“It’s About Trust”: Slavery and Ethics in the Dollhouse

Abstract

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (2009–2010) shows us what BDSM might look like in the strange posthuman world of the third millennium. Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory suggested as early as 1985 that the boundary between flesh and information systems was blurry, and would get blurrier (Haraway 1985/1990). In his novel Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling (1986) began to deploy the term “posthuman” to talk about these changes. In the late 1990s, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles built the concept of the posthuman into a full-fledged critical theory. Hayles emphasized embodiment. She claimed that thought depends “for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it,” and she argued quite convincingly that “this realization … is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman” (1999: xiv).