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The Department of Gender Studies will be hosting a public lecture entitled:

Venue: Hall E, M.A. Vassalli Conference Centre - Gateway Building (GWHE)

Date: Wednesday 22 June

Time: 17:00 - 19:00

'The triumphalist arrival of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries of 2016 represents a moment in which US politics has come to resemble, indeed mimic, the expulsive character of the reality aesthetic. Taking The Jerry Springer Show as the starting point for what Deborah Lynn Steinberg and I previously called 'Id TV' (Epstein and Steinberg 2003), I will argue that it heralded a generic shift in reality television, embracing what we termed 'cruelty realism'. The Jerry Springer Show was the first of this new fare of 'reality television' premised on modes of cruelty and humiliation.

Significantly, the show (unlike most of its early contemporaries) continues to be produced and internationally syndicated. Perhaps most importantly, the Springeresque aesthetic has informed multiple genres, from the USA's 24-hour news culture to cross-national modes of 'reality documentary' scurrilously focused on 'street criminals' and the poor, and could be seen in Trump's own version of the, originally British reality show, The Apprentice.

Before addressing the expulsive Id demonstrated by Trump himself and by his followers, I will offer an analysis of Jerry Springer formula focusing on the ways in which speech, space and the emotional universe of the show are organised and exploring the ways in which The Jerry Springer Show draws on and stages Freudian psychic positions. Here I argue that it is through this repertoire, that the show's emotional valences take on a particular currency in a reification of gender, race and particularly class distinction. I then reflect on the ways in which emotional performance, in conjunction with the Springeresque conventions of semaphoric violence, disorganised speech and narrative incompetence consolidate a speech/feeling community bound in 'pact of inequality'. I will then move on to show how, beginning from his own cruelty realist show and arguably earlier in his business dealings, Trump has moved on to the political stage to offer a chimera of democracy that, unlike the Jerry Springer Show's conceit of tolerance, is nakedly aggressive and regressive. Thus both the Trump and Springer phenomena resonate with their fixing of inequalities through broken narrative, clichés of the psyche and their gleefully brutalising affect. Together they represent the inter-permeability of media and materiality.'

The general public is cordially invited to attend this public lecture. For enquiries, please feel free to contact Ms Isabelle Camilleri and Ms Samantha Grima by phone on +356 2340 3956/3808 or by sending an email to isabelle.camilleri@um.edu.mt and samantha.grima@um.edu.mt