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Shards of the Glass Ceiling

Women’s Leadership and Corporations in Science Fiction Television
Les éclats de plafond de verre. Le « Leadership » des femmes et les grandes firmes dans deux séries TV de science-fiction
Scherben der Glasdecke. Die „Leadership“ der Frauen und Großunternehmen in zwei Science Fiction TV-Serien
Svetlana Seibel
p. 165-182

Résumés

La science-fiction est probablement le genre narratif où la thématique des conspirations et la critique de grandes firmes apparaît le plus souvent. Pour les séries TV qui traitent de ces thématiques, la firme antagoniste est décrite avec tellement de détails qu’elle devient un personnage à part entière de la narration. Ce faisant, les caractéristiques propres à cette firme antagoniste sont généralement réunies dans et projetées sur la figure du/de la chef*fe d’entreprise de sorte que c’est essentiellement cette personne qui communique au spectateur la mentalité entrepreneuriale. Dans cet article, je propose une analyse critique de deux séries TV qui met en lumière le conflit entre une culture « corporate », une représentation genrée de ce que signifie diriger et une subjectivité posthumaine. Je me demande quelle sont les conséquences sur la représentation lorsque la firme a un visage féminin. Mon analyse montre que les personnages de femmes cheffes d’entreprises ont tendance à être enfermées dans un rôle d’assistance qui génère une tension morale supplémentaire – une tension qui n’apparaît pas chez les personnages masculins mais est quasi-omniprésente chez les personnages féminins. D’autre part, les discours des personnages féminins « leaders », lorsqu’ils entrent en résistance contre les firmes, se recoupent avec ceux d’une subjectivité posthumaine, ce qui permet un espace narratif dans lequel ces personnages peuvent développer leur potentiel critique. Le présent article analyse ces thématiques dans deux séries crées après 2000 – Orphan Black et Dollhouse.

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Texte intégral

I always knew there was a glass ceiling. I just didn’t realize I would be cutting my own throat breaking through it. I was sick of the view up here, anyway.
Continuum, S2E09)

“There’s Always a Bloody Board”1

  • 1 Orphan Black, S4E9.
  • 2 Cristina Sedgewick: “The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Corporate A (...)
  • 3 Gordon Van Gelder/Ellen Datlew/Cristina Sedgewick: “On Sedgewick’s ‘The Fork in the Road’”. In: S (...)

1Science fiction as a narrative genre and corporations as a symbolic construct as well as economic entity have long been uneasy bed companions. On the one hand, science fiction’s increasing participation in pop cultural industries has made it a subject to the corporate marketing logics and processes. Cristina Sedgewick notes: “Readers’, writers’, and even editors’ interests are not necessarily identical with those of the multinational corporations producing and distributing SF”2. Although Gordon van Gelder contends that Sedgewick’s portrayal of the corporate interference in the field of SF is too sharply drawn,3 there is no denying the fact that market dynamics and production and distribution issues have the potential to, and in fact do, influence the way science fictional texts are constituted and disseminated, and sometimes play a defining role in the (in)ability of certain texts and narratives to reach a wider audience. As Tom Moylan points out, in the 1980s what Sedgewick calls the “House of SF” had to fight for the integrity of its vision in the face of “the changes in publication and distribution practices that were imposed by the restructuring of the publishing industry”:

  • 4 Tom Moylan: Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder 2000, p. 316, (...)

Increased profitability demands by new corporate parent companies put more value on producing endlessly repeating SF series rather than singular new works; revised tax laws prevented the holding of backlists of classical SF; and the domination of distribution by a shrinking number of large bookstores narrowed the range of books on offer to readers, who themselves became more vulnerable to the processes of an increasingly defined and controlled market.4

  • 5 Phil Wickham: Understanding Television Texts. London 2009, p. 16.

Of course, the ever-increasing commodification and corporatization of storytelling, science fictional or otherwise, are not restricted to the publishing context but extend to the majority of contemporary popular media. Television, with its culture of quotas, renewals, and streaming data that keeps creators and their production teams perpetually on their toes, is certainly not immune to it. In Phil Wickham’s words, “[t]he business and structural organization of television influences the form that TV texts can take. They are products of their place and time and the economic demands of the media industry”5.

2This relationship of tension with various cultural production industries is of special importance for science fiction because it is a genre that habitually and intensely engages in social critique, or, at the very least, a critical interrogation of societal norms and aspects of the hegemonic status quo. As Luke Hockley points out:

  • 6 Luke Hockley: “Science Fiction.” In: Glen Creeber (ed.): The Television Genre Book. London 2008, (...)

Underneath its unusual and often slightly flashy mise en scène, science-fiction television has a track record of addressing moral, ethical, political and philosophical themes […]. In this respect, science fiction on television is, at best, notably different from many, although not all, of its special effects-driven counterparts in cinema.6

Perhaps this particular conflict of interest between SF’s commitment to social critique and the power of corporate media industries to influence its content is one of the reasons why, across media, science fictional narratives so often choose a corporation as, essentially, the villain of the piece. The fictions of Arthur C. Clark and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick, and Margaret Atwood are just a few examples of such narrative use of corporations.

3The fictional evil corporations in SF are rarely just organizations. Instead, they are fleshed out and assigned agency to such a degree that they become virtually a character in the narrative. The defining traits of this type of antagonist are usually condensed and projected upon the character of a corporate leader, a person who serves as an embodiment of the amorphous corporate machine entity and who, as such, communicates to the audiences the essence of the corporate mindset. In a televised narrative, a corporate leader is the polished clock face to the corporation’s shadowed cogwheels. Keeping that in mind, what happens to representation when the corporate giant has a female face?

