The Korean War (1950–53) changed the material and affective landscape of the Korean peninsula and ushered in a new era ruled by a military dictatorship dependent on US military power. With bases dotting the South Korean peninsula, former agricultural villages became camptowns that catered to the needs of American soldiers. This article focuses on the South Korean melodrama Chiokhwa ( Hellflower , 1958), directed by Shin Sang-ok, which narrates a love triangle between two brothers and Sonya, a camptown prostitute or yanggongju . It examines the role of the postwar environment in constructing the spaces of the subject. Using the yanggongju figure as a technology of postwar memory, this work reevaluates the ecology of ruination left in the wake of the Korean War—as portrayed through Sonya, scenes of the city, the camptown, the base, and the surrounding fields and marshes—to explore the sense of loss and displacement of this period.

This essay analyzes Barbara Hammer's 1974 experimental nonfiction film Jane Brakhage . Both an homage and a rebuttal to the many films of Jane Brakhage made by her husband, Stan Brakhage, Hammer's film gives Jane the voice she never had in Stan's work. The article contextualizes Jane Brakhage 's production at a moment when competing strands of feminist thought took different approaches to the fraught topic of nature. Hammer's films were criticized as essentialist by feminists in the 1980s, but this essay argues that Jane Brakhage complicates that reading of Hammer's work. The film documents Jane's creative life in the mountains, but critiques the limitations of her role as a heterosexual wife and mother. By locating this short film within a larger genealogy of feminist and environmental thought, we can better appreciate the extent to which Hammer's films explore the feminist and queer potential of nature.

Gendered meanings, particularly around sentiment and attachment, shape hierarchies of value that organize our understandings of the creation, reproduction, and circulation of landscape photography. To explore these ideas, this article considers Australian wilderness diaries and calendars, which began to emerge in the late 1970s. Popular landscape photography is often derided as merely showing pristine, repetitive scenes: technically perfect shots of sunsets or snowy mountain peaks. Such images in mass-market print culture have been critiqued for presenting wilderness as separate from human intervention. Yet despite their limitations, diaries and calendars, as they move into gendered domestic spaces, do important work. Images of wilderness in everyday use provoke the question of how sentimental attachments toward landscapes might prompt environmental awareness and action.

This paper critically listens to the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry archives, a concatenation of slightly drawling white oilmen recorded in the mid twentieth century. The uniformity of the authorial voices in this archive helps to construct a monolithic white historiography that sanitizes collective memory in Texas. The archive offers insight into the sonic qualities of power in Texas as it is mediated through an idealized Texan identity via accent. In an effort to unsettle the authority of this totalizing Texan identity and its voice, this paper also listens to the history of Creole music as it migrated into Texas and transformed in contact with the state's oil industry. Placing these two different vocal histories together, one self-assured and one characterized by stretching its own limits, interrogates how we listen to the voice in history, attuned to sonic and vocal notations of power as it has alternately been enjoyed or endured.

In her sixty years on earth, Gene Stratton-Porter was many things: a women's club organizer, nature photographer, naturalist, conservationist, best-selling novelist, and a burgeoning film producer who died just as her film studio began to realize her mission of adapting her novels into movies that could further her education and conservation efforts. By 1960, eight of her books had been turned into twenty-one films—silent and sound, black and white and color, from Poverty Row studios to members of the Big Five. This article examines how Stratton-Porter and others translated her regionalism and conservationism to film across a span of forty-three years that saw major revolutions in Hollywood filmmaking. The Hollywood studio system, I argue, appropriated her successful brand of regionalism and her audience of women's club members, while also augmenting her problematically genteel mode of activism.

This introductory essay and interview trace Esther Figueroa's career in media, particularly the films she has written, directed, edited, and produced as part of specific campaigns to mobilize Jamaica's environmental movement against bauxite mining, tourism, and overfishing. Figueroa discusses her upbringing, her work in television in Hawaii, and the roles that feminism and race have played in her life and work.

This essay addresses the silences and soundings of Rebecca Belmore's (Anishinaabe) and Julie Nagam's (Anishinaabe/Métis/German/Syrian) sound art, which reflects their environmentalism and profound commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing, making, and listening. Working at the intersection of sound art and politics, the two perform sonic interventions into settler colonial spaces—the National Parks system and the gallery, respectively. Belmore's Wave Sound (2017) and Nagam's Our future is in the land: If we listen to it (2017) illustrate how their sound art gravitates toward the ecological and considers what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the nonhuman world—plants, animals, resources—sound like. Belmore and Nagam introduce marginalized perspectives and voices to address the problematic authority of whiteness that conspicuously dominates the discourse on music, sound, and environment—a relatively homogenous and exclusionary artistic, technological, and scientific discussion.

