrative decision untethers reproduction from futurity in ways that might be productive for rethinking the heteronormative futurism at the heart of contemporary reproductive politics.
Keywords
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) is a film about the politics of reproduction. While the plot follows the events that happen after twelve alien spacecraft arrive on earth, and linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are tasked with determining their purpose, a second, more significant arrival lies at the film’s heart, in the form of a child. This other arrival is hinted at in the opening sequence, when Louise’s voiceover begins the film with the lines, ‘I used to think this was the beginning of your story’. As she speaks, we are shown a series of shots of a girl’s life: a sleeping baby being held by Louise, a child playing dress-up, and then the same girl, a bit older, arguing and reconciling with her mother. Louise continues, ‘I remember moments in the middle, and this was the end’, as we see the girl, now a teenager, in a hospital bed with Louise by her side. Finally, we see Louise sobbing ‘come back to me, you come back to me’, over her teenaged daughter’s body. Then, a last shot as Louise walks the circular labyrinth of a darkened hospital corridor alone, as she says ‘but now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life’.
We initially assume we are being given background information on Louise’s life with this sequence, which is filmed as flashbacks. We are led to believe that Louise has recently lost this child, a notion reinforced as we watch her walking around a large, sparsely furnished house looking lonely, talking about her emotional state on the phone with her mother, and staring out of the window into a dreary, grey landscape. This assumption is further supported as we continue to meet Louise’s child in ‘flashbacks’ at key moments throughout the film, interrupting Louise and Ian’s storyline, as they learn to communicate with the aliens and realise that the aliens’ purpose on earth is to benevolently share their advanced language system. This is why it is a surprise when we realise that these flashbacks are actually flashforwards to Louise’s future. In fact, it is only in the final moments of the film that we begin to comprehend that learning the aliens’ language has allowed Louise to understand her life in full, and that she has been experiencing time out of order. The alien language is circular and directionless, and doesn’t progress from cause to effect, with no concept of time. Playing off the theory of linguistic relativity, which posits that language shapes the way we think and influences how we perceive the world, we realise that as Louise has learned the alien language she has begun to experience time as they do, as non-linear. This is significant because it means that Louise has been able to determine ahead of time not only that her future child will die a horrible, early death, but also that Ian will be the father of that child, whom they will name Hannah, which is a surprise to her as much to us when she first realises it. She will know that Hannah will die at the moment she is conceived, just as she will know ahead of time that when she confesses Hannah’s fate to Ian a few years before her death, he will abandon them, angry that Louise has, as he says, ‘made the wrong choice’. Yet, she will still go through with each of these decisions. This is what Louise means in the opening sequence, when she tells Hannah that ‘there are days that define your story beyond your life’. As she suggests, and as the film reinforces, reproductive choices have consequences beyond the individual.
This article investigates those consequences, taking seriously the question of what happens to the concept of reproductive choice when time is a loop, as it is for Louise. In doing so, it argues that Louise’s experience of non-linear time reconceptualises the very idea of choice itself, which is a concept that has dominated reproductive politics for several decades (Solinger, 2005), despite work addressing its inadequacy in making sense of how and why people decide to become parents (Ross, 2017). The film does this by radically untethering the concept of choice from the futurism to which it is usually sutured. For instance, women and other pregnant people are usually assumed to ‘enfold futures, both individual and the future of peoples’ (Deutscher, 2017: 5). It is because of this that they are depoliticised and controlled by the state, as their reproductive practices and behaviours are assumed to directly shape or control identities and communities, and their reproductive choices are therefore seen as in need of regulation. However, the film challenges the assumption that choosing to reproduce equals the continuance of identities or communities. Louise’s decision to have Hannah is not about attempting to safeguard the future, or continue generations. She knows she will be unable to stop her child’s death, yet she chooses pregnancy anyway. Louise’s decision to have Hannah can therefore be read as a queer turn away from the temporal promises usually inherent to ‘choice’ – promises of an open future made possible by intergenerational reproduction – in that it disrupts this reproductive futurism. While queerness is about gender and sexual identity and practice, it is also about not following certain conventional scripts of family, inheritance and child rearing, and is therefore about living outside, or alongside, the dominant frames of generational identity and life narrative that make up heteronormativity (Halberstam, 2005: 6). 1 As I detail below, these queer modes of temporality are present in Louise’s ‘time travel’ pregnancy. Even further, in representing reproduction as nonlinear, the film unravels the very idea of ‘reproductive choice’, thereby providing viewers an opportunity to rethink the heteronormativity that lies at the centre of our own reproductive politics.
