Abstract
This article extends our understanding of how media culture offers a critique of patriarchal gender relations in organizations. Our attention turns to comedies in media culture, arguing that parody harbours the potential to inform a politics of gender at work through the way that it denaturalizes culturally embedded gendered practices. Drawing on Judith Butler’s discussions of gender performativity, subversive parody and gender undoing we illustrate the critical and transgressive potential of parody in media culture. We do so in relation to a reading of the American animated television programme Futurama (1999–2003) with specific focus on the episode ‘Raging Bender’ (2000)—an episode that explicitly engages in drag-based gender parody. We consider the political salience of this critique and how it relates to the politics of doing and undoing gender in organizations more generally. The article demonstrates how media culture can be a valuable avenue for undertaking politically motivated studies of gender and organizations, and how this politics can be supported by the paradoxical undoing of gender that parody makes possible.
No girl has the will of a warrior. You have the will of a housewife or, at best, the schoolmarm. (Master Fnog, martial arts teacher at the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium, Futurama)
It was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) who suggested that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are part of the ensemble of texts that make up the culture of a people. What was being attested to was not the elitist minority culture that Arnold famously declared as being ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know […] the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (1869: viii). Instead, with Geertz, we see that all stories form a part of a culture as they collectively amount to us being ‘suspended in webs of significance’ we ourselves have spun (Geertz, 1973: 5). Today these stories are not just about what has been thought and said, but what has been produced, directed and transmitted through the global media. Within what Kellner calls media culture ‘images, sounds and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and behaviour, and providing the materials out of which people forge their identities’ (1995: 1).
Recognizing this, many who study organizations have turned their attention to an examination of how organizations are represented in the narratives of media culture whether it is in motion pictures, television programmes or popular music (see Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Parker, 2006; Rhodes and Westwood, 2008). An important part of such work has been a consideration of how media culture contains dramatic illustrations of gendered cultural norms, such that these norms can be examined, explored and critiqued. Much of this research is somewhat negative in its attitude, suggesting that media culture repeats and reinforces the types of gendered oppression that can be found in real workplaces (e.g. Brewis, 1998; Coltrane and Adams, 1997; Höpfl, 2003; O’Sullivan and Sheridan, 2005). This attitude, while dominant, does not prevail entirely. In contrast it has been demonstrated that media culture also offers forms of knowledge that are deeply and insightfully critical of gender oppression. Along these lines researchers have studied, inter alia, how media culture has questioned the gendered meaning of leadership (Bowring, 2004), how patriarchal discourse has been disrupted in Hollywood movies (Panayiotou, 2010), and how management and organization has been ‘queered’ through popular television (Tyler and Cohen, 2008).
In this article we explore and extend our understanding of how media culture offers a critique of patriarchal gender relations in organizations. Our particular attention turns to comedies in media culture arguing, following Butler (1990, 1993), that parody can inform politics of gender at work through the way that it denaturalizes culturally embedded gendered practices. We note that such a politics has not gone unnoticed in the organization studies literature. Tyler and Cohen (2008), for example, convincingly argue that the British television programme The Office offers a powerful critique of the normalization of conventional and asymmetrical gender relations in everyday organizational encounters. Similarly Kenny has demonstrated how the comedic documentary about the World Trade Organization The Yes Men serves to ‘destabilize hegemonic, taken-for-granted institutions’ (2009: 221).
In seeking to extend such important developments, we explore parody in terms of its potential to ‘undo’ restrictive and oppressive gender expectations (Butler, 2004) especially as they relate to workplace gender performances (cf. Pullen and Knights, 2007). We concur with Butler that gender can be regarded as a performative act that ‘is open to splitting, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the nature” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status’ (1990: 187). We concur also that this form of ‘revelation’ can inform or incite more material forms of gender undoing (Butler, 2004). We illustrate the critical and transgressive potential of parody in media culture through a discussion of the American animated television programme Futurama (1999–2003) with specific focus on the episode ‘Raging Bender’ (2000) and its explicit use of drag-based gender parody. Futurama is a science fiction workplace situation comedy that charts the goings on amongst the employees of the Planet Express Delivery Company, most commonly focusing on their alienation from and resistance to the society they live in. Futurama is important in that it is widely recognized as having taken on a role of ‘challenging widely held, commonly shared beliefs and values’ in a manner that defies ‘socio-political norms and conventions’ (Dale and Foy, 2010: 3). The most prominent themes in Futurama are ‘a relentless satire of the mass media, a critique of cynically ‘friendly’capitalism, and a mocking examination of love and sexuality’ (Bailey, 2002: 244). Together with its workplace setting, this makes Futurama an example par excellence of a mainstream ‘counter culture of organizations’ (Parker, 2006) as it relates to gender performance and relations in contemporary organizations.
The article begins by reviewing existing studies of gender, work and organization in media culture, suggesting that the dominant strand of this work has been in showing how this culture serves to perpetuate oppressive and patriarchal cultural norms and structures. We also point to a number of studies that have worked against that trend asserting that media culture also provides valuable critiques of gender relations. In the second part of the article we turn to the genre of parody in particular and, following Butler (1990), argue that this genre offers a fecund arena for such critique as it relates to the doing and undoing of gender (Butler, 2004) in workplace and business settings. The third and central part of the article presents our discussion of Futurama. We focus on the gendered characterization, emplotment and embodiment of two of the main characters: Turanga Leela, the confident and competent captain of Planet Express’s delivery ship; and Bender Bending Rodriguez, a robot who is sales manager with Planet Express as well as its most energetic exemplar of machismo. In the fourth part of the article we discuss the workplace relations between these characters and the depiction of their body images, gestures, acts and drag performances, so as to illustrate and explain the possibilities of an embodied gendered critique within media culture. Fifth we specifically consider the political salience of this critique and how it relates to the politics of doing and undoing gender in organizations more generally. We conclude by considering how these critiques are acts of resistance which can contribute to more inclusive, productive and affirmative consideration of gendered organization.
Through the course of our discussion, we see our contribution to the growing literature on organizations and media culture as three-fold. First by extending existing discussions of the critical value of parody in understanding and ‘undoing’ (Butler, 2004) gendered culture; second by examining how undoing gendered culture is achieved through the genre-blending of science fiction, situation comedy and the animated cartoon; and third, and perhaps most importantly, by showing how comedy, and parody in particular, provides an arena for the articulation of gendered organizational politics and media culture—one through which we can laugh at the performative unreality of our culture so as to be more politically attuned to how it might be undone. This is a politics, we argue, where parody is not in itself an effective form of subversion, but where it can be constituted as an important part of the webs of significance that support it.
Gender and work in media culture
How media culture functions in relation to gendered norms has been an important dimension of feminist studies of the media, focusing especially on how the representation of women relates to their oppression within patriarchy (Johnson, 2005). Such studies propose that an awareness of this oppression might facilitate women gaining control over their own identities (Rakow, 2006). Within organization studies, media culture has also been approached in this way. Indeed, many studies of gender, organizations and media culture point to examples of how this culture reinforces gender oppression and inequality at work within a dominant patriarchal organizational system—one which, while varying across different points in history, different cultural locations and in different institutional settings, shares the common feature of legitimizing and enforcing the rule by men and the subordination of women (Collinson and Hearn, 1994).
