Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.109
Phoebe Chen
This article analyzes the 1986 restoration of the first successful Technicolor II feature film, The Toll of the Sea (1922), which invoked Madame Butterfly tropes and fantasies of Asiatic femininity to amplify its spectacle of chromatic novelty. Restorers worked to reconstitute the film’s two-color scheme and used an antique beam-splitting Technicolor camera to shoot new footage of the narrative’s definitive suicide, which was missing from the recovered negative. By tracing these two constitutive absences—the initial suicide of the figure I call the “yellow woman” and the remade scenes of her death, voided of her corporeal presence—this article takes up restoration and racialization as analogous processes that reproduce material conditions of visibility. I use this restoration’s epistemic investment in certain forms of continuity and completion—technological, aesthetic, temporal—to examine how film archival practices can perpetuate historical ways of knowing circumscribed by racial and colonial common sense.
{"title":"Restoring the Technicolor Ornament","authors":"Phoebe Chen","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.109","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the 1986 restoration of the first successful Technicolor II feature film, The Toll of the Sea (1922), which invoked Madame Butterfly tropes and fantasies of Asiatic femininity to amplify its spectacle of chromatic novelty. Restorers worked to reconstitute the film’s two-color scheme and used an antique beam-splitting Technicolor camera to shoot new footage of the narrative’s definitive suicide, which was missing from the recovered negative. By tracing these two constitutive absences—the initial suicide of the figure I call the “yellow woman” and the remade scenes of her death, voided of her corporeal presence—this article takes up restoration and racialization as analogous processes that reproduce material conditions of visibility. I use this restoration’s epistemic investment in certain forms of continuity and completion—technological, aesthetic, temporal—to examine how film archival practices can perpetuate historical ways of knowing circumscribed by racial and colonial common sense.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946525","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181
Usha Iyer
This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to propose the framework of a pedagogy of reparations that aims to bear witness to and address the epistemic violence enacted by the hegemonic Euro-American film and media studies canon and curriculum. Spanning conceptual interrogations of the relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.
{"title":"A Pedagogy of Reparations","authors":"Usha Iyer","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181","url":null,"abstract":"This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to propose the framework of a pedagogy of reparations that aims to bear witness to and address the epistemic violence enacted by the hegemonic Euro-American film and media studies canon and curriculum. Spanning conceptual interrogations of the relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43123072","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.134
Roopika Risam
This essay examines how “decolonization” has become a buzzword, arguing that its trajectory follows that of “intersectionality,” another term popularized in media spaces and embraced by white leftist activists both in and outside of the academy. I propose that discursive activism online can be understood through two modes: extractive currency and redistributive currency. Exposing extractive media practices, this essay considers how “decolonization” has become commodified and stripped of its connection to the vital work of Indigenous people, transformed into what I call an “extractive currency” that promotes self-styled white “radical” voices at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. Decolonial feminist media theory, I suggest, has a crucial role to play in undoing the power of this extractive currency in favor of a redistributive currency by unveiling the role of media in creating it and, instead, centering models of decolonial feminist activism. This exploration of #MMIW, the social media hashtag drawing attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women, demonstrates how media can be used in tactical ways to transform local activism into transnational phenomena while insisting on the need to attend to the ongoing experience of colonial violence, born from Indigenous dispossession and genocide, that threatens the lives of Indigenous women. In this way, I suggest, decolonial feminist media theory has a crucial role to play in reimagining the economies of media activism.
