Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“I'm Nobody”

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14680777.2011.597105

1471-5902

Holly Randell‐Moon,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Abstract Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Instead of approaching Whedon's texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedon's texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity. Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female. Keywords: powerembodimentsubjectivitytechnologyfeminismsomatechnics Notes 1. My sincere thanks to the anonymous referees for their suggestions for improving this paper. 2. Due to space constraints and for the sake of clarity, I will concentrate on Dollhouse's first season as its narrative is relatively self-contained and, in my reading, its dénouement works to establish the program's central conceits about agency, power, identity, and the body. 3. The Fox Broadcasting Company produced and aired the North American run of Dollhouse. 4. Other, more recent examples could include Battlestar Galactica (2004 Battlestar Galactica (television series) (2004–2009) British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), David Eick Productions, R&D TV, Stanford Pictures (II), USA [Google Scholar]–2009) and United States of Tara (2009 United States of Tara (television series) (2009–2011) DreamWorks Television, USA [Google Scholar]–2011). 5. Denotes Season 1, Episode 2. 6. The poster with this tagline can be viewed at the website: http://www.allposters.com.au/-sp/Dollhouse-posters_i7936648_.htm 7. There are exceptions to this contract provision, as in the case of Priya Tsetsang (Sierra) who is involuntarily admitted to the dollhouse as a mental patient suffering from paranoid schizophrenia (“Belonging,” 2.4). The waiving of consent for people with mental illness points to the ways in which the liberal notion of a rational, autonomous subject is applied contingently to some bodies and not others on the basis of ability, race or gender. It is also worth pointing out that transnational neoliberal capitalism operates and profits on the basis of denying consent and freedom to laboring bodies located outside of Western liberal democracies. 8. See Catherine Coker (2010 Coker, Catherine. 2010. “Exploitation of bodies and minds in season one of Dollhouse”. In Sexual Rhetoric in the Works of Joss Whedon, Edited by: Waggoner, Erin B. 226–238. Jefferson: McFarland. [Google Scholar]) for an extended analysis of how Dollhouse's narrative content and characterization work to deconstruct and critique its own sexualized promotional material. 9. In this sense, Dollhouse displays a much more sophisticated and complex notion of power and gender construction than its predecessor Buffy. The latter's depiction of a world where only female vampire slayers and witches are naturally endowed with supernatural powers to save the world can be seen to rely on an “essential” femininity to recode power as inherently feminine in order to “correct” masculine depictions of power.