Moya Bailey, micha cárdenas, Laura Horak, Lokeilani Kaimana, Cáel M. Keegan, Geneveive Newman, Roxanne Samer, and Raffi Sarkissian Sense8 Roundtable

Abstract In “Sense8: A Roundtable,” eight scholars, myself included, think through key questions regarding one of today’s most impressive trans-produced mainstream media productions, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Netflix series Sense8, which has yet to receive substantive scholarly attention. We analyze how Sense8 both follows and breaks from the Wachowskis’ prior approach to narrative; offers a distinctly trans* engagement with the histories of cinematic and televisual genres; often relies on western colonial conceptions for its global imagination and marginalizes characters of color; and theorizes contemporary media spectatorship in its appeal to affect and eroticism. We do so believing Sense8 to be an important cultural interlocutor, not only with regard to the exploration of transgender representation but also questions of sexuality, race, and capital in the global present. However, we also share a conviction that the series’ potentiality still leaves substantial room for growth. We take a critical approach to our collective analysis, seeing in the series a glimmer of the kind of global utopian envisioning very much needed in our ceaselessly dystopian present.

The first season of J. Michael Straczynski and was the prime decree of those reviewers who were Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Sense8 was released looking to witness a similar “seamless marriage on Netflix on June 5, 2015. The series’ critical of style and substance.”2 Those reviewers who did reception was mixed. Many found Sense8—which appreciate Sense8 were those who saw the series as tells the story of eight individuals from across purposefully demanding the labor of an attentive the globe, who, having recently been “birthed” by audience. As Liz Shannon Miller, writing for a “mother” from another cluster, are beginning to IndieWire put it, “‘Sense8’ makes you work.”3 It was learn how to “visit” one another in each other’s built into the premise of the show. Miller elaborates, minds and even “share” their knowledges and “[The sensates] have no idea what’s going on, so the skillsets—simply confusing, while others claimed show reflects that.”4 Furthermore, this intellectual the show only skimmed the surfaces of these eight labor is matched with authentic emotions, as Joshua characters’ lives, relying on visual design, rather than Rothman pointed out in his review for The New 1 narrative, to keep viewers engaged. “It’s no Matrix” Yorker.5 Miller and Rothman were also two rare critics to analyze the series as the newest entry in the Wachowskis’ romantic oeuvre.6 In this case, the love of Trinity and Neo (or their precursors, the lesbian couple Violet and Corky of the Wachowskis’ directorial debut, the 1996 neo-noir Bound) radiates out between eight strangers across four continents. As the sensates work to keep their clustermates alive by sharing their knowledges, skillsets, memories, and emotions, they form a multitude of bonds. Some of these are more romantic, while others more platonic. However, they all eventually become (if but temporarily) sexual, thanks to two mind orgy scenes. If anyone was uncertain as to the Wachowskis’ commitment to queer sexualities, genders, and families, the Christmas special, which Netflix’sSense8 brings to the fore Hollywood’s first out transgender was released on December 23, 2016 and contained creators. the second of these orgies, affirmed this allegiance

74 Transgender Media Roxanne Samer, editor, Spectator 37:2 (Fall 2017): 74-88. BAILEY, ET AL. in grandiose and heartwarming ways that only the Wachowskis, as masters of visual drama and cheesy dialogue (whether to one’s taste or not), know how to pull off. The Christmas special marked the beginning of the second season, and ten more episodes are set to release on Netflix May 5, 2017. Lilly Wachowski is stepping back from Season 2 production, as she takes time away from the public eye. While Lana came out as trans in 2012, after much reluctance to Sense8 gives image and sound to a queer future that might not yet give up the freedoms of living in relative anonymity,7 be present but is for some nonetheless palpable on the horizon. Lilly was coerced into outing herself prematurely by the Daily Mail just last March. In the statement she progress and in my very being, be an example of the published in Chicago’s Windy City Times, so as to potentiality of another world.” 10 This roundtable was beat the British tabloid, Lilly critiqued the Daily formed out a desire to examine this text that makes Mail for its history of destructively outing public explicit its rejection of the here and now, marked figures before speaking to her own experience and by transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, and her resistance to overly simplistic narratives of globalized capitalism, and gives image and sound to transitioning: a queer future that might not yet be present but is for some nonetheless palpable on the horizon. But these words, ‘transgender’ and Moya Bailey, micha cárdenas, Laura Horak, ‘transitioned’ are hard for me because Lokeilani Kaimana, Cáel M. Keegan, Geneveive they both have lost their complexity in Newman, Raffi Sarkissian, and I conducted the their assimilation into the mainstream. roundtable between December 2016 and February There is a lack of nuance of time and 2017. In an attempt to mirror the kinds of space. To be transgender is something collaboration envisioned by the series, the eight of largely understood as existing within the us first wrote together in pairs before responding dogmatic terminus of male or female. to another pair’s writing. Trained in Cinema and And to ‘transition’ imparts a sense of Media Studies; Communication; American Studies; immediacy, a before and after from one Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Media terminus to another. But the reality, my Arts and Practice, in our collaborations we ostensibly reality is that I’ve been transitioning and “visited” each other and “shared” our knowledges will continue to transition all of my life, and skills with one another across geographies through the infinite that exists between via digital communication technologies. All of male and female as it does in the infinite the questions were authored by the roundtable’s between the binary of zero and one. We participants, and I made the pairings based on need to elevate the dialogue beyond the shared interests, combining questions in the ways simplicity of binary. Binary is a false that made the greatest sense to me. Although we idol.8 all wrote in pairs, I left the resulting format of each set of answers up to each individual pair. As you On her wall in her office, Lilly explains, she will see, we each took slightly different approaches has a quotation from queer theorist José Esteban to collaborative writing. Laura Horak and I crafted Muñoz that ends, “Queerness is essentially about our answers together, each of us having a hand in the rejection of a here and now and an insistence every paragraph we produced. The three other pairs on potentiality [or concrete possibility] for either took turns answering, each offering a slightly another world.”9 And this is what she, in living different interpretation of their given prompt, wrote and in working, is trying to do. She concludes her back and forth in dialogue and/or wrote their initial statement, “So I will continue to be an optimist answer one way and their response to another pair adding my shoulder to the Sisyphean struggle of a different way. What resulted from this process

