Abstract

Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics 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 from a range of backgrounds explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity. The essays within address family themes and explore Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy; extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a ‘posthuman’ world of biopolitical power by looking at the contexts of science, reproductive technology and the politics of gender; and finally, mobilize philosophy, history of science and literary theory in order to analyse the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor and shape life today.