It has been shown, for example, that the depiction of work-family segregation in television advertisements reinforces patriarchal gender stereotypes that serve to subordinate women by portraying men as active and instrumental, whilst portraying women as passive and emotional (Coltrane and Adams, 1997). In terms of the portrayal of fictional workplace relations, similar conclusions have been drawn. O’Sullivan and Sheridan’s (2005) reading of the British TV police drama The Bill (1984–2010) found that media culture was part and parcel of the maintenance and promulgation of patriarchal norms that privileged men at the expense of women. Their argument was that although the narrative of The Bill concerned organizational change and the implementation of more egalitarian management practices in the police force, this illustrated that contemporary management’s rhetoric of inclusion, consultation, team work are but a ruse for the further perpetuation of male authority, hierarchy and rationality—in other words it sustains the ‘gendered order’ (Gherardi, 1995).
Similar conclusions can be found in Brewis’ (1998) discussion of the 1994 Hollywood film Disclosure starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. This film was indeed ripe for a gendered analysis given that a central part of its plot involved workplace sexual harassment which, contra normal expectations, involved a female perpetrator and a male victim. The film was said to highlight men’s suspiciousness of and hostility to women in organizations, to illustrate the cultural practice of castigating and ostracizing successful working women, to exemplify the idea that women are perceived as a threat to male organization, and to portray working women as highly sexualized and greedy. Höpfl’s (2003) critique of the 1997 Hollywood film G. I. Jane—a story of a female soldier (Jordan O’Neill played by Demi Moore) in a hyper-masculine military organization—showed how the incorporation of women into (military) organizations requires ‘a cancellation of the feminine’ (p. 13) such that the culturally available positions for women are either as ‘playthings’ for outside work, or ‘quasi men’ at work. Collectively, such studies illustrate how media culture can mirror and promulgate inequitable and oppressive patriarchal gender relations at work. These are relations that limit women’s possibilities in masculine organizations to either being trivialized for their femininity or expected, in Wajcman’s (1998) words, to ‘manage like a man’ while still falling short of being fully accepted in the masculine social order.
Media culture, however, is not a monolith of meaning supporting unquestioned patriarchal values—the web of stories that make up a culture could never be singular. As Kellner explains contemporary media culture can provide ‘forms of ideological domination that that help to reproduce the current relations of power’ as well as ‘providing resources for […] empowerment, resistance and struggle’ (1995: 2; see also Gill, 2007). Research into the representation of gender in the media as it concerns work and organizations has also begun to explore this latter possibility. Recent research has illustrated how media culture carries the possibility to subvert gendered social practices at work especially by bringing into question the ‘strong plots’ that inform our cultural expectations of gendered behaviour (Czarniawska, 2006). Examples of this include Holliday’s (1998) discussion of how the film Philadelphia (1993) problematized the way that organizational spaces perpetuated gender hegemony and heterosexual normativity; Brewis et al.’s (1997) analysis of how the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994) served to disrupt gendered expectations of bodies at work; and Panayiotou’s demonstration of how Hollywood blockbusters frequently act as a ‘a critical testing ground for competing forms of masculinity [and] a way of exploring and challenging the dominant ethos of contemporary patriarchy’ (2010: 678–679). Such studies have begun to demonstrate how media culture can dispute and/or subvert taken for granted gendered practices (Czarniawska, 2006: 250).
In such cases gendered critique is not seen only as the business of the spectating critic commenting on media culture, but of considering the critique embedded in media culture itself. From such a location it can be seen that culture itself contains some valuable and insightful critiques of gendered relations at work as they might be located more generally in a ‘counter culture of organizations’ (Parker, 2006)—a ‘critique in culture’ rather than a ‘critique of culture’ (Rhodes, 2007, emphasis added). Moreover, this critique questions the common critical, yet elitist, position that media culture appeals to people’s lower instincts and serves as a means of social control and the perpetuation of unequal and patriarchal power structures (cf. Rhodes and Westwood, 2008). Indeed, in terms of contemporary media culture such generalizations are hard to sustain, even if they have dominated scholarly attention in organization studies. As Gauntlett (2008) summarizes: ‘representations of gender today are more complex, and less stereotyped than in the past […] modern media has a more complex view of gender and sexuality than ever before’ (p. 98) especially, we argue, as it relates to normative portrayals of gender relations and sexuality (cf. Halberstam, 2005).
If media culture offers the potential for the subversion of patriarchy, one particular mode of subversion especially powerful in contributing to such a politics is parody (Butler, 1990)—parody being ever-present in western media culture. Generally speaking, parody is a form of comedy that involves the creation of a copy of some character of social practices. This copying involves ‘a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity’ that plays on the ‘tension between the conservative effect of repetition and the revolutionary impact of difference’ (Hutcheon, 2000: xii). Parody establishes a zone of difference between the representation and the represented that involves an ‘imitation and transformation’ (Dentith, 2000: 3) which offers an evaluation of that which is imitated. Parody has been noted as a valuable reflexive critical strategy that seeks to both imitate and make fun of social practices in a way that can ‘oppose and destabilize official views of reality’ (Rhodes and Westwood, 2008: 121). Parody can thus be used as a ‘critique of a whole aesthetic, and the substitution of another in its place’ (Dentith, 2000: 34) through a process of imitation (Hutcheon, 2000).
Undoing gender and parody: advancing the political
The possibilities of parody as a means of gender subversion have been a particular focus in Judith Butler’s work (1990, 1993). Butler’s approach starts with her theorization of gender as being ‘performative’, arguing that ‘acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’ (Butler, 1990: 173). Gender is thus something that we do as we reproduce, in lived performance, those acts that have come to be associated with masculinity and femininity. The first implication of this is that we have ‘no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’ (p.173). Accordingly, this notion of the performative suggests that gender is something we do, as much as something we are. The second implication is political in that we are not inexorably tied to some naturalized or undeniable gender. As well as being ‘done’ gender can also be ‘undone’—it is ‘opened to a displacement or subversion from within’ (Butler, 2004: 47).
Organizations have been noted as especially powerful places where gender is ‘done’ (Gherardi, 1994) in the sense that they ‘are sites of incessant activity where gender often passes as unnoticed, denied or disavowed, partly because it is ‘done’ routinely and repeatedly, unknowingly and with a degree of automaticity that conceals its precariousness and performativity’ (Pullen and Knights, 2007: 505). It has been suggested that organizational practices commonly portrayed as being gender neutral rely specifically on gendered performance. Entrepreneurship for example has been linked to ‘doing gender’ in that the ways people perform ‘their roles as entrepreneurs [are] related to the parallel performance of masculine practices’ (Bruni et al., 2004: 426). Doing gender in work settings also relates to the performance of sexuality in that workplace cultures have been shown to embed assumptions that gender is a property associated with heterosexuality (Pringle, 2008). The doing of gender has also been considered in relation to women having to perform as quasi-men to gain acceptance in organizations and professions that are male dominated (Pilgeram, 2007; Powell et al., 2009). This focus on doing suggests generally that the performance of gender in work settings not only ‘significantly affects both women’s and men’s work experiences’ but also that dominant ‘gendering practices produced through interaction impair women workers’ identities and confidence’ (Martin, 2003: 343).
