Whereas audience’s engagements with fictional narratives have been intensely discussed, less attention has been paid to the particular emotional involvement evoked by Reality Television where viewers are offered a narrative devoid of empathic sensitivity to the misfortune of others. These non-empathic viewing experiences of emotional dissonance activate broader circuits of social values, judgements, and comparison through a process of devaluation. Departing from social neuroscience and affect studies, the chapter argues that the long-term emotional consequences of these viewing experiences where shame, scorn, and contempt are intertwined might influence viewers’ affective experiences and attitudes towards low-status groups through the brain/body/mind assemblage. 

Social network sites activate our sociality and introduce new patterns of pace for social interaction, new emotional affordances and new forms of group dynamics. As we adjust our social practices and needs in accordance with technological affordances, digital sociality takes place within complex informational and emotional spaces driven by speed and instant feedback. Algorithmic compilations drawn from user behaviours, opinions and preferences are based on emotional imprints formed through interactions with others. Personalized ecosystems of information created in digital media landscapes draw on our deep-rooted need to belong, to be part of a community and to seek recognition from others.

I Känslofyllda rum, beskriver mediaforskaren Anja Hirdman det vardagliga umgänget med medier genom vilka vi möter och upplever andra människor, händelser och omvärlden. Med utgångspunkt i ny forksning kring känslor och kroppar från fält som socialpsykologi, kulturstudier och neurovetenskap ställer författaren frågor om betraktandet av andra: varför vi berörs och hur känslor mellan skärm och tittare överförs. 

In the last decade celebrity gossip magazines targeted at a female audience have emerged in Sweden. With inquisitive attention paid to the detailed, fleshy exposure of female celebrities’ bodies and body parts, they portray what Weber refers to as body-based shame. This article argues that these flesh-images partake in an aesthetic feminine body discourse where the perfect and the imperfect are intrinsically linked with the ordinary and extraordinary paradox surrounding the celebrity persona. Flesh-images rely on their intertextuality. They indicate a loss of value, presenting female celebrities as ordinary by means of corporeal failure. While the exposure of body faults could point to the unattainable ideals of feminine bodily standards, they do so at the cost of reinforcing the implicit recognition of desire, shame and disgust familiar to female experience and looking relations. Hence, within a culture increasingly driven by a technology of extreme extroversion, flesh-images aimed at a female audience make sense through the logic of the revelation discourse that frames celebrity culture, and through the deeply ambivalent affects surrounding female embodiment.

In the wake of the affective turn, emotion and embodiment have emerged as key terms in cultural studies in order to acknowledge the affective dimension of media texts (Gibbs, 2002; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Drawing from the cross-disciplinary field of affect theory, the article examines the writing of desire in Harlequin romances through the delineation of gendered encounters. Against the backdrop of earlier feminist critiques of romance fiction, it argues that Harlequin’s intense focus on corporeal sensations and gazes encompasses a looking relationship that differs significantly from the visual mediation of gender and desire. With its use of an extended literary transvestism, a double narrator perspective, and the appropriation of a female gaze, Harlequin offers readers an affective imaginary space in which the significance of the gendered body is re-made, re-versed, and the male body is stripped of its unique position.

The article examines how mediated shame in the reality show The Luxury Trap where individuals with huge debts are being scolded for ‘their lack of economic self-control’ presents a specific kind of information about class played out as intensities, encounters and experience. Drawing on studies on affective reactivity, it extends the argument of reality TV as a site for classed otherness by examining how discordant affects, such as, non-empathic reactions to others’ emotional experiences, are formed, as well as transformed on the show. The shaming process evolves through different transitory phases: the inducing, internalization and (temporarily) reduction in shame. These sequential phases disclose the reliance on the passionate aspects of shame, that is, participants’ desire to re-enter into the common by freeing oneself from that which carries the mark for exclusion. They also provide the premise for the repetitive power of affect operation intrinsically linking class and shame together, giving body and form to the un-named, to that which drive us towards affective judgements and to the un-making of subjects. 

Världen över säljs medier och medieinnehåll med hjälp av bilder på kvinnor som kroppar att betrakta, diskutera, värdera, njuta av eller att förskräckas inför. I denna globala bild-och medieindustri produceras numer både idealiserade, estetiserade kroppar, och nedvärderande bilder som pekar ut kroppsliga ”brister”. I dessa så kallade chockbilder möter vi samma kropp men i en ”avslöjad” tappning; rynkor som förstör det släta, hela, skelett som hotar tränga igenom huden, eller fett som väller fram och döljer linjer. Detta är bilder som inte bara talar om andras kroppar utan som också talar till betraktarens kropp, där upplevelser av avsmak, fascination och oro kan mötas.  

I detta kapitel diskuteras hur den kroppsliga relationen mellan dessa bilder och betraktare kan förstås, och hur den repetitiva medieringen av kvinnokroppen som yta att bedöma, förstå och känna inför sammanbinder avsmak med det feminina. Genom att uppmärksamma dessa bilders kroppslighet, och de föreställningar om feminin ”kroppsskam” de levererar, visar kapitlet hur den feminina kroppen, både andras och den egna, presenteras som en potentiellt motbjudande yta.