Parody, subversion and the politics of gender at work: the case of Futurama’s ‘Raging Bender’
分析美国动画《飞出未来》中“愤怒的本德”一集，探讨戏仿如何通过解构性别表演来批判组织中的父权性别关系，并揭示媒体文化在性别政治中的批判潜力。
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.