TRANSGENDER MEDIA 75 SENSE8 ROUNDTABLE is not the definitive account of the series and its to the privileges afforded by white supremacist contributions to media platforms in transition or patriarchy. intersectional transfeminist storytelling. Instead, this roundtable offers an initiation of possible lines Raffi Sarkissian: Following, much like how the of inquiry. We hope that readers will travel with Wachowskis’ success and leverage today is based us, as we work to develop our thoughts in other on their legacy built around The Matrix, Netflix’s scholarly forms, and we invite Sense8 to grow with powerful position as original content creators us and expand its own thinking as it continues to is also built on years of lucrative licensing of model socially conscious television. -Roxanne existing content from dominant television and Samer film studios—or Hollywood capital. The streaming company’s foray into original programming What role does the Wachowski sisters’ out trans also relies on the currency afforded to name narratives play in assessing Sense8? What is the brand authors or rebooting existing IPs. What significance of this work being done on Netflix? makes Netflix’s investment inSense8 significant, Are streaming platforms somehow prime in the then, is the reaffirmation of the value of a post- larger economy of identity politics and media transition Wachowski brand—as transfeminine production? How does Sense8’s complex storytelling auteurs—particularly after the middling financial follow or break from the Wachowskis’ prior approach performance of their post-Matrix films. to narrative? Lokeilani Kaimana: As we switch to streaming, Raffi Sarkissian: Representing the Wachowskis’ it is also important to remember “flow” as a key first foray into television content, Netflix’s Sense8 component of television as a medium.11 Netflix can brings to the fore the first out transgender creators/ only mimic flow to the extent that it allows viewers directors in Hollywood and provokes a new to binge watch a single narrative. I think that in understanding of the Wachowskis as transgender the way that “flow” marks the active relationship auteurs. Far from an aside, the sisters’ transition as between technology and viewer for broadcast paratextual narrative not only informs the stakes television, we might see binge watching as marking and content of Sense8, but also productively disrupts the relationship between viewers and the Netflix the familiar masculinist auteur narrative born from platform. From here—with the expectation that the mainstream success of The Matrix. Accordingly, the Wachowskis create content for binge watching it is important to acknowledge, interrogate, and for Netflix—I see their Matrix franchise as a reconcile how the Wachowski brand is built on preliminary model. the currency of cisgender male privilege in the film industry. Raffi Sarkissian: Yes, in fact, I see their transition— from silver screen to streaming series—not so much Lokeilani Kaimana: Yes, the Wachowskis are the a break from their narrative approach, but a better first out transfeminine content creators with a fit for the type of complex and layered stories they successful Netflix narrative. I think it is historically have been imagining for years. If the cross-platform important to mark their subject positions as sprawling, transmedia storytelling of The Matrix transfeminine and as white; and to mention that was too much of an egg hunt for all but the most they come to Netflix after building a successful committed audience, and the numerous but non- brand of cinematic storytelling. Because there contemporaneous narratives that crowded Cloud cannot be a brand or object without a creative team, Atlas placed too many eggs in one basket, then and all teams require visionary leaders, I think it is the serial format of Sense8 is most akin to a long- important to weave the paratext of the authorship gestating egg—warming audiences to its world position into all critical approaches to cinematic or while pushing against grandstanding resolutions.12 televisual objects. And from this standpoint, I am, and have always been, suspicious of the Wachowskis’ Lokeilani Kaimana: The Wachowskis, at some oscillation across insider/outsider status and access point within each creative endeavor, swerve against

76 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. the media/technology/platform that contains the platform design. But now, we can see how beautiful story. There is something rich in this refusal to be and lush online streaming has become; we are in a contained by a single platform, which allows an new era of lush aesthetics beyond glitch aesthetics. intertextual or cross content experiential viewing. For example, when the Animatrix came out, I was The paratext of the sisters’ transitions is but part of a minority of trans and queer tech-nerd art another instance of fan connection that extends kids, intrigued by the interweaving of platform past the content of media object(s) to an affective designs and 3dimensional art practices. For me/ relationality that bridges across difference. Here, us, the pieces of the Wachowskis’ Matrix franchise I refer to the ways in which minority fan bases locked together logically because it—like our demand more “real” content from minority auteurs, bodies—exceeded the bounds of single platform who are often seen (across mainstream media and storytelling. The Matrix broke down the barriers subcultures) as avatars for minoritarian politics. The of cross-platform storytelling that was marketable Wachowskis bend, swerve, switch media objects, to the mainstream, but had been generated by technologies, platforms, and genders, which presses generations of coding and hacking. The production against respectability politics...which is a positive. design, including the script and characters of Sense8 is within the Wachowskis’ coding/hacking history. Raffi Sarkissian: And I think Sense8 matches the Only in our historical present, the aesthetics of ambition of their established brand both in its scale coding are smooth and lush, and the glitches are the of production and scope of content. While the serial viewers and underdeveloped characters. format allows those complex and layered narratives and ideas to ruminate and expand, I contend it Geneveive Newman: Raffi and Lokeilani make also overcompensates with high production value some excellent points, especially with regard to (afforded by Netflix’s Hollywood capital), normative the significance of acknowledging the intersecting romance, and western standards of beauty to sustain positions of privilege and marginality that the those innovative moves.13 Sense8 thrives when it Wachowskis occupy. Further, their analysis of how indulges in building the interpersonal connections the Wachowskis make use of Netflix’s streaming and metaphysical relationships among its sensates, platform to build a complex, detailed diegetic usually at the expense of plot and easy answers. While world for Sense8 without necessarily developing the today’s binge-watch culture values completion characters with the same complexity, is especially and conflict resolution as accomplishment, Sense8 interesting to a consideration of the show’s (extra) settles for discovery, process, and patience instead. diegetic power dynamics. Upon closer examination This is precisely why Sense8 should be read as a of how Sense8 represents its character’s various trans* narrative in addition to being a transgender- intersecting identities (racial, ethnic, gendered, authored project.14 etc.), world building plays a far greater role, in some instances, than exposition. Nomi’s identity as a trans Lokeilani Kaimana: I notice that we keep returning woman, for example, is only made clear through her to the unevenness of Sense8, catching how the interactions with the LGBTQ community and with expanse of production value is much greater than the depth of character development. This seems like a design choice: the Wachowskis design a fertile diegetic world where characters serve as avatars for minoritized folx. In the unevenness of their design is an ontological present in which Sense8 seems on brand in terms of requiring fan bases to craft extradiegetic narratives, and for critics to write across the timeline of the Wachowskis’ media projects. What Sense8 marks for the Wachowskis, in Nomi’s identity as a trans woman is made clear through her inter- terms of branding through visual content, is their actions with the LGBTQ community. history of storytelling parallel to histories of media

