[ecrea] CfP: The Money Shot Revisited: Changing Dynamics of Media Spectacle, Intensity and Excess

*The Money Shot Revisited: Changing Dynamics of Media Spectacle, 
Intensity and Excess*

*A one-day workshop, Monday 12 June 2017*

**

*Hosted by the Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies 
(CAMEo) and the Media Cultures research cluster, University of Leicester*

*In association with the Department of Gender Studies, Indiana 
University, Bloomington*

**

*Keynote speakers: Laura Grindstaff (University of California, Davis – 
author of /The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk 
Shows/) and Helen Wheatley (University of Warwick – author of 
/Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure/)*

**

*Respondents: Brenda R. Weber (Indiana University, Bloomington) and 
Helen Wood (University of Leicester)*

This workshop will draw together international scholars who are 
considering the phenomenon of ‘the money shot’ across different media 
forms and from different disciplinary perspectives.  In 2002, Laura 
Grindstaff broke new ground by showing how the success of television 
talk shows depended on producers’ ability to push their guests to the 
emotional brink and to the point of release – to get what she called the 
‘money shot’. This was the moment when talk show guests’ ‘raw’ emotional 
responses were captured on screen. Like the orgasmic cum shot of 
pornographic films, the money shot made visible the surrendering of the 
human body to its ‘animal’ emotions; its value and pleasures were 
located in the spectacular breakdown of the civilized self.

Fifteen years later, the economic and cultural contexts for media texts 
and performances have shifted profoundly, and new forms of production 
have enhanced the aesthetic generation of ‘spectacle’. The proliferation 
and mainstreaming of pornographies, the multiplicity of social media 
platforms based on disclosure and sharing, and the ever-extending 
reaches of media technologies into the most intimate zones of human life 
have formed new intensities - potentially reframing the relationship 
between the symbolic and the economic. The money shot is now extensified 
and commonplace, having travelled across reality television, drama, game 
shows, social media feeds, gaming, YouTube vlogs, celebrity interviews, 
paparazzi shots, and even into world politics.

This transdisciplinary symposium will bring together a diversity of 
scholars who are interested in the new affective intensities of 
contemporary culture, and how they are newly remade through spectacle, 
image and excess. Some of the questions it seeks to ask are:

·How is the money shot produced and made manifest across different media 
genres, textual forms and visual cultures?

·How do we understand its relationship to older forms of ‘media spectacle’?

·How does it disrupt or generate new forms of narrative development or 
diegetic relief?

·How have the proliferation of ‘ordinary celebrity’ and social media 
platforms transformed the money shot?

·What are the labour conditions of the money shot - what are the new 
relations of exploitation and care in its production?

·How does the money shot’s ubiquity challenge its efficacy?

·How might audiences be addressed by or asked to participate in its 
production?

·What are the classed, raced and gendered dimensions of the money shot?

·How are inequalities reproduced, spectacularised or subverted through 
moments of mediated emotional excess?

·Does the money shot contain any radical potential for resisting the 
conditions of its production or the social relations it implies?

**

*Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to **(cameo /at/ le.ac.uk)* 
<mailto:(cameo /at/ le.ac.uk)>*by April 21^st . *

Best wishes,

Jilly

*Jilly Boyce Kay*

*Research Associate in Media and Communication*

School of Media, Communication and Sociology

University of Leicester

https://leicester.academia.edu/JillyBoyceKay

Assistant Editor, /European Journal of Cultural Studies/

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