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

Within existential phenomenology, both seriality and style have been drawn on to theorise 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 socio-material environment. In this paper, my aim is to make explicit the constitutive relationship between style and seriality for the sake of theorising oppressive forms of normalisation. Focusing on the embodiment and perception of gendered and racialised categories, I argue that style and seriality are co-generative, as the various series to which we belong elicit certain styles, and that these habituated styles function to further serialise us. I illustrate this constitutive entanglement by discussing cases of racist and transphobic treatment of athletes who deviate from norms of white femininity.