Every night, the iconic opera singer Maria Callas was enthusiastically celebrated by a devoted audience and then died anew on the stage. Marina Abramović, in her opera project, embodies seven deaths in a row and questions society’s fascination with the diva and the spectacle. Abramović, the “diva assoluta” of performance art, uses in her project ingredients from the tradition of the opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk and adds experimentations with other media. Alternating on the stage, seven soloists sing seven über-famous arias: “Addio, del passato” (Valery, La Traviata), “Vissi d’arte” (Tosca), “Ave Maria” (Desdemona, Otello), “Un bel dì vedremo” (Cio-Cio-San, Madame Butterfly), “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (Carmen), “Il dolce suono” (Lucia di Lammermoor), and “Casta diva” (Norma). Abramović is lying in a bed at the front right corner of the stage but appears on a large video screen, where she illustrates seven deaths with co-actor Willem Dafoe. They jointly walk through fire (Norma), dance with a rope (Carmen), and handle a python that gradually suffocates her (Desdemona) (Figure 1). Abramović slowly falls off a building with kitschy cloud imagery in the background (Tosca) and dies painfully in other ways.

Figure 1:

7 Deaths of Maria Callas

Note. Copyright Bettina Stöß, courtesy Deutsche Oper Berlin.

What life, love, and death mean to us are fundamental questions, yet their relationship to a field such as business ethics remains mostly unthought. In what follows, I hope to explore how Abramović’s opera project opens up spaces for a new awareness for what is at stake in gendered relationships within business ethics, drawing particularly from feminist perspectives. Although gender and, more broadly conceived, diversity and inclusion initiatives in organizations have been the focus of business ethics scholarship (Grosser, Moon, & Nelson, Reference Grosser, Moon and Nelson2017), it is fair to say that addressing gender bias and discrimination in business practice is enormously difficult. It is in this regard that it is important to acknowledge the way in which gender is performed and (re)negotiated in-between individuals in everyday practices. Though such negotiations can be described in theory, and conceptually articulated through terms like performativity, abjection, and embodied affectivity, it is much more difficult for discrimination to be “felt.” Embracing plural sensual experiences of our world as a complement to scientific rationality, as advocated by a feminist epistemology (Kaufmann, Reference Kaufmann2022), can help business ethics to produce relevant scholarship that captures the emotions, relationships, and gendered power issues of organizational life.

The opera extends an invitation to develop our sensitivity to the lived experiences of others, suggesting an ethical position that embraces this embodied relationality, and it does so by means of spectacle. The social dynamic that maintains and reinforces practices of gender bias and discrimination goes far beyond the seemingly well-ordered categories often erected by scholarship or programmatic commitments to gender parity in the workplace. It is in this respect that theatre and opera spectacles can stimulate an embodied awareness of what lies at the heart of gender discrimination.

This spectacle points business ethicists to what goes on beyond the world of art, where the public takes pleasure from iconic women who are admired, but at the same time objectified. The iconic singer Callas and the celebrated Abramović share some biographical and artistic similarities, for example, their emotional openness and vulnerability, and both their artistic and private lives publicly coincide. Opera divas offstage are celebrated as eccentric social personae but are confined by gender roles. Abramović’s biography suggests that an alternative practice becomes possible—she survived painful separations and used them to develop her career (Great Wall Walk, 1988). Yet her artistic life enacts a rejection of the stereotypical feminine notion of self-sacrifice for love. She, for instance, does not shy away from making herself vulnerable to bodily harm, enacting in practice Bruce Nauman’s contention that “art is matter of life and death.” In Rhythm 0 (1974), Abramović offered herself to an audience, inviting them to use seventy-two objects on her, including a rose, honey, a razor blade, and even a revolver—and left the setting bleeding, with shredded clothes. This may seem excessive and unreasonable, but it is precisely the aesthetic intensity of such experimentations that prompts an awareness of more subtle, habituated or professionalized ways in which the female body remains at risk.

In the business world as well, women are the ultimate “spectacle” (Bell & Sinclair, Reference Bell and Sinclair2016). There is a fascination with their bodies, which are admired, assessed, and eventually excluded as “abject” (Höpfl, Reference Höpfl2000), as they contradict a prevailing masculine ethics within organizations that are framed as rational and disembodied, objective and gender-neutral (Pullen & Vachhani, Reference Pullen and Vachhani2021). The philosopher Manne (Reference Manne2018) has argued that in public life, women serve as scapegoats, are burned as witches, and are treated as pariahs by a pervasive misogyny that is policing, punishing, and exiling women who challenge male dominance.

