Dark Angel – In the year 2019 the US has been devastated in the wake of the Pulse--an electromagnetic shockwave unleashed by nuclear terrorists in 2009. This is Max's world, an unforgiving place even for a genetically engineered soldier like her. On the run from her creators and constantly in search of her past, Max joins forces with the idealistic cyberjournalist "Eyes Only". "She's a revved-up girl trying to make a run-down world a better place."
~~ Show Publicity

In a critique of masculinist scientific approaches, feminist scientist Donna Haraway has envisioned a relational model of science – one that pictures the scientific object "as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as a slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of "objective" knowledge" (Simians, Cyborgs and Women). The granting of agency to the object allows for a scientific practice "that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing." Max (Dark Angel) is a figure who embodies this type of relational science. More specifically, it is possible to analyze the scientific and cultural practices through which Max negotiates her relationship to the monstrous.

In analyzing the construct that is Max it is necessary to trace the gendered power dynamics that comprise her scientific and cultural dynamics. The question becomes: What does Max's identity as a genetically-engineered/enhanced human amount to? Or to put it another way how is Max’s scientific creation special. Gender is produced through the reiteration or repetition of regulatory norms established by dominant heterosexuality; the possibility of singularity or uniqueness arises when there is a variation on that repetition. Indeed Max reiterates the dominant norms of heterosexual femininity and is culturally intelligible as a "woman" precisely because she adopts female attitudes, make-up and styled hair. At the same that Max reiterates the visible norms of femininity, however, she activates/employs historically masculanized practices as well – that of the soldier/warrior. That is, Max's feminized body becomes the site through which scientific rational, technological, and cultural practices/discourses are articulated and negotiated. This convergence of masculanized practice/discourse at the site of the feminized body is made monstrous because it produces an excess of power that the dominant norms of heterosexual femininity cannot accommodate. Max's "in corprealation" is distinctive, then because it incorporates an excess of masculinized power, which is transformed into monstrosity as it engages with the feminine.

Drawing on the theories of feminist scientists – specifically those who propose a relational model of science – it can be suggested that Max negotiates her relationship to the monstrous in a way that empowers her. She bodily extends scientific and cultural practices and personally interrogates and exposes the limits of their masculinized traditions. Moreover as Max's own body is the object of "genetic invasion/manipulation"; she can no longer operate as "human" in a recognisably normal model. A "monster" herself, she cannot exercise a critical distance necessary to counter the deviant strain of scientific knowledge that led to her creation. Indeed, Max's fascination with and bodily personification of the monstrous lead her to challenge and to subvert the masculinized scientific and cultural discourses that constitute power within the society she inhabits.

Inhabiting these pages are odd boundary creatures – simians, cyborgs and women – all of which have had a destabilising place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the word, to demonstrate. Monsters signify.
~~ Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Human beings are now such monsters of such sophistication and complexity that we can’t begin to know ourselves until we manipulate and transform the human body, with multifarious and fantastic techniques, hybridised, implanted, mutated, cloned or doubled, commodified. In one respect, the body has seemed increasingly within the realm of conscious human manipulation and control, through transplantation, genetic and reproductive technologies, cryonics, plastic surgery, transsexual surgery, cybernetics, and the electronic sensorium. Countering these developments, these technologies have made the body a resource or commodity, alienating it from what is traditionally known as the "self."

The identity Max forms from her genetically enhanced body is not based purely on scientific rationalism but rather on her ability to negotiate the continuum of scientific rationality/monstrosity. Rather than negate her physically enhanced "masculanized" power, Max embraces its empowerment. As Donna Haraway suggests, simians, cyborgs and women are all monsters, "odd boundary creatures . . . that have had a destabilizing place in the Great Western evolutionary, technological and biological narratives" (Simians). Indeed Max and her incorpreal body is situated on the edge of scientific knowledge and as such is testing the limits of science.

Reversing the classic sci-fi alien invasion scenario, in Dark Angel the "alien" body comes to stand metonymically for all marginalization and commodification of human bodies. Dark Angel reflects an age in which, according to chaos theory, the human body currently finds itself in the vicinity of a strange attractor. Which is to say that the biological aspect of humanity dedicated to distinguishing self from Other is already irrevocably complexified, wherein things get weirder and weirder, faster and faster, until things change, quite utterly, signalling the emergence of a new order.

Dark Angel stars Jessica Alba as Max a genetically enhanced human prototype with exceptional athletic skills. Max kicks, punches, and enacts balletic manoeuvres with "eloquent" grace. Jessica Alba performs an interesting choreography throughout the series. She strikes physical poses that have a classic comic-book frame stance about them. It gives Max a larger than life quality which, coupled with her intelligence and beauty, transmits an incredible humanity.