{"title":"Indigenizing Decolonial Media Theory","authors":"Roopika Risam","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.134","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines how “decolonization” has become a buzzword, arguing that its trajectory follows that of “intersectionality,” another term popularized in media spaces and embraced by white leftist activists both in and outside of the academy. I propose that discursive activism online can be understood through two modes: extractive currency and redistributive currency. Exposing extractive media practices, this essay considers how “decolonization” has become commodified and stripped of its connection to the vital work of Indigenous people, transformed into what I call an “extractive currency” that promotes self-styled white “radical” voices at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. Decolonial feminist media theory, I suggest, has a crucial role to play in undoing the power of this extractive currency in favor of a redistributive currency by unveiling the role of media in creating it and, instead, centering models of decolonial feminist activism. This exploration of #MMIW, the social media hashtag drawing attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women, demonstrates how media can be used in tactical ways to transform local activism into transnational phenomena while insisting on the need to attend to the ongoing experience of colonial violence, born from Indigenous dispossession and genocide, that threatens the lives of Indigenous women. In this way, I suggest, decolonial feminist media theory has a crucial role to play in reimagining the economies of media activism.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46313102","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}
Section 213 of the 1932 Federal Economy Act mandated that if both members of a married couple worked for the federal government, one of them—usually the wife—would be dismissed when cuts were made. The law codified widespread prejudice against employed wives. This article interrogates how Depression-era feminists used their organizational publications to combat Section 213, primarily through sensationalist narratives about family hardship and couples scandalously cohabitating. These narratives were amplified in the mainstream press and in a widely syndicated fictional newspaper serial, which was optioned by Warner Bros. for a movie. That mainstream newspapers picked up feminist narratives illustrates the power of sensationalism at a time when objectivity is believed to have dominated news practices. The feminist campaign complicates that view, demonstrating sensationalism’s value as a persuasive tool and its use in “political mimesis,” with feminists asserting political agency by creating “correspondence” with opponents to raise consciousness.
{"title":"“Some Wonder If Government Is Coming Out against Love”","authors":"Jane Marcellus","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.33","url":null,"abstract":"Section 213 of the 1932 Federal Economy Act mandated that if both members of a married couple worked for the federal government, one of them—usually the wife—would be dismissed when cuts were made. The law codified widespread prejudice against employed wives. This article interrogates how Depression-era feminists used their organizational publications to combat Section 213, primarily through sensationalist narratives about family hardship and couples scandalously cohabitating. These narratives were amplified in the mainstream press and in a widely syndicated fictional newspaper serial, which was optioned by Warner Bros. for a movie. That mainstream newspapers picked up feminist narratives illustrates the power of sensationalism at a time when objectivity is believed to have dominated news practices. The feminist campaign complicates that view, demonstrating sensationalism’s value as a persuasive tool and its use in “political mimesis,” with feminists asserting political agency by creating “correspondence” with opponents to raise consciousness.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946843","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}
First produced as a teleplay for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in 1973, Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade stands at the juncture of art-making and statecraft. The play centers on the Jamaican performance tradition of Jonkonnu, an African-descended carnival practice. Wynter’s state-commissioned plays funded by the now defunct JBC were part of a larger trend in the Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century, a time when governments in the region sponsored theatrical works in order to teach newly minted citizens how to relate to emerging states. These works also reconfigured and centralized the role of Black working-class and poor women in the new national imaginary through characters like Maskarade’s Miss Gatha. Using archival recovery and critical fabulation, I analyze the origins of the 1973 teleplay and subsequent 1983 published script in order to demonstrate the connection between twentieth-century Caribbean statecraft, media, and post-colonial theory (namely Wynter’s theorizations of “Indigenization”).
{"title":"Sylvia Wynter, Maskarade, and Performing the State","authors":"D. Bainbridge","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.75","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.75","url":null,"abstract":"First produced as a teleplay for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in 1973, Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade stands at the juncture of art-making and statecraft. The play centers on the Jamaican performance tradition of Jonkonnu, an African-descended carnival practice. Wynter’s state-commissioned plays funded by the now defunct JBC were part of a larger trend in the Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century, a time when governments in the region sponsored theatrical works in order to teach newly minted citizens how to relate to emerging states. These works also reconfigured and centralized the role of Black working-class and poor women in the new national imaginary through characters like Maskarade’s Miss Gatha. Using archival recovery and critical fabulation, I analyze the origins of the 1973 teleplay and subsequent 1983 published script in order to demonstrate the connection between twentieth-century Caribbean statecraft, media, and post-colonial theory (namely Wynter’s theorizations of “Indigenization”).","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946977","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 revisits 1980s media coverage about the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Using insights from feminist media and affect theory, I examine the widespread perception that both science and journalism failed in their responsibility to report accurately about AIDS. The AIDS crisis intensified deep debates within both fields: about how scientists should translate complicated scientific issues into clear messaging about risk, and how reporters should frame and amplify those messages. Scientists and journalists also had to contend with new pressures from activists, “citizen scientists,” and conservative culture warriors. In battling over what should be reported about AIDS, scientists, journalists, and advocacy groups all accused their opponents of the sins of sensationalism and fearmongering. Revisiting these debates helps us understand today’s challenges around “risk messaging” about COVID-19 and the difficulties of differentiating between “healthy” and “unhealthy” fear.
{"title":"A “Creation of the Media”","authors":"Nancy Tomes","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.85","url":null,"abstract":"This article revisits 1980s media coverage about the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Using insights from feminist media and affect theory, I examine the widespread perception that both science and journalism failed in their responsibility to report accurately about AIDS. The AIDS crisis intensified deep debates within both fields: about how scientists should translate complicated scientific issues into clear messaging about risk, and how reporters should frame and amplify those messages. Scientists and journalists also had to contend with new pressures from activists, “citizen scientists,” and conservative culture warriors. In battling over what should be reported about AIDS, scientists, journalists, and advocacy groups all accused their opponents of the sins of sensationalism and fearmongering. Revisiting these debates helps us understand today’s challenges around “risk messaging” about COVID-19 and the difficulties of differentiating between “healthy” and “unhealthy” fear.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947150","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.115
Mark Williams
This essay will realize an intersectional historiographic approach to the career of Ina Ray Hutton, one of the most important band leaders during the rise and fall of the swing era. Hutton was known as the “blonde bombshell of rhythm,” an appellation that was critical not only to her popular notoriety but also to her success performing a sustained act of racial passing, the full public awareness of which has arrived in a belated and untimely fashion (absent from her obituaries). Although her passing was likely known within certain delimited communities, it was hidden from the larger dominant white culture of the day and from the popular memory of her trans-media audience. This study will focus on the contexts of her work at the beginning of her career, and end with her late career on local and network television as sites that provide new speculative interventions to recognize the significance of this singular performer.
{"title":"Passing for History","authors":"Mark Williams","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.115","url":null,"abstract":"This essay will realize an intersectional historiographic approach to the career of Ina Ray Hutton, one of the most important band leaders during the rise and fall of the swing era. Hutton was known as the “blonde bombshell of rhythm,” an appellation that was critical not only to her popular notoriety but also to her success performing a sustained act of racial passing, the full public awareness of which has arrived in a belated and untimely fashion (absent from her obituaries). Although her passing was likely known within certain delimited communities, it was hidden from the larger dominant white culture of the day and from the popular memory of her trans-media audience. This study will focus on the contexts of her work at the beginning of her career, and end with her late career on local and network television as sites that provide new speculative interventions to recognize the significance of this singular performer.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946236","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.156
Ren Heintz
In 2017, queer Chicanx artist Ken Gonzales-Day put on an elaborate installation, titled Bone-Grass Boy, of glossy photographs, sculpture, mural, and mixed-media all seemingly taking place within the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands. Accompanying the photographs is an old manuscript, also titled Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River, written by Ramoncita Gonzales in 1892. Gonzales-Day’s piece was inspired by a photograph he saw of his ancestor, a gender ambiguous person possibly named Ramoncita. Bone-Grass Boy, I suggest, is a type of speculative and performative archival practice through which Gonzales-Day brings together the erased histories of people of mixed racial, gendered, and sexual identities. I argue that the manipulation of media such as photography and the creation of a speculative archive is a type of queer archival practice that offers Ramoncita a place in history through Gonzales-Day’s queer present. I call this methodology “queer archival autoethnography,” which keeps close eyes on one’s own performative position in the archive, refusing any subject-object divide as well as past-present divide of either privileged or minoritarian archival encounters.
{"title":"Queer Archival Autoethnography in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Bone-Grass Boy","authors":"Ren Heintz","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.156","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, queer Chicanx artist Ken Gonzales-Day put on an elaborate installation, titled Bone-Grass Boy, of glossy photographs, sculpture, mural, and mixed-media all seemingly taking place within the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands. Accompanying the photographs is an old manuscript, also titled Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River, written by Ramoncita Gonzales in 1892. Gonzales-Day’s piece was inspired by a photograph he saw of his ancestor, a gender ambiguous person possibly named Ramoncita. Bone-Grass Boy, I suggest, is a type of speculative and performative archival practice through which Gonzales-Day brings together the erased histories of people of mixed racial, gendered, and sexual identities. I argue that the manipulation of media such as photography and the creation of a speculative archive is a type of queer archival practice that offers Ramoncita a place in history through Gonzales-Day’s queer present. I call this methodology “queer archival autoethnography,” which keeps close eyes on one’s own performative position in the archive, refusing any subject-object divide as well as past-present divide of either privileged or minoritarian archival encounters.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946540","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 focuses on the contemporary visual art practices by Kurdish female artists as strategies of counter-memory. The Kurdish community in Turkey has been facing ongoing violence, with its (cultural) heritage, memory, and archives constantly under threat. In this article, I use the archaeological metaphors of “ruins” and “ruination” by Ann Laura Stoler to examine the destruction, and discuss a selection of contemporary artworks by Kurdish women artists who represent such forces of destruction symbolically to build a counter-archive. Consulting research from other disciplines to explain the colonial dynamics in the region, I trace the decolonial feminist discourse within the Kurdish women’s movement. Finally, I explain how the female body and the city are recurrent themes in these artworks to challenge the colonialist, heteronormative, and nationalistic paradigms. Such artistic expressions of ruination, I argue, animate politics, disturb common sense, and mobilize counter-memory, one that is decolonial and feminist.
