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Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures. A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry. Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.

The queer women's comedic web series that have flourished in the last decade, serving as launching pads for their creators, coincided with media-industry nichification's segmentation of a consumer population regarded by advertisers and content providers as one monolithic LGBTQ community. The series I examine-from The Slope, which premiered in 2010, to Strangers, released in 2017-voice their creators' and characters' marginalization from and even opposition to such an imagined community, through recourse to what I call a "bad queer" rhetorical practice, which uses ironic metacommentary to critique assimilationist values and tropes alongside queer identity policing. These series emerged, at least initially, as an alternative sphere of queer media production and a queer discursive mode that employs disidentification as a politicized strategy to challenge dominant LGBTQ scripts. Offering an irreverent alternative to mainstream and millennial LGBTQ cultural products, these "bad queer" web series express the plurality of the queer "community" and expose political contestations within its ranks, and in so doing serve as brand differentiation for a new generation of queer media producers.

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory’s radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism’s queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

The article offers information related to the incention of digital remix culture by black men and queer women. It mentions about technique of extracting segments from existing recordings and using them to form the musical tracks of hiphop songs; and nonqueer and nonfemale people have participated heavily in fan production, digital sampling and gave rise to culture that has proliferated and thrived on the internet primarily through the creative labor of minority musical and fiction artists.

In 'Eros Ideologies' Laura E. Perez explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity. In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervantez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez's screen-printed images, Perez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Perez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices-from the poetic to the scholarly-Perez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.

Roshaya Rodness is a senior doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her dissertation addresses recent movements in queer theory with a special focus on cinema, poststructuralist ethics, and the nonhuman. She has published in Canadian Literature, Chiasma: A Site for Thought , and World Picture on topics that include contemporary film, indigenous authorship, postcontinental philosophy, and dream theories.

At the 2012 Golden Globe awards, during her acceptance speech for the Best Actress award for her performance in The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2012), Meryl Streep gave a shout-out to Adepero Oduye for her role as Alike in Dee Rees’s feature film Pariah (2011). The sentiment behind this esteemed acknowledgment was that brilliant performances in important independent films were overlooked and deserved recognition. Streep would go on to win the Best Actress Oscar for a her portrayal of Britain’s first woman prime minister, the a ultraconservative Margaret Thatcher.

Game Devs & Others: Tales from the Margins tell the true stories of life in the industry by people of color, LGBTQIA and other marginalized identities. This collection of essays give people a chance to tell their stories and to let others know what life on the other side of the screen is like when you’re not part of the supposed “majority”. Key Features This book is perfect for anyone interested in getting into the games industry who feels they have a marginalized identity For those who wish to better diversify their studio or workplace who may or may not have access to individuals that could or would share their stories about the industry Includes initiatives aimed at diversifying the industry that have a positive or negative impact on the ongoing discussions Coverage of ajor news items about diversity, conferences aimed at or having diversity at its core of content and mission are discussed Included essays are written with as little game dev specific jargon as possible, makeing it accessible to people outside the industry as well as those in the scene but that may not have all the insider lingo

Shari Frilot is a filmmaker and curator whose creative practice has been driven by sustained explorations of sexuality, technology, desire, cosmic and subatomic structures, mixed-raced identity, and chaos. She has often expressed her modus operandi in the following terms: “It’s impossible to see a cloud when you’re in the middle of it. You have to move outside of the cloud to really get a sense of it.” By continually shifting between the outside and inside of a given framework—whether institutional or personal—Frilot has developed keen modes of challenging conventional structures for understanding and engaging the moving image.

I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, where it was infested with gangs and drugs and violence. But I was always the type of person that wanted to be better than my environment, and I was also the type of person that didn’t want people to underestimate me because of where I came from. And so I made up in my mind, even as a young child, that I wanted to be somebody. I love making movies. I’ve wanted to be who I am ever since I saw Sidney Lumet’s movie The Wiz (1978).

