Expo afterlife: corporate performance and capitalist futurity in the Carousel of Progress

This article discusses a theatrical spectacle created by Walt Disney and General Electric for the 1964 New York World’s Fair that has run for the last five decades: the Carousel of Progress, a history pageant that stages the evolution of domestic technology in the twentieth century. As a spectacle dedicated to celebrating tools that bolster women’s participation in the social reproduction of capitalism, the author argues, the Carousel shows how expos utilize theatricality in order to inscribe industrial technologies within corporate ideologies. By apprehending the Carousel of Progress as a site of corporate performance, the author demonstrates how the Carousel’s afterlife in theme park entertainment has enabled Disney to theatricalize disparate modes of capitalist futurity in response to shifting cultural sensibilities. The author situates the Carousel within an economy that has consistently presented female domestic labor as subordinate to corporate capital, culminating with its late-1990s staging of an illusory prefeminism, which fantasizes a twentieth century in which no feminist movement took place. Engaging with theories of corporate performance, this article takes up the Carousel of Progress’s production history as an indication of theatricality’s longstanding utility to corporate capitalism.