| Summary: | "In a surveillance culture, the ubiquity of audio-visual recording devices has enabled the unprecedented documentation of private indiscretions, scandalous conversations, and obscene behaviors ranging from the high-profile to the ordinary. From former President Donald J. Trump's lewd banter on the infamous Access Hollywood video and leaked audio of celebrity racist tirades to outburst of violent hate speech posted daily to YouTube, convergence 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. In Caught on Tape, Casey Ryan Kelly addresses why the culture of public revelations has failed to hold the perpetrators accountable. Kelly 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. Drawing from scholarship in rhetoric, media studies, and psychoanalysis, 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 it is we, the spectators who are the ones caught on tape"--
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