Focussing on the doing of gender attests not only to the idea that gender is not a ‘property of a person’ (Kelan, 2010: 176) but also that it is enacted by people in their everyday activities; work being such an activity (Hancock and Tyler, 2007). Important here is that whilst acknowledging the regulatory structures and practices which seek to normalize gender, a performative approach also attests to the political possibility of change through individual and collective acts. Indeed, accepting that gender is something that is ‘done’ alerts us ‘to the taken-for-granted expressions of difference that appear natural but are not’ (Deutsch, 2007: 108). This gives rise to the possibility that gender can also be ‘undone’ (Butler, 2004) through resistant performances that counteract ‘restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life’ (p. 1). In terms of gender and work, this surfaces the potential of the ‘undoing of gender and difference to disrupt gender norms and practices in work organizations’ (Pullen and Simpson, 2009: 561) and ‘offer alternative performances and performativities of doing gender’ in organizations (Phillips and Knowles, 2010: 1). In this vein there have been studies of how gender can be undone in contexts of employment tribunals (Jeanes, 2007), educational organizations (Rooney et al., 2010), agricultural work (Pilgeram, 2007) and sports management (Claringbould and Knoppers, 2007).
For Butler parody is an especially important type of performance that can enact an undoing of gender—one that renders sedimented presuppositions of gender ontology as ‘open to rearticulation’ (p. 214). Parody is one means through which gender undoing can be performed and demonstrated. In parodying dominant gender practices, gender is turned back on itself so as to undo those very practices. This is accomplished as embodied gender performance is taken out of the mundane through an exaggerated depiction of that performance (Butler, 1990, 1993). This mimetic and excessive performance of gender becomes a mode of culture critiquing culture (cf. Taussig, 1993). This can be particularly potent in that without parody’s laughter the earnestness that often characterizes critique can fall on hard ground—either ignored or subject to reflex counter attack. It is in this sense that those gender parodies that can be found in media culture can be looked to as allies for research into gender and organization which is politically informed, especially when the they ‘expose those in power through forms of self aware ridicule’ (Critchley, 2008: 124). Such engagement is enabled through ‘parodic critique’ that opens possibilities for theoretical, analytical and practical forms of resistance.
Parody gains its comedic effect through the humorous and exaggerated copying of that which is thought to be ‘original’ to culture. Moreover, in this copying, parody reveals that ‘the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original’ (Butler, 1990: 41). With parody it is through de-normalization, achieved through the failure to faithfully repeat gender, that the ‘“cultural fictions” that regulate subjectivity’ can be exposed as ‘the performative effect of a stable and permanent identity’ and as ‘a politically tenuous construction’ (Freitas, 2007: 137). This performative tenuousness challenges patriarchy as a repressive and regulatory structure and as a ‘universalizing concept that overrides or reduces distinct articulations of gender asymmetry’ (Butler, 1990: 45–46). As Butler suggests, drawing on Jameson, the subversive potential of parody relies on a ‘the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects’ (p. 146). In the case of gender, the effect is to reveal ‘the “original” as a failed effort to “copy” a phantasmatic ideal that cannot be copied without failure’ (1990: 201). Consequentially, with Butler, we are concerned with investigating possible ways of ‘doing gender [which] repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which they are mobilized’ (pp. 41–42). This amounts to a situation where ‘laughter emerges as the realisation that all along the original was derived’ (p. 139).
Butler exemplifies parody with a discussion of drag performance—both of drag kings and drag queens. For Butler (1990), drag ‘effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity’ through a ‘double inversion’ that displaces the ‘enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity’ (p. 74). Butler quotes Newton in explaining the meaning of this double inversion:
At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says […] “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [ the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [ my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine”. (Newton, 1972 in Butler, 1990: 174)
Relating this to parody, Butler explains that when an original or primary gender identity is parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities, what happens is that the whole system of gender binaries becomes destabilized. What this means is that ‘in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself’ (Butler, 1990: 175, emphasis in original). The point then for Butler is that drag, as a parody of gender identity, can serve to destabilize gender binaries by using gendered self-representation as a site for the politics of subversion. With drag gender is recognized as having been ‘copied’, but the combination of that repetition with the differences that are also brought in are what enables subversion. As both man and woman the drag queen makes us less sure about what masculinity and femininity might mean because of the disjunctures created between the ‘sign of gender’ and ‘the body that it figures’, even though that gender cannot be read without that body (Butler, 1993: 237).
Following Butler, parodies in media culture have been used to suggest the possibility of a gendered critique of organizations. In one such study Tyler and Cohen characterize the British sit-com The Office (2001–2003) as a ‘parody of gender performativity’ (2008: 113) which ‘can be read as a popular cultural text that exemplifies many of the critical insights, as well as some of the limitations, of queer theory’ (p. 114). The Office is a ‘mockumentary’ that charts the mundane goings on in the eponymous office of a paper distributor. Consistent with other examples of the British sit-com it provides a parody where male managers are ‘represented negatively, as inept, amateurish or in some other way flawed’ as well as being ‘weak, dependent and rather pathetic’ (Rhodes and Westwood, 2008: 117). Echoing Butler’s (1990) insistence that parody is a chief means through which oppressive gender norms and relations can be denaturalized and destabilized, Tyler and Cohen (2008) show how The Office, especially in its depiction of the main character David Brent, ‘exaggerates and ridicules particular aspects of reified gender performance, especially the implicit conflation of hegemonic masculinity and contemporary forms of culture management and transformational leadership’ (p. 124–125). For Tyler and Cohen The Office brings into ‘comic relief’ the similitude of management and a highly problematic masculinity associated with homophobia, sexism, pride in sexual conquest, paternalism and an excessive desire for recognition. In imitating this variety of managerial masculinity, however, Tyler and Cohen point out that The Office shows that these managerial ‘virtues’ are a mask for the ineptitude, vulnerability and weakness of men at work. With The Office, the assumption of masculine power as a bedrock of organization is revealed as a house of cards with no foundation on which to erect and sustain performance.
