{"title":"Letters, Queer and Women’s Comix, and Making Community","authors":"Nicholas Sammond","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.57","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.57","url":null,"abstract":"This article charts the role of underground women’s and queer comics in the formation of local communities and liberation movements. It moves beyond an analysis of the comics themselves, considering the role that correspondence—between fans and editors, between artists and editors, between editors and publishers, between fans and artists—plays in crafting community through critical discourse, practical discussion, and commerce. It explores the tension between radical, sometimes anticapitalist organizing and the need of artists, publishers, and bookstore owners to make a living while supporting and being supported by their communities. Finally, it locates a tradition in the comics community of mutual support and encouragement, an “ethics of care,” that not only provided space for different and marginalized voices but saw in the production of comics a means by which to link individual and local struggles to emergent national liberation movements.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139125277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LambdaMOO as Identitopia","authors":"Michele White","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.84","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.84","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139128304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fire in the Hole","authors":"Diana W. Anselmo","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.28","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the letters female fans submitted to Motion Picture Magazine between 1914 and 1918, this article seeks to center negative feelings as a constitutional part of Hollywood reception during the World War I years. Emergent at this time, the language of affective film reception took up a combative tenor reflective of women’s lived experiences: anger, derision, and dissent pervade the first-person writings submitted by self-identified movie-loving “misses” and “girls.” Reading their published correspondence as proto-manifestations of feminist “troublemakers” and “killjoys” helps in historicizing early Hollywood fandom as an “intimate publics” commercially centered on women’s culture, but communally appropriated by female consumers as a means to express antisocial responses.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139127025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital Pleasure and Danger","authors":"Raven Maragh-Lloyd","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.131","url":null,"abstract":"This roundtable discussion features two leading scholars of critical race and digital media, Drs. Brooklyne Gipson and Kishonna Gray. The impacts of pleasure and danger on social network sites and digital media certainly predate these technologies yet are heightened in unique ways by their affordances. Both Gipson and Gray discuss how they center Black feminism, queerness, and intersectionality in their approaches to digital media studies and the conundrum of harm, pleasure, and nuance online. They discuss themes such as storytelling, methods, and play to push the boundaries of the binary and chart a path forward that is neither afraid of nor essentialist about the role of technology in our lives.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139127193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Get out of here you anti”","authors":"Rukmini Pande","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.107","url":null,"abstract":"Pleasure(s) of people of marginalized genders and sexualities are central to media fandom scholarship, making it suitable to analyze as an identitopia. Recently, the figure of the fandom antifan or anti, an individual deemed hostile to fan pleasure, particularly around shipping practices and fanwork production, has gained prominence in fandom discussions. The anti is seen to interrupt media fandom’s identitopia through policing and puritanism. A troubling aspect of this formulation is the consistent identification of fans who are critical of fandom’s negotiation of race/ism, as antis themselves. They are then accused of supporting censorship in the name of social justice. This is a disruption of antifandom models as these fans do not claim a negative stance themselves. This article theorizes this disruption via the fandom killjoy, drawing from in-depth fan interviews and examining related racist incidents in fandom spaces.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139129448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Long Histories of Mediated Community","authors":"Reem Hilu","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.17","url":null,"abstract":"Reem Hilu interviews Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, professor of Communication, and director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Chun discusses her work that historicizes the utopian and dystopian framings of digital media and network technologies, focusing on the nature of community, or its absence, online. Throughout the conversation, Hilu and Chun sought to maintain a dialogue between interpretations of contemporary mediated communities online and longer histories through which media have worked to organize connections and associations.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139129700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Doing “Applied Film History”","authors":"Kate Saccone","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.101","url":null,"abstract":"Kate Saccone interviews Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Eye Filmmuseum’s silent film curator. Rongen-Kaynakçi discusses various aspects of her career and daily work, from archival research and film restoration projects to curating film programs and working with scholars and digital research platforms. Central to this conversation is Rongen-Kaynakçi’s role within the archive in relation to feminist film history and challenging established (patriarchal) film histories.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scenes of Destruction and Beauty","authors":"J. Peterson","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.43","url":null,"abstract":"This essay addresses a surprising convergence of women, cinema, and forest conservation in the 1910s and ’20s. I tell the story of a short nonfiction “woman’s redwood film” produced in 1919 to anchor a larger analysis of women’s shifting roles in the public sphere. Women’s clubs played a prominent role in the early American conservation movement; women were also influential in the silent-era film culture of Humboldt County, California. I show how these two roles came together briefly in the sponsorship of an educational film by the Women’s Save-the-Redwoods League. While the league continued to use nontheatrical film in the 1920s, its women’s auxiliary receded into the background. The marginalization of women in conservation thus bears similarities to the marginalization of women in the film industry as both enterprises became more powerful. Additionally, both cinema and conservation were shaped by the era’s virulent white supremacism, though in different ways.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating a “Feminist Nation”","authors":"Lexington Davis","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.108","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and the 1970s underground press, this article retraces the history of International Videoletters, a feminist video exchange network that operated from 1975 to 1977. Though primarily based in the United States, the network expressed global aspirations to transform the televisual landscape, a goal it shared with other activist video collectives of the era. However, in contrast to many male-led guerrilla television groups, International Videoletters prioritized its independence from broadcast television, structuring its network instead as an autonomous, women-run media system. I argue that by emphasizing the relationship between video producers and viewers through nonhierarchical organizational structures, independent distribution systems, and dynamic feedback sessions, International Videoletters fostered a feminist counterpublic committed to transforming media representation of women. Through analysis of the network’s operations and output, this article asserts the centrality of grassroots feminist media initiatives like International Videoletters to the history of guerrilla television, where they have largely been overlooked.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136372677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Falling: 3 x <i>Girls in Uniform</i>","authors":"Catherine Grant","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.44","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.44","url":null,"abstract":"In this short written reflection on the design and making of “Falling: 3 x Girls in Uniform,” my 2019 videographic study of three film adaptations of Das Mädchen Manuela, I set out to record some thoughts on how and why my video emerged in its particular display form, and why I would describe it, therefore, as having been composed primarily according to a curatorial, rather than expressive or argumentative, logic.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136372680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}