Doing More with Less

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

Editors’ Introduction

Research Article| April 01 2018 Melodrama and Soap Opera Elana Levine Elana Levine Elana Levine is a professor in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke University Press, 2007), coauthor of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012), editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and coeditor of Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Duke University Press, 2007). Her next book, Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History, is under contract with Duke University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 117–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.117 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elana Levine; Melodrama and Soap Opera. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 117–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.117 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: female spectator, melodrama, soap opera, television, woman's film Feminist film and television studies shared a crucial period of development in the late 1970s and early 1980s, taking shape into influential fields and helping to establish central questions for media scholarship that would carry through to the twenty-first century. Laura Mulvey's mid-1970s theorization of male spectatorship revolutionized the field, but left many feminist scholars wondering about female spectatorship, specifically the potential for feminized forms of “visual pleasure,” whether in cinema or other media.1 The result was a turn by feminist thinkers toward two objects: melodrama and soap opera. The work generated amid the Western world's second wave of feminism focused on women's engagement with screen cultures, but in so doing explored conceptions of spectatorship and audiencehood, the relationship between textual analysis and contextual inquiry, and the specificity of film and television as narrative forms and sites for the construction of identity.2 The study of film melodrama preceded... You do not currently have access to this content.

Questioning traditional ideas of hegemonic femininity, queerness and heteronormativity, this article examines Moira Walley-Beckett’sAnne with an E(2017–19, CBC and Netflix) as a means of revisiting queer and female histories in contemporary television. Reinvestigating classicAnne of Green Gables, this series pushes the boundaries of history by modernizing historical ideas about gender, sexuality, class and race in the early twentieth century. Using feminist theory, queer theory and critical cultural studies approaches, this article argues that these coming-of-age narratives of girlhood, bisexuality and femininity interrogate binary notions of past and present, childhood and adulthood, fact and fiction. By blending and blurring literary and fictional histories, this series pushes up against the whiteness and heteronormativity within media culture, drawing attention not only to the absence of people of colour and LGBTQ+ characters within literary and media histories more generally but also to alternative possibilities for more inclusive media representation. In this way, this series is rethinking historical and literary representations of girlhood, (bi)sexuality and feminist empowerment by putting queer people and women at the centre of its storytelling.

Reviewed by: Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer Cait McKinney (bio) Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer. Duke University Press, a Camera Obscura Book. 2022. 304 pages. $107.95 hardcover; $28.95 paperback; also available in e-book. Feminist theory and queer cultures often locate lesbian feminism a bit out of time, a formation that is over(ish) but drags on, affecting present movements. In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer enters this fray with a metaphor about being tongue-tied. Lesbian is a hard word to say, they suggest, both technically—as the transition from the slow, smooth les- to the hard, quick -bian requires a sudden shift in embouchure—and also conceptually, in that some associate the term lesbian with transphobia and white feminism. For Samer, speaking the word lesbian "always feels like molasses," because there is urgency in uttering the word but its lineages are a mouthful. This image is bound up with the author's emphasis on the gendered body, located in time, as what we always think and theorize from.1 The slow, careful being with 1970s lesbian media that unfolds in this book is geared toward a different kind of historiographic opening, which Samer names lesbian potentiality. With this concept, Samer puts forward a new theory of lesbian media history as offering alternative visions of sexual and gendered life, visions that emerge from concrete experiences of lesbian conviviality, including the film screening, video workshop, and fan newsletter. Lesbian documentary and science fiction, they assert, enact worlds without patriarchy, prisons, or binaries that wound. These visions are "potentialities" because they present former [End Page 209] futures that were never realized, that are indeed unrealizable, but that generate ideas scholars and activists committed to liberation "may want to imagine within the ongoing project of forging freer futures."2 Samer emphasizes that potentiality has implications for historiographies of media and of social movements, which are freed from the burden of making something progressive and linear out of the past to revel in historical contingencies as they either resonate onward or don't. "What happened and what did not happen" is as important in Samer's method as "what could have not been but was and what could have been but was not."3 As Samer puts it, sounding a bit weary of trends in media history, "there are historiographical alternatives to simply converting past potentialities into a resource in the service of our imagined future."4 Freed from the burden of being a precedent for feminists and queer people "today," lesbian media in this book are allowed to be expansive, messy. In this process, Samer paints lesbian as a structure of feeling more than an identity category and a capacious concept for which people who might call themselves trans today have always had affinity. Samer builds on the work of Giorgio Agamben to carefully contextualize lesbian potentialities as existing and concrete rather than generic. Unlike related theories such as José Esteban Muñoz's aesthetic focus on queer futurity, potentialities are not abstract or utopian.5 Rather, they emerge from grounded conditions of lesbian feminist collaboration across media, politics, and affective life. Samer finds these lesbian potentialities in counterpublics formed around documentary film and video and science fiction fandoms, each of which take up one-half of the book. In the first two chapters on documentary, Samer begins with a study of film distribution, an under-theorized aspect of 1970s lesbian feminism's cultural infrastructure. Investigating the origins of Women Make Movies and some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Samer frames the traveling film screening as an eventful space where audiences labored to generate, negotiate, and revise meanings between their local contexts and the feminist politics of the films they watched together. Feminist distribution is a culmination of activist-artist labor, technologies and systems, and routines through which audiences are invited to encounter media. Returning to the concreteness of lesbian potentiality, Samer shows how film distribution as a system combines with dialogic consciousness-raising as a practice. This conjuncture happens in and through a political vision of what an end to compulsory heterosexuality...