TRANSGENDER MEDIA 77 SENSE8 ROUNDTABLE her family. Without these scenes—which function inherently speculative orientation toward what more to characterize the world in which Nomi might come into perception. exists than to build characters in their own right— the legibility of Nomi’s gender falls away. Finally, How does Sense8 (re)constitute gender and sexuality Raffi’s point that Sense8 is ultimately contented by situating its characters within specific genre with the ambiguity of unresolved questions, with conventions? Might Sense8 offer a distinctly trans* the introduction of possibilities, brings to mind the engagement with the histories of cinematic and overarching project of queer futurity, at least in José televisual genres? Muñoz’s articulation: that the goal is not to see a concrete future in which problems are solved, but Geneveive Newman: When we engage with rather to begin imagining the world differently, and scholars like Linda Williams, Vivian Sobchack, and further, to image within an amorphous, ephemeral Barbara Creed, we see that genre conventions, both abyss.15 aesthetic and narrative, (re)define gender on screen. The show Sense8 unsettles the aestheticization of Cáel M. Keegan: I would agree with Raffi, women largely through these characters in genres Lokeilani, and Genevieve that the Wachowskis’ traditionally associated with men. For example, Sun art is not driven primarily by character. They Bak’s storyline mirrors martial arts films and tends are far more interested in creating emblematic16 to be shot in blues and grays. Likewise, masculine experiences that “teach” through sensation than aesthetics are unsettled by placing male characters they are in characterization. Characters often exist in traditional genre roles (gangster, police officer), mainly as avatars through which the audience is while simultaneously emphasizing the emotional permitted to have new sensory experiences. I would excess of these roles, rather than allowing for the interject that their work is indeed expository, but emotional distance consistent with their incumbent not in same the manner as most contemporary genre conventions. Further, in scenes where multiple film or television, which tend to use character characters converge, genre and gender become development or plot to make explicit the stakes of indistinct, leaving only the body as barer of excess. their drama. Instead, the Wachowskis craft aesthetic Williams, Sobchack, and Creed root their experiences that instruct the audience in what theories in the horror genre, although in different might become possible directly through expanded ways and to different effect. Williams’ work on the forms of perception, especially through new visual intersection of horror, melodrama, and pornography experiences of temporality and spatiality. What situates the convergence of genre and gender as matters in their art is expansion of the perceivable representationally rooted in expressions of excess world: Characters are only a pathway into the (bleeding, crying, ejaculating).17 Sobchack’s theory speculative sensoria they seek to induce. They are prioritizes constructions of temporality within therefore often faulted for thin characterization or the home/family in horror, melodrama, and dialogue by contemporary popular film criticism, science fiction (representing past, present, and which gives little serious attention to aesthetics. future respectively) in order to consider how these One thing Lokeilani says above specifically genres’ themes situate woman/domestic space/ stands out to me: that the Wachowskis’ work anxiety as a singular assemblage.18 Finally, Creed’s in The Matrix Trilogy, much like transgender work invokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, embodiment, “exceeded the bounds” of a single linking women in horror with bodily excretion, platform. While Sense8 is the Wachowskis’ with physical excess, as a site of agency and terror.19 most topically “transgender” text, it is my larger These theories prioritize a feminist framework argument elsewhere that their work has—from its centered on cisgender women as the subject; they first iteration in Bound—presented an unfolding, can be an effective lens through which to consider phenomenologically trans* engagement with Sense8’s unsettling of gender vis-à-vis genre. Read cinema as a durational and future-oriented in this way, genre conventions constitute different medium. The Wachowskis’ aesthetic vision reveals ways of visually and narratively representing how transgender, like cinema itself, involves an excess; the canted angle in horror representing

