Seriality and style: The embodiment, perception, and normalization of collectives

Abstract Within existential phenomenology, both seriality and style have been drawn on to theorize the embodiment and perceptibility of (social) ontological differences. While style refers to how we encounter the world and others not in the abstract, but as immediately and intuitively meaningful, seriality is a form of collective being that pertains to our being similarly constrained and enabled by the material environment. In this article, my aim is to make explicit the constitutive relationship between style and seriality for the sake of theorizing oppressive forms of normalization. Focusing on the embodiment and perception of gendered and racialized categories, I argue that style and seriality are cogenerative, as the various series to which we belong elicit certain styles, and that these habituated styles function to further serialize us. I illustrate this constitutive entanglement by discussing the recent racist and transphobic treatment of athletes who deviate from norms of white femininity.