This essay and accompanying conversation examine the works of filmmaker and scholar Zeinabu irene Davis, whose work centers Black women, engaging their histories and contemporary stories, and thus representing their agency and complex personhood. Davis acknowledges Third Cinema and African/Afro diasporic influences in shaping her style of storytelling and in evolving her fierce Black aesthetic that disrupts the normativity of the dominant white gaze in mainstream media. These choices signify Davis’s ethos and priorities as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a womanist, and a community organizer who humanizes and celebrates her characters on-screen.

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.

This article analyzes the connections between gender, labor, and mobility by tracing the transnational careers of two Australian women who began working at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the 1930s and 1940s: Peggie Broadhead and Muriel Howlett. Both participated in the production of media content aimed at British diasporic audiences while at the same time negotiating their own Australian national identity and sense of belonging, within an imperial framework. A close study of institutional and private archives reveals that these professional responsibilities and tensions resulted in the formation of a new transnational identity of “Dominions broadcaster.” This article reveals the agency and adaptability of Australian women working in international broadcasting, and argues that through their labor and mobility they inscribed and made real the idea of imperial and Commonwealth networks.

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.

Using program content, industry contextualization, and archival materials, this article analyzes The Gypsy Rose Lee Show (ABC, 1965–68) in terms of its complex relationship to labor and the consequences of labor practices for television workers. Hosted by famed performer Gypsy Rose Lee, this syndicated program utilized the celebrity and performance skills of its host and guests to both express and mask the labors required of television production. While the feminized and queer qualities of such labors created progressive performances around marginalized workers and invisible work, in some aspects the show acceded to the economic demands of capital against the rights of labor. Lee as a television celebrity and worker thus warrants consideration for her contributions to a transitional moment in American culture and television history.