78 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. the uncanniness of impending but unknowable Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Sandy Stone danger, the cold blues, grays, and silvers of science writes, “To foreground the practices of inscription fiction representing the inconsolability of isolation and reading which are part of this deliberate from physical human contact. Sense8’s engagement invocation of dissonance, I suggest constituting with genre largely follows this logic in that genre transsexuals not as a class or problematic ‘third is not used, necessarily, as a form of shorthand for gender,’ but rather as a genre--a set of embodied expressing consistent themes, but rather as ways of texts whose potential for productive disruption expressing excessive bodily emotion in a legible and of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has distinctive manner. yet to be explored.”21 Is this not precisely Sense8’s While each character exists, initially, within intervention? Elsewhere, I have written about how their own distinctive genre, these divisions are fluid. genre on Sense8 operates, much like gender or race, Individual characters cross into other characters’ as a set of geopolitically situated narrative “cages.”22 storylines/spaces/genres, and climactic scenes. Characters begin in separate, distinctly racialized There, all eight characters exist in the same fluid, and gendered narrative settings that the text amorphous space with no consistent, distinct progressively collapses toward simultaneity, stacking aesthetic (genre in Sense8 comes to mean bodily up “nows” until genre becomes the mirrorball excess; excess of elation, pain, intimacy, control). surface of a new geometry of global time. Yet rather By extension, gender is fluid, gendered traits or than collapsing into a singular consciousness, the abilities transferable, unfixed. In this way, the show cluster ripples embodied sensation back upon itself actively denies biological essentialist approaches to into something far more capacious, complex, and sex/gender as determinants for physical/mental/ internally expansive. Subjectivity on Sense8 is plural, emotional ability. While it does situate specific enfolded, and unfolding. traits, such as physical strength or emotional control, As in all the Wachowskis’ work, Sense8’s with specific characters, these traits are never the central danger is the threat of being trapped in one sole province of those characters. Moreover, which closed form or story—the threat of what I call “cis character possesses which traits is determined by aesthetics” in my project on their films. Sense8 is the aesthetic conventions that help identify the in many ways a meta-commentary on the formal character, not necessarily by their gender or by the rules of televisual narrative, but also on the rules way that their genre has traditionally been gendered. of human perception. This is not necessarily the absence of a consistent aesthetic, but a distinctly Cáel M. Keegan: Given that “inversion” is a fitting trans*-informed de-limitation of aesthetic reality rhetorical strategy for discussing transgender- itself. The text is a progression in form from Speed produced media, I’d like to provide a mirror image Racer, in which the Wachowskis use a cinematic of Geneveive’s above reading: If in traditional media cubism to illustrate how time can be perceived analysis, genre is a “technology of gender,”20 then a from multiple perspectives without using cuts.23 trans* theorization of media might explore how the Sense8 is thus “limbic” in its aesthetics (the first subjective experience of gender informs the creation episode is titled “Limbic Resonance”), situating us of genre itself. Trans* engagements with genre might “on the edge” of subjective and generic perspectives not only theorize gender as the outcome of aesthetic and at the limit of how television has historically processes, but might also treat aesthetic production been structured. The show’s limbic trans* aesthetic as arising from the sensoria of gendered perception. positions us between genders, genres, geographies, Gender becomes a “technology of genre.” To think cultures, and bodies, demonstrating the potential about how genre is like gender, rather than how for contact across boundaries and the trauma of gender is like genre, is a phenomenological turn their enforced confines. The result is an astonishing that transgender studies offers to more traditional exploration of trans* phenomenology as it might be film and media theories. formalized by popular televisual narrative. Resistant conceptualizations of genre lie at the very heart of trans* studies. In her foundational call Laura Horak and Roxanne Samer: Film genre for a new transgender politics in “The Empire Strikes scholar Steve Neale has shown that genres consist

TRANSGENDER MEDIA 79 SENSE8 ROUNDTABLE not only of groups of films, but equally of “specific bigger issue of social, cultural, and geographically- systems of expectation and hypothesis which situated differences and power differentials between spectators bring with them to the cinema.”24 These the sensates (as discussed by micha and Moya expectations allow spectators to quickly understand elsewhere in this roundtable). Sun, Kala, and what is happening, who the characters are, and Capheus are linked by global capital as well as by what is likely to happen. Neale shows that genre their sensate connection—Sun’s firm invests in the categories and generic regimes change over time. pharmaceutical Kala works at, which produces the He argues that genres are “processes”—dominated AIDS drugs that Capheus strives to acquire. What by repetition, but...also marked fundamentally by would it look like for to them to talk about these 25 difference, variation and change.” In light of these routes of global capital and their unequal positions definitions, Cáel’s claim that gender is a “technology in relation to it? What might Sun and Capheus of genre” is quite persuasive. People bring a pre- have to offer beyond martial arts and driving skills, existing set of expectations to their encounters with respectively? While genre is not inherently a cage, other bodies. They mobilize these expectations in the series’ initial repetition of geopolitical generic order to make sense of the signs they encounter clichés is, and we welcome the possibility of a more (e.g. body morphology, clothing, hair, grooming, complex vision of collective resistance. voice). Furthermore, the categories available and how signs fit into them changes over time and How do Sense8’s racial and global politics compare space. This argument reminds us of our clustermate to or intersect with the series’ gender and sexual micha cárdenas’ essay, “Shifting Futures: Digital politics? To what extent and in what ways does Trans of Color Praxis,” in which she argues that the series stereotype or marginalize its characters trans women, much like Janelle Monáe’s alter ego of color? What would a more rigorous version android uprising leader Cindi Mayweather, must of Sense8 provide in terms of thinking through “the modulate their visibility, “shifting their body and human” in relationship to violence and collective 26 appearance as necessary for survival.” resistance? Geneveive and Cáel are also both right to point out how each character’s world evokes micha cárdenas: Sense8 brings me to tears, over distinct genres: Will’s police procedural, Nomi’s and over again. The storyline centered on Nomi hacker thriller, Sun’s Taiwanese martial arts film/ Marks is a rare and important depiction of a trans high finance family melodrama, Lito’s Mexican woman in a lesbian relationship being cared for, telenovela/drug cartel drama, Kala’s Bollywood desired, and having sexual autonomy. Still, the romance, Wolfgang’s Eastern European organized series relies on western colonial conceptions for its crime action/drama, Capheus’ African gangster global imagination, positing the human as unified film, and Riley’s maternal melodrama. We agree by violence. with Genevieve and Cáel that some of the series’ I agree with the Claire Light’s critique that most dynamic or engaging moments come from Sense8 is based on a western liberal colonial concept when these genres meet, mix, and collapse. And yet, we are not as confident as Cáel that the characters will completely break out of their essentializing racial/national cages. While Cáel’s argument that the series crosses genres to create a trans aesthetic that critiques the stereotypes enacted in each separate space is compelling, we would also contend that the series continues to lean into the pleasures of these disparate genres (particularly the kineticism of Sun’s martial arts skills and the emotionality of Nomi Marks’ storyline is a rare and important depiction of a trans Lito’s melodrama). Looking forward, we think it woman in a lesbian relationship being cared for, desired, and hav- would be important to see the series acknowledge ing sexual autonomy. the barriers it keeps up, while also addressing the

80 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. of multiculturalism, centered in white American culture, whose empathy relies on the universality of western values.27 Yet I disagree with Light’s early statement that Lana Wachowski has access to a male perspective as well as her claim that the Wachowskis’ global imagination is novel or unique, as anticolonial, antiracist and women of color feminist movements have theorized a global imagination for decades. A more philosophically rigorous Sense8 might In a time of rampant hypervisible extrajudicial murders of Black delve more deeply into the conflicts among the people at the hands of the police, the Black nurse’s questioning ontologies, ethics and worldviews of a devout of whether Deshawn’s life is worth saving seems especially caustic Hindu woman in Mumbai, an atheist in Berlin and a transgender woman in San Francisco. Further, easy when you can feel nothing.” Yet this too easily studies of empathy by Flanagan and Belman point equates humanness with violence. Sylvia Wynter’s out that in cases where audiences do not already work is important here, to reimagine ethics globally have empathy for another, showing them the details by positing a new praxis of being human, in of another’s suffering may bring them pleasure, solidarity with oppressed groups whom the human not more empathy.28 In contrast, Octavia Butler’s has been defined to exclude and authorize violence 29 Mind of My Mind, published in 1977, portrayed a against. similar telepathic cluster rife with racial and gender conflicts that dealt with similarities to historical Moya Bailey: For all its achievements in trans Black slavery. representation, Sense8 fails at the intersections An additional failure of the show’s efforts at of identity. In rendering Nomi as a real person, creating a global imagination or global ethics is that her Black girlfriend Amanita (Neets) is made it assumes a fixity between race and place which superhuman with no life outside of protecting and reinforces racial nationalisms. Why is the San helping Nomi. While viewers are invited into the Francisco character white and the Kenyan character realities of Nomi’s life as a trans woman, we are Black? Why is the Korean character not in San not made to acknowledge her whiteness nor Neets Francisco or Berlin? A global imagination offers blackness and how that shapes their relationship. opportunities for rethinking geo-body politics in When race is acknowledged in the show it is done ways that Sense8’s imagination fails to. so to support the white characters’ development. My primary concern is the centering of the In the first season, Sense8 police officer Will first season on the white heterosexual romance Gorski saves the life of Deshawn, a young Black between Riley and Will, a police officer. The season gangbanger, to the indifference of Will’s Black culminates with all the characters coming to Riley’s partner and the surprising hostility of a Black head aid, which demonstrates that the characters of color nurse. To establish Will’s character, the writers use and in global south countries are actually simply these two Black characters to question whether supporting stories. The image of all the characters Deshawn’s life is worth saving. “If he lives and he coming to the aid of a Black trans woman in Chicago kills someone, let’s say a cop, how are you going to suffering at the hands of the medical-industrial- feel about that?” the nurse asks, leaving Will and complex and the prison-industrial complex would the audience pondering the nature of his good have been a far more powerful and timely political deed. In a time of rampant hypervisible extrajudicial statement. murders of Black people at the hands of the police, Sense8 raises questions about the meaning of her question seems especially caustic. humanity when Jonas Maliki states, “To reveal the I highlight this scene because it dispatches secret that there is another kind of human, one a thinly veiled racist narrative through a Black whose existence threatens the very fundament of character rather than addressing the structural their reality: no, they’ll never allow that… killing is racism that undergirds the realities of the world.

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Nomi’s hacker past has as much to do with her class the series. and racial privilege as does Will’s ability to go to One particular shortcoming we note in relation Iceland and save cluster member Riley. While we to how racial and global politics fair with gender see various skin tones and cultures represented in and sexual politics in Sense8 is its hierarchically the Sense8 cluster, we are not made to grapple with coded coupling. Building on micha’s observation, those differences as viewers nor are the characters the Christmas Special further reinforces Will made to either. Are we to assume that the sensate and Riley as the narrative center of the series, cluster members are all anti-racist, queer, and trans and their romance as safeguarding the cluster’s positive prior to understanding themselves as well being. Will’s chase and physical union with mentally linked? How powerful would it have been Riley is simultaneously a consummation of their to see the hard conversations that led the cluster budding romance and the cluster’s teamwork. to embrace each other’s unique and intersecting Thereafter, the cluster’s survival is in the hands of identities? the couple’s ability to care for each other as they Aml Ameen, who played Capheus in Season avoid detection. Wolfgang and Kala, meanwhile, 1, left the show amid rumors that he did not want are caught in an intercultural affair predicated on to kiss a man as scripted and that he resented flirtation and forbidden desires. This relationship taking direction from Lana and Lilly Wachowski.30 relies on heteronormative and western prescriptions These allegations were denied by actress Jamie of “culture” as a predominant barrier to establish the Clayton, who plays Nomi.31 Another theory cites stakes of their attraction. Lana Wachowski’s anti-Black racism as Ameen’s The cluster’s queer and transgender characters, motivation, though its relative invisibility says a Lito and Nomi, are the only sensates romantically lot about the fandom, which mirrors the show’s linked to long-time non-cluster partners. While attitude towards race itself.32 refreshingly situated in supportive non-cluster There are missed opportunities in the series that communities, the de-centering of their romantic could be righted through collaboration with writers and sexual narratives from the cluster forecloses any from the different countries explored. While gender opportunities to queer or critically disrupt intra- and sexuality are explored, race as it intersects in all cluster politics of attraction. The resilience of Lito the lives of the cluster remains invisible. The 2016 and Nomi’s romantic relationships signals (to us) an US election reminds me of the power of media uncritical overcompensation in Sense8’s storyline for to shape narratives and stories in such away that queer and trans representations. Sun and Capheus, galvanize people to action, for good or for ill. Sense8 on the other hand, are coupled only in so far as they is an incredible platform and it needs to go beyond are the only sensates without any romantic or sexual a simple diversity model of inclusion and actually partners or narratives. The desexualizing of Sun and illustrate the delicate work of building relationships Capheus reinforces our observation that the writing across intersecting identities. team of Sense8 cannot imagine non-Western characters of color as instigators and occupiers of Lokeilani Kaimana and Raffi Sarkissian: We write their own desires. in coalition with micha and Moya’s assertions of Any differences and potential conflicts Sense8’s failed global imagination and intersections between the sensates or their uneven representation of identity. We know that there is no such thing as a seem to be solved—or silenced—by the series’ neutral media object. Sense8 creators Lana and Lilly signature orgies. Seen one way, these shared Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynsky—three, experiences flatten intersectional connections white US-Americans—are also credited for writing through a dominant erotic aesthetic—slow motion, all the episodes for the first season. As important orgasmic—that connotes perfunctory pleasure as it is to recognize the space the Wachowskis have and partnership. Recalling Moya’s query, are we opened in Hollywood, or Silicon Valley, production to assume that the cluster mates are all anti-racist, as transfeminine auteurs, it is equally imperative to queer, and trans-positive? What if they had to work interrogate the limited intersectionality they have through cross-cultural understandings of gender built into the metaphysical world and characters of and sexuality? How exciting it would be to have

