Featuring....BAD SPECTATORS (SCMS 2022)

Kick your SCMS 2022 off early with Panel A2, organized by SIG mainstay Maggie Hennefeld! Here's a preview from Maggie herself:

BAD SPECTATORS

In the Covid-era of incessant Zoom meetings and on-again / off-again webcams, it would be difficult to avoid identifying oneself as a bad media spectator. This panel brings the current zeitgeist of laughably bad spectatorship to bear on the interdisciplinary field of comedy AND film & media studies. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Maggie Hennefeld, Jean Ma, and James Leo Cahill will all model and theorize bad spectatorship, spanning questions of pleasure, enjoyment, attention, escapism, affect, technology, and aural disturbance: laughing, snoring, barking, yawning, hiccupping, and day-dreaming. Comedy studies has always been concerned with the physical life of "laughing spectators" and their relation to the gender, race, and power politics of funny representation. We draw on the field's crucial body of work to stage an ultimate reckoning between media studies and the rise of bad spectators.