In order to unpack how the film unburdens reproduction from futurity, and why this might reconfigure how we think about reproductive choice, I have broken my argument into several sections. In the first, I outline how and why reproductive futurism continues to structure reproductive politics, which I define as the political struggle over who has the power over women’s and other pregnant people’s fertility, although this struggle is often focused on abortion (Solinger, 2005: 210). Then I turn to Arrival to question how these insights might be taken further if we challenge the assumption that reproduction is always about futurity. In this section, I use the work of feminist new materialists, specifically Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s work on affective kinship bonds and neurohormones, in order to claim that the film is able to untether reproduction from futurity through severing the presumed link between maternal attachment and pregnancy. Maternal attachment is not related to embodied pregnancy in the film, as Louise’s connection to her daughter happens before Hannah is physically alive. Their bond therefore is a form of ‘affective kinship’, as Pitts-Taylor (2016: 90) puts it, which challenges what it means to be biologically related because it happens in her mind. Finally, I end with a discussion of how the film, and new materialism more broadly, might help us destabilise the notions of linear progress and generational succession that usually dominate reproductive politics, by seeing reproduction itself as a queer, untimely process.
Reproductive/queer
Reproductive futurism can be broadly understood as the taken-for-granted imperative to connect the political security of the future to heteronormative kinship structures. Memorably outlined in Lee Edelman’s (2004) monograph, No Future, reproductive futurism is the organising structure that dominates much of our political lives: it is the process whereby heteronormativity becomes structural, so much so that the figural child is used as a symbol, or prop, for the future itself (Edelman, 2004: 29). In turn, the figural child is used to place a limit on what is imaginable politically, and to limit the rights of real, live citizens in the name of protecting future idealised citizens. As Edelman outlines, the end result is that the figural child ‘alone embodies the citizen as ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed’ (2004: 4). Anyone who appears as a threat to the reproduction of the future child, and therefore to the mandate of collective reproduction, is seen not only as a threat to actual children, but far more ominously as a threat to the entire social order. This is because ‘we are no more able to conceive of politics without the fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (Edelman, 2004: 11). 2 Therefore, under the absolute primacy of reproductive futurism, and its structural heteronormativity, the figural child represents the one figure that is always worth fighting for politically and worth protecting legally. It not only symbolises the future, but also sets a limit on what is imaginable politically.
One of the reasons why reproductive futurism is such a useful framework for analysing politics is that once we see it at work, we notice it everywhere. For instance, reproductive futurism helps make clear how the figural child is successfully used to justify the regulating of pregnancy, and of pregnant bodies. And, it is a particularly useful framework for analysing the logic of the anti-abortion movement, which relies heavily on reproductive futurism for its life politics. But we can also see reproductive futurism in the language of those against gay marriage, in transphobic ‘bathroom’ bills, in white supremacist discourse about national purity and even, most insidiously, in the environmental movement. Indeed, one of Edelman’s critiques is that the Left and the Right both make use of the figural child. However, as tempting as it is to start cataloguing the various ways reproductive futurism is used to justify policies and to shape politics, several theorists have pointed out that this form of critique has limitations. 3 As a cultural narrative and structural system, reproductive futurism leaves little to no room for resistance, as under reproductive futurity, at least as Edelman outlines it, the political present is completely determined. As he states, resistance to this organising principle of communal relations is ‘unthinkable’ (Edelman, 2004: 2). In fact, Edelman suggests that the only reaction possible to this totalising system is to embrace negativity, refuse the future, take up the position of the queer and reject the social order and the child ‘in whose name we’re collectively terrorized’ (2004: 29).
