"I am also a we". A Multimodal Stylistic Reading of Posthuman Subjectivity in "Sense8"

This article investigates the stylistic and multimodal strategies through which "Sense8" (2015-2018) represents posthuman bodies and subjectivity. The series builds its narrative around shared physical and emotional experience, staging eight geographically scattered characters who discover their psychic and sensorial connection as members of a different human clade. Drawing on the hybrid methodological framework of Multimodal Stylistics (Nørgaard 2010; 2019), the study analyses a corpus comprising the series’ twenty-four episodes. On a verbal level, the analysis foregrounds deictic choices as the primary stylistic resource through which Sense8 destabilises the humanist assumption of a singular, bounded subject. On a multimodal level, visual mechanisms of gaze, salience, and framing are examined alongside the series’ deployment of music, which functions not as soundtrack, but as a joining force of affective and sensorial synchronisation. Findings are discussed through van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network for the discursive representation of agency, and Balirano’s (2017) multimodal prosody, which accounts for the intermodal rhythms and patterns that prime audiences for collective attunement and social change. Taken together, the analyses present "Sense8"’s intersectional and posthuman vision of humanity as discursively and multimodally performed through language, image, and music, proposing that the series proposes a relationality that exceed the boundaries of the screen and remain available and necessary in the real present.