82 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. irreconcilable conflict within the sensates so that sense to those of us who have conducted friendships they might problem solve from across difference. and romantic relationships via Skype and FaceTime. We are requiring that narratives be coalitional—that Much as these video-calling technologies make storylines not be distilled to tokenized appeasement long distance communication more visceral than onscreen, that scenes be written in which characters previous connective technologies by engaging more press up against their varying powers within senses, movement, and the possibility of collective nationalist and global political arenas. We feminist connection, the sensates expand their connectivity trans non-binary queer poc media scholars demand over the course of the first season such that by the that representations be messy. We demand that second season visiting and sharing between all eight the creative team add writers and producers with simultaneously becomes as natural as one-to-one the lived experiences of intersecting identities and connection. This creation of a collective via affective difference. sharing also evokes the way trans youth have used YouTube to share knowledge, author themselves, How does Sense8’s use of cinematography, editing, and create far-flung communities.35 Sense8 suggests and sound design render the connections between these affinities in Episode 2 when it cuts between sensates legible? What are the implications of its members of the cluster while Nomi narrates a construction of “visiting” and “sharing”? In what YouTube video in honor of LGBT Pride. In each ways could the series be said to theorize contemporary case, affect travels across space and time to create media spectatorship, even as it invites new spectators new, hitherto unimagined links between people. through its appeals to affect and eroticism? The connections between sensates also model a corporeal form of spectatorship that the series Laura Horak and Roxanne Samer: Connections invites from its viewers. In a scene in Episode 3 on between sensates take many different forms, and a Mexican film set, the actor Lito asks his director the series exploits the distinctive properties of whether he should play the scene as if his character audiovisual media to convey these psychic and knows that he is going to be betrayed. The director corporeal connections. For most of the first season, responds, forcefully: “The audience doesn’t know. the sensates are located in eight separate places. The audience is with you. They are you. When From these disparate locations, they “visit” one you know, they know.” Sense8, likewise, invites its another in each other’s minds and “share” their viewers to be and be with the characters onscreen, sensations, emotions, and skills. To convey these just as the sensates are and are with each other. This forms of connection, the series cuts back and invitation makes explicit what phenomenological forth between places, within which the actors’ film theorists, including Vivian Sobchack, Laura bodies both substitute for and confront each other. U. Marks, and Jennifer Barker, have been arguing Parallel editing is the show’s dominant form. Tom for decades, namely that spectatorship is not an Gunning has pointed out that parallel editing was intellectual and individualized exercise of a human integral to shifting cinema from the self-contained mind over an object, but a corporeal and even at shots of the “cinema of attractions” to a uniquely times haptic or carnal intersubjective experience cinematic form of narration that asked spectators to make imaginative connections between shots to experience a sense of temporal and/or spatial continuity.33 Gunning connected this cinematic technique to early twentieth century filmgoers’ everyday experience of the annihilation of space and time wrought by new technologies such as the railway, telegraph, and telephone.34 Likewise, the psychic connections that Sense8 presents via parallel editing stand in for and also interact with digital The series gives form to experiences we spectators also have with network technologies that annihilate time and space audiovisual media—feeling as if we are both “here” and “there.” today. The sensates’ “visits” make a certain kind of

TRANSGENDER MEDIA 83 SENSE8 ROUNDTABLE between a human body and a film body as well as the bodies depicted onscreen.36 In moments of “sharing,” as when Sun gets her period and Lito experiences unprecedented cramps and bloating, the sensates often confuse their bodies with each others’. As Lito and Sun see each other in their own mirrors and reach out to touch fingers, the series gives form to experiences we spectators also have with audiovisual media—feeling as if we are both “here” and “there,” being both the subject and object of tactile desire, and opening ourselves, as Sobchack has written, to being “diffusely” and “ambivalently” the characters’ bodies, the film’s body, and our own body.37 This dissolution of the boundaries between flesh is most dramatically visualized in the series’ orgy scenes. As Alexis Lothian points out, these scenes explore “the affective, visceral power” of the series’ depiction of bodily connectivity and refuse to leave the body behind, unlike many earlier digital utopian imaginings. Lothian rightly argues that the absence of three sensates of color (Sun, Kala, and In watching Sense8, we are invited to become entangled in the Capheus) in the series’ first orgy scene (in Episode sensates’ bodies, stories, and struggle, as one Christmas Special 8) “highlight[s] the racial limitations of dominant promotion put it, to “Survive. Together.” queer representation as well as of the white liberal 38 imaginatively joined by the other four sensates and fantasy that we are all the same under the skin.” each other. The series does not reveal what Sun, Kala, The second orgy scene, in the Christmas special, Capheus or Wolfgang are up to in their respective includes all eight sensates. While the series fails to locations in favor of cutting languidly between undo racialized hierarchies and sometimes leans Will and Riley’s dark hideaway apartment, Nomi on stereotypes, these sequences nonetheless point and Amanita’s sun strewn picnic hill, and Lito and toward utopian modes of connection that could Hernando’s club bathroom stall. Each set of eight reach to include the spectator’s own body. The series’ or nine bodies pulsates to Jetta’s remixed cover of second orgy sequence takes place in three locations Ten Years After’s 1971 hit “I’d Love to Change as three couples—Lito/Hernando, Nomi/Amanita, the World,” forming inexplicable compositions and Will/Riley—begin to have sex. They are soon of sensual pleasure reminiscent of Gian Lorenzo Bernini or Antonio Canova sculptures. As Marks has written, such erotic moments in film and video make more apparent the haptic nature of much audiovisual media.39 In this overwhelming orgy scene, in which one body mounts another which mounts another and every hand and mouth seem to find a different partner in each shot, we are not invited to identify with a given figure so much as encouraged to form a bodily relationship to the many, In this scene, in which one body mounts another which mounts an- interlaced bodies on screen. As Barker elaborates other and every hand and mouth seem to find a different partner on Marks, “We don’t ‘master,’ possess, or know the in each shot, we are encouraged to form a bodily relationship to the other (the film) completely in that touch, nor do we many, interlaced bodies on screen. lose ourselves or give ourselves over completely to