本文以当代库尔德女性艺术家的视觉艺术实践作为反记忆策略。土耳其的库尔德社区一直面临着持续的暴力，其（文化）遗产、记忆和档案不断受到威胁。在这篇文章中，我使用Ann Laura Stoler的“废墟”和“毁灭”的考古隐喻来审视这种破坏，并讨论了库尔德女艺术家的当代艺术品选择，她们象征性地代表了这种破坏力量，以建立一个反档案。参考其他学科的研究来解释该地区的殖民动态，我追溯了库尔德妇女运动中的非殖民化女权主义话语。最后，我解释了女性身体和城市是如何在这些艺术品中反复出现的主题，以挑战殖民主义、非规范主义和民族主义范式。我认为，这种毁灭性的艺术表达活跃了政治，扰乱了常识，调动了反记忆，这是一种非殖民化和女权主义的记忆。
{"title":"Ruins, Ruination, and Counter-Memory in Kurdish Women’s Art","authors":"Asli Özgen","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.16","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the contemporary visual art practices by Kurdish female artists as strategies of counter-memory. The Kurdish community in Turkey has been facing ongoing violence, with its (cultural) heritage, memory, and archives constantly under threat. In this article, I use the archaeological metaphors of “ruins” and “ruination” by Ann Laura Stoler to examine the destruction, and discuss a selection of contemporary artworks by Kurdish women artists who represent such forces of destruction symbolically to build a counter-archive. Consulting research from other disciplines to explain the colonial dynamics in the region, I trace the decolonial feminist discourse within the Kurdish women’s movement. Finally, I explain how the female body and the city are recurrent themes in these artworks to challenge the colonialist, heteronormative, and nationalistic paradigms. Such artistic expressions of ruination, I argue, animate politics, disturb common sense, and mobilize counter-memory, one that is decolonial and feminist.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48731011","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}
Awareness of computers and computation rose considerably in the United States between 1939 and 1969. Press attention and public demonstrations showcased early robots and the push-button kitchen as two approachable yet fantastical examples of how computing processes might be applied to social life. Media coverage was hyperbolic and sensational, but also cautiously enthusiastic, skeptical, and sometimes dismissive. Public displays and print media consistently engaged signifiers of white, middle-class womanhood during the multidecade era when computers went from calculating machines to technologies families could begin to imagine in their homes. While much scholarship theorizes sensationalism as affective excess in opposition to the rational, the emergence of computing in this period necessitates a new consideration of sensationalistic media practices. The case of how publics were introduced to early ideas about computers is an opportunity to consider the complexity of sensationalism as a bundle of affects anchored in the iconography of white femininity, a mode I term sensible sensationalism.
{"title":"A Warm Meal and Kisses Too","authors":"S. Murray","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.55","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.55","url":null,"abstract":"Awareness of computers and computation rose considerably in the United States between 1939 and 1969. Press attention and public demonstrations showcased early robots and the push-button kitchen as two approachable yet fantastical examples of how computing processes might be applied to social life. Media coverage was hyperbolic and sensational, but also cautiously enthusiastic, skeptical, and sometimes dismissive. Public displays and print media consistently engaged signifiers of white, middle-class womanhood during the multidecade era when computers went from calculating machines to technologies families could begin to imagine in their homes. While much scholarship theorizes sensationalism as affective excess in opposition to the rational, the emergence of computing in this period necessitates a new consideration of sensationalistic media practices. The case of how publics were introduced to early ideas about computers is an opportunity to consider the complexity of sensationalism as a bundle of affects anchored in the iconography of white femininity, a mode I term sensible sensationalism.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947081","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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