Article:

Strategic pleasure: Gendered anger as collective emotion in WANTED

‘Strategic Pleasure’ considers how collective emotions are generated for physically dispersed audiences of television and film narratives. How might viewers who are not co-present come to constitute communities through felt commonality? To answer this question, the essay turns to work on imagined communities and introduces the concept of socioemotionality to describe public emotional experiences encompassing social relations. In particular, the paper looks at the collective emotion of gendered anger in connection with the Australian television serial Wanted. Its deployment of gendered anger enables non-Australian audiences to locate themselves in an otherwise national series.