4In this article, I will explore the relationship between corporate machine narrative and female leader characters in two post-2000 SF TV series – Dollhouse (2009-2010) and Orphan Black (2013-2017). It is my contention that two distinct but interrelated dynamics can be observed in this context. The first has to do with women corporate leaders, whose storylines usually have them fail in their corporate role, mostly for moral purposes frequently associated with themes of nurture. In this first dynamic, a female corporate leader character tends to be embedded, in one way or another, in a discourse of nurture which generates additional moral tension in relation to the corporate machine, a tension which is uncommon for male characters of the same order but almost omnipresent in women characters. A female corporate leader, although having successfully broken through the proverbial glass ceiling, is in her turn routinely portrayed as broken, cut up by the metaphorical glass shards. The second dynamic involves women characters fighting against corporations and the ways in which discourses on gender, corporate mindset, posthumanism, and personhood intersect in such characters. In the two shows under consideration here, I argue, this second dynamic produces speculative pathways to posthuman subjectivity which is embodied by these women characters.

Women of the Corporation: Breaking the Glass Ceiling?

  • 7 Nada K. Kakabadse / Catarina Figueira / Katerina Nicolopoulou / Jessica Hong Yang /Andrew P. Kaka (...)
  • 8 Ibid., p. 269; see also Table 1, p. 270.
  • 9 Kakabadse / Figueira /Nicolopoulou /Yang /Kakabadse /Özbilginm: “Gender Diversity”, p. 272.

5But before turning to fictional characters, what of actual corporate leaders? As studies of corporate culture suggest, gendered double standards that see women as less capable corporate leaders than men operate in actual boardrooms in very tangible ways. To start with, women in corporate executive positions are still rather thin on the ground. In their article on board gender diversity, Kakabadse et al. state that “women still hold few board sits”7 and “gender-balanced boards […] are rare”8. However, rather than only looking at comparative numbers, the article asks the question of how women fare once they actually break through the proverbial glass ceiling and join an executive board. The results of the study plainly show that women executives who join a corporate board feel that they have entered a male-coded and-dominated cultural sphere and need to shift and adjust their attitudes and responses accordingly in order to fit in and secure their position: “Women directors who make it to the board have already demonstrated their knowledge, skills, and capabilities. Yet, they appear to need to gain credibility before they can be accepted”9. Women directors report a sense of being judged and scrutinized in everything they do, from the chain of their arguments to the pitch of their voices:

  • 10 Ibid., p. 273.

The respondents underscored that they need to learn to fit into the board environment and blend with male colleagues. […] Many respondents […] have chosen not to express their views initially to avoid possible conflict. Even the tone of voice is important in the boardroom.10

  • 11 Ibid., p. 275-276.

This situation seems to stand in a direct causal relationship to the low numbers of female executives present in boardrooms: because women still constitute a distinct minority in such environments, their ability to counteract androcentric normativity in the boardroom culture remains limited. Although studies suggest that this dynamic is clearly gendered, the board members do not necessarily recognize it as such: “Male domination means that women join as outsiders, only to accept rather than challenge male norms, one of which remains the idea that merit, competence, and performance of the board are free from gender bias”11.

  • 12 Ibid., p. 273.
  • 13 Ibid., p. 269.

6All this has wide-reaching implications for women executives in corporate settings, ranging from “experiences of others not listening to them and exclusion from socializing and even decision making” or being “subjected to inappropriate behaviors, which indicates that male directors notice their gender more than their individual contributions”12 to instances when “companies with male-only boards achieve higher valuation than those with a woman on their board due to the perception that poorly performing women may lead to a firm’s negative valuation”13. It follows that merely achieving a seat on the board does not necessarily equal success for women and, in fact, often marks the beginning of a new struggle in the context of and against patriarchal structures that define boardroom culture. The glass ceiling may be broken, but the cuts it leaves are often deeper than meets the eye.

Nurture Prevails: The Female Caretaker Trope

  • 14 Ibid., p. 268.

7In popular narratives of all kinds, women characters are often given roles which revolve around their function as caretakers and nurturers in a broad sense, or specifically in relation to children. The urge to take care of others is habitually ascribed in larger doses to individuals defined as biologically female, and its primacy in women’s lives is blown out of proportion. In an almost deterministic fashion, women characters are driven by matters of family history, reproduction, and an instinct to nurture, even when operating in arenas coded as professional, such as a corporate boardroom. Such fictional portrayals build on extradiegetic discursive strands that perpetuate a narrative of binary separation of male and female qualities, behaviors, and modes of thinking and project them onto the workspace: “[T]he distinction between masculinity and femininity has been prevalent in the corporate governance literature […]; namely, there are either ‘masculinist’ ethics, as highlighted in the dominant discourses of resources, or ‘feminist’ ethics, as highlighted in the dominant discourses of relationship and caring14. It is this gendered separation of spheres that is problematic in this context. In and of itself, a nurturing attitude is, of course, positive and worth aspiring to. The actual problem, then, is not that women are portrayed as nurturing, but ‘how it is done – that even in professional settings nurture is presented as a female biological imperative, often hinging on motherhood, instead of as an important aspect of good leadership. In a broader sense, such portrayals open up questions of how leadership in general is conceived in contemporary Eurowestern societies, and why the concept of leadership is so frequently divorced from the concept of care, although successful leadership is impossible without it.

