The cultural phenomenon of international superstar and American ex-pat extraordinaire Joséphine Baker’s success in Paris is mediated primarily through its documentation on film transferred to video and digital formats. In many ways, Baker is a media marvel. Meanwhile, much of the engagement with Baker’s legacy, both written and embodied, takes place through well-established rubrics of theater, choreography, fiction, academic criticism, and even citation in poetry, film, and painting almost as though discussing unmediated material. Thus since we experience Baker’s legacy in reproduction, that is, in highly mediated (and ephemeral) digital formats, what would it mean to mine Baker as a repository that could be explored through digital interpretive practices? As Baker’s image endures as image, the video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself reframes Baker as a thinking spectator of her own work.
{"title":"Joséphine Baker Watches Herself","authors":"Terri Francis","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.32","url":null,"abstract":"The cultural phenomenon of international superstar and American ex-pat extraordinaire Joséphine Baker’s success in Paris is mediated primarily through its documentation on film transferred to video and digital formats. In many ways, Baker is a media marvel. Meanwhile, much of the engagement with Baker’s legacy, both written and embodied, takes place through well-established rubrics of theater, choreography, fiction, academic criticism, and even citation in poetry, film, and painting almost as though discussing unmediated material. Thus since we experience Baker’s legacy in reproduction, that is, in highly mediated (and ephemeral) digital formats, what would it mean to mine Baker as a repository that could be explored through digital interpretive practices? As Baker’s image endures as image, the video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself reframes Baker as a thinking spectator of her own work.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136372674","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}
This article investigates the phenomenon of “Hawaiian Fevers” in US popular culture during the Progressive Era. Examining the careers of “hula” celebrities Toots Paka and Doraldina, I examine how both dancers sought to legitimize their appropriations of Hawaiian culture through performances of timelessness and wildness that established iconography of Hawai‘i as an otherworldly territory. The racial masquerade of this performed Hawaiianness eased white identification with embodiments of “going native” while also promising transformational access to a leisure-class paradise. Examining the press rhetoric surrounding both dancers, I consider how cross-race performances of hula instructed American women on how to be adeptly modern postindustrial imperial subjects. In fantasizing Hawai‘i as the restorative otherworld foil of the United States, these celebrities and the hula craze in which they participated reveal how the United States authenticates its own imagination of itself as a modernizing missionary of industrial imperialism.
{"title":"“More Hawaiian Than Hawaii Itself”","authors":"Briand Gentry","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.81","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.81","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the phenomenon of “Hawaiian Fevers” in US popular culture during the Progressive Era. Examining the careers of “hula” celebrities Toots Paka and Doraldina, I examine how both dancers sought to legitimize their appropriations of Hawaiian culture through performances of timelessness and wildness that established iconography of Hawai‘i as an otherworldly territory. The racial masquerade of this performed Hawaiianness eased white identification with embodiments of “going native” while also promising transformational access to a leisure-class paradise. Examining the press rhetoric surrounding both dancers, I consider how cross-race performances of hula instructed American women on how to be adeptly modern postindustrial imperial subjects. In fantasizing Hawai‘i as the restorative otherworld foil of the United States, these celebrities and the hula craze in which they participated reveal how the United States authenticates its own imagination of itself as a modernizing missionary of industrial imperialism.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136372694","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}
Zora Neale Hurston was an author, playwright, anthropologist, and, briefly, a screenwriter. Paramount Pictures hired Hurston in 1941, but there is little documentation of her work for the studio. The brief mentions that exist reveal that Hurston worked on the script for an unproduced musical called Very Hot in Haiti. Yet, information about the unfilmed project is scarce. In this essay, I explore Hurston’s work for Paramount through a speculative approach: I analyze the documents that are known—trade papers, newspapers, production data, and Hurston’s writings—to inform speculation about the unknown, and potentially unknowable, aspects of her experience. In short, I ask: What might Hurston have worked on at Paramount? And what do those possibilities suggest or reveal about Hurston and studio-era Hollywood? The results demonstrate the power of taking a speculative, contextual, deductive approach to analysis of underdocumented historical figures.
