Sense8: Transcending Television

Description

This collection explores the many ways in which the Netflix series Sense8 transcends television. As its characters transcend physical and psychological borders of gender and geography, so the series itself transcends those between television, new media platforms and new screen technologies, while dissolving those between its producers, stars, audiences and fans. Sense8 united, inspired and energized a global community of fans that realized its own power by means of online interaction and a successful campaign to secure a series finale. The series' playful but poignant exploration of globalization, empathy, transnationalism, queer and trans aesthetics, gender fluidity, imagined communities and communities of sentiment also inspired the interdisciplinary range of contributors to this volume. In this collection, leading academics illuminate Sense8 as a progressive and challenging series that points to vital, multifarious, contemporary social, political, aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Sense8: Transcending Television is much more than an academic examination of a series; it is an account and analysis of the way that we all receive, communicate and consider ourselves as participants in global communities that are social, political and cultural, and now both physical and virtual too.

Deborah Shaw is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Transnational Cinemas (Now Transnational Screens), and her books include Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Ten Key Films (2003), The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Alfonso Cuaron (2013), The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (co-edited with Ann Davies and Dolores Tierney, 2014), and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics (co-edited with Deborah Martin 2017). Rob Stone is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Spanish Cinema (2001), Julio Medem (2007) and Walk, Don't Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013, 2nd edn 2018) and co-author of Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (2016). He also co-edited Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2013), A Companion to Luis Bunuel (2013) and The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (2018).

Sense8 (2015-2018), conceived of and produced by the Wachowskis was a Netflix phenomenon that transcended multiple boundaries of sexuality, gender, nation and sensibility just as the fledgeling streaming platform was also carving out a progressive identity as a producer of original content. The multiple contributions to this volume featuring both key scholars and emergent voices show that this was a complex relationship in which the desires of the producers, fans and the platform were not always in alignment. Bringing together television and film studies approaches with queer and fan studies perspectives, this multi-faceted volume highlights the powerful impact Sense8 had as something more and other than conventional film or television. It also brilliantly shows the ways that the trans*, queer and polyamorous intimacies and empathy represented in the show were refracted in the communities surrounding the show, constituting a comet-like transformative event at the centre of progressive contemporary screen cultures. * Michael N. Goddard, Reader in Film, Television and Moving Image, University of Westminster, UK * Suitably for a volume focused on a series whose motto was 'diversity in unity', the essays in this superb collection approach Sense8 from divergent but nicely complementary angles, illuminating it in relation to matters of representation, aesthetics, medium specificity, philosophy, spectatorship and activism. Exalting the series' affirmative and jubilant queer globalism, while also critical of its limitations and shortfalls, this expertly crafted and eminently readable anthology evaluates Sense8's impact and relevance, while using it as a means of pondering over questions of community, communality, connection, connectivity and collectivity in our divided and fractured world. I couldn't think of more pressing issues to attend to at this moment in time. * Tiago de Luca, Associate Professor in Film Studies, University of Warwick, UK * Assembling a magnificent cluster of scholars, Sense8: Transcending Television is an indispensable companion to the Netflix series. Beautifully written and pulsing with critical insights, this collection of essays demonstrates the same 'radical empathy' embodied by Sense8 itself. It reveals how the sensate - a group of individuals bound to one another despite distance and difference - mirrors the immersive and collective viewing experience of audiences in the streaming era. Shaw and Stone's collection not only articulates the generative potential of Sense8's queer and trans world building - it heightens it. * Tanya Horeck, Associate Professor in Film & Media, Anglia Ruskin University, UK *