Feminist Media Histories
@femmediahist.bsky.social
Feminist Media Histories examines the role gender has played in media across a range of historical periods and global contexts. Published quarterly by UC Press. Sign up for our seasonal newsletter: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/kxDtFBP
Our Fall 2026 issue, "Women of IMAX," guest edited by Jessica Mulvogue and Allison Whitney, is now live! Starting with Autumn Durald Arkapaw's Oscar win, it traces women's technical and artistic roles in IMAX history. Intro free NOW: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Armida de la Garza uses McLuhan's media theory to reassess the white dress in The Two Fridas (1939). By comparing its representation across painting, photography, film, it shows how different media shape perception and generate new interpretations of Kahlo's work. Read more: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Why is it that Clueless's Cher Horowitz ends up dating her stepbrother? Bartholomew argues that the 1995 film indexes cultural fantasies about the nuclear family, the reproduction of class, and feminization of labor in the US at the end of the 20th century. Article free now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Elspeth H. Brown and Alisha Stranges's article "Photography, Fashion, and Queer Worldmaking at the Pussy Palace" examines how photography and fashion functioned as technologies of queer and trans worldmaking at Toronto's Pussy Palace bathhouse events (1998–2014). Free now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Read Kimberly Lamm's new research article "Self-Fashioning and Sorrow: Queer Black Fugitivity in Carl Van Vechten’s Photographs of Nella Larsen" for free now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh.... See less
Daphne Gerson's “Putting Entertainment Education on Trial: Examining PFI’s Sex Education Web Series 'Sex Ki Adalat'” links sex education to notions of justice, human rights, and gender equality through its use of comedy, courtroom setting, and web series format. FREE NOW! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In the "The Arab Female Dandy in 'Al-Masrah': Fashioning Egyptian Modernity," Yasmine Nachabe Taan explores how fashion, photography, and cross-dressing became powerful tools through which Arab women challenged gender norms in early twentieth-century Egypt. Free now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Safi Faye with and against the United Nations: African Women, Development Filmmaking, and the Neoliberal Turn," Nikolaus Perneczky examines the development films of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye. Read for free now: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Threadbare Politics: Feminist T-Shirts as Queer Media," Catherine A. Evans argues that T-shirts are, indeed, media, centering activist Kipp Dawson’s collection of over 250 political shirts. @caevans.bsky.social Read for free now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Miguel Errazu's "Abundance and Frustration: Women’s Labor and the Archive of the Miners’ Film Workshop" recovers the story of women's labour in the 1983 Super 8 training project established between the Bolivian Mineworkers' Federation and French NGO Association Varan. Free! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
12(3) "Fashion as/and Media," guest edited by Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins, is now live! In this issue fashion operates intermedially, foregrounding its relational capacity across photography, television, magazines, and novels. —Editors' Introduction, FREE NOW: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Seeing and Unseeing like a State: Configuring Indian Women in Official Films," Ritika Kaushik finds the possibility of identifying affective encounters and subjective experiences that exceed the bounds of the state’s developmental agendas. FREE to read now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
We are excited to announce a Pride Month Special, in which we are re-releasing SIX essays for the month of the June! Work from Candace Moore, Ryan Powell, Ann Cvetkovich, Kiki Loveday, Iris Pint, and Celiany Rivera-Velázquez is FREE for the month of June www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/f...
Weixian Pan's "Terra-Developmentalism: Cinematic Construction of Women Geologists and Resource Frontiers in Early Socialist China" is now FREE! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro's "Aesthetics of Development: Modern Industries in the Ehlers Sisters’ Mexican Films (1919-1922)" is now FREE for a limited time! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Austrian avant-garde artist VALIE EXPORT died one week ago, days before her 86th birthday. In honor of her work, we share Jeff Scheible's speculative research article, "Expanded Cinema, Recycled Cinema: A Ping-Pong Volley between VALIE EXPORT and Agnès Varda"—now open access doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Our Spring 2026 issue—"Gender, Media, and Developmentalism," guest edited by Dalila Missero and Masha Salazkina—is now LIVE! online.ucpress.edu/fmh/issue/12/2 Editors' Introduction, open access NOW: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "When Sex Is on TV," Helena Shaskevich examines Julie Gustafson's groundbreaking feminist video as a pivotal case study in the relationship between intimacy, sexual politics, and diverging scales of television between the 1970s and mid-1980s in the U.S OPEN ACCESS NOW: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In “The Hauntology of Chinese Cyberfeminism,” Crassula Shang traces how Chinese cyberfeminist histories persist through hauntings rather than empirical records, and how such hauntings reveal a deeply global and material struggle. Open access TODAY: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Sergio Rigoletto's "Spectral Proximities: Speculations on the Mediterranean Beach" argues that reorienting the camera on the Sicilian beach of Sampieri allows the recognition of a spectral proximity that implicates queerness within the scene of migrant death. Open access now! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Open access NOW—Carla Mereu Keating and Catherine O'Rawe discuss the challenges faced in researching women's contributions to the Italian film industry. READ a history of film studios STUDIOTEC: Film Studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, 1930–60. doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Katie Kirkland theorizes documentary as a practice of intimate exchange through a reading of Emily Jacir’s epistolary film 'Letter to a Friend' (2019)—a speculative, counterforesic investigation of her familial home in Bethlehem (Dar Jacir) as the site of a future crime FREE doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Speculative Knowledge and the Situated 'Dispositifs' of Zora Neale Hurston and Stella Adler’s Digital Film Collections," Tanya Clement and Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth propose strategies for speculating in dialogue these recently digitized artifacts. Don't miss it! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Anjo-marí Gouws argues that Jane Wodening was not Stan Brakhage’s muse. Rather, through her body and her labor, she was his medium. Read "By Brakhage, or What We Owe Jane Wodening" for free: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Folding the Pages of Computer History: Occupational Health and Office Space," Rose Rowson argues that obstetric concerns and technologies should be integrated into the history of computing. Read for free today! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Usha Iyer maps the stickiness of transregional flows and blockages through the performative repertoires of an Indian orchestra singer, Kanchan, and a double diasporic, Indo- Caribbean-Canadian drag queen, Priyanka. “The Sticky Intimacies of Jammin’" is open access now: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In “Doing More with Less: Informed Speculation as Method,” Allyson Nadia Field embraces the forms of imaginative, creative, and experimental writing of film/media history while at the same time urging rigorous and responsible scholarship Download for free and hold it close— doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Heat Is a Power Relation: Standards, Standpoints, and the Intimacies of Comfort," Sasha Crawford-Holland analyzes how media distribute thermal dis/comfort, arguing that heat is not only a physical relation, but a power relation. @sashach.bsky.social Read for free now: doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
In "Ancestral Intelligences," Mashinka Firunts Hakopian articulates feminist interventions into dominant imaginaries of artificial intelligence and algorithmic visual culture. Excerpts forthcoming in 'Ancestral Intelligences: Diasporic Technologies of Worldmaking'! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....
Another open access "note" on historical methods by Srijita Banerjee! doi.org/10.1525/fmh.... Through scrapbooking, DIY-ing and hand-crafting paper, Jodie Mack creates a kaleidoscopic filmic world that speaks to the marginalized and suppressed nature of feminized labour in 'Dusty Stacks of Mom'.
