Infrastructures for media ‘extension’: licensing trade expos and the production of media distribution

Abstract

This article focuses on licensing – the practise of brand ‘extension’ – to investigate global media distribution as it contingently emerges from the infrastructural spaces of professional trade events. Licensing expos are not only aesthetic, legal and financial compounds that ‘produce’ media distribution by coordinating the exchange of economic assets and the provision of adaptations, ancillary goods and ‘scripted experiences’ for global blockbuster films and media franchises. They are also sites where diffuse forms of power circulate within and against the bodies of their attendees through assemblages of data, objects, architectures and repeatable technical standards. Through multi-sited participant observation at these affective infrastructures, the paper argues that the production of media distribution is inseparable from the production of subjectivities – of the professionals that make these events as well as the active audiences whose behaviours they aim at envisioning, preempting and shaping.