Research Article| October 01 2019 Détourning Asia/America with Valerie Soe: https://vimeo.com/298057510/b8ac9472e1 Mila Zuo, Mila Zuo Mila Zuo is an assistant professor in the department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include non-Western and Asian American cinemas, star studies, film philosophy, and critical feminist, race, and queer theory. She has published in Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and the volumes Exploiting East Asian Cinemas (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her current book project examines the affective world-making of contemporary Chinese women film stars. Zuo's short film Carnal Orient (2016) premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. Her latest film, Kin, was awarded the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Valerie Soe Valerie Soe Valerie Soe is a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. Since 1986 her experimental videos, installations, and documentaries have won dozens of awards, grants, and commissions, and have been exhibited worldwide at such venues as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the New Museum, New York. She has published extensively in books and journals, including Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, Asian Cinema, and Amerasia Journal. Soe is the author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com (recipient of a 2012 Arts Writers Grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation). Her latest film is Love Boat: Taiwan (2019). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2019) 5 (4): 56–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.4.56 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mila Zuo, Valerie Soe; Détourning Asia/America with Valerie Soe: https://vimeo.com/298057510/b8ac9472e1. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2019; 5 (4): 56–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.4.56 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: Asian American film, feminist film, punk, Situationists, Valerie Soe This combined video interview and visual essay explores the video and film works of Asian American feminist filmmaker Valerie Soe through the concept of détournement, an aesthetics of appropriation, reuse, and remix articulated by Guy Debord and the Situationists.1 Following Debord's observation that “spectacle is not a collection of images” but rather “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” Soe's creative output over the past thirty years deepens and complicates our understanding of the Asian American community's experiences with racism and alienation.2 By recontextualizing popular film and television images, Soe hijacks and reroutes the spectacularization of gendered Asian bodies as mediatized “image-objects” in films like Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re)Educational Videotape (1999), Cynsin: An American Princess (1991), and Snapshot: Six Months of the Korean American Male (2007). Soe's documentary works, including Mixed Blood (1992), The Chinese Gardens (2012), and The Oak Park Story (2010),... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2015 Editor's Introduction Shelley Stamp Shelley Stamp Shelley Stamp is the author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood and Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon and the founding editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal. She is professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she won the Excellence in Teaching Award. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2015) 1 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Shelley Stamp; Editor's Introduction. Feminist Media Histories 1 January 2015; 1 (1): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Feminist scholarship has transformed our understanding of media history over the past three decades. Many of the best new histories of film, radio, television, video, digital technology, and playable media have been written from a feminist perspective or focus on female audiences, consumers, critics, artists, producers, and other makers. And much of the best new feminist media scholarship takes a historical perspective. This work has been propelled and sustained by landmark scholarly organizations in which communities of feminist scholars are fostered and nurtured. Console-ing Passions, mounting its twenty-third conference in 2015 in Dublin, has produced a wholesale rewriting of histories of audio, television, video, games, and new media. Women and the Silent Screen, convening for its eighth international meeting in Pittsburgh in September 2015, similarly has transformed research on early cinema. And in 2016, the Doing Women's Film and Television Conference will meet for a third time in London, bringing... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| April 01 2018 Film Costume Drake Stutesman Drake Stutesman Drake Stutesman is an adjunct professor at New York University, teaching theoretical film costume. She edits the peer-reviewed cinema and media journal Framework. Her work has been published by, among others, the British Film Institute, MoCA L.A., and Bookforum. Recent work includes Hat (Reaktion, forthcoming) and essays on melodrama (Columbia University Press), silent cinema (Rutgers University Press), Japanese film (Film, Fashion & Consumption), the 1960s (Indiana University Press), subjectivity in biography (China Film Press), and costume scholarship (Bloomsbury). She is writing a biography of costume designer Clare West, and a monograph on milliner and couturier Mr. John. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 84–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.84 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Drake Stutesman; Film Costume. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 84–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.84 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: costume, fashion, film Film costume design is a profession that has been dominated by women since the industry's beginning and, although it is an influential cinematic art, it is one of the least recognized. One reason is that although a film costume is a highly constructed garment made, fundamentally, to support the narrative, it is often, in culture and in scholarship, blurred with fashion (as branding or shopping versus creative design) and typically referred to as “fashion in film.” That these separate skills need to be redefined makes film costume a compelling, even frontier subject for feminist scholars, and in the last fifteen or so years it has gained greater status as more information emerges about how women influenced cinema. Cinema's roots lie with the nineteenth-century stage giants. Costume, in this world, was important and openly discussed as a performance tool until the early 1900s.1 In 1906 fashion writer Eliza Davis Aria... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| April 01 2018 Media Policy and Governance Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer is a professor of communication at Tulane University. Her latest book, Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy (2017), is available for free as an open-access download via the University of California Press and Luminos Press: https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.25/. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Vicki Mayer; Media Policy and Governance. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 113–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.113 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: feminist history, media governance, media law, media policy Given feminism's explicit remit over gender politics, it would be easy to point to every feminist media scholar of the past century as having an implicit standpoint toward media politics, whether it be around issues of representation, institutional dynamics, or uses and interactions. Yet a genealogy of feminist scholars who explicitly address media law and policy—the study of media and governance—well, that's a rarer breed. The governance guys tend to flock together, flapping their white papers and cooing in the strange undertones of technocratic discourses. Women who historically distinguished themselves in the field tended to fly alongside, and were not feminist per se in their scholarship. Which raises the question, What are feminist studies of media governance? Surely among the normative theories of the liberal state, civil society, information, and the public sphere, there have been approaches that debunk the universal subject while attending to gender as one of the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| April 01 2018 Masculinity Studies Kishonna L. Gray Kishonna L. Gray Kishonna L. Gray is an assistant professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her work broadly intersects identity and new media, with a particular focus on gaming. She is working on a monograph tentatively titled On Being Black and … The Journey to Intersectionality in Digital Gaming Culture, currently under contract with Louisiana State University Press. Follow her on Twitter @KishonnaGray. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kishonna L. Gray; Masculinity Studies. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 107–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.107 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: feminism, hegemony, masculinity, media, narrative One of the significant contributions of feminist theory is the critical examination of masculinity and heterosexual oppression. For example, lesbian and radical feminists examine women's subordination to men in a heterosexual hierarchy and highlight the problem of male domination over women in challenging the institution of heterosexuality.1 From this perspective, male domination over women is the fundamental problem and the fundamental injustice within the system of heterosexuality, and a particular focus is placed on men as being core arbiters of this structure. Recent work in masculinity studies has criticized this essentialist thinking, arguing that masculinity takes on a multiplicity of forms and arises out of social interaction, not biology, and focuses on the role of marginalized groups in perpetuating oppression.2 This focus moves the discussion of masculinity and heterosexuality from unspoken and accepted assumptions to the social arena, where the gender order is fluid, and where masculinity is,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Histories of digital social media and identitopias should address references in the 1990s and more recently to LambdaMOO—a multiuser setting where characters and synchronous experiences are rendered by texts. Chronicles about LambdaMOO are often linked to the rape of a female and nonbinary character and Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace” reportage from 1993. In this article, I address the implications of how Dibbell’s text is widely cited, attracted many individuals to LambdaMOO, and is associated with reshaping the site. I cite the pleasure and danger and rape literature and perform a feminist analysis of writing about LambdaMOO. I argue that we need to interrogate how LambdaMOO, including character attributes, community, and governance, are tied to online rapes. LambdaMOO functions as an identitopia, which can be defined as a system that foregrounds and combines identity explorations, liberatory and regulatory community experiences, celebrations and critiques of the site, and violence.

