Human Purpose and Reproduction

“The true social violence of ideologies of reproductive futurity lies not merely in an assertion that the non-reproductive have no place in the future, but fundamentally that they deserve no place in the future because reproduction functions as symbolic proof of divine favor.”

Kustritz’s “Postmodern Eugenics” highlighted the focus on reproduction in Battlestar Galactica and shows how the premise of the show and its characters, both human and Cylon, force reproduction as the sole purpose and meaning of human life. Kustritz’s introduction of homosexuality into this analysis surprised me, as the series does not touch upon the subject n the least. None of its characters are homosexual –apparently there are two evil lesbians in an offset movie, though their function seems more rooted in their evilness than anything else – while near all other aspects of diversity are covered through the characters. If queers, as Kustritz quotes Edelman to believe, really do represent a “cultural role as the absolute negation of attempts to fill that symbolic void” of needing to procreate, then their absence in Battlestar symbolizes a death of civilized culture in a way, and a return to an animal mentality wherein the continuation of one’s race trumps one’s own life and thoughts. Moreover, human focus on reproduction goes further into a form of eugenics with the fact that the human-cylon hybrids can only be produced when the child, before it is even born, will be provided with a nurturing “hetoronormative” family situation. In this new race of mixed cylons and humans, survival through reproduction is so imperative that a woman’s own body or unborn fetuses decree whether or not her giving or their birth would be healthy and beneficial to society, assumedly as the result of not having grown in an ideal environment.

Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” explores this theme as well, but in respect to the female form and scopophilia, for both males and the film spectator. Mulvey argues that part of the male’s appeal to scopophilia, the act of finding pleasure in looking, is his phallocentric idea that the observed female has a desire to own a penis. Perversely, the woman’s vagina is not an actual part to her body, but an absence of a part, namely the penis – she is the “bearer of the bleeding wound” (199). Her purpose, and the purpose of the male scopophilia, is thus rooted in a need to procreate, a need to fill a physical void through sex: the purpose of the women’s body is simply to fulfill a man’s desire, or a spectator’s desire, and, in doing so, continue the human race. Scopophiliac observers, both in the film and out of it as the audience, are usually not focused on the reproductive aspect to the sexuality behind this need, and this argument may thus be discredited for that. However, the eroticism portrayed for all viewers is clearly related to reproduction and also depicts the woman as a less-than-human object, with a function of producing a child that takes mental precedence over her actual life. Through this form of film and this form of erotic viewing, both viewer and male character demean the woman to a place in society solely meant for reproduction.