Section 11: Workshop

Seriality Porn

It’s good for more than just reproduction. The most popular seriality of them all shows every trait of commercial continuation but exists neither as narrative nor play. The massive modular hook-up of human bodies and technological media that defines capitalist cultures of seriality is all but unmentionable, by users or scholars, when encountered in its bluntest form. This workshop addresses the exploitations of pleasure and the pleasures of exploitation that are typical of commodified serial storytelling in general (where every ‘again’ is always also a ‘more’) but regularly neglected in their pornographic manifestation. What does it mean that here, as in seriality studies itself, final satisfactions remain ever unlikely?

Chair: Linda Williams (UC Berkeley)

Format: Four 20-minute papers.

Sarah Schaschek (Independent Scholar): Beats of the Body: Why Seriality Studies Should Look Beyond the Analysis of Pornographic Images and Towards the Conceptualization of its Sound

Phyll Smith (University of East Anglia) & Ellen Wright (De Montfort University): Tijuana Bibles and the Pornographic Iteration of Hollywood.

Amy Herzog (CUNY): Desire, Looped: Serial Forms, Living Commodities, and the Starlight Peep Show Films

Madita Oeming (Paderborn): (S)exploiting Television – Porn Parodies of Popular US TV-Series