{"title":"In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in Hollywood","authors":"Kallan Benjamin","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.53","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.53","url":null,"abstract":"Zora Neale Hurston was an author, playwright, anthropologist, and, briefly, a screenwriter. Paramount Pictures hired Hurston in 1941, but there is little documentation of her work for the studio. The brief mentions that exist reveal that Hurston worked on the script for an unproduced musical called Very Hot in Haiti. Yet, information about the unfilmed project is scarce. In this essay, I explore Hurston’s work for Paramount through a speculative approach: I analyze the documents that are known—trade papers, newspapers, production data, and Hurston’s writings—to inform speculation about the unknown, and potentially unknowable, aspects of her experience. In short, I ask: What might Hurston have worked on at Paramount? And what do those possibilities suggest or reveal about Hurston and studio-era Hollywood? The results demonstrate the power of taking a speculative, contextual, deductive approach to analysis of underdocumented historical figures.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136371285","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.151
Leilani Nishime
Leilani Nishime interviews Vanessa Au and Ellison Sheih, the former and current codirectors of the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. Au and Sheih discuss the mission of the film festival, the process of selecting films, the ideological investments of the festival organizers, and the labor involved in running a festival. Of central importance to the conversation is the relationship between film festivals and the surrounding communities.
{"title":"Creating Community","authors":"Leilani Nishime","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.151","url":null,"abstract":"Leilani Nishime interviews Vanessa Au and Ellison Sheih, the former and current codirectors of the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. Au and Sheih discuss the mission of the film festival, the process of selecting films, the ideological investments of the festival organizers, and the labor involved in running a festival. Of central importance to the conversation is the relationship between film festivals and the surrounding communities.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136371290","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}
This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to distribute clandestine information on hormonal, sartorial, and social self-fashioning and support. This symbiotic relationship with the pornographic allowed information about transfeminity to circulate to individuals with little economic means as well as to reach people who did not have regional or cultural access to the respectable “CD,” “TV,” or “TS” community media of the era. In this way, these magazines formed part of a social safety network: a shadow system of circulating subcultural knowledges within mainstream media in order to survive legal censorship, medical exclusion, and economic abandonment.
{"title":"Solidarity in the Centerfold","authors":"Cassius Adair","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.52","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. While this genre of “transploitation” magazine did reproduce transfeminine bodies as fetish objects, transfeminine individuals themselves also used the adult magazine and bookstore market to distribute clandestine information on hormonal, sartorial, and social self-fashioning and support. This symbiotic relationship with the pornographic allowed information about transfeminity to circulate to individuals with little economic means as well as to reach people who did not have regional or cultural access to the respectable “CD,” “TV,” or “TS” community media of the era. In this way, these magazines formed part of a social safety network: a shadow system of circulating subcultural knowledges within mainstream media in order to survive legal censorship, medical exclusion, and economic abandonment.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42012154","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}
Hải Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hà Nội (1974) captures the traumatic war causalities caused by the US B-52 bombing campaign in December 1972 through the memories of a child witness figure. While the US media typically portrayed Vietnamese children as helpless victims, and mainstream North Vietnamese media portrayed them as heroes, the film presents its child protagonist as both a victim and care agent within her community’s care network. The essay shows that Little Girl foregrounds the caring capability of a wounded community by using care as a structural force and a central aesthetic. I argue that Little Girl produces an aesthetics of care, including visual and sonic motifs to inscribe the tender tone that underscores the images of the damaged city. In this way, the film shows that care has the potential to reframe the narrative of war while avoiding the dominant frozen trope of traumatic memories.