84 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. it.”40 In watching Sense8, we do not posses the series of care that come about through delicate negotiations or its globally networked protagonists. Instead, we of difference. Laura and Roxanne cite nuanced are invited to become entangled—intellectually, considerations of difference that the filmmakers emotionally, and erotically—in their bodies, their elide. The show’s philosophy is a valorization of stories, and their struggle, as one Christmas Special unmediated communication, a logical extension promotion put it, to “Survive. Together.” of contemporary social media. Laura and Roxanne make this connection as well. Yet, unlike the Moya Bailey: The Christmas orgy does inspire some empathy across difference seen in Sense8, the world possibility for human relationships but the fact that social media has wrought is one where the President the experience does not become integrated with of the US is an avowed perpetrator of sexual assault all the cluster members makes it seem gratuitous. and an open racist. Following this orgy Kala still thinks of herself as a virgin. Rather than critique virginity as a concept While I admire the Wachowskis’ utopian imagining or draw on the experiences of her fellow sensate of possibilities for intimate connection across lines including Sun, she remains timid and unsure. of race, trans/cis/gender and nationality, perhaps it is While she does finally sleep with her husband, it my own feeling of having been excluded from queer seems to be about proving to herself that she can sexual cultures which precludes me from becoming and deflecting her feelings for Wolfgang. We are entangled with the scene, leaving me questioning not privy to Capheus’ sexuality except through the its believability. In my experience, it is difficult to orgy scene. He and Sun are the only members of unpack the motivations for that exclusion between the cluster without current romantic interests with being trans, mixed race, and mixed class. Further, I their relationships to their parents taking precedent. am unwilling to separate the erotic from the politics I actually enjoy this frame that does not center of prison abolition, so Will’s presence in the scene romantic relationships but it seems that these also interrupts my experience of viewing it. In “The characters are cut short when compared to their Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde describes how fellow cluster members. the erotic can be a ground for global change, if the role of difference in the erotic is acknowledged.41 micha cárdenas: Moya, I agree with your critique As you have pointed out, Moya, sexuality does and appreciate your approach of thinking critically not transcend considerations of race, but is often about the sex in Sense8. Laura and Roxanne make generated from feelings of difference. strong claims about the tactile and embodied experience of viewing Sense8 that I resonate with, Moya Bailey: So true, micha! I appreciate you even while my experience of spectatorship of the highlighting the limits of the show within the group sex scenes differs from what they describe context of our real world. As you state, the show in complex ways. The group sex scenes extend wants to be a window of possibility but doesn’t the philosophy the Wachowskis advance through actually grapple with how messy the path(s) to show, that if people were just more connected, possibility are. Besides being titillating for the such as through telepathy, then they would feel audience, these orgy scenes could do more to push more empathy, or even affection for each other. Yet, notions of care beyond monogamy, familial, or even continuing your thinking Moya, instead of seeing cluster ties. Sense8 wants to show us that possibility, sex as a moment of transcendence that dissolves but that possibility is always some how out of difference, which is how I see it presented in Sense8, frame. I understand sex as a space for utopian possibilities

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Dr. Moya Bailey’s work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. She is an assistant professor in the department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University.

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and Interactive Media Design at the University of Washington Bothell, where she also serves as director the Poetic Operations Collaborative, a design research lab. cárdenas is an artist/theorist who creates media art to reduce violence and increase health. cárdenas was the recipient of the first ever James Tiptree Jr. fellowship, a fellowship to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today.

Laura Horak is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, with a cross-appointment in Women’s & Gender Studies. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014), which won the Society of Cinema & Media Studies Award for Best Edited Collection. She is currently building an online collaborative database of trans and gender variant filmmakers—please email her at [email protected] if you’d like to participate in the project.

Lokeilani Kaimana is a queer Brown non-binary femme scholar, doctoral candidate in radio-television-film at the University of Texas at Austin, and instructor at Michigan State University in the English department. Their research centers femme of color media artists’ praxis, and they believe in wildness and that queerness is not yet here.

Cáel M. Keegan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Liberal Studies at Grand Valley State University. Keegan researches and writes primarily about queer and transgender aesthetics in popular visual cultures. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’ History of California Literature, Studies in Sex and Gender, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, MedieKultur, and Social Alternatives. His book, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Imaging Transgender, will be published in the Contemporary Film Directors Series of the University of Illinois Press.

Geneveive Newman is a recent graduate of the Cinema and Media Studies Master of Arts program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She also completed her Bachelor of Arts in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. As an independent scholar, her work is primarily concerned with embodied viewership experiences; the politics of in-betweenness in cultural production; horror and science fiction cinema; and Irish television, film, and literature. The theoretical foundation for her work is in queer studies, critical race and gender studies, and transnational cinema studies.

Roxanne Samer, PhD, is the 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Scholar/Teaching Fellow in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She has published in Jump Cut, Feminist Media Histories, and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. In Fall 2017, the University of Texas Press will publish Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media, a collection of innovative essays from across the journal Spectator’s history that she edited with William Whittington.