This presidential address challenges IR scholars to reflect on their scholarly responsibility in what some have termed a new age of empire and in which critics of US foreign policy—academics and otherwise—are increasingly under attack. Using the metaphor of frontlines and sidelines, the question is raised as to whether we can or should engage directly in the policy world or remain at a critical distance from it. This essay focuses on some ways in which feminist scholarship is responding to these questions and challenges. Claiming that knowledge and practice cannot be separated, feminists argue that the foundations of modern knowledge, built during an earlier age of empire, are implicated, often unconsciously, in the ways in which scholars and policymakers construct and respond to global events today. The divisive gendered dimensions of the clash of civilizations and the gendered workings of the global economy and the way we analyze it are presented to illustrate this claim. The essay presents some feminist reformulations that could contribute to more inclusionary theory and practice.

What does it mean to critically engage with the AI art through a feminist lens – and how can such engagement help reveal and resist the power structures encoded in its systems? This paper argues that AI systems are not only a cultural product but also a symptom of broader sociotechnical infrastructures marked by gendered exclusion, epistemic injustice, and hidden labor. The central thesis is that feminist critique is essential to unpacking how AI systems reproduce marginalization under the guise of objectivity and innovation. Drawing on feminist scholarship and critical media history, the paper situates the AI art within a broader lineage of feminist engagement with technology, from cyberfeminist net art to contemporary AI art, and within the emerging scholarly discourse on feminist AI. Methodologically, it combines historical analysis, theoretical synthesis, and qualitative case study interpretation. The analysis frames selected feminist AI artworks through both media-historical context and the perspectives articulated by the artists themselves. Through the analysis of selected feminist AI artworks, it demonstrates how these practices challenge dominant narratives of neutrality and progress. Rather than seeking inclusion within flawed systems, the feminist AI art reimagines technological infrastructures around care, accountability, and alternative ways of knowing. These interventions resist the abstraction and erasure that characterize much of mainstream AI, offering epistemological and aesthetic strategies that confront and reconfigure power relations in digital culture.

> “The very concept of feminist emancipation harbors an implicit ecology.” > > —Claire Colebrook, Sex after Life , 20141 Feminism has contributed much to the discourses of environmentalism. But as we come to understand and face the climate crisis in this critical moment, it is time for new voices and new paradigms to emerge in feminist scholarship on the environment. As this special issue demonstrates, feminist media history can be particularly salient to current debates in the environmental humanities. The essays collected here present a set of materially grounded case studies on the role of women in historical representations of the environment, the gendering of nature, and the history of feminist interventions in environmental media. Feminism, media studies, and history are each vast categories, but what joins them together here is the concept of the environment. For the purposes of this special issue, I define “environment” in the broadest possible terms to mean the habitat and matter that surround us on our planet—atmosphere, landforms, oceans, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks, weather—along with the human and nonhuman lives that they support: animals, plants, microorganisms, ecosystems, and so forth. Although “environment” is conventionally understood as a synonym for “nature,” I include the built environment—that which has been made by humans—in my definition. Likewise, I invoke feminism in the most inclusive terms …

Introduction