8In a feat of art imitating life, the perceived polarity of the concept of leadership, coded as masculine and tough, and the concept of nurture, coded as feminine and soft, is the driving force of character development in many television productions featuring female leaders or female struggle for institutional leadership. Perhaps nowhere is this tension as evident and as central to the character development as in female leaders of fictional corporate giants. When women characters become corporate leaders, their actions are to a high degree motivated by familial attachments and personal relationships of care and nurture. Depending on their stance vis-à-vis these issues, the narrative tends to pass moral judgment on the character: the fall from grace for female leaders often originates in a failure to care, and their absolution, when possible, lies in the return to their expected roles as nurturers. In her essay “In Defense of Unlikable Women”, Kameron Hurley argues that

  • 15 Kameron Hurley: “In Defense of Unlikable Women.” In: The Geek Feminist Revolution. New York 2016, (...)

women have been so often cast as mothers, potential mothers, caretakers, and servants, assistants, and handmaidens of all sorts that it’s become a conscious but also unconscious expectation that anyone who isn’t—at least some of the time—must be inherently unnatural. And when we find a woman who doesn’t fit this mold, we work hard to sweep her back into her box, because if she gets out, well… it might mean she has the ability to take on a multitude of roles.15

Female corporate leaders who push hardcore corporate agendas often fit the mold of an unlikable character, mostly because of their manipulative tactics and the lack of empathy they display. However, the gist of their unlikability lies not in the complex particulars of their individual character and the totality of their personal biography, but in their failure to pursue the postulated biological imperative to always err on the side of nurture. The corporate environment is coded as hyper-masculine, especially on the executive level, and, instead of creatively and productively interacting with this environment, women lose their way when transplanted there. Even so, their drive to nurture rarely completely disappears; rather, it is distorted by the corporate logic they embrace, and manifests in grotesque forms that are hard to sympathize with. Even when women pass through the glass ceiling, therefore, their lives and their options continue to be determined by it. They walk with glass lodged in their flesh, bleeding onto the expensive furniture as they move. For such female characters, the only way to redeem themselves is to turn against the corporation and assert their leadership outside of its institutional structure.

Women Leaders of the Corporation: Rachel Duncan and Adelle DeWitt

  • 16 Orphan Black, S2E10.

9One of the aspects of Orphan Black which make it one of the most significant shows in relation to the exploration of social gender structures is the fact that it features not one, but a number of women at the institutional top. They all have different positions within their respective organizations, and although the particularities of these positions are not always very clear, it is certain that they are all high-ranking actors in their respective institutional contexts. Examples of such women include Marion Bowles, a member of the mysterious Topside which, in her own words, is an entity “you won’t find […] in any company directory. We steer the Dyad Group, with many other multinationals”16; Evie Cho, the CEO of the Brightborn Group, which appears to be a subsidiary of the Dyad Group; Dr. Virginia Coady, the head of the military faction supervising Project Castor; Susan Duncan, one of the two geneticists originally at the head of Project Leda; and Rachel Duncan, the CEO of the Dyad Group. The mere fact that this many women are shown as occupying positions of institutional power in the series is remarkable in its own right.

  • 17 Rachel is by no means the only one of these women at the top whose portrayal is dominated by them (...)
  • 18 Sarah K. Donovan: “Not Why but Who.” In: Richard Greene / Rachel Robinson-Green (ed.): Orphan Bla (...)

10Of all these characters, Rachel Duncan has the most visibility throughout the series, and is the most complex.17 The only Leda clone raised as to be completely self-aware and in an immediate proximity to the Dyad Institute, she is unique to the project. The fact that she is often described as “a child raised by Neolution” suggests that she inherited not only a high-ranking executive position in the corporation, but also the philosophy and ideology on which it is built. However, although initially presented as a composed and commanding business woman at the top of her game, Rachel is gradually revealed as a deeply dysfunctional character. In Sarah Donovan’s words, “[w]hile calm, cool, and calculating on the outside, inside she is a child in desperate need of parental love”18. The trauma of having been taken away from her adoptive parents as a small child and placed into Dr. Leekie’s care turns into anger when she finds out later in the series that they are both still alive. Thus, in her character makeup and inability to relate in a healthy manner, Rachel is presented as a result of failed nurture.

  • 19 Orphan Black, S2E10.

11Another motivation at work that makes Rachel as ruthless as she is heartbroken becomes obvious when her relationship with Sarah is considered. Rachel’s feud with Sarah is striking in its passionate intensity. Throughout the series, Rachel is caught in a perpetual cycle of competition with Sarah that transcends the interest the corporation has in Sarah’s biology—business at hand, as it were—and appears to be personal. Despite her habitual antagonism towards them all, Rachel never shows any personal interest in any of the other clones, but she is obsessed with Sarah. Yes, Sarah openly defies Rachel and her authority on several occasions, most notably during their encounter in the Dyad headquarters when Sarah, in Rachel’s words, “laid hands” on her19. Yet the true reason for Rachel’s fixation on Sarah seems to be essentially the same as everybody else’s: whereas all other clones but Helena are sterile, Sarah is not only fertile, but she actually managed to successfully bring a healthy child—her daughter Kira—into the world. However, while all the others are interested in this aspect of Sarah’s biology for the sake of scientific curiosity or profit margins, Rachel’s interest is personal: she desperately wants a child of her own.

12Throughout the series, there are several hints to that effect, but the most eye-opening moment is Rachel’s conversation with her creator and adopted father Ethan Duncan at the Dyad Institute:

  • 20 Orphan Black, S2E8.

RACHEL: Answer me this, Professor. Why Sarah? Of all of us. Why is it the unmonitored tramp was successful?
DUNCAN: In her fertility? Huh! Rachel, she’s a failure, not a success. You are all barren by design.
RACHEL: I suppose you couldn’t have created a reproducing prototype, could you? That would be irresponsible. Which is unforgivable.20

While the bitterness Rachel feels about her infertility is already evident in the choice of words and the biting sarcasm of the last three sentences, the real sense of desperation is communicated by visual cinematic means. As Rachel faces Duncan in her usual composed manner accompanied by a sparse, stifled body language the show has established as typical for her, the scene is interrupted by flashes of images of Rachel frantically smashing the objects and furniture decorating the office she and Duncan are having their conversation in. The images, edited into the conversation and interrupting it at intervals, display an eerie atmosphere which suggests that their function is to expose Rachel’s desperate inner state and intense emotional response to Duncan calmly informing her of the practical reasons why she will never be able to have children of her own. The effect that his explanations have is not only to deny Rachel the very possibility of ever getting her wish, but also to out her into the position of an object once again, reminding her that she is a “prototype” and that someone else’s design determines what she can and cannot have. The scene ends with a close-up of Rachel’s tearful face covered in smudged mascara filling the frame of one of the flashing sequences that visualize her inner turmoil, signifying the peak of pain and despair.