While this directive may be appealing, rejecting the social order doesn’t leave much of a position for those who have or want children, and it is telling that there are no pregnant bodies in Edelman’s work. In fact, the implication is that anyone with a uterus is ‘structurally somehow always on the side of reproductive futurism regardless of whether they have children or not’ (Power, 2012: 256). Further, as Anca Parvulescu points out, in order to say no to the social order, as Edelman suggests, one must wilfully ignore the reproductive labour, including child and elder care, which goes into our everyday lives: ‘a worldview in which women remain tacit agents of reproductive work’ (2017: 90). In other words, Edelman’s theory ignores the ways that women are already structurally adjacent to reproductive futurism through forms of gendered labour, and it risks assuming that anyone with a womb is structurally heteronormative – a parent in waiting – by virtue of their reproductive capacity, an assumption that ironically aligns with the anti-abortion movement. Judith Halberstam and others have therefore called for a queer political position that is more focused on gender, one that, as Halberstam puts it, is ‘not naively oriented to a liberal notion of progressive entitlement’, but is also not tied to a nihilism that ‘always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction’ (2008: 154). One that undoes, as Maggie Nelson suggests, the ‘tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other’ (2015: 75). Speaking as someone who was queer before, and is still queer after (despite) reproducing, Nelson argues that ‘reproductive futurism needs no more disciples’ (2015: 75). Instead, quoting Judith Butler, she asks, ‘when or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when and how do they radially recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship’? How can you tell; or rather, who’s to tell? (2015: 14).
It is with these provocations in mind that I turn to Arrival, exploring how the film might help us theorise a model of temporality that disturbs the reproductive/queer binary that not only upholds reproductive futurism, but also structures reproductive politics more generally. As James Bliss argues, this binary has never been as stable as it seems, in that some forms of heterosexual reproduction have always been structurally queer. For example, reproduction without futurity was and continues to be a reality for many racialised peoples, who are forced into modes of reproduction that are ‘not future-oriented’, and are ‘not granted the security of nuclear bonds’ (Bliss, 2015: 86). Bliss suggests, however, that through this structural queering of the ‘natally alienated’, we ‘might find in this reproduction without futurity not a crisis scenario’, but ‘an opportunity’ (2015: 86). Toward this end, I want to extend Bliss’ proposition in order to examine how the film positively disrupts the assumption that if one is reproductive, one is therefore invested in reproductive futurism. In other words, could reproduction itself be rethought of as a queer process if we challenge the assumption that it is always related to futurity? And, could a time travel narrative provide us with a speculative model for what this kind of non-reproductive reproduction might look like? If what is ‘most useful in Edelman’s account is his reading of queerness as a structural position’, as Bliss suggests, then there is an opportunity to develop a reproductive politics ‘that inhabits the incoherence’ of this ‘queer capacity’ (2015: 86). Arrival provides viewers with an opportunity to think through this queer capacity by showing us a version of pregnancy that disrupts the assumed relationship between reproduction and futurity. As I will detail in the next section, it does so by representing pregnancy as something that happens to the mind, rather than in the body, and by illustrating that there is an affective, neurohormonal basis for kinship bonds that exceeds heteronormative or bio-determinative temporalities.