The parody of masculine managerial power has also been examined in relation to the American prime time television cartoon series The Simpsons (1989–present). Just as Tyler and Cohen show how The Office undermines the assumption of masculine organizational power, The Simpsons demonstrates how the male body is revealed as weak and vulnerable (Rhodes and Pullen, 2007). The particular parody present in The Simpsons resembles what Bakhtin (1965/1984) referred to as ‘grotesque realism’—an exaggeration of the body in its material form replete with ‘multiple, bulging, over- or under-sized, protuberant and incomplete [….] corporeal bulk’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 8–9). In The Simpsons masculine power is parodied especially in the depiction of the manager and industrialist Montgomery Burns. What is shown is that Burns’ ‘warted, emaciated body is the source of humour—the ugliness and deformedness of the body being played with to illustrate capitalist normative masculine social relations’ (Rhodes and Pullen, 2007: 172). The critical potential of such gender parody is that it enables certain taken for granted aspects of working culture to be laid bare as being a fragile veneer that hides a less powerful image of the meaning of masculinity at work. Indeed, The Simpsons ‘is funny because it uses the grotesque male body as a means to question the assumptions of masculine power in relation both to sexual and organizational potency’ (Rhodes and Pullen, 2007: 175). This illustrates more generally, as Halberstam surmises, how humour is ‘an effective tool for exposing the constructedness of masculinity’ as an impossible ideal that can never really be achieved (2005: 135). In terms of these particular television comedies what is developed is an incisive form of gender critique that stems from their use of subversive parody. In both cases, the politics of these programmes work by challenging gender through humour—the repetitive use of humour that renders masculine managerial power ludicrous.
Futurama’s Raging Bender
As we have been discussing, studies of gender and organizations in media culture have illustrated the presence and persistence of patriarchal gender relations in organizations, as well as the potential to subvert and critique them through parody. This attests to the view that ‘some of the most popular cultural texts of the day are involved in current political and cultural struggles’ (Kellner, 1995: 4). To explore how such a struggle is manifest in a specific example of media culture we turn to the television programme Futurama. Futurama is a half-hour animated situation comedy that originally aired between 1999–2003 in the United States but was subsequently extensively re-run. Four feature length films were also released between 2007 and 2009, and from 2008 more of the original format series appeared. Futurama was created by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, and although it never received the massive popularity accorded to The Simpsons it has still attracted a massive fan base—indeed the sustained popularity of the first series leading the American cable television channel Comedy Central to take the series on for new episodes in 2008.
Futurama envisions its 31st century future as relatively bleak and mundane. Despite its futuristic setting, however, in many ways the issues and problems its characters face mirror those of people in contemporary society. ‘Pollution is still a concern, people are trapped in dead end jobs, and political conflicts can lead to the endangerment of billions of lives’ and, as relevant to our interests here, ‘Futurama also deals with the problems of the workplace, one of Groening’s central themes’ (Sharp, 2006: 701). In dealing with these issues Groening has an explicitly political intent—as he said at the time of the programme’s launch:
What I’m trying to do—in the guise of light entertainment, if that’s possible—is nudge people, jostle them a little, wake them up to some of the ways in which we’re being manipulated and exploited. And in my amusing little way I try to hit on some of the unspoken rules of our culture. (Groening in Alters, 2003: 180)
To examine how Futurama performs this critique of these ‘unspoken rules of our culture’ we concentrate on one particular episode of the show. The episode we are concerned with is titled ‘Raging Bender’ 1 (Production Code: 2ACV08, first aired 27 February 2000). 2 We have chosen this episode because of its direct connection with the themes of gender relations, parody and drag as played out in a commercial work context. Indeed, whilst the programme has addressed a variety of social and political issues including the role of religion in society, the power of global political institutions, and attitudes towards homosexuality (as well as ‘robosexuality’ in terms of relationships between humans and robots), ‘Raging Bender’ directly concerns gender relations in terms of its depiction of the two main characters Bender Bending Rodriguez and Turanga Leela.
Starting with Bender we have a very much stereotyped characterization of a form of hypermasculinity. Although he is a robot, Bender is an aficionado of many male-oriented pursuits—he smokes cigars, he drinks whiskey, he swears incessantly, he gambles, he is insensitive to others and he spend much of his time hanging around with ‘fembots’ whom he refers to as bimbos and floosies. Bender is a spoof on masculinity—a spoof which immediately announces itself in relation to the extremities of male gender performance. And, as we shall see, it is the humorous repetition of this masculinity that allows the programme to subvert and displace traditional organizational gender relations. Bender is of course not the only masculinized character in the programme—indeed, a variety of masculine archetypes are present. The main character Philip J. Fry is a slovenly and somewhat dim witted nerd, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth is a mad scientist type, Hermes Conrad is an arch bureaucrat, and Zapp Branigan is a macho ladies man who leads the Earth’s galactic army (Infosphere, 2011). What is particular about Bender, however, is that his is a spoof on a certain ‘rat-pack’ (a group of male friends) or playboy masculinity that was gaining attention in the late 1990s with its focus on whisky drinking and cigar smoking all imagined in a world where ‘men were men and women were easy [or] men were men and women had to put up with it’ (McCracken, 2008: 185). Epitomizing political incorrectness, rat-pack masculinity is staunchly heterosexual and promiscuous (Lehman, 2001). What is especially interesting about ‘Raging Bender’ is the way that this form of masculinity is both highlighted and challenged by work place demands within a market oriented system, and more importantly, the way that this serves to undermine masculinity through parody. What is also important, as derived from the science fiction genre, is that bender is a robot who has no sex—his masculinity is thus shown to be entirely performative rather bearing a connection to his metallic body.
Bender’s gender position is sharply contrasted with that of Leela—both in general and in the episode analysed. There are two main female characters in Futurama—Leela and Dr Amy Wong. Amy’s character is aligned with a post-feminist female stereotype (McRobbie, 2005) which, in the context of popular culture, refers to female characters who lead an independent, equal and free lifestyle. Amy is professionally successful, independent and sexually confident, yet is depicted as ‘cute’, wears mid-riff tops and is vain. This femininity is used to contrast her with Leela’s character. The two are ‘engaged in a constant low-intensity feud, and [Amy] often accuses [Leela] of not being ladylike enough to be a true woman’ (Infosphere, 2011: n.p.). Leela is of course not a ‘true’ woman—she is a one eyed mutant with purple hair—a freak even amongst the bizarre populace of Futurama. But, unlike Bender, this connects to a much more complex gender performance—as described by the series creator Matt Groening, she is positioned as a ‘strong-willed, opinionated, gentle (when not fighting), gives orders, unlucky in love, loves weapons, loves animals’ (Groening in Sterngold, 2002: 2). Indeed, this is also a critical dimension of our concern with her relationship with Bender – in contrast to Bender’s normally mono-gendered character, Leela embodies and performs intersections between masculinity and femininity on her own terms.
Moving on to the episode in question, the story line is set up when Bender and his work colleagues go to the cinema to see All My Circuits: The Movie. Unable to see the screen properly over the head of a much larger robot sitting in the next row, Bender begins a verbal assault on him and his female companion, later kicking him in the back through the seat. Unable to resolve their differences, the robot challenges Bender to a fight. To Bender’s surprise the other robot transforms into a huge muscular fighting machine with laser guns for eyes. ‘I’m gonna open a pile of whup-ass on you!’, the transformed robot exclaims. Bender drops his tub of popcorn and motor oil, on which the other robot then slips. Before Bender can attempt even one futile punch, the force of the fall causes his opponent’s system to shut down. Confused about the exact nature of what happened, the crowd of cinema goers believe that Bender has won the fight. As it turns out it is no ordinary robot that Bender is thought to have defeated—it was The Masked Unit from The Ultimate Fighting Robot League, a 31st century robotic form of professional wrestling cum cage fighting. Caught up in the adulatory attention of his false victory Bender’s ego gets the better of him and he decides to take a job working in the professional competition. ‘I’m gonna be the greatest Ultimate Robot Fighter ever. Float like a floatbot, sting like an automatic stinging machine!’, he exclaims.