13Rachel’s position at the top of the corporation, thus, is motivated by two designs that are outside herself and her power. On the one hand, she occupies the position she does because of someone else’s decision to breed “a child raised by Neolution”; on the other, her actions in that position are motivated by a desire for both a normal childhood and a biological motherhood. As a corporate executive, Rachel is thus embedded in a double discourse of nurture which determines not only her behavior, but her very character. The series rarely shows Rachel in situations that showcase her skills as a highly educated and astute professional. At the same time, on many occasions her apparent professionalism and composure are revealed to be fake, even unhealthy, and to crumble under emotional pressure, while her fixation on issues having to do with nurture and reproduction is presented as the determining factor of her leadership style. In Hurley’s terms, all of her “unlikability” as a character is channeled through storylines of failed nurture. Rachel’s portrayal as a woman at the corporate top is dominated by a representation that emphasizes her unfulfilled function as a daughter and a mother over her position as a professional and an executive.

14Although Joss Whedon’s short-lived series Dollhouse is primarily the story of Echo, the character who undergoes the most extensive development in the course of the show’s two seasons is Adelle DeWitt, the head of the Los Angeles division of Dollhouse, a shady business enterprise that traffics in humans operating under the auspices of the formidable Rossum Corporation. Due in no small part to the expert performance delivered by Olivia Williams, Adelle is one of the most impressively complex characters ever to grace the small screen. Unlike Orphan Black, Adelle is also the only woman in an executive position on Dollhouse.

15Adelle’s transformation takes her from a corporate executive trying to fulfill the corporation’s vision and objective without completely compromising her conscience through a total complicity with the system to the head of the resistance against it. Her passage down that road is never straightforward, often leaving the viewers confounded and at a loss as to how to react to her:

  • 21 Jonathan Mason: “Like a Boss”. In: Jane Espenson (ed.): Inside Joss’ Dollhouse: From Alpha to Ros (...)

[I]t was easy to view Adelle as just a manipulative higher-up in the inter-office food chain, screwing the little guy to appease her corporate masters before they did the same to her. However, Adelle was a carefully considered balance of the pragmatic responsibilities required of her job and compassion demanded by her conscience. It was a tightrope act maintained by her personal need for control and her talent for exerting it over others.21

Thanks to this complexity, although the only female executive on the Dollhouse team, Adelle never feels like a token or a trope. In her institutional and personal meanderings, she is the one character on the show who most fully embodies her own reprimand spoken to Caroline in the show’s pilot: “Actions have consequences”. One of Adelle’s qualities that garner respect is her ability to always own up to the consequences of her actions in the end.

16In her dealings as the head of the LA Dollhouse, Adelle often attempts to find a balance between her need to cement her executive position by securing profit and advancement for the corporation and its investors and caring for the well-being of the Dolls. However, these two objectives are frequently shown to be incompatible, and although Adelle is presented as professional and competent in what she does, her standing in the House is increasingly compromised by complications resulting from her leniency. The corporation in Dollhouse is an entity which requires complete submission and does not allow room for unauthorized creative thinking, much less creative empathy. In Adelle’s own words: “If you keep secrets from the corporation, you may have every expectation of being chopped into pieces yourself” (Dollhouse, S2E10).

17Interestingly, even while playing an executive hardliner, Adelle participates in the discourse of nurture. In the wiped state, the Dolls in the house are often described as children, the newborns who need to be handled with care, nurtured, and protected from the ugliness of the world. As Topher puts it: “Being wiped is not unlike being born, it’s traumatic. […] [I]n here we minimize the trauma with throw pillows and perfectly crunchy lettuce, there’s no conflict” (Dollhouse, S1E14). Thus, while Adelle is running the house, she is effectively acting as the Dolls’ mother who simultaneously facilitates and oversees their birthing process. Depending on her decisions vis-à-vis the Dolls’ well-being and equilibrium, she is painted as a good or a bad mother.

18The extent to which Adelle is a more effective and considerate nurturer who understands the needs of her “children” infinitely better than a male executive would or could is made evident with the change of regime in LA’s Dollhouse. When Adelle loses her position as head of the house and is replaced by Harding, the change in the Dolls’ routine signifies his inability to understand and handle the trauma of the wipe birth: when the viewers get the first glimpse of the house’s routine under Harding (Dollhouse, S2E7), the lighting of the common area has become harsher, the Dolls’ movements have changed from slow, pensive walking to virtually marching in formation, and their physical activities have switched from meditative yoga to military-like boot camp exercises. In short, the change of leadership in the Dollhouse is coded as having gone from a soft feminine style to a hard masculine routine.

19Nor do these changes only impact the Dolls’ free time. Adelle’s own remarks indicate that their personal dignity and security as Actives are also being compromised by the new administration: “Feels like ages ago that we actually weighed a request against an Active’s chance of survival, let alone well-being” (Dollhouse, S2E7). At the same time, Adelle is being treated as a secretary by the new head of the house and has become a subject to condescending gendered remarks from both the clients and Harding himself (Dollhouse, S2E7). It is partly these kinds of humiliations that prompt Adelle to give Topher’s secret tech over to the corporation in order to regain her position of power. When she does so, it seems that Adelle has accepted the corporate logic as her guiding principle. Her unconditional surrender to the dark side seems reiterated during her later interaction with Alpha when she notes: “I have moved beyond chivalry on to self-preservation” (Dollhouse, D2E8). Nevertheless, she is ultimately unable to pursue her hard course. In the end, she sides with the resistance against the corporation, risking her life because her character and empathy forbid complicity, and also because she feels a responsibility for her actions and the fate of the world when it turns out that, despite her statement that she is “not planning on presiding over the end of Western civilization” (Dollhouse, S1E10), it turns out that it is in fact precisely what she is doing. Actions have consequences.

