“You Deserve to Be Satisfied”: Women in Tech and the Affective Reconfiguration of the Workplace through Song in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist

Abstract

Since the late 2000s, public debates over “women in tech” have highlighted the lack of diversity in the sector, coinciding with amoment of growth for the industry (Hardey 2020). Discussions in mainstream media have informed a limited increase in the representation of “women in tech” in popular filmand television. The musical television series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (2019–2020) offers an example through Zoey, a software programmer at a San Francisco technology firm who can hear people express their thoughts through popular songs. This chapter will explore the workplace relationship between Zoey and her boss Joan as representative of neoliberal feminist values.I argue that the dialectic between narrative and numbers, characteristic of the musical genre, negotiates tensions over the role of“women in tech” and feminist discourses in popular culture. In the narrative, the antagonism between Zoey and the “brogrammers”makes the inequalities in the industry visible without challenging their structural roots, as typical of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018). The analysis of key musical numbers will then demonstrate how the conventions of the integrated musical emphasise anaffective reconfiguration of the workplace as a performative arena that fosters an emotional connectivity between characters andreinforces discourses of female empowerment.

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ORCID for Eleonora Sammartino: orcid.org/0000-0002-7268-8014

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