Affective kinship
The primacy of reproductive futurism in our everyday lives suggests that reproductive politics are as much, or more, about attempts to control, or stabilise, the status of the human, as they are about reproductive acts themselves. As Edelman suggests, reproductive politics are animated by fantasies of the singularity of the human, which are fully supported by the structure of heteronormativity. These fantasies have been critiqued by feminist new materialists as well, who also note that our focus on the singularity of human life overlooks the ways that all forms of living are interdependent and symbiotic. 4 For instance, a significant application of new materialist thought has been the destabilisation of binaries such as body/mind and nature/culture by highlighting how the assumed divisions between human and non-human, animate and inanimate matter, biology and culture are both untenable and hierarchical. As Victoria Pitts-Taylor argues, asserting the ‘importance of nurture over nature, culture over biology, or representation over materiality has lost its critical purchase’, as both the social and biological sciences have undergone ‘paradigm shifts’ that challenge biological determinism and acknowledge the ways that matter ‘acts and participates in its own measure’ and the ways that organisms participate in their own self-organisation (2016: 7). New materialists suggest that organisms of all kinds exist only in relationship to others – human and non-human alike (Barad, 2003: 826). In thinking about biology and matter as agential, or as having agency, therefore, new materialist theories have the potential to challenge what we count as ‘life’ in our reproductive politics in a way that is complementary to queer theories of temporality. For instance, in analysing modes of embodiment, the relationships between bodies and the bodies’ own material agency, new materialists demonstrate that experiences of time happen in differing and multifaceted ways: ‘time is not given, it is not universally given, but rather that time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices’ (Barad, 2012: 66). New materialist epistemologies demonstrate that ‘history and biology are coconstituted’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 7) in a way that destabilises the notions of linear progress and generational succession that dominate reproductive politics. This is similar to how queer theories of temporality highlight ‘the non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in time and space’ (Halberstam, 2005: 6), in a way that challenges reproductive futurism.
I bring these two bodies of thought together in order to approach Louise’s time travel pregnancy, and as a way to rethink the temporality of our own reproductive politics, which, as I outlined in the introduction, have been dominated by future-oriented conversations about choice. As I have already argued, Louise’s choice is the centre of the film, so much so that the plot itself – the anxious encounter with the alien other – can be read as an ‘allegory of the decision to have a child in the twenty-first century’ (Morgenstern, 2018a). While one reading of this allegory might be that the film repeats ‘the same-old Hollywood storyline’ that suggests ‘experiencing motherhood is worth any pain, no matter how devastating the experience is that follows’ (Weingarten, 2018), I read the film as an allegory for affective forms of kinship. Here, I mean affective in the sense used by Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed, who see affects as ‘prepersonal’ (Massumi, 2004: xvii) in that they play a foundational role in determining the emotional and physical relationships between our bodies, environments and other people. For instance, in ‘Happy Objects’, Ahmed suggests that affects are ‘sticky’ in that they are what sticks, or what sustains, or what preserves an emotional connection (2010: 29). Louise’s attachment to Hannah sticks, then, because it involves the ‘unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, and how we are touched by what we are near’ (Ahmed, 2010: 30). In other words, the reason Louise decides to have Hannah is because Hannah is as animate and alive in her mind at the present moment as she will be in the future, and Louise is therefore affectively attuned to her before she becomes pregnant. While we could say that Louise’s attachment is solely the consequence of her time travel, I suggest her attachment highlights the ways that kinship ties are always more than mechanistic. This means not simply that her connection to Hannah is contingent on time travel, but rather that it is time travel which allows us to see the ways that kinship is always affective.
