Sense8

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 González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (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 Buñuel (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.

• List of figuresList of contributorsIntroduction: A Sense8 of BelongingDeborah Shaw and Rob Stone1. What’s Going On?: Netflix and the Commissioning of Sense8Amanda Lotz2. You Are No Longer Just You: Netflix, Sense8 and the Evolution of TelevisionZoë Shacklock3. Skip Intro?: Sense8’s Title SequenceJames Walters4. The Sense8 Bible: The Creation of a New Creed for Our TimesDeborah Shaw5. What's Queer about a Cluster?: Sense8’s Polycentric ImaginaryRosalind Galt6. Between Necropower and Erotopolitics: Community and Clusterfuck as Alloerotic DistractionJohn Lessard7. Sing a Song of Sense8: Musicality, Multiplicity and SynchronicityRob Stone8. Sense8 and The City: Frontier CosmopolitanismLuis Freijo9. The Common Good: Birth, Death and Self-sacrifice in/ofSense8 Will McKeown10. Dancing in the Streets: The Politics of Sense8’s Pleasure ActivismSo Mayer11. #WeAreTheGlobalCluster: Affectivity, Resistance and Sense8 FandomRox Samer and Laura Horak12. Revisiting the ClusterCáel M. KeeganIndex