Orphan Black

Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics is an edited collection that covers the areas in which the series has generated the most academic interest: performance and technology; gender and reproduction; biopolitics and community. 

Chapters explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, while others address family themes and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of (post-)evolutionary science, reproductive technology and the politics of gender. Still others extend that inquiry on family to the broader question of community in a ‘posthuman’ world of biopolitical power; here, scholars mobilize philosophy, history of science and literary theory to analyze how Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor and shape life.