Raffi Sarkissian is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at USC’s Annenberg School and holds an MA in Critical Studies from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. His academic scholarship investigates the politics of representation in popular LGBT media cultures, including film festivals, award shows, television, celebrities, social media, and digital publics. He has published in Spectator and the edited volume, Queer Youth and Media Cultures. Notes 1 Brian Lowry, “TV Review: ‘Sense8,’ Variety (May 27, 2015), http://variety.com/2015/tv/reviews/sense8-wachowskis-netflix- review-1201499916/; Margaret Lyons, “There Is Not a Ton of Sense in Sense8,” Vulture ( June 4, 2015), http://www.vulture. com/2015/06/sense8-review-netflix.html; and David Wiegand, “Wachowskis are up to something strange in ‘Sense 8,’ San Francisco Chronicle ( June 2, 2015), http://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/TV-Sensory-mother-lode-from-the-Wachowskis-6302229.php. 2 Joshua Alston, “Netflix’s Sense8 brings the Wachowskis’ vapid, hypnotic sensibility to TV,” A.V. Club ( June 5, 2015), http://www. avclub.com/review/netflixs-sense8-brings-wachowskis-vapid-hypnotic-s-220360. Alessandra Stanley, writing for The New York Times, made a similar comparative Matrix critique. Alessandra Stanley, “Review: ‘Sense8,’ the Wachowskis’ Netflix Series, Connects Young and Cute,” The New York Times ( June 3, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/arts/television/review-sense8-the- wachowskis-netflix-series-connects-young-and-cute.html. 3 Liz Shannon Miller, “Review: Why ‘Sense8’ Season 1 Is Netflix’s Most Baffling Series Yet,” IndieWire ( June 5, 2015), http://www. indiewire.com/2015/06/review-why-sense8-season-1-is-netflixs-most-baffling-series-yet-61233/. Jules-Pierre Malartre similarly wrote, “Sense8 grabs you, and you get the feeling that you’ll be along for the ride all the way to the end. The main reason for this lies in the creators’ respect of the viewers’ intelligence.” Jules-Pierre Malartre, “Sense8 season 1 review,” Den of Geek ( June 8, 2015),

86 FALL 2017 BAILEY, ET AL. http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/sense8/35693/sense8-season-1-review. 4 Miller, “Review: Why ‘Sense8’ Season 1 Is Netflix’s Most Baffling Series Yet.” 5 Joshua Rothman, “Sympathetic Sci-Fi,” The New Yorker ( July 14, 2015), http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ sympathetic-sci-fi. 6 Miller, “Why ‘Sense8’ Season 1 Is Netflix’s Most Baffling Series Yet,” and Rothman, “Sympathetic Sci-Fi.” 7 In her HRC Visibility Award speech, which also served as her public coming out statement, Lana wrote of her and Lilly’s shared decision after The Matrix to no longer do press: “After The Matrix was released in 1999, we both experienced this alarming contraction of our world and thus our lives. We became acutely aware of the preciousness of anonymity…Anonymity allows you access to civic space, to a form of participation and public life, to an egalitarian invisibility that neither of us was prepared to give up. We told Warner Brothers that we decided we didn’t want to do press anymore.” “Lana Wachowski receives the HRC Visibility Award,” YouTube video, 31:09, posted by the Human Rights Campaign, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c. 8 Tracy Bain, “Second Wachowski filmmaker sibling comes out as trans,” Windy City Times (March 8, 2016), http://www. windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmaker-sibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html. In fact, Lana Wachowski made a similar critique of “transitioning” (as well as a similar concluding gesture to making possible “other worlds previously unimaginable”). “Lana Wachowski receives the HRC Visibility Award.” 9 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 10 Tracy Bain, “Second Wachowski filmmaker sibling comes out as trans,” Windy City Times (March 8, 2016), http://www. windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmaker-sibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html. 11 Raymond Williams, Television, Technology, and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge, 1974). 12 For more on The Matrix as transmedia storytelling, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2006). 13 Sense8 was reportedly the most expensive television series when it premiered in 2015. See Jeff Rindskopf, “The 10 Most Expensive TV Shows of 2015,” TV Cheat Sheet, April 22, 2016, http://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-10-most-expensive-tv-shows- of-2015.html/?a=viewall. 14 Cáel Keegan, “Tongues without Bodies: The Wachowskis’ Sense8,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, No. 3-4 (2016): 605-10. 15 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Similar articulations of queer futurity/potentiality can also be found in: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) and Claire Colebrook, Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction Vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014). 16 Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 2015). 17 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): 141-159. 18 Vivian Sobchack, “Bringing It All Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange,” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987): 175-194. 19 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). 20 Theresa DeLauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1987), 3. 21 Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (Routledge, 1991), 296. 22 Cáel M. Keegan, “Tongues Without Bodies,” 608. 23 Drew McWeeny, “An epic interview with the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer: From ‘Cloud Atlas’ to ‘Jupiter Ascending,’” Hitfix (October 2, 2015), https://staging.hitfix.com/motion-captured/an-epic-interview-with-the-wachowskis-and-tom-tykwer-from- cloud-atlas-to-jupiter-ascending. 24 Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre,” Screen 31, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 46. 25 Neale, “Questions of Genre,” 55-56. 26 micha cárdenas, “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 6 (2015), doi:10.7264/N3WH2N8D. 27 Claire Light, “Sense8 and the Failure of Global Imagination,” thenerdsofcolor ( June 10, 2015). https://thenerdsofcolor. org/2015/06/10/sense8-and-the-failure-of-global-imagination/. 28 Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan, “Designing games to foster empathy,” International Journal of Cognitive Technology 15.1 (2010), 11. 29 Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press), 24-25. 30 Kevin Fitzpatrick, “‘Sense8’ Season 2 Explains Lilly Wachowski, Aml Ameen Exits,” ScreenCrush (May 26, 2016), http:// screencrush.com/sense8-season-2-lilly-wachowski-aml-ameen/. 31 Nellie Andreeva and Mike Fleming, Jr.,“‘Sense8′: Aml Ameen Replaced By Toby Onwumere In Wachowskis’ Netflix Series,” Deadline (April 26, 2016), http://deadline.com/2016/04/sense8-aml-ameen-toby-onwumere-recasting-wachowski-netflix- series-1201744886/. 32 Guest Contributor, “An Open Letter to Trans Communities and Our Co-Conspirators,” The Feminist Wire (April 3, 2015), http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/04/an-open-letter-to-trans-communities-and-our-co-conspirators/. 33 Tom Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32, No. 2 (June 20, 1991), 186. Gunning borrows the phrase “annihilation of space and time” from Stephen Kern. 34 Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone,” 186. 35 Laura Horak, “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, No. 4 (November

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1, 2014): 572–85; and Tobias Raun, Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 36 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 37 Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” Sense of Cinema 5, http:// sensesofcinema.com/2000/conference-special-effects-special-affects/fingers/. 38 Alexis Lothian, “Sense 8 and utopian connectivity,” Science Fiction Film and Television 9, No. 1 (2016), 95. 39 Marks, Touch, 1-22. 40 Barker, The Tactile Eye, 35-36. 41 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” first delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978; republished in Sister Outsider (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53-59.

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