The release of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (BR 2049) in 2017, the long-anticipated sequel to one of the late twentieth century’s most iconic films, was met with a swooning chorus of four-star reviews, many hailing the film as ‘one of greatest science fiction films of all time’. Much of the swoon stemmed from the way in which the film functions as a canvas for philosophical speculation, raising core questions of traditional philosophical inquiry: ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’ (Shanahan 8). Indeed, the seductive philosophising of BR 2049 animated a score of video essays and no fewer than two scholarly anthologies.

In one feisty corner of the internet however, feminist bloggers and critics have asked a different kind of question, namely: ‘Does Blade Runner 2049 have a woman problem?’ While the response to this question has frequently focused on Joi, the sexbot who, for Sara Stewart and many others represents ‘a sci-fi fanboy’s wet dream’, feminist critiques have taken issue with the presumed gender neutrality of BR 2049’s philosophical turn as Rosie Fletcher and Sam Ashurst wryly observe: ‘The original film made us question what it means to be human. Blade Runner 2049 explores what it means to be a man’.

I want to suggest that this ‘woman problem’ is not unique to BR 2049 but, in fact, might be traced through much of Villeneuve’s oeuvre, from his early films rooted in the independent art film habitus of Quebec to his blockbuster globalised Hollywood endeavours. Villeneuve’s woman problem, however, is not so much about the objectification of the female body, the traditional animus of feminist critique. The multiple female protagonists in his films are provided with agential purpose and are often, in his latter Hollywood work, centred as a film’s moral centre in militarised worlds of hyperbolic masculinity. The issue inheres in the ways in which these female protagonists are consistently figured in relation to variants of what Lee Edelman has named ‘reproductive futurism’, a cultural dominant, heterosexist phantasm and disciplinary technology that represents the child, procreation and domestic biological lineage as a utopian and redemptive embodiment of the future.