The Future Stops Here

The first wormhole chapter uses a speculative engagement with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men to link disparate times and spaces in the book: the history of no future shown by feminist, eugenic, imperial narratives in part 1 and the affirmative prospects for queer of color futures in part 2. The major studio film, filmed in London by the Mexican director, highlights the presence in twenty-first-century transnational popular culture of tropes from the fictional futures examined in the previous pages. Cuarón’s adaptation of the 1992 novel by P. D. James underlines the ways in which hopeful futurity is unevenly distributed along the same lines of race, gender, sexuality, capital, and globalization that determine who gets to be seen as fully human. The contradictions surrounding the character of Kee—a black woman pregnant with the first child to be born in decades whose representation in the film leaves much to be desired—become a point of possibility opening on to different worlds and futures.