Affective Politics in Contemporary Media. Double book launch with Eliza Steinbock, Toni Pape and Sudeep Dasgupta

In contemporary media culture, public discourses run to a considerable degree on feelings. Such feelings, called “affects,” can be mobilised in a variety of ways. This event will focus on the political dimension of affect by a double book launch of new books in Media Studies by Eliza Steinbock and Toni Pape.

This double book launch addresses the role of affect in two areas: Eliza Steinbock will present her work on trans cinema and how it uses affect to foreground the processual character of trans embodiment. How do the different structures of affect from genres like sci-fi (curiosity) and the trick film (surprise) allow for trans cinema to challenge how trans bodies are often portrayed as odd or shocking? Further, what can contemporary trans politics learn from these cinematic experiments with affects? Toni Pape will speak about the use of affect in media to shape our perception of the future: do we think of the future as being full of potential or as dark and full of danger? And what difference does that make for our political culture? Sudeep Dasgupta will moderate the event and reflect on the topicality of both books within queer media studies. This event will also feature short responses to Steinbock’s Shimmering Images from Yasco Horsman and to Pape’s Figures of Time from Judith Keilbach.

About the speakers

Eliza Steinbock is Assistant Professor of Cultural Analysis at Leiden University’s Centre for the Arts in Society, where they are involved in critical diversity issues. Steinbock is trained in cultural analysis (PhD 2011) and investigates visual culture mediums like film, digital media, and photography, with a special focus on dimensions of race, gender and sexuality. Her current book project is the culmination of a NWO Veni grant on contemporary transgender (self) portraiture in the wider field of visual activism, which includes interviews with trans-identified cultural producers based in Toronto, Berlin, Cape Town and Johannesburg. www.elizasteinbock.com

Toni Pape is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Focusing on television and video games, his research addresses the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is the author of the monograph Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemption (Duke University Press, 2019). His current research project “The Aesthetics of Stealth” focuses on practices of disappearance in contemporary media. Parts of this project have appeared in Feminist Media Studies and Critical Studies in Television. Toni is a member of the editorial boards of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and the 3Ecologies book series (Punctum).

Judith Keilbach teaches Television Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University. Her research interests include the transformation of television, television history and theory, the relation of media technology and historiography, archives, animals, aerial images and media events. 

Sudeep Dasgupta teaches at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include the transformations in visual culture as they impinge on questions of perception, experience and representation as well as feminist and queer theory in relation to aesthetics and experience.

Yasco Horsman teaches Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include literature (Kafka, Beckett, Coetzee), cinema (Resnais), graphic novels (Spiegelman, Ware, Clowes), animation (Mickey), drones and flipbooks and he currently focusses on the “funny animal” figure in early animation and comic strips

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