{"title":"Cinema of Care","authors":"Qui-Ha Hoang Nguyen","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.33","url":null,"abstract":"Hải Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hà Nội (1974) captures the traumatic war causalities caused by the US B-52 bombing campaign in December 1972 through the memories of a child witness figure. While the US media typically portrayed Vietnamese children as helpless victims, and mainstream North Vietnamese media portrayed them as heroes, the film presents its child protagonist as both a victim and care agent within her community’s care network. The essay shows that Little Girl foregrounds the caring capability of a wounded community by using care as a structural force and a central aesthetic. I argue that Little Girl produces an aesthetics of care, including visual and sonic motifs to inscribe the tender tone that underscores the images of the damaged city. In this way, the film shows that care has the potential to reframe the narrative of war while avoiding the dominant frozen trope of traumatic memories.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47325261","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}
This essay explores forms of feminist screen media that produce political desires about sexual liberation. I focus on key works, especially from the 1970s, that visualize women’s pleasure in conversation with the language of documentary, that is, on projects committed to matters of truth, agency, education, autonomy, and self-care—terms that began to shape sexual politics in the context of 1970s feminism. Political claims about sex and pleasure exist in a range of nonfiction films from the period, including experimental and realist documentaries, although there is as much to learn from what is clearly absent from the history of women’s documentaries about sexuality. I conclude with rare examples of feminist media projects about sexuality and orgasm that explore the connective tissue between the orgasmically radical as well as the social and the material conditions of women’s lives that affect their access to, and even need for, care and pleasure.
{"title":"Sexuality and Discourses of Care in Feminist Documentary","authors":"Shilyh Warren","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.14","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores forms of feminist screen media that produce political desires about sexual liberation. I focus on key works, especially from the 1970s, that visualize women’s pleasure in conversation with the language of documentary, that is, on projects committed to matters of truth, agency, education, autonomy, and self-care—terms that began to shape sexual politics in the context of 1970s feminism. Political claims about sex and pleasure exist in a range of nonfiction films from the period, including experimental and realist documentaries, although there is as much to learn from what is clearly absent from the history of women’s documentaries about sexuality. I conclude with rare examples of feminist media projects about sexuality and orgasm that explore the connective tissue between the orgasmically radical as well as the social and the material conditions of women’s lives that affect their access to, and even need for, care and pleasure.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49578386","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}
In an understudied cluster of films from the 1920s in Spain that feature the tumultuous lives of female music-hall entertainers, posters, postcards, and magazines not only mirror the shape of windows, doors and thresholds, but also direct the flow of circulating images of women. These portable, paper media immobilize or propel women’s bodies into motion, constituting portals that enable or disrupt fame, security and “happiness.” Rectangular artifacts both don the walls, windows, and cabinets in these films' mise-en-scène, and drive the story, character development, and the production of gender and racial identity. These films show characters interacting with posters, postcards, and magazines in a way that becomes as determining as the gripping plots, enabling women to pivot between stark, atavistic, or impoverished rurality and electrifying urban spaces. In this article, I examine the governing status of paratexts and the female star image in early Spanish film culture by tracing the history of La gitana blanca, a film directed by Ricardo de Baños initially released in 1919 and then reedited and redistributed internationally in 1923. In its opening moments, La gitana blanca offers us a view into how paratexts not only saturated the media ecology of the 1920s but also were “responsible for popular culture’s encounters with countless story worlds.” In the context of Spanish film historiography’s master narratives, in which cultural hierarchies remain tightly enmeshed with gendered and racialized logics, a cross-media perspective proves instrumental in revealing the extent to which film culture mediated the real and fictive lives of women.