20Dollhouse, thus, still promotes the idea that a woman is unlikely to keep her integrity and at the same time be successful as a corporate executive because of this environment’s inherent ruthlessness which is incompatible with women’s innate empathy and instinct to nurture. However, it also creates an alternative vision of female leadership, one where Adelle is able to use the leadership skills she developed during her corporate tenure in order to correct the system’s mistakes. Unlike Rachel, who by the end of Orphan Black is lonely and without a purpose, when Adelle abandons her corporate position of power to join the resistance she does not lose her role as a leader—she redefines it. Echo is maybe the one physically fighting the battle, but, ultimately, she is a foot soldier in a resistance which is orchestrated, strategized, and sustained by Adelle. Topher is the one who puts it in so many words: “You are our general,” he says to Adelle. “We can’t lose you” (Dollhouse, S2E11). Later, when Topher decides to sacrifice himself to undo the damage his tech has caused, Adelle’s first impulse is to stay with him until he reminds her of her responsibilities as the one in charge:

  • 22 Dollhouse, S2E13.

ADELLE: You don’t have to do it, you know. At least not alone.
TOPHER: I do. I’ll fix what we did to their heads. You fix what we did to the rest of the world. Your job is waaay harder.22

  • 23 Mason: “Like a Boss”, p. 95.

Adelle is not only “the first voice heard in Dollhouse23, but also the last one standing. When the explosion sends Topher’s pulse rushing over LA reversing the effects of the imprinting technology and those affected by it momentarily fall unconscious to the ground, Adelle and Zone, both never imprinted, are the only two individuals to remain on their feet. In these final scenes of the show, the discourse of nurture undergoes an ultimate subversion when Zone, who appeared to represent the tough male fighter archetype for much of his screen time on Dollhouse, decides to adopt a little girl without a family, because “somebody’s gotta look after her” (Dollhouse, S2E13). Together with his peacetime occupation as a landscape architect, the one who nurtures things that grow, Zone becomes the ultimate nurturer of the show in the conventional sense, thus undoing the binary and questioning the idea that men are inherently incapable of good nurturance. But Adelle, as Topher’s last words suggest, remains the leader. As all the other characters—Echo, Paul, Topher, Alpha, Priya and Anthony—walk their personal paths, Adelle stays on task even when the apocalypse has been averted. She was the one to lead the resistance; now she is the one to lead the restoration. In Echo’s words, Adelle remains “ever the shepherd” (Dollhouse, S2E13).

Women Leaders Against the Corporation: Towards Posthuman Subjectivity

21Grappling with the notion of personhood and the status of the individual in a complex, interrelated world and in the face of developing technologies and their applications is central to various strands of posthumanism. These ideas and their relation to ethics and the notion of informed consent are frequent themes in contemporary science fiction across media. They are certainly central to both Orphan Black and Dollhouse, both shows interrogating what non-consensual applications of transhumanist philosophies and technologies to human subjects do to the characters’ sense of personhood. Gender and sexuality are implicated into these considerations, as is corporate agency. All of these themes complicate notions of simplistic techno-optimism in relation to technological development and human enhancement.

With their focus on human cloning and neurocognitive imprinting, the TV shows under consideration set up narrative and philosophical frameworks in which questions of bioethics take center stage. For the clone-“sestras” of Orphan Black these themes are expressed not only through the murky premise of human cloning, but also through violations of their bodily autonomy at every stage of the process. The infertility sequences that are built into their DNA not only externally determine which experiences cloned individuals can and cannot have, but also, through a scientists’ mistake, make them terminally ill. Once born, the clones are permanently monitored, often through romantic partners assigned to them or recruited by the Dyad Group without the subject’s knowledge, which makes the consensual nature of relationships practiced within these intimate bonds questionable at best. But the ultimate violation of the clones’ sense of personhood is revealed to be the fact that the corporation patented each one of them by encoding a special synthetic sequence into their genome which, decoded, reads: “This organism and derivative genetic material is restricted intellectual property” (Orphan Black, E1E10). This patent not only reduces the bodies of the clones to the status of property, but also lays claim on any biological offspring they might have. In a legally binding way, such a patent denies cloned individuals any right to personhood – biological, civic, or fiscal – superseding their right to self-determination by a capitalist ideology of property, not unlike slavery.

22Modern-day slavery is also the term that comes up in relation to the Dolls in Dollhouse. Here, too, corporate notions of consent are revealed as dubious. The practices used by the corporation to recruit their so-called Actives include contractual consent under duress, the use of convicts, and the non-consensual enlisting of mental patients. Although the terms of the contract stipulate five years of service to the Dollhouse in exchange for a financially comfortable new beginning that makes accumulated life problems such as deep grief, poor mental health, or criminal record go away, later in the show it is revealed that once a person’s brain has been imprinted with an “Active architecture”, it will never return to its original state and will remain vulnerable to acts of neurocognitive coercion and terrorism for life. The Dollhouse contract also does not appear to explain that the “engagements” the Dolls are made to perform in the course of their 5-year tenure at Dollhouse not seldom carry a risk of death. The Dollhouse contract, therefore, is a far cry from the notion of informed consent.

