What I’m talking about in this article is the way narrative is constructed in terms of gender, and where that construction places women within the system of order. How is a woman’s identity constructed? How does she formulate her narrative desire? How is that desire manifest within the visual language of the show?

Serial television privileges certain narrative modes which are tied strongly to a larger system of symbolic order. Gender is constructed in terms of difference, outward from the subject. The idea of a “self” is predicated on the capacity to occupy this subject position, which is difficult if you don’t identify with the dominant narratives used to give meaning to the idea of a subject.

When you say “as simple as male vs female” you misrepresent my point of view. Male and female are distinctions at the heart of the structuralist (phallogocentric) understanding of existence. For Derrida and Lacan, the post-structuralist question of gender construction is tied up in the central problem of existence, which is “what does it mean to say ‘I’?” The idea of governmental, religious, academic or economic hegemony relies on a concept of power as it relates to the individual. Our modern idea of “self” is the result of thousands of years of rule by a variety of dominant forces, all of which rely on the subject-object distinction to exert influence over individual action. Gender is possibly the most fundamental battleground for that power struggle, as gender construction generates power relationships regardless of any other cultural distinction.

When we consider the “self,” we do not declare positively any of the things that place us within the symbolic order. Rather, we declare negatively that we lack the things that deny us the possibility of selfhood. Race, gender, class, religion, sexual desire: these things all disappear in the construction of self. The classical self is therefore the hetero, white, wealthy Western man, and narrative is a direct result of that. The self wants what Lacan called “l’objet petit a” and that “wanting” is one of the chief ways the self is constituted. It’s also the primary theme of narrative: a character wants something, therefore we have a story.

The primary “objet petit a” is, of course, the woman. Not only is gender tied up with the idea of “otherness” as it determines self, it’s also tied up with desire as it determines the subject position. The whole nature of the construction of gender in terms of narrative (who a character is, what the character wants) puts women in a place where they aren’t allowed to “be” except when they can exist outside of their own gender identity.

Some great writers on this subject include Luce Irigaray, Elin Diamond, Teresa de Lauretis and Jackie Stacey. They do a better job of being clear than I do.

Your point that television (and really entertainment) as a medium is misogynistic is not wrong and for me to argue against it would be stupid because you could lay countless examples at my feet as to why it is. The problem is that going back to your diatribe on Hamlet (or MacBeth?) in the comments of a previous post that your definition of misogyny is very far away from what I believe. If you (or the previous commenter) can read misogyny in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the casting decision to make the middle-aged, British, brainy librarian foil male vs. Buffy’s brawn, then you, I, and the aforementioned commenter will never come to an agreement. If that is the case then a story, by definition, has to be misogynistic unless every good guy is a woman and every bad guy is a man.

For me, the philosophical implications of Dollhouse go far beyond anything as simple as male vs. female. As I mentioned in my first comment… it raises much more questions about the question of identity and self. The question of whether Ballard is still Ballard after being rendered brain-dead and having his self re-installed from a back-up or what, exactly, Echo is.

As for the post-structuralist argument… you could absolutely argue circles around me as to good post-structuralism vs. bad. As a philosophical examination of the concept of “self” I think it’s probably unmatched as a television show.

(And, FWIW, I like to think that the point I was making was slightly more nuanced than that.)

If I loan someone my car, it is unethical for them to do anything to it that could negatively impact my life once it’s returned. They shouldn’t, say, smoke in it, because that would seep into the upholstery. They shouldn’t use it to smuggle drugs, because I could be held liable. However, it is NOT unethical (though perhaps rude, or even immoral) for them to do something I wouldn’t WANT done, but that has no lasting physical impact – say, having sex in the back seat.

Basically, the essence of rape is the mental and emotional “scars” that are left behind on the survivor after the act. If the “owners” have their bodies returned to them without those “scars,” then any sex involved was not an unethical use of the bodies. I would definitely hesitate to call it rape, without those scars. I think it’s fundamentally wrong in this case to say that the lack of explicit consent equates to refusal. The will is removed, not just ignored or subverted. You can’t say something is “against [her] will” if there is not will for it to be against.