In the fall of 1980, the remote, rural Gold Rush town of Oakhurst, California, became home to Sierra On-Line, a computer game manufacturer that emerged as one of the most successful and iconic game companies of the 1980s and 1990s. Forty years later, Sierra On-Line is long gone from Oakhurst, but its operational and labor infrastructure remain strangely present—a civic palimpsest composed of repurposed buildings, regional archives, local memorials, and the fraying memories of its citizens. This article explores the undocumented dimensions of the computer game industry's supply chain during the final decades of the twentieth century, focusing on the emotional labor and maintenance work involved in sales, customer service, and technical support. Unfolding in three scenes—each pinned to a financial crash, each oriented to the experience of a different female employee—the article traces the material and affective networks that made gaming possible and computers thinkable as machines of everyday life in the late twentieth-century United States.

This article traces a limited affective history of game studies in order to understand why marginalized scholars frequently feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in the field. Following the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, it digs into the inaugural issue of the journal Game Studies as well as the infamous narratology-versus-ludology debate to understand how the anxious and emotional rhetoric of the early game studies field imaginary created an environment hostile to the political perspectives of feminist studies and other political scholarly fields. It introduces the concept of “scholarly negging” to account for the gendered emotional manipulation enacted by men who seek to control the field's terms of conversation.

A brief introductory essay provides historical and scholarly context for an interview with the French game designer Muriel Tramis, whose pioneering work between 1987 and 2000 unusually foregrounded issues of race, colonialism, and sexuality but remains little known outside of France.

This oral and written history examines three generations of pioneering women game developers from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—the South American region known as the Southern Cone. Each of the individuals interviewed—Marcela Nievas, Sofía Battegazzore, Maureen Berho, and Martina Santoro—offers insight on female leadership over three generations of precipitous growth in regional game development. Together, their personal and professional trajectories demonstrate how the embodied and material conditions of game production condition diverse histories of game development, challenging universalizing myths of a global game industry in which “anybody can make games.” At the same time, these four developers' histories working outside the conventional centers of the global game industry reflect the transformative role of women developers and game designers across the Global South in shaping three generations of global game culture.

The cultural ubiquity of The Lord of the Rings has shaped our contemporary assumptions about what the fantasy genre looks like, and these assumptions have in turn determined to a great extent what video games look like both historically and today. The Lord of the Rings and video games are, sadly, both well known for their lack of diversity, and this article argues that that is no coincidence. Focusing on the impact of the life and work of J. R. R. Tolkien, it traces fantasy media from the birth of the genre to the present day to discuss how exclusion is remediated, normalized, and justified. It challenges the racism of the “historical accuracy” fallacy and details how very old sexist literary tropes are continually remediated into contemporary fantasy video games. It asks: What can past discourses surrounding diversity in fantasy media tell us about the resistance to diversity in video games in the present?

The game genres that typically dominate the discourse of game studies, from role-playing games with their questing heroes to simulation games with their emphasis on settler and/or military aggression, are associated with masculinity. Romance, when it exists at all, is a footnote that follows the same rules of conquest and victory as other models of masculine play: princesses are rescued, lovers are “won.” This article argues that the very decision to design romantic play is an act of feminist game design. Its examination of Plundered Hearts , released by Infocom in 1987 and designed by Amy Briggs, positions the contributions of romantic play as an essential part of the history of feminist games. It traces Briggs's contributions as a feminist designer, including her design of playable women characters and her engagement with nontraditional methods of play in Plundered Hearts ,and contrasts her work with that of her peers.

This article, a Black feminist mixtape, blends music, interviews, and critical analysis in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Black women have impactfully engaged with the video game industry. Organized as musical “tracks,” it uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games. In prioritizing the personal as not only political but also instructive for how we might think about digital media histories and feminism, each mixtape track focuses on Black women's lived experiences with games. As it argues throughout, Black feminism as defined and experienced by the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s has been an active and meaningful part of Black women's labor and play practices with video games.