Spectators in the opera commonly react to the aesthetic formalization of extreme emotions by the female artist as a mirror, or filter, which leads to a transference and mutual exchange of emotional intensity (Bronfen, Reference Bronfen and Abramović2022: 23). This affects the audience, who feels the pain, trembles and aches at the sight of the diva, the poorest, the haunted, la traviata (the woman who lost her way)! With regard to business ethics research, this resonates with feminist epistemologies and multiplicities of feminist knowing that bear witness to lived experiences (Borgerson, Reference Borgerson2007), that are intercorporeal and relational (Pullen & Vachhani, Reference Pullen and Vachhani2021). Audiences affectively relate to female protagonists and to human fears: pain, suffering, mortality—a cornerstone of Abramović’s works. This offers an important addition to business ethics literature that aims to highlight certain blind spots in terms of how women’s empowerment is pursued in and through corporate social responsibility, for instance (McCarthy, Reference McCarthy2017). One can only “live” women’s (dis)empowerment in and through embodied affection.

Abramović steps up the performance of the traditional diva to push our perception even further. The dramaturgy, with seven excessive deaths in a row, exposes the core of widely criticized prefeminist opera narratives in which women desperately struggle in a patriarchal society, being sacrificed for love. For example, Callas’s signature role Norma (“Casta Diva”), the mystical priestess, the single working mother, must burn to death—the fire being bombastically recreated as an inevitability in Abramović’s film projections. The performance shows how our social order influences how we perceive the world. Empathizing with and relating to the painful experience of the diva encourages us to comprehend how business ethics based on patriarchal authority position women as “the other” to men, before they inevitably take a fall, miserably and abjectively.

Opera divas, who perish in the plays performed to this day, offer affective clues about deep-seated gender prejudice and invisible barriers. Well-meant attempts to enable women and nonbinary individuals to enter leadership positions may fail because what blocks their success lies at a much deeper level of individual and organizational psychology. For example, with regard to the “glass cliff” literature, could it be that watching women fail is yet another spectacle in which women pay the price for stepping outside their traditional gender role? Women are a spectacle; like any diva, they are not tolerated and must pay—not with their lives, but with their careers. The persistence of sexual harassment and gender-based violence suggests that they are routinely humiliated, brushed aside, and sacrificed; only the stage is different. The larger-than-life opera experience can prompt researchers to identify gendered practices that come in a sexist disguise of appreciation and abjection (the diva! la traviata!).

Abramović’s project fulfills a pedagogical task by providing an experience for business ethicists from an epistemological position that exposes and questions the spectacle that traps women, like any diva onstage and offstage. She does not act against this with a clear argument, strong words, or hard facts. She does not end the show or leave the stage, as Callas often did, provoking scandal—which in the end still confirms the stereotypical, emotional woman and the gendered rules of the spectacle. Abramović uses her power as performer who, as the medium, is the message. Traditionally, the actor (Greek: hypokrites), who openly plays her part, shows that appearances may be deceiving and the spectacle itself “rotten.” Abramović in her embodied position refrains from singing herself, does not speak, and rests motionlessly in bed for a full hour. Different from The Artist Is Present (2010; staged as a face-to-face, long-term performance at the Museum of Modern Art), Abramović is present, but also not present. When Abramović finally gets out of bed, the tension is palpable in the sold-out Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Spectators adjust their position, stretch their heads, hold their breath, and follow her slow gestures. This is a moment of resurrection, of life, of coming together, of the presence to which Abramović often refers, and it is fulfilling but also mercilessly exposes the audience in their longing for this moment. Abramović makes us experience that her female body is caught up in gendered expectations that we as the audience have internalized, preying on the diva’s spectacle, which is inevitably followed by a demise.

Abramović, however, opens up interpretations and in the last scene embodies a dying Callas in her apartment in Paris, opening curtains, walking through the space, smashing a crystal vase, while it remains open whether she is dying or being resurrected. This is a woman who is the author of her own story, suggesting that this option be made available—in life, work, and research. This bodily experience can enrich our understanding of the spectacle that feminist business ethicists call a “set of relations that symbolically and materially violates” women (Pullen & Vachhani, Reference Pullen and Vachhani2021: 240). We need to question how similar norms and rules govern our work and research.

This links to a philosophical debate in theatre theory about an affective and emotional training that operates beyond rational considerations. Theatre theorist Lehmann (Reference Lehmann2006: 187) reminds us that “theatre does not attain its political, ethical reality by way of information, theses and messages; in short: by way of its content in the traditional sense.” Rather, theatre genuinely works with affect and sensibility (Empfindsamkeit). Abramović reproduces and exaggerates expectations, produces disorientation, and plays with the taboo by showing a series of deaths to provide aesthetic situations in which affects are addressed, released, and questioned.

Integrating this aesthetic experience into our research prompts us to be critical and to develop a better “feeling” for the embodied and affective arguments that individuals make beyond a rational discourse that we also find in business studies and that rests on many implicit assumptions that regulate women’s subordination. Challenging these rules and reasons can help to produce a more holistic scholarship about organizations. From a feminist epistemology, it strengthens suggestions of writing and thinking beyond the strong gender binaries and probing an affective solidarity with others marginalized. It is about being open to the other and developing an embodied relationality, a corporeal ethics. This is the aesthetic and ethical position Maria and Marina share when they expose their bodies and open themselves to risk—they are more than a spectacle; they are human. Such performances can be seen as an offer to empathize and cultivate our sensitivity to the lived experiences of others, inviting us to exist not at the expense of one another but ethically in relation.