Even at this early stage of the episode we see a parody of masculinity—the hyper masculine Bender starts a fight that he accidentally wins, and then goes on to bask in the masculine glory of his new found status of victor of a David and Goliath confrontation. It is at this point in the narrative, however, that the gendered plot thickens as Leela enters. Leela strongly encourages Bender to join the competition: ‘You’ve got to do it. I don’t care how suicidal it is’ she insists. Leela’s motives become apparent with a flashback scene to her childhood in the 31st century orphanage known as the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium. As a teenager Leela was bullied, most likely because of her one-eyed appearance. To address this she became a student of Arcturan Kung Fu and although this sport is a male dominated endeavour, Leela was hugely successful, outperforming her male counterparts with apparent ease. One day at the gym after she easily knocks out two boys, her teacher, Master Fnog, announces that these very two boys will be going to the Junior Championship while she will not. Outraged that she has not been selected despite being the superior fighter she confidently protests: ‘But, Master Fnog, I can beat these dorks with one eye closed’. At this stage Leela appears unaware that she is caught up in a set of oppressive gender relations that prevent her exercising her natural potential and trained talent merely on account of her biological sex. Fnog responds by saying that Leela cannot go to the championship because she does not have the ‘will of the warrior’. Leela protests again, but Fnog retorts: ‘No girl has the will of a warrior. You have the will of a housewife or, at best, the schoolmarm’. The cultural logic of institutionalized gender oppression is laid bare. Leela still does not give up and challenges Fnog himself to a fight, but the gendered order is already in place and cannot be disturbed by a single confrontation. Fnog laughs at her—but it is a laugh of assumed superiority not one of parody.
Although cast in an animated comedy, the story of gendered discrimination contrasting with non-traditional gender identity is writ large. Despite superior skills a woman cannot compete because it is a man’s game—dominated by men and for men. This is a closed game where masculinity wins before any contest has been entered into. But now some years later Leela still bears the scars of this discrimination despite her professional success in a male dominated workplace—she is captain and pilot of a space ship and the boss of male characters such as Fry and Bender. But it is through Bender that she seeks some redemption; she becomes his manager in the Ultimate Fighting Robot League. ‘I lost my chance to be a champion’, she says to him, ‘I won’t let you throw away yours’. Leela’s competitiveness and the will-to-win needs an outlet, and it is the hapless Bender who is to provide it—she commences his training as a fighting robot. Under Leela’s tutelage Bender becomes extraordinarily successful: dubbed Bender the Offender, he defeats The Clearcutter at RobotMania XXVII, he is victorious over The Billionairebot, he lauds over The Foreigner, and he blows out The Chainsmoker. Despite his success his masculine power is always frail—an artifice of ego and bravado. The Ultimate Fighting Robot competition is fixed, and as fight promoter Doubledeal explains in every fight it is the most popular robot, the one who is the ‘lowest common denominator’, who always wins. It is this crude business logic that that now seems to determine the success of Bender’s stereotyped masculinity as it relates to his new job—it is what ‘the market’ wants, so that is what is delivered by the organization. Any pretence to authenticity that Bender might muster is always subservient to this market orientation and the workplace performances it demands.
Eventually Bender’s popularity wanes and he is now the one who Doubledeal insists takes on the role of a villain. And what might be most villainous in this world of masculine competition? Bender is told to wear a pink tutu and his new job involves adopting the fighting persona of Gender Bender. As one of his robot work mates explains: ‘You’ll be the most unpopular robot fighter since Sergeant Faeces Processor’. It is here that the cultural business of the fights is revealed—what are imagined to be hated cultural stereotypes are always set as the villains, and in the morality play of the fight the villain always loses. Moreover, the figure of both woman and sexually ambiguous man are examples of such stereotypes—a culture echoing Leela’s childhood experience in Arcturan Kung Fu.
The screen is filled with an image of Bender in his pink tutu and a blonde curly wig, waving his legs and speaking into a pink phone with an exaggerated feminine voice. The fight announcer’s voices echoes:
You loved him as Bender the Offender! Now get ready to hate him as he threatens your sexuality in his new persona … The Gender Bender!
With this statement we see the second major gendered commentary: not only is it the case that women cannot contend in a man’s world, but also that any threats to male sexuality are to be universally abhorred and treated violently so as to maintain the myth of masculine prowess. This aligns again with Leela’s experience—her ability as a woman to excel in what are thought to be masculine pursuits has struggled to be recognized within patriarchal culture especially given that the presence of her femininity and sexuality undermine that very masculinity. She is feared and excluded as a woman who is better, in a sense more masculine, than the boys. Indeed, it is perhaps not coincidental that Leela is a ‘sewer mutant’ who was passed off as an alien in order be able to live on the surface—in the world of Futurama it is against the law for mutants to live anywhere but in the sewer. The metaphoric parallels between this and the kind of gender mutation with which she is characterized (albeit affirmative) appear stark.
Meanwhile with his new Gender Bender persona, Bender prepares for his next fight where he will match up with the 400 hundred ton ‘Gizmo from Pismo Beach’—the Destructor. We also find out that the Destructor’s trainer is Master Fnog—the Arcturan Kung Fu master from Leela’s childhood. The contest commences as feminine Bender starts to be destroyed by his powerful masculine opponent. In turn the bout turns into a fight between Leela and Fnog, as she realizes that Fnog is operating the huge robot by remote control underneath the fight ring. Leela accuses Fnog of cheating: ‘You didn’t train Destructor. You’re just controlling him like a puppet. I mean, cheating in a fake fight. That’s low!’ Childishly Fnog replies ‘Better than being a girl. Like you. You’re a girl!’ So, after all of these years, Leela decides to prove that she has the will of a warrior and she will not be dismissed on account of being a woman. No longer needing to use Bender as a surrogate Leela starts a fight with Fnog. She matches Fnog punch for punch eventually winning the fight by outwitting him as much as out fighting him. When it is all over Leela says to Bender: ‘I’m proud of you, Bender. Sure, you lost. You lost bad. But the important thing is I beat up someone who hurt my feelings in high school’. That said, Leela did not win because she was a woman, she won because she was the more intelligent opponent, and perhaps more importantly she was not distracted by the masculine hubris that characterized both Bender and Fnog.
