Overview

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction, and biopolitics and community.  Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology, and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a ""posthuman"" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science, and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor, and shape life today.

Full Product Details

9781783209224

Table of Contents

Reviews

A diverse yet coherent collection of essays that each contribute something singular while transitioning seamlessly from one piece to the next. Indeed, the text accomplishes the editors' stated purpose to 'explicitly explore the overlaps between two or more of our key words' (9). The authors' syndetic considerations of performance, gender and biopolitics map the intricate world of Orphan Black to reveal that our present is very much implicated in the futures the series imagines. . . . [It] offers fruitful analyses of both the series and its genre and the wider theoretical networks that lend it its significance. This work on Orphan Black delivers complex engagements with film theory, community, technology, biopolitics, immunity studies, disability studies, female identity, performance and many other lenses too diverse to list here. Its essays would be instrumental to scholars considering the series from myriad positions. . . . This collection presents theoretical frameworks and compelling readings that structure the series for readers, provoking new lines of inquiry. . . . Orphan Black occupies an interesting liminality in its near-futurity that prompts us to look for sf within our own lives. This collection captures that self-relationality and tracks its evolution into new ways of being together, serving as an intriguing jumping-off point for future work on Orphan Black and cloning fiction in general. -- Science Fiction Film and Television

Author Information

Andrea Goulet is professor and graduate chair of French and francophone studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert A. Rushing is professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

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