Recent research on the brain’s plasticity, or its ability to biologically change and be changed in response to its social and physical environment, also focuses on how kinship ties are affective rather than biologically determined. For instance, in The Brain’s Body, Pitts-Taylor critiques the commonly used, heteronormative frameworks for understanding kinship, which dominate scientific discourse and assume kinship is a systematic reflection of genetic connections. These frameworks overlook or pathologise any data that falls outside of a heterosexual context, and obscure ‘the complexity of the experience [they are] trying to explain for all bodies’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 115). However, Pitts-Taylor does not simply argue that kinship is socially constructed, or that biology is irrelevant to social patterns, but demonstrates that what we might label ‘queer’ attachments (i.e. non-heterosexual, non-reproductive) proliferate in nature. Looking to recent experiments on rodents, for instance, Pitts-Taylor outlines how the hormone oxytocin, which scientists believe is primarily responsible for the feelings of attachment that female mammals develop in relationship to their offspring, is also primarily responsible for the feelings of attachment that male mammals develop with their offspring, and that we all have to our friends and chosen family. She argues that this research suggests that kinship ties are not systematic, linear or mechanical, but are rather a matter of ‘lived feeling that requires intercorporeal contact’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 98). That is, although oxytocin, which is produced by the brain, is strongly identified with maternal bonding, animals who have not given birth can develop what Pitts-Taylor describes as a ‘maternalized brain’ (2016: 105), and develop hormonal attachments to a variety of other animals with whom they are not genetically related. This means that ‘the reality of felt, affective bonds’ does not ‘follow heteronormative and reproductive patterns’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 99). Rather, ‘bonds develop through close interpersonal interaction’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 109). Although oxytocin supports affective attachment, then, this process is neither static nor automatic. Rather, bodies in interaction are required to become mutually attuned and oriented towards each other in order to produce the hormone. Therefore, an individual’s capacity for affective attachments should be viewed through what Pitts-Taylor describes as the ‘lens of bodily capacity’ (2016: 111) – and thought of ‘as materially as well as discursively performative’ (2016: 112), in that it is the plasticity of the brain, or its ability to change and be changed by its environment, which allows for such affective ties to develop.
I suggest that Louise’s attachment to Hannah might also be viewed through the ‘lens of bodily capacity’, and as similarly material and discursive, in that their attachment is driven by changes to Louise’s brain that are akin to the ones Pitts-Taylor outlines. Louise attaches to Hannah because of what happens to her brain while learning the alien language – because of her brain’s plasticity. This attachment is queer because it happens outside of a heterosexual context, in fact before Hannah is even physically ‘alive’, yet it still involves what Pitts-Taylor describes as a ‘maternalized brain’ (2016: 105) – the development of an intense, real, hormonal attachment typically associated with the period after birth. However, the typical trajectory of mammal becomes pregnant, gives birth, develops oxytocin and attaches to infant is backwards. In fact, it is Hannah who seems to have a peculiar and distinctive kind of agency in relation to Louise, rather than the other way around. The film even suggests that Louise’s attraction to Ian stems from her realisation that their union will bring her Hannah, and key scenes with Hannah, such as when Louise tells her she is ‘unstoppable’, further suggest that it is Hannah who instigates their bond, and that it is Hannah to whom Louise is primarily attracted, not Ian. We understand this especially when Louise moves back and forth in time to stop a war and realises that she can control the future, yet she can’t seem to choose to not have Hannah, regardless of the pain Hannah’s death will bring. Louise’s inability to stop Hannah, therefore, can be attributed to their affective bond, and in this case to a bond that exceeds time. It is not that Louise simply imagines what it will feel like to be Hannah’s mother, but that she experiences a ‘maternalized brain’ before she is pregnant. This temporal disruption radically reworks the assumed heteronormative pattern that is usually seen as the ‘natural’ basis for kinship attachments. Instead, it is Louise’s brain that is agentic. Put another way, if the brain is not just formed by the forces of language, culture and politics but is also formative, shaping our affective relationships to each other neuro-hormonally, as Pitts-Taylor outlines, the relationship that Louise has with Hannah represents this formation in action. Their attachment therefore not only offers a way to think about affective forms of kinship outside of bio-deterministic or heteronormative definitions, but, more importantly for my purposes here, it suggests a way to radically rethink the assumed temporality of kinship ties.
