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The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.

In this contribution, I provide an in-depth rhetorical and textual analysis of a television debate program broadcast in 2015 on the mainstream television news channel, Habertürk TV in Turkey. The debate brought together women committed to varying political projects, including Kemalism, Islamism, leftist movements, Kurdish women’s movements, and feminism. I find this debate program unique because it took place at a crucial moment in Turkey’s recent history, preceding increasing restrictions on the media that eventually cost more than half of the program participants’ jobs and positions. In my analysis, I focus on how the program’s moderator and the women participants define “women’s issues” in an increasingly authoritarian and conflictual political climate where women are divided with regard to supporting or opposing the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) political program. The results of my analysis show that “sisterhood” does not provide common ground for women in a politically polarized environment and women with more political power dominate the conservation.

This chapter discusses how Chinese television has been refashioned by the digital entertainment industry, and contends that new genres, identities, and representations have emerged in recognition of youths as the most valuable and desirable category of audience. It does so by way of three case studies. The first illustrates the symbiotic relationship between online literature and television drama production, and how the former contributes to the fantastical turn of Chinese television. The second seeks to understand the emergence of new cultural figures of “supreme heroine” and “sweet males” in the context of the rise of female fandom in contemporary Chinese popular culture. The third reveals how traditional television content, or in this case a political drama, may be recreated by online distributors and influencers so as to be aligned with the habits, attitudes, and preferences of the younger audiences. The chapter concludes that to understand contemporary Chinese television culture, the Internet and social media must become an integral component of inquiry because of their powerful remediating role in the public communication of any cultural text.

When scholars and policy makers contemplate the Arab “media revolution,” they mostly think of Al-Jazeera and its news competitors. They are guided by the assumption that all-news satellite television networks are the predominant, even the single, shaper of the Arab public sphere, a perspective exacerbated by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Drawing on a larger work (Kraidy, 2009, forthcoming), this chapter presents an alternative view, emphasizing instead the combined impact of Arab entertainment television and small media such as mobile phones on Arab governance. It explores how entertainment television is an active contributor to shaping what Arab publics discuss and do in both the social and political realms. As local (in this case regional/pan-Arab, reaching two dozen Arabic-speaking countries) adaptations of global television formats, Arab reality television shows exhibit a combination of signs and practices from several worldviews. As such, this chapter will show how Arab reality shows are open to multiple processes of appropriation and redeployment. Though numerous scholars have for years studied the differentiated “reception” of television texts in various contexts, this chapter focuses specifically on television formats in a context of growing media convergence and protracted political instability and social upheaval. Specifically, it focuses on reality television’s social and political impact, which stems primarily from its activation of new communication processes between a variety of information and media technologies creating what I call “hypermedia space.” In the new Arab information order, reality television activates hypermedia space because it promotes participatory practices like voting, campaigning and alliance building, via mobile telephones and related devices.

In this chapter, I would like to consider how interactive reality television contributes to the negotiation between national particulars and transnational media flows. Specifically, I want to look at the successful franchise So You Think You Can Dance , a dynamic global media flashpoint and a remarkably adaptable format that serves as a site of pleasurable and contradictory engagement with the sense of national culture and community that television manufactures. But what makes the show of particular interest to me is that it allows audiences, in an increasing number of television markets around the world, to collectively determine their ideal national performers through a competition that requires mastery of a virtual international smorgasbord of popular dance forms and styles, the vast majority of which originate elsewhere, or from within the national, racial, and ethnic cultures of others. Second, in choosing to examine dance shows, I join with a growing number of scholars who have, over the past 15 years, argued for increased attention to dance as a primary site of knowledge production concerning bodies, identities, and representation.

In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—taking a taxi ride, traversing airport security, sitting on an airplane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.”

This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”

Cet article propose une étude comparative de la première saison de la série policière québécoise primée 19-2 (Ici Radio-Canada Télé, 2011-2015) et de son adaptation canadienne anglophone (Bravo, 2014-). L’étude des deux séries 19-2 permet d’investiguer, à travers un exemple récent, le processus d’adaptation télévisuelle au Canada. Les similitudes narratives et esthétiques entre les deux séries sont tout d’abord brièvement présentées: l’histoire et les arcs narratifs sont quasi identiques, la plupart des personnages conservent les mêmes noms, sans compter que les stratégies narratives marquantes de cette œuvres ont été pour la plupart reproduites dans la nouvelle version. Ces deux œuvres, appréhendées en tant que « performances » distinctes, sont ensuite analysées à travers le prisme du genre. L’analyse de quelques scènes clés et arcs narratifs permettra de démontrer que ces deux productions sont très différentes en ce qui concerne leur construction narrative de masculinités télévisées – particulièrement leur négociation différentielle de conceptions hégémoniques des identités – et leur représentation des rapports hommes-femmes.