***********************************************************

As to the notion of post-structuralism, which I know next-to-nothing about, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge the show for “peddling flesh” when that is the explicit nature of the medium of television to begin with. The show is subtly mocking its medium specifically by coming up with an almost farcical premise that excuses its use of exclusively “beautiful people.” It’s like, a self-aware Models, Inc.

Television itself, *media* itself, “propagates an inherently misogynist and heteronormative system of representation that serves up images of sexually available women to the male viewer.” Dollhouse, at least, tells you it’s wrong for doing so. Those running the Dollhouse are unambiguously immoral. We sympathize with them at our own peril. The show’s morality is not exactly a well-kept secret. I think that working within the system is the best, if not only, way to lampoon and dismantle it.

Yeah, after hearing self-identifying poststructuralists given a pretty hearty verbal flogging on the podcast (with feminists cited as a group that frequently offend), I’m a little wary.

As far as analyzing Joss Whedon from a third-wave feminist perspective goes, I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have more food for thought than Dollhouse, if only because the longer run of the show allowed for more character and mythology development. I think there are definitely interesting questions in the show for a feminist critique to explore (e.g. Is Buffy’s power as a feminist hero diminished by the fact that she needs her male mentor to train her and tell her what to do? Are the lesbian characters fetishized or humanized? Do the supernatural origins of all powerful female characters add to their power, or serve to explain why these powerful women are the exception?)

As far as Dollhouse goes, although the female (and to some degree the male) dolls are raped, fetishized, dehumanized, and enslaved, as a viewer I never felt that Joss Whedon includes those themes in the show because he approves of them. Personally, I always took the overtly stereotypical personalities the dolls are sometime imprinted with as more of a commentary on how society pigeonholes people based on gender and identity than an insight into Joss Whedon’s feminism.

Although it hasn’t come up yet, I think the most solidly feminist moment in Dollhouse comes at the end of the first season, when Alpha imprints Echo with all of her personalities. Because in that moment she not only rejects the role that Alpha assigned her in “creating” that personality and physically confronts him, but she also confronts her original personality (Caroline), and reproaches her for choosing to enter the Dollhouse.

In that scene (which was, granted, not as powerful as it could have been), the exploited woman confronts the part of herself that has given into the Dollhouse (society). And it is that personality (or combination of personalities) that become dominant, and define Echo from that point forward in the series. For me, Dollhouse is less about sex, and more about the roles culture assigns based on race and gender.

It may be a coincidence, but I feel like that view is reinforced by the fact that the show’s title is very similar to that of Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House,” in which a woman ultimately rejects the characteristics and role assigned to her by society and her husband.

That was long, and not really in the same vein as the conversation up until this point. But I did want to give my contribution.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=dollhouse+consent

Nobody ever wants to talk about post-structuralism. I’m going to sulk for a while.

Our moral intuitions tell us, perhaps, that to contrive to have sex with an amnesiac under conditions that the pre-amnesia person wouldn’t consent to is to commit a wrongful act. On the other hand, that completely changes the characterization of the sex from a matter of the amnesiac’s consent to that of the other person’s intent. That should very obviously raise problems–if you don’t mean to do it, is it no longer rape? Can a morally stunted college freshman sidestep the issue by claiming ignorance or chemically diminished capacity? And doesn’t that absolve any of the dolls’ clients from responsibility because they cannot have knowledge of the original person’s character, intent, or preference?

How much reference should be made to an ‘original’ person’s choices? A person can act as they otherwise wouldn’t for a variety of reasons: they’re drunk, they’re off their anti-depressants, they just got out of a bad relationship, or they contractually relinquished their volition to a futuristic sociopathic corporation. If that’s a spectrum, how do we make a dispositive distinction between actual consent and artificial consent?