  • 24 Adam Winkler: We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York / Lon (...)
  • 25 Winkler: We the Corporations, p. xxi.

23At the same time as these fictional corporations are working to strip away the personhood of those they consider their merchandise by legal means such as copyrighting, patenting, and contractual agreements under duress, the corporations themselves are considered legal persons under the United States law. As such, in a nefarious twist of irony, their rights and agency are protected as constitutional rights, as legal scholar Adam Winkler shows in his book We the Corporations. Winkler argues that over the course of American history “corporations have won the lion’s share of constitutional protections”24: “Corporations have a straightforward motivation to seek constitutional rights: to fight against laws and regulations that restrict business autonomy and interfere with the pursuit of profit”25. In the two TV series discussed here, corporations use such constitutional rights for the purposes of interfering into the political process in order to secure government regulations that allow their ethically questionable enterprises to continue and expand. As Ambrose puts it in the episode “Epitaph One” in Dollhouse: “I think you will find in the coming months we can do whatever we want. […] We’ve always been above the law, Adelle. Only now, we’re also writing it. This will all be legal within a year. Everybody who matters is either a client or one of ours” (Dollhouse, S1E13). To that end, the Rossum Corporation goes so far as to create a Doll senator, monitored by a corporate agent under the guise of his wife, in order to further its agenda by political means. Pitting the idea of corporate personhood against the personhood of those that corporations purport to own, both shows introduce and grapple with tough questions regarding the effects of a capitalist system run wild on human subjectivity.

24The subjectivity in question is not just human, however. Rather, the shows utilize the conflict between corporations and bioengineered characters to explore the tension between notions of transhuman and posthuman subjectivity. In this equation, the corporation embodies a transhuman ideology of human enhancement that seeks to transcend the human as an animal category and works towards achieving a superhuman subjectivity. As Francesca Ferrando explains:

  • 26 Francesca Ferrando: “Transhumanism / Posthumanism”. In: Rosi Braidotti / Maria Hlavajova (eds.): (...)

Transhumanism traces its roots within the Enlightenment and does not reject the humanistic tradition […]; on the contrary, transhumanism focuses specifically on human enhancement, which explains its symbol “H+” as an acronym for “Humanity Plus.” The main keys to access such a goal are identified in science and technology, in their existing, emerging, and speculative frames. In the progressive timeline of the transhuman, the future bears unique potentials: some humans may transcend their actual outfit in such radical ways as to become posthuman.26

The corporate agendas of the two shows’ fictional corporations reflect just such notions of transhuman subjectivity reserved for a select few: both Rossum Corporation and the Dyad Group carry out human experiments in bioengineering in order to prolong and eventually limitlessly extend life for an elite portion of humankind – those who can afford it. Ambrose is the one who breaks the news to Adelle in Dollhouse:

  • 27 Dollhouse, S1E13.

AMBROSE: Upgrades. We at Rossum now provide select clients with complete anatomy upgrades.
ADELLE: You’re giving away our Actives.
AMRBOSE: No, we’re not giving them away. We’re charging a lump nine-figure sum.27

In Orphan Black, the Dyad Group pursues a similar agenda, spurred by the ideology of Neolution – “a self-directed evolution”, governed by technological advances (Orphan Black, S1E6). Having begun as a resource for its founder John Patrick Matheson aka P.T. Westmorland to prolong his own life, the corporation’s long-term business plan turns its pro-longevity and stem cell research into a source of profit to service the rich in a vision of the world governed by eugenics. As Siobhan explains to Rachel: “Neolution wants to sell curated commercialized evolution to the one percent who can afford it, so they can live forever, grow a bloody tail if they want to. The rest of us, Coady’s department, targeted for sterilization” (Orphan Black, S5E8).

  • 28 For more information on the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, see: Adam Winkler: We the Corpora (...)
  • 29 Winkler: We the Corporations, p. 380.
  • 30 Ibid., p. 381.

25In these visions, the corporate personhood equals a transhuman personhood, in both its self-fashioning and the products it sells. Significantly, in both shows female leaders are pitted against male corporate heavyweights who quite literally embody these eugenic ideologies. Having realized that any power they have appeared to possess in the hierarchy of the corporation is nothing but a smokescreen, both Rachel and Adelle turn on their respective corporations and assume a key role in bringing about their downfall. As they follow the motions of transhuman corporate strategies throughout their respective series, these female corporate leaders expose the gendered dimension of inequalities inherent in transhuman futurist potentialities, frequently through the context of reproductive technologies and self-determination—a discussion that is prominent in the U.S. where many states actively push for legislation aimed at curtailing access to abortion. The controversial Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby case of 2014 that ended in a Supreme Court decision asserting the right of for-profit corporations to deny birth control health insurance coverage to their female employees on the grounds of religious beliefs of the corporation’s controlling individuals is an example of a public debate where issues of corporate rights and female reproductive freedom become entangled. This case immediately comes to mind when considering the reproductive freedom themes of these two TV shows28. As Winkler asserts, “[t]he Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby was a near-perfect embodiment of the more than two-hundred-year history of corporate rights jurisprudence”29, and this decision was argued on the basis of the idea of corporate personhood, although interpreted in misguided ways, according to Winkler30. Drawing such critical parallels uncovers ways in which gendered power relations could play out in speculative futurist imaginings, based on extradiegetic precedent.

  • 31 Rosi Braidotti: Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge 2020, p. 59.

26Against such predatory visions of transhumanist corporate personhood both Dollhouse and Orphan Black position characters who perform a posthumanist subjectivity in Rosi Braidotti’s sense. According to Braidotti, unlike posthumanism, in its interpretations of posthumanity transhumanism dabbles in “normative neo-humanism”31:

  • 32 Ibid., p. 59-60.

