In film and television, opening title and closing credit sequences often function as the equivalent to the covers of a book, marking its beginning and end. Genette likened paratexts to thresholds or vestibules, in line with Jorge Luis Borges’ description of prefaces (Genette 261). Opening title sequences are but one example of what Gérard Genette terms paratexts, which are secondary texts that influence the reading of the primary text, such as book covers, title pages, author names, interviews, ads, reviews, and public responses. They are “a film within a film” whose “very purpose is to serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in the context of careers, movie title, entertainment, commercials, fashion, and art” (Stanitzek 45, 46). Opening title sequences play an important role in understanding television series. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female.

Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity.

Instead of approaching Whedon's texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedon's texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do.

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