"Addressing both the scope and the significance of television program format transferthe practice of using the basic idea of a program to produce a new version of that programthis book details this rapidly growing area of the international television distribution system. Also addressed is the remaking of a program by the television industry of another nation, highlighting issues of meaning and cultural identity of national audiences."

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.

Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of "queer" to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. Leung explores Hong Kong cultural productions -- cinema, fiction, popular music and subcultural projects -- and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overloo... Source: Publisher

How might certain moving images move us into transgender becoming? Th e recent proliferation of transgender images in the media of the Global North has been widely regarded as supporting transgender political and social equality.

Transgender representations generally distance the transgender characters from the audience as objects of ridicule, fear, and sympathy. This distancing is accomplished through the use of specific narrative conventions and visual codes. In this dissertation, I analyze representations of transgender individuals in popular film comedies, thrillers, and independent dramas. Through a textual analysis of 24 films, I argue that the narrative conventions and visual codes of the films work to prevent identification or connection between the transgender characters and the audience. The purpose of this distancing is to privilege the heteronormative identities of the characters over their transgender identities. This dissertation is grounded in a cultural studies approach to representation as constitutive and constraining and a positional approach to gender that views gender identity as a position taken in a specific social context. Contributions are made to the fields of communication, film studies, and gender studies through the methodological approach to textual analysis of categories of films over individual case studies and the idea that individuals can be positioned in identities they do not actively claim for themselves. This dissertation also makes a significant contribution to conceptions of the gaze through the development of three transgender gazes that focus on the ways the characters are visually constructed rather than the viewpoints taken by audience members. In the end, transgender representations work to support heteronormativity by constructing the transgender characters in specific ways to prevent audience members from developing deeper connections with them.

Discussions of established women filmmakers whose careers have produced major bodies of work, as well as newer filmmakers and new media artists.

Since Nell Shipman wrote and starred in Back to God's Country (1919), Canadian women have been making films. The accolades given to film-makers such as Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Alanis Obomsawin (My Name Is Kahenttiiosta, Walker), and Micheline Lanctot (Deux Actrices) at festivals throughout the world in recent years attest to the growing international recognition for films made by Canadian women. With Gendering the Nation the editors have produced a definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. In dialogue with new paradigms for understanding the relationship of cinema with nation and gender, Gendering the Nation seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture. This collection of critical essays employs a variety of frameworks to analyse cinematic practices that range from narrative to documentary to the avant garde.

In 1989, three years before the New Queer Wave was even invented or discovered, two very different yet interconnected films were produced on either side of the Atlantic. Both soon became critically successful and both would win a number of prizes at different international film festivals and venues. In retrospect, these two films have come to constitute the very incitement to the Wave. British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston premiered in early 1989 and American filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied premiered later that same year, the latter including a still photo from the former so as to pay homage

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.

This dissertation is about gay and lesbian film festivals, the first of which was founded in San Francisco in 1977 and subsequently served as a model for their international proliferation over the next thirty years. While the films programmed in these festivals have received a great deal of attention from scholars and critics, the festival institution itself has received less consideration. This dissertation narrates the history of gay and lesbian film festivals through an economic lens, asking how fundraising practices have been deployed in the community building projects of festivals, how the administrative structures of festivals as nonprofit organizations have been leveraged by the state toward the management of new social movements, and how these nonprofits have participated in the identification and cultivation of populations as niche markets by the commercial sector. This historical schema will offer an alternative model for understanding queer image production, not through a textual analysis of those images, but through an examination of the material circumstances of their circulation and distribution. This dissertation is not simply about the ways that community organizations like film festivals have been strategically engaged by the state and the market in the management and exploitation of gays and lesbians, it argues that gays and lesbians themselves have articulated their politics, artistic practice, and discourse of community within (and against) the parameters defined by the demands of organizational sustainability. Furthermore, this dissertation will illustrate why taking economic activity seriously as a part of the material practices of queer image production answers crucial questions about the ways that sexuality operates as a category of governance. The history of gay and lesbian film festivals, and their regulation through the administrative structures of the nonprofit sector, is part of a much larger history of political struggle and the development of new social movements over the past three decades.