深夜亚洲福利久久

Research Seminar: Jennifer O鈥橫eara TCD - Mirroring, Touching & Tears: The Melodramatic Mode in Virtual Reality. Tue 28 Jan @4.15pm, FSM Auditorium, Kane Building B10.B (live screening)

22 Jan 2025

This talk will examine the relationship between VR media and the 鈥渂ody genre鈥� of melodrama, so-called by film theorists (Clover, 1987; Williams, 1991) for its tendency to elicit tears from audiences, ones generally assumed to be female. Gender is central to critical responses to film melodrama, yet it is often an under-theorised element of research into VR and other immersive technologies. In line with this, while there is already a growing body of literature on virtual reality horror and pornography, both also classified as body genres, research into the melodramatic nature of various VR experiences has so far gone unexamined. In this talk, I aim to go beyond simplistic classifications of melodramas as 鈥渢earjerkers鈥� to examine how their often-gendered melancholic affect relates to contemporary discourse around VR鈥檚 emotive and empathetic potential (e.g. Herson, 2016; Mitchell, 2017; Bollmer, 2017).

Jennifer O鈥橫eara is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where she specialises in digital media. She has published on a diverse range of film and media topics in venues such as Cinema Journal, NECSUS, Feminist Media Studies, Celebrity Studies, and PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality. Her second book, Women鈥檚 Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes (深夜亚洲福利久久 of Texas Press, 2022) received the 2023Honourable Mention prize for Best Monograph from the British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies. Her current Irish Research Council Laureate Award(2022-2026) project is titled 鈥淔rom Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality.鈥