{"title":"Paratexts as Portals","authors":"Eva Woods Peiró","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.3.4","url":null,"abstract":"In an understudied cluster of films from the 1920s in Spain that feature the tumultuous lives of female music-hall entertainers, posters, postcards, and magazines not only mirror the shape of windows, doors and thresholds, but also direct the flow of circulating images of women. These portable, paper media immobilize or propel women’s bodies into motion, constituting portals that enable or disrupt fame, security and “happiness.” Rectangular artifacts both don the walls, windows, and cabinets in these films' mise-en-scène, and drive the story, character development, and the production of gender and racial identity. These films show characters interacting with posters, postcards, and magazines in a way that becomes as determining as the gripping plots, enabling women to pivot between stark, atavistic, or impoverished rurality and electrifying urban spaces. In this article, I examine the governing status of paratexts and the female star image in early Spanish film culture by tracing the history of La gitana blanca, a film directed by Ricardo de Baños initially released in 1919 and then reedited and redistributed internationally in 1923. In its opening moments, La gitana blanca offers us a view into how paratexts not only saturated the media ecology of the 1920s but also were “responsible for popular culture’s encounters with countless story worlds.” In the context of Spanish film historiography’s master narratives, in which cultural hierarchies remain tightly enmeshed with gendered and racialized logics, a cross-media perspective proves instrumental in revealing the extent to which film culture mediated the real and fictive lives of women.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66948107","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}
In view of the increasing production and use of data in the course of digitalization, the goal of feminist film historians to increase the visibility of women’s work has taken on a new urgency. Through the production, processing, and dissemination of data, blind spots in a research field such as feminist film history can be maintained or amplified, but also minimized. Access to data as well as the critical reflection on that data is therefore one of the greatest challenges for humanistic scholars today. Against this backdrop, this article discusses how digital data visualization can enhance and transform research on women in early cinema. Presenting a case study on the Women Film Pioneers Explorer, I argue that data visualizations can help us reflect on our own (feminist) film historiographical approaches, epistemological premises, and representative conventions and thus on the “situatedness of knowledges.”
{"title":"The Women Film Pioneers Explorer","authors":"Sarah-Mai Dang","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.76","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.76","url":null,"abstract":"In view of the increasing production and use of data in the course of digitalization, the goal of feminist film historians to increase the visibility of women’s work has taken on a new urgency. Through the production, processing, and dissemination of data, blind spots in a research field such as feminist film history can be maintained or amplified, but also minimized. Access to data as well as the critical reflection on that data is therefore one of the greatest challenges for humanistic scholars today. Against this backdrop, this article discusses how digital data visualization can enhance and transform research on women in early cinema. Presenting a case study on the Women Film Pioneers Explorer, I argue that data visualizations can help us reflect on our own (feminist) film historiographical approaches, epistemological premises, and representative conventions and thus on the “situatedness of knowledges.”","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947188","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}
“Climate Rage: Extractivism and Dispossession in The Olive Tree” is a video essay analyzing the film El Olivo (The Olive Tree, 2016) to explore anger as a response to ecological degradation. The video essay examines the anger of a young, female protagonist in response to the sale of her grandfather’s olive tree within the context of Spain’s ongoing economic and environmental crisis. The essay considers the impacts of environmental violence on human bodies, particularly women and marginalized groups, and emphasizes the interdependence of self and environment. Introducing the term “ecopathy” to refer to the awareness of being embedded in the environment and the range of emotions it evokes, the essay draws from the foundational work of Black feminist authors like Audre Lorde, who study rage as a transformative emotion and applies this methodology to environmental studies, embracing rage’s potential to mobilize communities and challenge the status quo.
{"title":"Climate Rage","authors":"Celia Sainz","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.28","url":null,"abstract":"“Climate Rage: Extractivism and Dispossession in The Olive Tree” is a video essay analyzing the film El Olivo (The Olive Tree, 2016) to explore anger as a response to ecological degradation. The video essay examines the anger of a young, female protagonist in response to the sale of her grandfather’s olive tree within the context of Spain’s ongoing economic and environmental crisis. The essay considers the impacts of environmental violence on human bodies, particularly women and marginalized groups, and emphasizes the interdependence of self and environment. Introducing the term “ecopathy” to refer to the awareness of being embedded in the environment and the range of emotions it evokes, the essay draws from the foundational work of Black feminist authors like Audre Lorde, who study rage as a transformative emotion and applies this methodology to environmental studies, embracing rage’s potential to mobilize communities and challenge the status quo.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136372424","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}
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