The film further challenges the temporality of kinship through disrupting the singularity of the present. It is not just that Louise meets Hannah – whose name, suggestively, is a palindrome – in her mind before she exists, but also that Hannah’s temporality runs alongside Louise’s. This makes Louise’s opening plea to Hannah, ‘you come back to me’, less of a request and more of a description. For instance, in a key moment in the film’s plot Louise moves forward in time and experiences a conversation with Hannah that allows her to solve a problem in the film’s present. Just as she is able to experience maternal attachment before pregnancy, in this example their shared contemporaneity is a queering of time. As Elizabeth Freeman suggests, queer time involves the ways that the past may be dragged, as Freeman puts it, into the future in a way that makes it neither entirely past nor entirely present but instead highlights how queer histories may be part of, or haunt, the multiplicities of the now (2010: 62). The film suggests something similar, as Louise’s future is dragged into the present, and most importantly, it suggests that this queering of time may be made possible not despite of, but because of, reproduction. This constitutes a direct challenge to the assumption at the base of reproductive futurism, which is that reproduction is about the continuation of generations, families and ways of being. Instead, Louise’s relationship with Hannah challenges the so-called straightness of reproductive futurism through her foreknowledge of Hannah’s death. As Sara Ahmed argues, heteronormativity is largely ‘about imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course’ (2006: 554). She suggests that the points on this line, ‘accumulate, creating the impression of a straight line. To follow such a line might be a way to become straight, by not deviating at any point’ (Ahmed, 2006: 554). Louise deviates. And, what she deviates to is not a temporality that is premised on the open future of the figural child, but on the subjectivity of a mother whose reproductive choice is non-reproductive. What she therefore represents is a maternal subject who is not in the service of reproducing the future (Baraitser, 2014: 6). This is significant because the film consequently opens up the possibility of expanding, first, what kinds of maternal subjectivities can signify as queer (McBean, 2014: 9) and, second, the idea that reproductive choices are always aligned with futurism. In other words, in representing kinship as both affective and atemporal, the film is able to represent a form of non-reproductive futurism. While Edelman argues that ‘we are no more able to conceive of politics without the fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (2004: 16), the film arguably does both. It does this by reimagining kinship and what it means to be attached to one another, and by representing what it means to be ‘alive’ outside of dichotomies such as mind/body, biology/culture and animate/inanimate. Much like new materialism itself, therefore, the film offers ways of seeing outside of the dualities that are usually used to map and to mark reproductive bodies and politics.
Conclusion
Arrival unsettles the assumption that reproductive choices are always shaped by, or related to, futurity. The film is a visual representation of getting off the straight line that Ahmed describes, as it subverts the fantasy that heterosexuality always ‘produces a narrative structure that offers an individual a past and future via intergenerational families’ (Stevens, 1999: 14). As I have argued, this, in turn, unburdens reproduction from heteronormative time in a way that allows reproduction to signify as queer. In fact, Louise’s time travel pregnancy is queer for several reasons: it disrupts the heteronormative time of reproductive futurism, it demonstrates that a ‘maternalized brain’, to use Pitts-Taylor’s language, can precede reproduction and it exceeds heterosexuality itself. While it may seem counterintuitive to claim that a pregnancy that will result from heterosexual sex exceeds heterosexuality, what I mean is that Louise’s relationship with Hannah overrides her relationship with Ian. Her desire for Hannah spurs, and then overtakes, any desire for Ian. Louise and Hannah’s relationship is therefore based on an affective attachment, rather than a personal choice, which is also a kind of maternal erotic. As Maggie Nelson suggests, not only is ‘there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself’, insofar as it is ‘profoundly strange and wild and transformative’ (2015: 13), but also there is something erotic in the relationship between infant and parent, which she describes as a ‘love affair’ (2015: 44). Discussing the pleasure she experiences in the intercorporeal aspects of parenting, she asks: ‘How does one go about partitioning one sexual feeling off from another, presumably more “real” sexual feeling? Or, more to the point, why the partition? It isn’t like a love affair. It is a love affair … I have my baby, and my baby has me. It is a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology’ (2015: 44). 5 Similarly, Louise’s relationship to Hannah is its own dyad. What is most significant for my argument, however, is that Louise experiences these strange, wild and erotic aspects before she is pregnant. In turn, it is this nonlinearity that exposes the intercorporeal, affective aspect of all attachments, an aspect which is usually subsumed in heteronormative, bio-deterministic definitions of kinship. That is, the ‘time travel’ component of Louise’s pregnancy allows us to see that reproduction has never been as straight as it seems. 6