In 2005 Angela Robinson released her spy spoof, D.E.B.S. (2004). Robinson first realized the project as the short film D.E.B.S. (2003) through a training program with POWER UP (Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up), the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit film production company and educational organization for women and the GLBTQ community. In 2005 she also became the second black woman and first black lesbian to direct a studio feature, the Disney film Herbie Fully Loaded starring Lindsay Lohan. This moment marked the beginning of the black lesbian media maker hyphenate as Angela Robinson moved to television and began working on The L Word as a writer, director, and eventually producer. Patricia White's essay in this section, "'Invite Me In!': Angela Robinson at the Hollywood Threshold," offers an in-depth exploration of her career trajectory.

The Mammy has been in our field of vision as a popular icon representing black womanhood for more than a century in literature, film, and television and in consumer and material culture.¹ Described as an asexual, rotund slave of older age whose sole responsibility is to take care of her master’s children, Mammy is a beloved character who represents all that is nurturing and maternal. She is dark-skinned and boisterous and thought to have mannish features such as large feet and hands. Mammy wears a large skirt, hiding her sex, and covers her nappy hair with a bandanna or handkerchief.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender people is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages ( Skilda tiders danser , Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta ( Fram för Lilla Märta , Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician ( Ansiktet , Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart ( Nånting måste gå sönder , Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.

Pedro Almodóvar is an internationally acclaimed Spanish director. The national and international fascination over Almodóvar's cinema lies in his ability to reflect the problems of contemporary society, his lucidity in combining the urban and the rural, his ability to express the frustrations of modern man, as well as his freshness and spontaneity. Although the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men. This groundbreaking edited volume studies the men in the cinema of Almodóvar from a broad yet comprehensive and complementary perspective. Each chapter of All About Almodóvar's Men methodically dissects these male characters—their misery and their greatness, their frustrations and their desires—offering a kaleidoscopic view of man that goes beyond the narrow framework in which many studies have locked the rich cinema of Almodóvar.

The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.

Este texto reflexiona sobre los discursos e imaginarios de género y sexualidad que se producen dentro del campo del videoarte realizado en Ecuador entre 1998 y 2013. Desde finales de los noventa, hay una presencia de videos que abordan temáticas de cuerpo, política, deseo, violencia, roles e identidad que posicionan nuevos temáticas, lugares de enunciación y sujetos través de las tecnologías de video. A través de un conjunto de obras emblemáticas, el texto analiza los discursos y las estrategias visuales con las cuales se construyen feminidades, masculinidades y diversidades sexuales en el contexto contemporáneo. Está producción plantea un relato alternativo frente a las tendencias dominantes dentro de la historia del arte ecuatoriano. Muestra las nuevas sensibilidades y sujetos que se afirman a través del uso de tecnologías de video. This paper reflects on the speeches and imaginary of gender and sexuality that occur within the field of video art made in Ecuador between 1998 and 2013. Since the late nineties, there is a presence of vid-eos that address issues of body politics, desire, vio-lence, roles and identity that position new themes, places and subjects of enunciation through video technologies. Through a set of emblematic works, the text analyzes the speeches and visual strategies which femininity, masculinity and sexual diversities are built in a contemporary context. This production presents an alternative story against the dominant trends in the history of Ecuadorian art. It shows the new sensibilities and subjects that are affirmed through the use of video technology.

This essay performs a critical comparison of two documentary films about queer and trans people of color, Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1991) and Wu Tsang's Wildness (2012) and examines how the two films negotiate of the politics of representing reality and “realness.” The comparison illuminates two entwined problematics: the ways in which the challenges faced by each film are emblematic of the larger historical context in which they were made, specifically notions of queer community and its subjects; and the ways in which the negotiation of these challenges occurs in relation to a broader field of ethical and formal questions relating to documentary itself.

Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film The Watermelon Woman earned a place in cinematic history as the first feature-length narrative film written and directed by an out black lesbian about black lesbians. This article examines how the film provides an important opportunity to mark the burgeoning genre of black queer documentary as a historiographical medium. The documentary film is a tool that highlights underexplored issues in black experience and provides a cultural site for imagining new possibilities for black lesbian subjectivity and creating innovative approaches to representing sexuality in black filmmaking.

The silence around queerness is decisively broken. Much has happened in the last two decades. Today, there are queer groups, writers, activists, academics, filmmakers, and an increasing number of spaces where friendship, solidarity, and political engagement can be nurtured. Queer activism has been responsible for bringing a legal challenge to Section 377 (IPC) that criminalizes “sexual acts against the order of nature”.

The Velvet Light Trap 53 (2004) 26-39 On December 2, 2001, HBO began airing Project Greenlight, a twelve-part documentary series chronicling the production of a feature film by novice writer-director Pete Jones. With its spectacle of backroom dealings, unchecked egos, and human frailties, the television series capitalized on the contemporaneous success of like-minded "reality" programs such as Survivor and Temptation Island. Perhaps more closely, Project Greenlight also tapped into the current vogue for the "behind-the-scenes" and the "making-of" genres, represented by straight-to-video titles such as Star Trek-Deep Space Nine: Behind the Scenes (1993), Making of Jurassic Park (1995), and The Matrix Revisited (2001), television programs such as the Sundance Channel's Anatomy of a Scene, HBO's First Look, and MTV's Making the Video, and the proliferation of behind-the-scenes and making-of packaging on DVDs. A reflection of the growth of film-related ancillary products in the 1980s, the ever-expanding Hollywood ego, and the demands of a twenty-four-hour television cable market, the increased appearance of the making-of documentary format no doubt also reflects the renewed interest in amateur filmmaking promulgated by the age of desktop video. Perhaps as a manifestation of this interest, making-of documentaries have become increasingly more detailed in their coverage. Whereas the 1981 television special The Making of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (Phillip Schuman) focuses mostly on the film's stunt work, special effects, location shoots, and set design, the recently released making-of documentary The Matrix Revisited focuses on script development, preproduction, production, postproduction, and exhibition, introducing viewers to costume designers, storyboard artists, and editors along the way. This attention to production detail can also be seen in Sundance's Anatomy of a Scene, which hones in on the construction, from music to costume to camera work, of a single scene. And certainly raising the bar on the level of detail included in the making-of genre is Project Greenlight, which is a "warts-and-all" look at film production, from squabbles over budgets to catering fiascos. Despite the making-of video's increased attention to the minutiae of filmmaking, one of the areas that remains outside the purview of most Hollywood making-of documentaries is the production of sex. Discussions about the cinematic logistics of creating a sex scene—how, when, and with what resources—are usually not featured in making-of documentaries. Of course, given our celebrity-driven culture, the question of sex vis-à-vis film production, particularly a Hollywood film production, is hardly absent from the publicity that surrounds a film. It is not uncommon to hear actresses or actors discussing what it was like to kiss another actor on the set. But these kinds of concerns are usually the province of entertainment magazines and television, not the province of ancillary related products such as the making-of video. While stories of roles requiring nudity or sex scenes abound on television shows such as Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, and E! News Daily,these kinds of topics are less likely to appear in production-generated documentaries. Indeed, while the production of the provocative sex scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (Marc Forster, 2001) generated much discussion on television entertainment programs, talk shows, and newsmagazines, it was the film's prison execution sequence that was featured in the Sundance Channel's making-of special on the film. Given the lack of focus on sex scenes in most making-of documentaries, it is interesting to note that the two existing making-of documentaries for lesbian-made, lesbian-themed feature films—The Making of Bar Girls (1995) and Moments: The Making of Claire of the Moon (1992)—both heavily focus on the production of lesbian sex. Moreover, both lesbian making-of documentaries emphasize the cast's and the crew's sexual titillation over the creation of sexual sequences. In this essay I look at what this strategy reveals about the collective climate and concerns of lesbian feature filmmaking in the United States today.