Gender parody: from Futurama to the future of gender
Raging Bender enacts gender parody as located in the workplace and commercial context of professional sport. Although the cartoon images provide casual entertainment for both children and adults, as we have seen, a more biting critical commentary of gendered culture is also present. That is not to say that our reading of Futurama is essential, nor to presume that other viewers of the programme will share our uptake of it. That said, our reading of this episode is not one designed to uncover some hidden structures of meaning only accessible with specialized academic knowledge or training—the reading we advance is one that attests to both the accessibility and sophistication of the narrative that has been produced. It is on this basis that we can affirm that Futurama demonstrates how a critique of workplace gendered relations and of patriarchy are possible and present in mass mediated culture. We also affirm and that there is thus the opportunity to connect with such culture as part of a broader feminist political project of understanding and overcoming women’s oppression at work (Tong, 2007). So, while Futurama may or may not be read as a form of gender ‘undoing’ (Butler, 2004) we assert that it is open to such a reading. Moreover, this opening renders this example of popular culture as an ally to a gender politics that seeks to question and re-assess the meaning and practice of gender.
Of fundamental importance to Futurama’s critical practice is that it is an especially ‘unrealistic’ form of media culture—this distancing from reality being achieved by the fact that it comes in the form of a fantasy based cartoon presented as a genre pastiche of television animation, situation comedy and science fiction. This ‘unreality’ is central to the programme’s critical potential because it derives its parody by bringing into focus the problematic of gendered politics as occurring in our experienced organizational reality. This function of unreality in relation to parody is achieved specifically through the inclusion of science fiction in the genre pastiche that characterized the programme. As Suvin (1979) elaborates, the defining feature of science fiction is a form of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that is achieved by setting the narrative in an environment vastly different (usually future) from the contemporary world. In Futurama this environment is one where humans, aliens and androids engage in intergalactic adventures in a strange yet oddly familiar futuristic world. Science fiction is able to develop novel perspectives and appreciations of social issues by exploring them in such unusual settings—settings which draw more attention to the cultural problematic of those issues. In our case the issues being the social problematic of patriarchy, gender oppression and the doing of gender in business and work.
This is effective because science fiction always contains what Suvin calls a novum—a newness, for example a strange future, that is distanced ‘from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality’ (p. 64). Such strangeness, rather than alienating the viewer, actually enables a critical perspective of current realities to be highlighted. Science fiction ‘works’ because it operates through a balance between the radically different and the familiar and this enables the familiar to be seen in a different way (Roberts, 2006). Moreover, the process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization provides science fiction with the possibility of critique that is achieved by working ‘the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar so as to construct the positions of intelligibility within which the audience can locate itself and possibly be reflexively aware of that location’ (Rhodes and Westwood, 2008: 84). Futurama is a case in point, and as Booker (2006) points out:
Despite the hi-tech nature of the future society of Futurama, in most ways very little has changed since … 1999. Thus the satire of the series is clearly aimed at our own contemporary world, and Futurama has no particular interest in imagining what the future might actually be like—indeed, it projects a future designed specifically to satirize our own present. (Booker, 2006: 115)
The novum of a futuristic world enables the current realities of patriarchy to be mocked and gendered norms and relations re-imagined. In this sense Futurama’s status as both science fiction and comedy provide it with a critical double-whammy of novum and parody—one where the present realities of patriarchal and heteronormative cultures and institutions can be brought out for scrutiny. Maybe this is achieved through the bizarre antics of a one eyed mutant and a tin can robot, but these unusual characters contribute to a novum that makes their cultural importance to the present all the more stunning.
The parody that is present in Futurama works because these non-humans are recognizable as human beings, they are a copy of the human that, following Butler (990) show how dominant models of gender are ‘done’ and can be ‘undone’. This is most obvious in the case of Bender’s masculinity, but Leela’s character is much more affirmatively critical because she represents a woman who does not give into the patriarchal structures in which she is inevitably located. Moreover, she does so through a projected subjectivity that is both masculine and feminine. Being located this way Leela cannot easily be defined by the singular cultural stereotypes of womanhood – stereotypes that she undoes in her gender performance as a means of with the patriarchal oppression that began as a child in an educational context. Leela is strong, independent, successful and autonomous, but simultaneously she lives every day in the wake of a troubled past as an orphan and social outsider. Contrasted with Bender’s one-dimensional ‘rat-pack’ masculinity, Leela is a multi-dimensional character who does not easily conform to gender stereotypes or expectations, even though her possibilities are constrained by the patriarchal culture in which she is situated. It is in this way that she performs an undoing of gender by performing ‘gender in a way that goes beyond conventional parameters [and by] displacing gender […] through enacting multiple forms of masculinities and femininities’ (Kelan, 2010: 192).
It is Bender and his relation to masculinity, however, which is the main target of the parody in ‘Raging Bender’. Compared to the complexity of Leela’s character, Bender is much simpler—he embodies a particular masculine stereotype portrayed in radically exaggerated caricature. With this exaggeration, his masculinity is revealed in brute simplicity and shows how ridiculous this masculinity is in the first place, as well as uncovering how it works at the service of corporate interests. This is then mirrored in the open sexism of Master Fnog, a person who, whilst assuming the natural superiority of masculinity, has to fight hard (literally) to continually support the frailty of his own myths. And he loses! The original cultural masculinity that is being copied is revealed in all its artifice—that is not to deny the power of this masculinity, but certainly to suggest that it can be undermined by laughing at its stupidity. Moreover Bender’s drag performance while working as a ‘Raging Bender’ is not of the kind envisaged in Butler’s notion of ‘double inversion’. Instead his being cast as feminine serves only to ridicule the fragility of his masculinity and to surface a certain pathetic male rendering of what constitutes femininity in the first place. In this sense Bender’s workplace drag performance doesn’t so much invert the meaning of gender, but rather subverts its stereotypes. Bender is rendered inept, pathetic and ridiculous as a man and a worker, even though he is also ridiculing male fantasies of femininity as being frivolous, shallow and contemptible.
The gender dynamics in Futurama speak to the parodic relation between the ‘original’ and the ‘imitation’—but also upset the very idea of the original being somehow fixed or primary. Instead, the meaning of gendered identity is denaturalized and reframed– ‘the parody is of the very notion of an original’ (Butler, 1990: 175) whether it be an original masculinity or original femininity. But despite the episode’s title it is Leela who is the protagonist, and the one who undergoes transformation. Cast against Bender’s one-dimensional masculinity, Leela’s gender position is shown as being more complex in her lifelong efforts to fight the ‘gender violations’ (Butler, 2004) that she has been subjected to at school, at work and in business. It is her character too that aligns more with the kind of inversions that Butler articulates—in a sense her gender has already been inverted as her character fluidly blends genders as a means to both become herself and deal with the challenges of her own life. In a very different sense to the robot she is also a ‘gender bender’, but one is able to forge an identity outside the forms of gender violation that she has been subject to.
With both Bender and Leela we laugh rather than cry but this ‘laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original gender was derived’ (Butler, 1990: 176) and holds to potential to be undone (Butler, 2004). The stereotypical images of masculinity and femininity through the professional staging of Bender the Offender’s crass male aggression and Gender Bender’s boundary transgression can, following Butler, be seen as political because they work to upset those patriarchal cultural categories that seek to limit individual freedom and becoming—and they do this through a non-invasive medium comedy. Pivotally Leela signals the possibility of this as being a real political struggle that can and should be engaged with in the work place and beyond.
