This article explores the role of erotic experimentation in the emergence of newly developed media and technology. It argues that, just as pornographic videotape pioneered home entertainment practices in the 1970s and 1980s, so too are contemporary erotic technologies, such as smart vibrators, at the forefront of a turn toward interactive media and technology that engage and stimulate the body. The article traces these convergences of sex and tech through the history of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an industry showcase of emerging media and technology and a crucial site for the maintenance of cross-sector relations necessary for technological advancement. It concludes by considering the recent rise of “sex tech” alongside histories of the vibrator’s earliest product categorizations in the Victorian era in order to identify the endurance of market frames including health, wellness, and femininity, that legitimize socially taboo technologies.

This article explores and historicizes the rise of the woman filmmaker in India in the late 1970s and the 1980s in two overlapping domains: a vastly expanded communications infrastructure, including the spread of television, and second wave feminism. It takes as a case study the media maker Sai Paranjpye, whose eclectic career across a range of media—theater, TV, cinema, print—in multiple formats—ad films, documentaries, educational shorts, TV films, full-length features—was fairly typical of the nature of women's media work at this time, as women took whatever work they could find in a rapidly mutating media ecology. The article suggests that these media migrations provide a model of gendered media work that is constitutively intermedial, and thus reorders the aesthetic and narrative protocols of mainstream cinema.

The last several decades have witnessed the publication of many revisionist and self-critical superhero comics, yet the most critically discussed of these focus on the straight white male characters who have always dominated the genre. In contrast, the ongoing series Alias (2001–4) stars Jessica Jones, a superhero turned private investigator who is empowered by a radioactive accident yet disempowered by her gender within a male-dominated superhero community that both excludes women and actively abuses them. This article argues that Alias redresses the superhero genre's marginalization and victimization of female characters by emphasizing Jessica's complex subjectivity and implicating male superheroes in her multifaceted abuse. It also considers Jessica's translation into more traditional comics series, wherein she becomes sidelined as a wife and stay-at-home mother; these series prove the difficulty of maintaining progressive politics within genres where the visual and narrative conventions are so steeped in gender stereotypes.

Archie comics have long faced pressures to confront social issues and produce more diverse, inclusive narratives. With Riverdale , the Archie-verse has newly asserted its cultural relevance by simultaneously embracing and revising a nostalgia for earlier Archie comics and characters. This essay explores how the social media paratexts of the Riverdale actors negotiate between the feminist aspirations of the television show and the less progressive politics of earlier Archie comics. Examining these transmedial paratexts, it demonstrates how the beloved Archie characters from earlier comics become newly embodied and vocalized by the actors who portray them in Riverdale , thus inviting comics readers and television fans to embrace a new feminist vision for the Archie-verse while also opening it up to postfeminist critiques.

Postfeminist ideology “takes feminism into account” by framing liberal feminist principles as already achieved, thus preempting a more radical feminist politics that it constructs as both unpleasant and irrelevant. In a corresponding mode, postfeminist cultural objects derive their power in part by preempting feminist critique with irony. It is precisely this ideological double bind that the comedian Amy Schumer confronts. This essay analyzes how Schumer develops a feminist critique of the knotty problems of postfeminist ideology. Postfeminism casts feminism as abject, as the “repulsive and disgusting” monster that perpetually endangers the “empowered” postfeminist woman of today. But Schumer inverts this construction: in her show's sketches, postfeminism as an ideological formation materializes in an array of comic abjections to which Schumer's persona is subject. In short, the condition of postfeminism is one of abjection. The comic hyperbole of Schumer's character's abjections, combined with her uncritical complicity, invokes for the viewer feminist solutions.

The television adaptation of How to Marry a Millionaire (1957–59) premiered on the NTA Film Network on October 7, 1957, and was described by one reporter as “a frivolous series, by turns amusing and corny.” That the show was, even in its day, notably camp serves as an important counterpoint to accusations of dated-ness—the implication that it ever reflected the values of the day with a straight face. Rather than seeing How to Marry a Millionaire as a relic of the past, we might view it instead as surprisingly contemporary, both in its status as a trans-industry consumer product and in its comic point of view that pokes fun at 1950s gender performativity, teases the viewer with the ever-present threat of impropriety, and even proves eerily prescient about the future of computerized dating.

This article places existing discourses on Egyptian cinema, revolution, and global feminism in conversation with theories of film melodrama. The text examines the tradition of Egyptian melodrama as a site for analogizing women's liberation with national modernization in the wake of the 1952 Revolution—an analogy facilitated by the careful manipulation of melodramatic vernaculars of emotionality, and the endurance of affective cultural memory. In this context melodrama functions as a specific critical tool for understanding how popular film culture then and now organizes people politically and affectively, on- and offscreen. The article further investigates the “method of contradictions” that seems necessary to think critically about comparative melodrama at three levels of discourse: melodrama in general; the Egyptian melodramatic tradition specifically; and within melodramatic scholarship that tends to resemble its object of study.

“‘The Mystery Woman of Hollywood’: Greta Garbo, Feminism, and Stardom” analyzes feminism as manifested in Greta Garbo's life and career. It focuses on her European background; the media discourse on her; feminism in her films and in the United States in the 1920s; and Garbo's rebellion against Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the heads of her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It also deals with her dress reform stance, her masculine femininity, the nature of her fans (especially the “Garbomaniacs”), and her friendships with the screenwriters Salka Viertel and Mercedes de Acosta. It concludes with an analysis of the 1933 film Queen Christina , characterizing it as the culmination of Garbo's feminism.

Bunny Yeager was a pinup model and photographer who appeared on TV and in exploitation films, while creating pinups and “art” nudes for Playboy , coffee-table books, and how-to publications. She is currently experiencing a revival as part of a subcultural vogue for 1950s and 1960s Americana. In her images she was often both subject and photographer, and her self-reflexive pictures engage with issues of authorship, control, and the sexualized gaze. This text examines Yeager's portraiture, her instructive writing, her representation in the film Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera (1963), and the way she positioned herself when discussing her work, to demonstrate how she embodied a mode of professional and sexual agency that engaged with broader, progressive ideas pertaining to women's labor and identity circulating in 1960s America as part of feminism's second wave.

Women use the #ManicureMonday Twitter hashtag to educate people about hand and nail care, share their nail art and expertise, and look at various hands. Beginning in 2013, the scientist Hope Jahren organized a hashtag hijacking in which scientists who were not in control of or associated with #ManicureMonday disrupted individuals' collaborative conversations about manicures, tried to educate participants, and expressed the scientists' values and interests. The scientists argued that what women's hands do is more important than how they look and that women and their manicured hands are constructed as passive objects on the Twitter feed. Jahren and these other scientists have identified Twitter as useful for their conversations about science and extended their own social capital by microblogging. They also use Twitter as a way to instruct women about objectification and other feminist issues and to intervene in women's interest in their nails, which these scientists believe is frivolous and disempowering. In this article, I address the diverse ways in which these ideas of usefulness, useful media, instruction, and social capital are articulated through #ManicureMonday by performing a close textual analysis of the manicure tweets and the hashtag hijacking. My reading is based on the relationship among feminist inquiries about viewing positions and objectification, the literature on useful media, and conceptions of social capital. I argue that we need to attend to the ways the #ManicureMonday hijacking and other instances of media education may not be useful for all participants.