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Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials

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Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Volume 28 Affect Article 5 12-2019 Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials Blake K. Beaver Duke University DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.28.01 Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Beaver, Blake K. (2019) "Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials," disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 28 , Article 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.28.01 Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol28/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Social Theory at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials This article develops a theory of sadness pornographies in contemporary feel-sad television. Under the sad porn category, the essay explores a key sub-genre in contemporary serial dramas: trauma porn. The article is anchored in an affective analysis of two contemporary serials: Amazon's Transparent and NBC's This Is Us, both of which center multigenerational, familial trauma. Through a combined Berlantian and Spinozist optic, the essay attends to various episodes from the two serials to illuminate the phenomenon of trauma porn in current feel-sad media. In this reading, the essay considers how Spinoza's understandings of the temporality of affect relate to the particular temporalities of traumatic TV in its streaming and broadcast formats. In the analytic process, the article constructs a speculative spectator, who craves feel-sad media to affectively self-reproduce - to emotionally endure - in the face of current workspaces' managed non-catharsis. The essay concludes with a theory of sad-joy, framed by Spinoza's affective schema, to dramatize a singularly contemporary mode of purgation, one which succeeds classical and modern theories of cathartic tragedy. Bl~ke Karsten Beave: is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. H1s. research spans f1ln: and media studies, affect theory, feminism, and queer theory. His current proJect explores questions of emotional realism, ecstatic affect, and feminist politics in the contemporary docusoap. Contact: [email protected] © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creativ,e Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https:/ I creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ 4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author(s) and the publication source are credited. article's founding observation televisual mediation that creates "affective states that sadness pornography constitutes a expectations" of joyful sadness (2008, 4). As we vital genre of contemporary media production will see in a discussion of representative serials' and consumption. Urban Dictionary user relation to the contemporary emotive spectator, Brendogfox describes sad porn as media "that the sad porn genre "brackets structural and exists for the sole purpose of historical antagonism" by providing spaces of making people feel deep sadness. Usually there affective intensity closely interlinked with the is no sexual theme, yet like regular porn, some saturated yet administered affects of people seem to get off on it" (2016). Sad porn contemporary labor, affects upon which constellates a network of exemplary sub-genres, businesses capitalize at the same time as they each of which are defined and circumscribed by prohibit a threshold of cathartic intensity, sorrowful affects. Prominent examples include whether in the corporate workspace, the retail disability, inspiration, and as we will observe store, or sites of gig-economic production. The most closely, trauma porn. sad porn genre generates viewers' desirous The pornography in sad porn designates attachments to feeling powerful through feeling an ironic tone. Oxford English Dictionary defines disempowered. Moreover, sad porn manages pornography as "the explicit description or moods of political powerlessness in the exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in governed non-catharsis of contemporary labor literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner environments. intended to stimulate erotic rather than In heavily invoking the concept of aesthetic feelings." Although sad porn does not genre, I aim to do justice to sad porn's necessarily represent the sexual, it does require moving-image genealogy. Regarding the from the spectator an erotic attachment to sad-pornographic serial's televisual lineage, we unhappy depressive, solemn, and/ or mournful should look to Michael Z. Newman and Elana viewing affects. I describe these attachments as Levine (2012), who trace the contemporary erotic because they mediate a relation of passion primetime serial drama, perhaps the most and amorousness (rather than one of genital lauded mode of television programming in the and other erogenous pleasures) in/ to the convergent era, back to its primary 1 emotional labors of televisual consumption. In serial-narrative predecessor: the daytime soap this way, the metaphoric nature of pornography opera. For Newman and Levine, soap operas' in "sad porn" figures a desirous drive for sad vanguard approach to "long-form, novelistic media similar to traditional pornography's storytelling" is both co-opted and erased in erotic force, while maintaining the full sincerity legitimating discourses that inform the of sadness. Said another way, the descriptor sad cinematization of contemporary, high-culture porn may be tongue-in-cheek, but the actual television. Moreover, for Newman and Levine, emotional turbulences of its viewership - sad the legitimation of current serials at the expense porn - represent genuine sorrow. Sadness of soap operas' denigration poses anti-feminist pornography as a genre marks an erotic and anti-feminine consequences (82). One attachment to feelings of sadness when viewing strategy for distancing serial dramas from their contemporary television. soap operatic precursors is to manage seriality's In imagining sadness pornography as a temporality. As soap operas are historically genre, I think with Lauren Berlant's revaluation associated with non-endings, narrative gaps, of the term. With Berlant, I argue for sad porn and the modes of feminine fantasy that the 2 as an overarching "aesthetic structure" across "forbidden gap" and "illicit non-ending entail, 1 Thus, I distinguish between the sexual and the 2 For a discussion of the relationship between soaps' erotic, here, based on the latter's associations with narrative form and feminine political aesthetics, see passion and love. Martha Nochimson (1992), No End to Her: Soap Opera primetime serials impose endings "to keep that parallel meta-genre, one seriality and its associations with feminized sub-genres like disability, inspiration, and excess from overrunning the narrative" (92). trauma porn in its pleasurably sad Newman and Levine's generalization, however, representational and spectatorial strategies. As may not prove so simple. Exemplary primetime a "problem-solving cultural form," what I and streaming serial dramas in the current would term melo-porn or porno-drama in moment nurture the feminized and affectively Williams's analysis alerts us to the unique social charged never-ending-ness of soaps in what we and political-economic complications that will observe as their multi-generationally sadness pornography aims to disentangle: traumatic and temporally layered narratives. In namely, a situation of affectively suffused yet the case of Transparent and This Is Us, the non-cathartic labor in the workspace. This "forbidden gap" of trauma sustains seriality emotional labor in the workplace then and the political-narrative potential such implicates scenes of spectatorial emotion seriality awards. management in pornographic weeping at home As part of a filmic lineage, sadness or on mobile devices, with each viewing pornography's soap operatic roots reach back situation mediated by various televisual and/ or even further to a cinematic forebearer: the digital representations and technologies. melodramatic "weepie." Linda Williams (1991) Under the sad porn meta-genre, I wish predicts sadness pornography and sad-joy in to explore a key sub-structure of aesthetic her articulation of the affiliation between expectation. In television, across broadcast and pornography and melodrama as digital channels, sadness pornography emerges interpenetrating, excessive, gross, and in serial dramas, particularly centered around sensational genres. In Williams's argument, the the (ab)normal family, through what I and relationship between pornography and others call trauma porn. I anchor this article in melodrama is complex. Pornography and an affective analysis of two contemporary melodrama share an excessive and sensational serials, Amazon's Transparent and NBC's This Is status in their imaging of gratuitous sex and Us, both of which represent multigenerational, emotion; in their treatment of "the spectacle of a familial trauma. I read various episodes from body caught in the grip of intense sensation or the two serials to illuminate the phenomenon of emotion"; and in their emphasis
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