Sense8: Transcending Television

This collection explores the many ways in which the Netflix series Sense8 transcends television. As its characters transcend physical and psychological borders of gender and geography, so the series itself transcends those between television, new media platforms and new screen technologies, while dissolving those between its producers, stars, audiences and fans. Sense8united, inspired and energized a global community of fans that realized its own power by means of online interaction and a successful campaign to secure a series finale. The series’ playful but poignant exploration of globalization, empathy, transnationalism, queer and trans aesthetics, gender fluidity, imagined communities and communities of sentiment also inspired the interdisciplinary range of contributors to this volume.

In this collection, leading academics illuminate Sense8 as a progressive and challenging series that points to vital, multifarious, contemporary social, political, aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Sense8: Transcending Television is much more than an academic examination of a series; it is an account and analysis of the way that we all receive, communicate and consider ourselves as participants in global communities that are social, political and cultural, and now both physical and virtual too.

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).