Center for Humanistic Inquiry CHI Salon: "Predatory Spectators and Grand Supremes: TV's Child Beauty Pageants" with Hunter Hargraves

This talk takes up the idiom of the child beauty pageant contestant in television, drawing from (among other things) the 1996 cable news coverage of the death of JonBenét Ramsey and the popular reality series Toddlers & Tiaras (TLC, 2009-2013, 2016). Hargraves will cull from early 20th-century work on the uncanny, cultural studies work on representations of family relations on television, and interventions in film and media theory that frame spectatorship as haptic in order to develop a model of predatory spectatorship that "touch" audiences in affectively uncomfortable ways. He proposes that the 'bad touches' enabled by the formal logic of these programs present them as texts so self-aware of their ability to represent the fantasy of pornography that they interpellate the audience into the role of the sexual predator, both fulfilling and challenging the programs' disciplinary objective to instrumentalize state power.

Childcare will be provided.