Sense8

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. Although never a mainstream hit, partly because of its reductive labelling as a science-fiction or gay series by some critics and programmers, Sense8 united, inspired and energised a global audience that discovered it had the power to similarly transcend the traditionally passive and purely receptive nature of spectators by campaigning for its successful renewal.

The series' playful but poignant exploration of globalisation, empathy, transnationalism, queer aesthetics, gender fluidity, imagined communities, and communities of sentiment quickly convinced an interdisciplinary range of contributors to this volume that here was a progressive and challenging series that pointed 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.