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Feel-Sad Tv: Sadness Pornography In Contemporary Serials, Blake K. Beaver

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article develops a theory of sadness pornographies in contemporary feel-sad television. Under the sad porn category, the essay explores a key sub-genre in contemporary serial dramas: trauma porn. The article is anchored in an affective analysis of two contemporary serials: Amazon's Transparent and NBC's This Is Us, both of which center multigenerational, familial trauma. Through a combined Berlantian and Spinozist optic, the essay attends to various episodes from the two serials to illuminate the phenomenon of trauma porn in current feel-sad media. In this reading, the essay considers how Spinoza's understandings of the temporality of affect relate to the …