From parody to workplace politics?
The articulation of culture, parody and politics that we attest to is not one that is universally accepted. Exemplifying this Nussbaum (1999) in a scathing critique of Butler castigates her as ‘The Professor of Parody’ whose gender theorizing amounts to little more that ‘hip defeatism’. Complaining that contemporary feminist scholarship in the United States lost its practical and political edge, Nussbaum accused Butler of ‘collaborating with evil’ (p. 45) in that she offers a false hope for women by insisting that stylistic and symbolic changes are sufficient for a feminist politics as opposed to the more traditional focus on concrete projects of social change. Nussbaum denounces what she sees as Butler’s ‘quietism’ arguing that she does not go beyond ‘symbolic resistance’ as enacted through gesture and speech. If there is a politics at play here, Nussbaum counsels, it is one that ‘eschews such a hope [of justice and] takes pleasure in its impossibility’ (1999: 43). Given what’s been said in this article so far, perhaps we too could be accused of enacting a view that being ‘deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories’ (p. 38).
We are reminded of Butler’s own assessment of the value of parody. When discussing her valorization of the critical potential of drag, Butler specifically addresses the question of ‘how do we get from parody to politics?’ (2004: 213)—a journey Nussbaum seems to believe impossible. Butler explains her position biographically outlining that her interest in the political potential of parody emerged when she, as a young woman, used to spend her evenings at a gay bar that from time to time became a drag bar. Through this experience Butler reports that her realization was that ‘some of these so called men could do femininity much better than I ever could, ever wanted to, ever would’ (p. 213). As with Leela’s childhood experience, Butler speaks of the forced cultural compulsion to occupy gender norms not of one’s own choosing as an unliveable and disabling violation.
As Butler evinces ‘when gender norms operate as violations, they function as an interpolation that one refuses only by agreeing to pay the consequences: losing one’s job, home, the prospects of desire, or for life’ (2004: 213). In this light what Butler takes from drag parody is an ability to realize that gender is neither natural nor immutable—in other words it opens up the political possibility to envisage, and perform, oneself differently as a result of assumed gender ontology having been put into question. What Butler does not do, however, is assume—as Nussbaum accuses her—that ‘all that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech’ (1999: 38). The ‘point’, more modestly, that Butler argues is not that drag or parody is by itself ‘subversive of gender norms’ but rather than it renders such norms ‘open to rearticulation’ (p. 214). Parody is thus an invitation to change rather than its accomplishment. In this sense parody can be an important part of a gender politics rather than constituting that politics in its entirety. Indeed, it would be more than ridiculous for us to suggest that a twenty two minute television cartoon is a politics all of its own … but it just might be twenty two minute of politics.
As Critchley comments ‘politically, humour is a powerless power that uses its position of weakness to expose those in power through forms of self aware ridicule’ (2008: 124). In our case when that power is male power, institutionalized in the workplace with corporate backing, it is in popular comedy that works such an exposition, as we have seen. Media culture is entertaining but in our laughter and identification we can become reflexively aware of the power relations we are located in—relations which have been noted as privileging and normalizing the masculine in organizations (Acker, 1990). We can also begin to consider alternatives to both responding to those relations, and to the relations themselves. This is the political activity that Critchley calls a ‘tactical frivolity’ (p. 124). Taking up this frivolity, he argues that ‘critics should tell more jokes’ (2007: 17), and we add should listen more carefully to those jokes that find their place in media culture. In this sense humour’s ‘critical capacity in relation to everyday life’ (Critchley, 2007: 17) works because it reveals the meaning of this life by defamiliarizing it as well as playing ‘with the accepted practices of a given society’ (p. 18). It is in a similar way that we suggest that the parody of Futurama also enacts this form of play. Moreover, if a feminist politics that redresses the normalization of gender and oppression of women in organizations is at stake (Calás and Smircich, 2006), then it is not so much that media culture can perform such a politics by itself, but more that it can align with such a politics and be an ally to it—it is an opening that needs to be taken up just as it itself takes up politics from elsewhere. The political aims remain the same: ‘disrupting masculine hegemony at work’ (Knights and Kerfoot, 2004) such that ‘that dominance, control, and subordination, particularly the subordination of women, are eradicated, or at least minimized, in our organization life’ (Acker, 1990: 155).
In the episode discussed we see a range of workplace related political issues surface through parody and laughter—culturally embedded discrimination that denies meritocratic advancement for women (Castilla and Benard, 2010), the assumption of heterosexual masculinity as the dominant cultural and organizational position of hegemony (Pringle, 2008), the perpetuation of dualistic gender formation as a form of discrimination and marginalization (Thanem, 2011), and the exploitation of gendered culture for the benefit of corporate self interest (Bettany et al., 2010). Although such issues have demonstrated scholarly and political importance, on the small screen they are rendered as both serious and laughable. It is between these extremes that political potential surfaces. In doing so, this media presentation constitutes a ‘disturbance of the political status quo’ (Critchley, 2008: 13) and a ‘thinking beyond the imperialism sustained by familiar ideas’ (Diprose, 2002: 145). Such a politics calls into account the authority of oppressive discourse and attests to both a questioning and opening up of gendered identity.
In the case of Futurama the gendered critique offers a double edged sword—on the one hand it suggests that the dominance of masculinity is a ball and chain that women wear in pursuing their own success in the world, but it also makes the weight of that ball all the more apparent as well as ridiculous. Leela’s childhood experience of being discriminated against as a woman flavours her whole life, especially her working life—but reflexively acknowledging this through humour suggests that this discrimination is not something that needs be accepted by women. This is especially so when the men they must contend with are ego-maniacal fools who lack reflexivity about their own masculine advantage (cf. Steinberg, 1992). But just as Critchley (2007) argues, it is with humour and laughter that we can realize the contingency and mutability of power. It is by engaging with humour and popular comedy that patriarchal power can too be undermined—undermined by parodying it so as to reveal the flimsy ground on which that power founds itself. In this sense ‘humour is an exemplary practice because it is a universal human activity that invites us to become philosophical spectators upon our lives. It is practically enacted theory’ (Critchley, 2007: 28).
Presenting humour as a subversive act for bolstering gender politics in organizations relies on sustained, repetitive performances which works the dialectics between doing and undoing gender, identity and non-identity, and performance and non-performance. In the case of Futurama the repeat performance of male behaviour subverts masculinity by mimicking and mocking it (cf. Tyler and Cohen, 2008) as well as by positing the possibility of a more authentic multi-gender performance. This is subversion as a stylized act performed through parody of cultural and organizational norms and the materiality of the stereotypes permeating gendered subjects in business, work and organization (cf. Bryson and Davies, 2010). As we have seen, the creators of media culture can and have skilfully used humour to portray and enable critiques of gender as it is both embodied and sedimented in workplaces, commercial practice and other institutions. This reminds us that performativity—especially gender performativity—is not just about speech acts, it is about those bodily acts that perform gender. Butler employs the term ‘chiasmus’ to signify the complex relationship between speech and materiality in performativity stating that: ‘there is always a dimension of bodily life that cannot be fully represented, even as it works as the condition and activating condition of language’ (2004: 198–199). The presentation of the bodies of Bender and Leela are cases in point. This reminds us that gender politics in organizations needs to incorporate the bodily in a manner already present in media culture. Without chiasmus the body as a site of subversion and politics is neglected (Tyler and Cohen, 2010).
