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.

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?

This paper examines changing representations of women in Chinese television dramas since the early 1990s and interprets them within a framework of global socialist media cultures, considering both domestic developments and transnational trends. Drawing on the analysis of three selected dramas, it traces the trajectory of televised femininity from exemplary socialist worker-citizens devoted to family and community, to more individualized middle-class urbanites. It is tempting to see this transformation as an outcome of China's integration into the global capitalist economy, the attendant retreat of the party-state from the private realm, and the infusion of Western cultural gender ideals. Yet this interpretation downplays important continuities, and misses intriguing parallels with TV dramas produced in socialist Eastern Europe. The argument pays particular attention to the enduring appeal of the socialist-style superwoman who shoulders the double burden of a professional career and unpaid domestic work while also acting as a discerning citizen-consumer.

For much of the history of anime, women were in charge of shiage (finishing), the tasks of inking, coloring, and cleaning up drawings. Despite its seemingly minor contribution to the creative process, shiage reflects important historical transformations in anime production, since compared to other aspects of cel-style animation, it is more subject to the influence of technological innovations as well as labor redistribution. In the late 1970s, animation work took on special appeal due to its associations with creativity, media consumption, and leisure culture. Advertisements for animation work in women's magazines reflected this changing image. These ads presented shiage as a creative hobby and a form of self-cultivation. This phenomenon shows how the convergence of production and consumption in “prosumption” supported new forms of value extraction and labor exploitation, both for the animation industry as well as for opportunistic companies that positioned themselves between would-be workers and studios.

This article examines how the writers and publicists behind the pioneering radio serial Clara, Lu 'n' Em circulated representations of gendered labor in early prime-time and daytime network radio. Through their satiric impersonations of “syntax-scrambling” midwestern housewives, the careful promotion of the three young stars, and their sale of Super Suds to American housewives, they established gender norms for both the production and the consumption of commercial messages in early radio. The creative team supporting Clara, Lu 'n' Em helped write the script for how broadcasters and sponsors could negotiate economic pressures and cultural concerns about women's paid work in the young medium. By embracing domesticity, the program negotiated the division then developing between prime-time and daytime programming, modeled modern consumer behavior for a mass female audience, and pledged its support for gendered spheres of labor.

This article engages with the work of Adrian Piper in order to explore relationships among visuality, data, race, and gender. It specifically pairs Piper's multimedia installation Cornered (1988) with her conception of pseudorationality, which she develops in her philosophical work on Immanuel Kant, and brings this pairing to bear on current discussions in software and critical algorithm studies. Cornered 's exposure of the pseudorationality of racist perception and its visual grammar contributes to our understanding of the racist and gendered conditions of data's appearance, particularly in terms of data's reliance on the visual. Ultimately, I argue, Piper's work provokes us to call into question the stability of “data” itself.

This article addresses how feminist interrogations of research methods and knowledge claims have an important role to play in the collection and dispersion of quantitative data. Taking the contemporary film industry as a historical formation, and seeking to identify and understand patterns of continued gendered inequality, it considers the methodological and ethical dilemmas we have experienced as feminist researchers gathering and presenting quantitative data on the numbers of women working in the UK film industry between 2003 and 2015. It argues that data plays a paradoxical role in creating a sense of women's absence, and ultimately arrives at a set of guiding principles for feminist quantitative research in film histories.

This article examines humor as it intersects with race and gender in digital media. It takes up the idea of laughter to explore how Black expressive culture emerges online, both individually and collectively, in the contemporary moment, arguing that web-based objects such as blogs and podcasts as well as tweets, hashtags, and memes that exist and circulate on social media produce racialized and gendered humor predicated on ridicule. Such ridicule is tied to a genealogy of Black feminist and Black queer enactments of “sass” and “shade” as affective strategies of social scrutiny. By detailing the humor associated with the popular viral personalities Luvvie Ajayi and Crissle West as well as the social networking platform Twitter, this article begins the work of archiving Black women's daily comedic performances on the Internet.