In queering reproduction in this manner, the film simultaneously challenges the humanist, heteronormative fantasies that I have claimed also sustain popular reproductive debates and politics. In other words, by undoing the illusion that heteronormativity can safeguard the future, the film’s narrative usefully exposes that this illusion is the central fantasy of most reproductive politics as well. Even further, it reveals that this illusion disavows the only certainty of all reproductive choices, which is that they all end in death. The choice to have a child is a kind of choice of death as well, in that the only thing we can be certain of when we have a child is that at some point that child will die (Morgenstern, 2018b). We are all already living and dying together in a complex web of kinship regardless of our attempts to imagine ourselves as autonomous, independent beings with endless or boundless futures. What makes this radical is that the film uses time travel to force Louise to come to terms with this realisation, yet it still centres her subjectivity rather than retreating to a romance plot, or using the symbolic child as a prop, or as a narrative solution. It is therefore able to present a reproductive politics that counters how Hollywood films usually represent reproductive choices (as selfish or self-sacrificing). As Deutscher notes, we deny that pregnant people can and do make decisions about human life all the time. In fact, anti-abortion extremists are perhaps the only group to truly admit this ability, which is why they represent uteruses as ‘spaces of potential danger to both individual and population life’, as they fear the pregnant person’s capacity to jeopardise the latter (Deutscher, 2017: 4). However, the film is upfront about the fact that reproductive decisions are as able to impede as to unfold futures. The film therefore turns away from reproductive futurism for its politics, and instead gives us a representation of reproductive choice that undoes fantasies of lineal descent, of clean lines of origin and of patrilineage (Sheldon, 2013).
Reading the film critically, then, can help us see that our current reproductive frameworks, even those that we might consider progressive, are often problematically animated by similar desires and assumptions about kinship patterns, generational sequence and the singularity of heterosexual reproduction. To fully challenge these desires and assumptions will mean finding ways to understand reproductive choices outside of the prevalent frames of generational identity and life narrative that anchor reproductive politics on both sides of debates. As Pitts-Taylor asserts, the goal in theorising queer forms of kinship is ‘not only to rehabilitate kinship as less heteronormative, but rather to rethink what it means to be biologically related to one another’ (2016: 98). This is similar to Margaret Gibson’s argument that it is a mistake to think that queering reproductive politics ‘is only and inevitably a matter of addition, of bringing parents who identify as “queer” and/or “trans” into existing unyielding frameworks’ (2014: 5). Instead, she contends, ‘queering’ should ‘extend beyond individual identity and toward a consideration of how relationships, communities, genders, and sexualities might proceed otherwise’ (Gibson, 2014: 6). Proceeding otherwise will mean not only challenging the status quo, but also rethinking the politics of choice itself, as I have suggested here, through the tools afforded us in the study of biology, of affect and of sexuality. It will mean, for instance, taking seriously that matter is ‘deeply situated and dynamic’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 10), and also that the body may ‘act outside of or before the medium of rationality and subjectivity’ (2016: 11). If our goal is to ‘make kin mean something other or something more than entities tied by ancestry and genealogy’, as Donna Haraway (2016: 103) suggests, we will need to find frames for making sense of reproductive choices that are irrational, affective, disorienting and, in some cases, non-reproductive. Arrival provides such a frame. Its political potential is therefore found in its speculative potential, as it represents pregnancy in a way that reimagines not only the relationship between biology and kinship, but also the relationship between reproduction and time. In doing so, it exposes the temporal foundations of our own reproductive politics in a way that opens up other models for imaging the reproducibility of future.