This intervention upon the human is presented as in keeping with the classical humanist rationalism of the Enlightenment. It extends the humanistic belief in the perfectibility of Man through scientific rationality, with a concrete and heavily industrial robotics and an artificial-intelligence driven programme of human enhancement. In this framework, the posthuman is defined as a super-human meta-rationalist entity. [Nick] Bostrom [director of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity] is a champion of the Capitalocene in that he advocates the benefits of capitalism and his approach receives ample economic support from both the scientific community-“Major Science”-and the corporate world.32

  • 33 Ibid., p. 54.
  • 34 Ibid., p. 54.

Meanwhile, a genuinely posthuman subject, for Braidotti, is characterized by ethical and political engagement, a multi-directional relationality, and “a critical detachment from both Humanism and anthropocentrism, which respects the force of non-human elements”33. In their ideal form, posthuman subjects are understood as grounded in a philosophy of posthumanism which is based on a social critique of anthropocentrism, sexism, racism, coloniality and imperialism, as well as the hierarchical ideology of human and humanist exceptionalism. “[T]he proper subject of the posthuman convergence,” Braidotti writes, “is not ‘Man’, but a new collective subject, a ‘we-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same’ kind of subject”34. As Braidotti’s phrasing indicates, posthuman subjectivity is set to challenge not only the anthropocentrism, but also the androcentrism at play in humanism-bound notions of subjectivity and visions of the future. In addition, it foregrounds relationality immanent in her understanding of posthuman subjectivity and its connections to social justice.

  • 35 Ibid., p. 50.

27The characters defying transhumanist corporations in Dollhouse and Orphan Black trace a narrative trajectory corresponding to the development of posthuman subjectivity and consciousness in this sense. By doing so, they navigate a tension between what Braidotti calls “potentia (“our relational capacity”) and “potestas” (“the protocols of institutional control”)35. As they resist the corporate control over their biology and neurocognition, these characters create new modes of relationality that hold them together. In Orphan Black, the female clones weave a tight network of sisterhood that by the end of the show spans the entire world, using the anglicized plural of the Slavic word for “sister”-“sestras”-as a term to describe it. The kind of linguistic alienation or dissonance into which the word in this code-switching form is embedded signals the specificity of this relational bond and the expansion of the feminist notion of sisterhood into its posthuman iteration. As such, this sestrahood is not biologically determined, as everyone who develops a close personal relationship with the clone-sisters becomes inducted into it (with a special category of “brother-sestra” created for Felix). By this logic Rachel, although biologically a sister, remains excluded, not only because of her track record of trying to harm members of the sestrahood in various ways during her tenure as the CEO of Dyad, but also because she has never managed to develop an actual relational bond to her clone-sisters beyond occasional collaboration forced by circumstances. Rachel’s hard work and ruthlessness in her attempt to overcome her clone subjectivity and become “human” belie her attachment to humanist and transhumanist understandings of subjectivity that alienate her from the posthuman relationality on which the sestrahood is based.

  • 36 This theme underlines the idea that posthuman subjectivity is not necessarily determined by physi (...)

28In Dollhouse, on the other hand, posthuman relationality is tied to notions of memory and remembrance. While their participation in resistance against corporate visions of a profit-driven und elitist bioengineered future bring characters close together, the real deep relationality is created among those whose memories of the apocalypse and everything leading up to it are not wiped by Topher’s blast that resets everyone who has been imprinted and is above ground at the time of its release. The blast returns to the imprinted their original personalities, but wipes out all memory of the crisis. Only the so-called Actuals, those who have altogether escaped imprinting, and those who have hidden from the blast underground, retain these memories. In that sense, Adelle embodies a posthuman subjectivity even though (and precisely because) she has never been imprinted and has no “Active architecture” in her brain.36 Together with Zone, who, like Adelle, has never been imprinted; Echo, Priya, Anthony, and little T., who hide from the blast underground; and the imprint of Paul who, after his physical death, receives new life in Echo’s head, Adelle becomes part of a posthuman network of collective memory, which underscores her responsibility as a leader in the newly restored world to never let this history repeat itself. Together, this small group of posthuman subjects is set up to embody the relational objective signified by the heading of the photo collage on the wall of Adelle’s devastated former executive office-“To Remember”.

  • 37 Kameron Hurley: “Women and Gentlemen: On Unmasking the Sobering Reality of Hyper-Masculine Charac (...)

29In SF television, female leaders embedded into a corporate machine narrative often function as a critique of the corporation as an institution and of the corporate mindset, in that they seem to most effectively showcase all that is unethical and wrong with these types of organizations. The effect this produces is two-fold. On the one hand, since these fictional corporations are coded as masculine and determined by patriarchal structures, presenting the ineffectiveness and disposability of female leaders in such a setting serves to critique the system in its entirety. This strategy of handling the theme utilizes the effect produced by what Kameron Hurley calls “putting women into […] hyper-masculine roles”37.

  • 38 Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Men and Women of the Corporation. New York 1993, p. 3.

30On the other hand, this kind of critique functions at the expense of the very idea that a woman in a corporate leadership position can be successful and at the same time remain uncompromised in terms of personal values and human decency. Given that on the contemporary labor market landscape the corporate form objectively “employs a large portion of the labor force, and its practices often serve as models for the organization of other systems”38, such representation in popular culture is not unproblematic. Discursively promoting the idea of women’s inherent incompatibility with corporate settings has a potential of limiting women’s options on the very real labor market that in many cases is already biased against them, and closing off large economic sectors to female participation and professional advancement.

  • 39 Kameron Hurley: “Gender, Family, Nookie: The Speculative Frontier.” In: The Geek Feminist Revolut (...)