Often described as one of Iran's premier film directors, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is celebrated for her contribution to the country's cinema. She excels in representing contemporary situations, often in relation to the changing roles of women but also covering a broad spectrum of social issues, including war, poverty, domestic abuse, and class mobility. In her most recent film, Tales (2014), she seamlessly intersects seven different stories. In these narratives, Banietemad's most memorable women characters once again take the stage, reminding audiences of the historical and cultural significance of her previous films and how she has shaped the history of Iranian cinema in terms of the representation of women. Banietemad's characters embody a sense of nostalgia, in that women like Tooba (Golab Adineh), Nobar (Fatemah Motamed-Aria), and Sara (Baran Kosari) have become iconic. Yet in revisiting these characters, they are rewritten, re-described, and reinvigorated in dialogue with Iran's present. An oral history of Rakhshan Banietemad's career offers a rich lens into Iranian cinema and culture over nearly three decades.

This article contextualizes the significance of popular culture and the everyday in feminist communication practices through the example of Sabun Köpüğü ( Soap Bubble ), a feminist radio production in Turkey that ran from May 2000 to October 2001. The research draws from the author's interviews with Müge İplikçi, the main producer of Sabun Köpüğü , and Ömer Madra, the founder of Açık Radyo, in 2004; the content of the episodes; and the author's observations as a listener and as a guest speaker on the program. Sabun Köpüğü was not publicly announced as a feminist program; however, it implicitly aimed to genderize discourses along lines that were elsewhere excluded from public debate. The author argues that the significance of Sabun Köpüğü as discursive-level feminist radio activism was mediated by a specific set of political conditions (e.g., gender politics, censorship, broadcasting regulations, the role of the state, and media ownership); by the history of feminist and intellectual movements; and by the economic, social, and political context that framed its production. Through the incorporation of gendered knowledge into areas where gender dimensions were marginalized and excluded, and through the promotion of dialogue and a conversational style, the program contributed to the politics of feminism in the space of radio

This essay critiques the liberal axiom of “having a voice,” using readings of Leslie Thornton's experimental films. Drawing on cultural critics such as Rey Chow, Mladen Dolar, and Frances Dyson, I show how the notion of the voice, as it has been taken up by feminist media critics and documentary practitioners, is thoroughly mired in the cultural politics of objectification. I focus on the trope of voice-over commentary, which has been favored among feminist filmmakers working to subvert the representational conventions of narrative cinema and ethnographic documentary. I argue that the associations of verbal commentary with textual authority and liberation in contemporary feminist debates extends a metaphysical narrative that favors certain ideal, and therefore more human, voices over those voices encumbered by the matter of embodied difference. Contrary to giving a voice in the conventional sense, Thornton's unusual manipulations of the voice-over behave as a defense of voicelessness. In Jennifer, Where Are You? (1981), Adynata (1983), and Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985–2013), Thornton explores the violences of the voice, as well as the alternative modes of relation that its abjected, ephemeral materialities can enable. Thornton's films offer counterintuitive insights regarding the way that sound operates in relation to the image in cinema and, in the process, rearrange our understanding of the voice and of the horizons of humanity onto which it can open.

This article examines the “turn to lifestyle” in the longstanding genres of how-to and domestic advice programming, which began in 1994 with the launch of Home & Garden Television (HGTV) and the Food Network. It frames lifestyle's spread across the growing cable television system in the late 1990s and 2000s as the result of industrial conditions that favored the growth and consolidation of cable networks, as well as growing cultural interest in “lifestyle” as a consumerist form of identity. In this context, a turn to lifestyle in programming offered the new networks HGTV and Food Network a way to broaden the appeal of their programs in an increasingly competitive niche cable environment, as well as to secure upscale audiences for advertisers. The article examines a range of HGTV and Food Network programs that utilized lifestyle's logic, including Emeril Live!, Paula's Home Cooking, Barefoot Contessa, Divine Design with Candice Olson, Design on a Dime , and Small Space, Big Style . In such programs, lifestyle became codified in a set of televisual logics that departed from those found on how-to programs: they articulated middle-class fantasies of ordinariness, had an attenuated focus on instruction in favor of the more diffuse and aspirational concept of “inspiration,” and posited small-scale domestic gatherings as the ideal mode of social engagement in a period of diminishing wealth and income security.