Transnational Media Cultures

Abstract

The field of transnational feminist media cultures emerges from the intersection of three key analytical realms: the geopolitical site, a feminist orientation, and media technologies and cultures. Each of these realms originally derives from a specific discipline and its reinvention. The geopolitical site stems from area studies and its de-insularization under the pressure of globalization theory. The feminist orientation bespeaks a desire for gender and sexuality equality that has drastically reconfigured sociopolitical theories. Media technologies and cultures have been undergoing major transformations since the turn of the twentieth century, resulting in a highly dynamic field that embraces proliferating and interacting media studied through an array of historical, theoretical, and sociopolitical lenses. What brings these three analytical realms together is their shared transnational and poly-local drive, which is borne out in their historical genesis, and is only accelerating in the current era of expanding globalization characterized by five “scapes” of border-crossing flows—ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes—as theorized by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.1 As a film scholar committed to exploring the border-crossing movements, translations, and transpositions of film technologies, cultures, and workers, while paying special attention to women's contributions as makers, performers, users, consumers, prosumers, historians, and critics, I find my intellectual home in transnational feminist media …