31The only two options such narratives leave open for their female corporate leaders are either to rebel and break with the institution, or to effectively become a monster created in its image. It seems, therefore, that the justified critique of the corporate profit-above-all-else ideology and the entanglements of economic and political power is achieved at the expense of female agency in a professional setting: women are incompatible with functioning corporations and have no real power there. They may, however, be uniquely positioned to redefine those structures. This discursive tension, one that is not easy to resolve and that resists simplistic conclusions, defines many incarnations of female corporate leaders in SF narratives. And so, in closing, I once again refer to Kameron Hurley’s words: “Story is powerful. It can hold us back. Box us in. But it can also challenge our assumptions. Teach us to build structures. Or tear down those structures altogether and start over again anew”39.

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Notes

1 Orphan Black, S4E9.

2 Cristina Sedgewick: “The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Corporate America?” In: Science Fiction Studies, 18.1 (1991), p. 12.

3 Gordon Van Gelder/Ellen Datlew/Cristina Sedgewick: “On Sedgewick’s ‘The Fork in the Road’”. In: Science Fiction Studies, 18.2, 1991, p. 295-296 : Here Van Gelder states: “Mistakes […] in Ms Sedgewick’s article suggest to me that the author has worked too hard to make her case for SF’s being overrun by ‘Megacorporate America.’ The lack of any mention whatsoever of small press book publishing in SF further indicates to me that the article’s portrait of the ‘House of SF’ is incomplete, if not entirely distorted” (294). Sedgewick responds to these remarks in the same article in the following manner: “I […] regret that Mr. Van Gelder failed to grasp the important subtheme in my article, namely that to survive the House of SF must (inter alia) develop the alternative small press, as the feminist movement has so successfully done. Feminist readers have never enjoyed such a plethora and variety of (mainstream) texts as they do now, in large part due to their efforts to promote the publication and distribution of texts by university and independent presses. As I said in my article, there is no reason the House of SF cannot do the same—given the will and the consensus of the House to do so”.

4 Tom Moylan: Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder 2000, p. 316, n. 7.

5 Phil Wickham: Understanding Television Texts. London 2009, p. 16.

6 Luke Hockley: “Science Fiction.” In: Glen Creeber (ed.): The Television Genre Book. London 2008, p. 37.

7 Nada K. Kakabadse / Catarina Figueira / Katerina Nicolopoulou / Jessica Hong Yang /Andrew P. Kakabadse / Mustafa Özbilgin: “Gender Diversity and Board Performance: Women’s Experiences and Perspectives”. In: Human Resource Management 54.2, 2015, p. 265.

8 Ibid., p. 269; see also Table 1, p. 270.

9 Kakabadse / Figueira /Nicolopoulou /Yang /Kakabadse /Özbilginm: “Gender Diversity”, p. 272.

10 Ibid., p. 273.

11 Ibid., p. 275-276.

12 Ibid., p. 273.

13 Ibid., p. 269.

14 Ibid., p. 268.

15 Kameron Hurley: “In Defense of Unlikable Women.” In: The Geek Feminist Revolution. New York 2016, p. 111.

16 Orphan Black, S2E10.

17 Rachel is by no means the only one of these women at the top whose portrayal is dominated by themes of motherhood and nurturing. In fact, all of these characters are associated with such themes: Marion Bowles serves as an adopted mother to Charlotte, the most recent and young of the clones; Dr. Virginia Coady develops an extremely unhealthy maternal relationship with the Castor clones in her care; Evie Cho runs an artificial insemination scheme that experiments on babies and euthanizes those of them who constitute failed attempts, thus functioning as the ultimate bad mother; and Susan Duncan is a mother who abandoned her daughter Rachel in the name of science and who ultimately pays for this transgression with her life.

18 Sarah K. Donovan: “Not Why but Who.” In: Richard Greene / Rachel Robinson-Green (ed.): Orphan Black and Philosophy: Grand Theft DNA. Chicago 2016, p. 130.

19 Orphan Black, S2E10.

20 Orphan Black, S2E8.

21 Jonathan Mason: “Like a Boss”. In: Jane Espenson (ed.): Inside Joss’ Dollhouse: From Alpha to Rossum. Dallas 2010, p. 96.

22 Dollhouse, S2E13.

23 Mason: “Like a Boss”, p. 95.

24 Adam Winkler: We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York / London 2018, p. 394.

25 Winkler: We the Corporations, p. xxi.

26 Francesca Ferrando: “Transhumanism / Posthumanism”. In: Rosi Braidotti / Maria Hlavajova (eds.): Posthuman Glossary. London / New York 2018, p. 439.

27 Dollhouse, S1E13.

28 For more information on the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, see: Adam Winkler: We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York / London 2018, p. xvi-xvii and p. 379-382.

29 Winkler: We the Corporations, p. 380.

30 Ibid., p. 381.

31 Rosi Braidotti: Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge 2020, p. 59.

32 Ibid., p. 59-60.

33 Ibid., p. 54.

34 Ibid., p. 54.

35 Ibid., p. 50.

36 This theme underlines the idea that posthuman subjectivity is not necessarily determined by physical modifications of the subject, but by modifications of the surrounding world.

37 Kameron Hurley: “Women and Gentlemen: On Unmasking the Sobering Reality of Hyper-Masculine Characters.” In: The Geek Feminist Revolution. New York 2016, p. 116.

38 Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Men and Women of the Corporation. New York 1993, p. 3.

39 Kameron Hurley: “Gender, Family, Nookie: The Speculative Frontier.” In: The Geek Feminist Revolution. New York 2016, p 124.

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Svetlana Seibel, « Shards of the Glass Ceiling »Recherches germaniques [En ligne], HS 17 | 2022, mis en ligne le 07 juillet 2022, consulté le 09 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rg/8245 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rg.8245

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Svetlana Seibel

Docteure en littérature nord-américaine
Assistante
Universität des Saarlandes
Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen
svetlana.seibel[at]uni-saarland.de

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