During World War II, African American WACs (Women’s Army Corps) served as “motion picture operators,” representing a significant yet overlooked history at the intersection of nontheatrical film studies, African American studies, and women’s studies. This essay explores the success African American WACs experienced at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and the challenging assumptions and beliefs that affected the trajectory of Black women in technical film trades. Although Black women faced both racial and gender-based discrimination, they countered stereotypes by demonstrating technical proficiency as the first documented African American female projectionists in the United States. The neglected history of African American WAC projectionists underscores the need for a broader examination of the relationship between race, gender, and technology.
A License to Project: Black Female Projectionists and “Men’s Work” in the US Women’s Army Corps Available to Purchase
Jasmyn R. Castro is a fifth year PhD student in the Cinema and Media Studies program of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Digital Asset Manager for the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. In 2014, she created the African American Home Movie Archive (AAHMA), an online index of African American home movie collections throughout the United States, in order to aid streamlined access to nontheatrical film collections and encourage the incorporation of these films in interdisciplinary scholarship. Her chapter, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent,” was published as part of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, a volume that reevaluates assumptions about American film culture and race’s place within it. Her research interests include access, archival film studies, Black film and television history, neglected histories, self-documentation, and representation. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the activist origins of Black film and television practitioners during the first half of the twentieth century.
Jasmyn Castro; A License to Project: Black Female Projectionists and “Men’s Work” in the US Women’s Army Corps. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2025; 11 (2): 9–24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2025.11.2.9
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