We suggest that the gendered critique from media culture is powerful and insightful and stands in stark contrast to the more solemn activity of gender theorizing in organizations generally. Instead of seeing female difference only in terms of marginalization and victimization, women are presented and seen in multiple ways. Leela is both different and bullied, as well as being strong and masculine, and through her the processual fluidity of sex and gender are conveyed. More generally the animated form allows for this par excellence—robot bodies enable the transgendering of characters to occur with playful boundary crossing and exaggerated chiasmus. For Raging Bender, the character is scripted and animated in ways which play with gendered meaning and practice, as well as denying assumptions of gender neutrality and bodily androgyny. These bodies are marked by gender, but these marks that are ‘up for grabs’ in the humorous narrative. In the end the importance of sexed and gendered bodies are both highlighted and disrupted, and patriarchal values brought into stark comic relief.
Concluding
As Kellner argued ‘media culture is a contested terrain across which key social groups and competing political ideologies struggle for dominance and that individuals live these struggles through the images, discourses, myths and spectacles of media culture’ (1995: 2). Through this article one such struggle that we have been concerned with is the gendered inequality and patriarchal oppression in and around organizations. In some cases this illustration is such that media culture is complicit in fostering this inequality and oppression (Brewis, 1998; Coltrane and Adams, 1997; Höpfl, 2003; O’Sullivan and Sheridan, 2005). There are also other examples of media culture that perform cultural critique of the way that gender limits possibilities for being for both men and women in organizations. In both views, however, what is demonstrated is that articulating theory with media culture is a valuable exercise for organizational critique (cf. Rhodes and Westwood, 2008), especially politically motivated and theoretically charged research into gender, work and organizations. If feminist politics is taken to include undoing gender in terms of ‘unsettling gendered norms of work, organization and the academy’ (Pullen and Knights, 2007: 510) then, as we hope to have shown in this article, reading gender in media culture can provide grist for this mill.
What we see in media culture is the presence of gender as a site of struggle as it relates to organizations—a form of social and collective resistance that is central to the undoing of gender (Butler, 2004). This struggle is one in which long-standing patriarchal structures in culture and organizations are contested by what Parker calls a ‘counter culture of organizations’—a ‘profuse symbolic jungle’ (2006: 3) whose subversions have been traditionally neglected by organizational theorists. The point of considering this counter culture academically is not to be able to directly assert that the highly specific cultural artefact that we have reviewed has changed anybody’s life. Indeed, to suggest that by dozing in front of the television for half an hour watching a cartoon might lead to some sort of individual transformation or serve as a call to political action is naive and ludicrous. We are also not suggesting that we have, or indeed can, isolate any particular cultural texts’ ‘“meaning” for participants in particular work situations’ (Parker, 2006: 11). Instead our intentions are more cultural in their ambitions. Such ambitions are pursued by reading individual cultural texts to explore their relations with a broader ‘cultural political struggle’ (p. 10) as it can be located in the tangled web of texts that constitute culture. Such struggles are those in which political positions are co-produced, but also one where the media can provide ‘resources which individuals can appropriate, or reject, in forming their own identities against dominant models’ (Kellner, 1995: 3). We argue that bringing together the study of organizations and media culture not only contributes to established writing on resisting organizational patriarchy (see Calás and Smircich, 2006; Thomas and Davies, 2005), but that it also promotes ‘ways to foster social relations that generate rather than close off sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences’ (Diprose, 2002: 15).
Comedy, and parody in particular, are especially useful forms of media culture through which a political counterpoint to gender oppression can be generated, illustrated and supported—indeed, they are best regarded as an ally to a critical analysis of gendered relations at work and a broader struggle against gender oppression. Parody possesses the ability to be light and dark, uplifting and depressing, as well as light hearted and painfully heavy. Amidst the laughter it operates as a cultural form of critique that renders challenges that are much harder to present with a straight face. Simple props such as a pink tutu as worn by a robot enable a playful gender improvisation that undermines the assumption that one’s gender is somehow natural or given and, moreover it does so at the both a linguistic and corporeal level (Butler, 2004). Bender is not a man or woman, he’s a robot! It may simply be the case that as critical academics we might be well served to ‘tell more jokes’ (Critchley, 2007)—or at least listen well to those jokes and to laugh out loud, such that ‘by laughing at power we can expose its contingency, we can realize that what appeared to be fixed and oppressive is just the sort of thing that should be mocked and ridiculed’ and that these jokes can provide ‘the conditions for taking up a critical position with respect to what passes for everyday life, producing a change in our situation which can be both liberating and elevating’ (p. 18).
Parody can only make sense, and can only be popular and successful, if it plays with the idea of a social reality that is widely accepted amongst its viewers. For the parodic imitation to be recognized and be found humorous, the viewer must have knowledge of the original that is being parodied. For this reason parody can shed light in the meaning of that original as well as denaturalize it. Following our example, when we laugh at gender norms and patriarchal power as we enjoy Futurama, we are (a) acknowledging the existence of that power, and (b) making a critical judgment that the exercise of that power is problematic and conspicuous (c) recognizing how that power operates through language and body. In this article we have sought to show how the conjunction of these three features of parody provide it with the ability to offer exacting and politically charged critiques of patriarchal gendered oppression in organizations. Even though it does so through different means, in terms of its ends such humour shares much with political critiques of gender inequality. In this case media culture and feminist politics are on the same side. Rather than being seen just as a means of propagating dogma and cultural common sense, media culture is a medium which critical approaches to studying gender and organizations might align with for the benefit for its own political project. Moreover, parody demonstrates paradoxical character of resistance to gendered violations—a paradox where ‘if I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven by paradox is the condition of its possibility’ (Butler, 2004: 3). Parody highlights this in the way that it draws attention to the power of social world in which we are thrust, whilst at the same time pointing to its non-immutability and potential for subversion—a process that highlights the very possibility of agency as it concerns gendered identity
What enables parody to be subversive is that it has the ‘capacity to reveal some of the ways in which reified and naturalized conceptions of organizational identity might be understood as performatively constituted’ (Tyler and Cohen, 2008: 129). In contributing to this subversive politics, our article has discussed one particular cultural artefact so as to draw out the relationship between parody, drag performance and politics and it relates to the undoing of gender, especially in workplace, organizational and business related settings. Here we have been clear in asserting that while the symbolic critique of parody does not in and of itself constitute such a politics, it is best regarded as harbouring the potential of being a powerful ally to it. In terms of the study of culture we have also shown that this political potential was achieved, in this case, through the genre-blending of science fiction, situation comedy and the animated cartoon—a mixture of styles that we contend is especially powerful in denaturalizing the violations of patriarchal gender normativity.