Book Launch - Casey Ryan Kelly - Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Thursday, Oct 26, 2023  5:30pm - 6:30pm

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Arts

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Join us on Thursday, October 26th as we welcome author Dr. Casey Ryan Kelly!
He will be presenting his new book "Caught on Tape"!

About the Book:
In a surveillance culture, the ubiquity of audio-visual recording devices has enabled the unprecedented documentation of private indiscretions, scandalous conversations, and obscene behaviors performed by both ordinary and high-profile people. From former President Donald J. Trump's lewd banter on the infamous Access Hollywood video and leaked audio of celebrity racist tirades to outbursts of violent hate speech posted daily to YouTube, contemporary media culture is awash in obscene performances of transgressive white masculinity. Such exposés are screened and viewed under the assumption that revealing secret prejudices will necessarily realize the promises of democracy and bring about a postracial and postfeminist future. This book addresses why the culture of public revelations has failed to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Caught on Tape illustrates how public revelations constitute a symbolic and imaginary world for the public that is preoccupied with the obscene enjoyment of transgressive white masculinity: a compulsively repetitive experience of ecstatic and excessive pleasure-in-pain that arises from encounters with that which disturbs, traumatizes, and interrupts illusory notions of our coherent selves and reality. Caught on Tape argues that addressing race and gender inequality with the promise of scandalous hot mics and obscene private videos transforms antiracism and gender justice into disempowering forms of spectatorship that ultimately conceal the structural nature of whiteness, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The central argument of this book is that the spectators are the ones really caught on tape.”

About the Author:
Dr. Casey Ryan Kelly (he/him), Professor, Rhetoric and Public Culture & Director of Graduate Studies, is a rhetorical theorist and critic who investigates the relationship between white masculinity, extremist politics, and networked media culture. Dr. Kelly’s scholarship is primarily guided by theories of cultural psychoanalysis, whiteness, and Afropessimism. He is the author of Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment (Oxford University Press) (and) is currently completing a co-authored book (with Dr. William Sipe) entitled Manifesting Violence that examines the rhetoric of mass shooters and conspiracy theories of racial replacement (University of Alabama Press). His next book project, tentatively titled Swoll: The Body Rhetorics of the Far Right, examines the muscle-bound fantasies and fitness anxieties that underwrite white nationalism in the U.S. Dr. Kelly is the recipient of numerous awards from the National Communication Association, including the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award and the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression.