Sense8 Roundtable
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.
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