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Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?

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.

Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesA profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

Stresses the crucial importance of LGBT festivals in promoting examples of queer cinema throughout Europe and the USA.

"Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue in the context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the "state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema, to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output. This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement."--Publisher's description

In novel ways, and from a surprising location, Yvonne Welbon’s Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography (1995) explores some of the same dilemmas that earlier African American expatriate artists promulgated, using their time abroad as a win dow onto America, while relishing the nurturing possibilities of partial escape from American racism. Some of the most complex and insightful observations about America and American racism have been crafted by African American expatriate artists such as James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. These artists’ depictions of their encounters abroad complicate our understandings of American identity and American racism.

In interviews the comedian Wanda Sykes describes being a successful black, openly gay woman in Hollywood as akin to being a unicorn. Clearly Sykes is majestic. Yet her joke hinges on a bitter truth: the mainstream media industry grants few women, not to mention lesbians of color, access to power. Despite shifts in the cultural imaginary around civil rights, Hollywood continues to maintain an embarrassing lack of diversity in its labor force, especially at decision-making levels. To battle this long-standing reputation, studios have developed diversity-hiring programs.

It is the twenty-first century, and there is a black lesbian director and producer making pornography! Porn, a genre of film and media that in the last quarter of the twentieth century many black feminist lesbians viewed as capable only of representing and manifesting violence, abuse, and shame. In this essay I examine one of the early works of the black lesbian filmmaker Shine Louise Houston, In Search of the Wild Kingdom (2007), to explore how and why we have arrived at what is a transition from Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms to Pink and White Productions, and from New

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.

Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first decades to selfidentified transvestite and transsexual filmmakers, like Ed Wood and Christine Jorgensen of the mid-twentieth century, to the enormous upsurge in trans filmmaking of the 1990s, this article explores the rich and complex history of trans and gender variant filmmaking. It also considers the untraceable gender variant filmmakers who worked in film and television without their gender history becoming known and those who made home movies that have been lost to history.

This collection of new writing on contemporary Greek cinema builds and expands on existing work in the field, providing a coherent analysis of films which, despite their international importance, have so far received limited critical attention. The volume maps key trends in Greek cinema since the 1990s within the wider context of production and consumption at both national and international levels. It offers a wide range of critical analyses of documentary and avant-garde filmmaking, art house and popular cinema, and the work of established and new directors as well as deliberations on teaching methodologies and marketing strategies. The book seeks to highlight the continuities, mutual influences and common contexts that inform, shape and inspire filmmaking in Greece today.

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic.

In the three decades after 1980, major changes took place in the ways in which culture in Tibet was produced, transmitted, and consumed.¹ These changes, however, were not evidence of the radical transformation often claimed as the result of digitization, but were brought about by earlier forms of technological development. In terms of music and radio, it was the arrival of cheap cassette players and recorders in Tibet in the late 1980s that allowed Tibetans to choose for the first time when to listen and, within the limits allowed by the market and the government, what to listen to (Dhondup

My chapter looks at Chinese independent cinema as an institutionalizing enterprise. In other words, although many filmmakers keep emphasizing the individualistic quality of their agenda or the idiosyncrasy of their film works, independent films have developed things in common, such as certain thematics, addresses, formalistic styles, and modes of production. Their survival is also predicated more and more on shared infrastructures of film communities, distribution agents, and exhibition networks. Of course, this does not mean that the institution of Chinese independent cinema is settled and finalized; it isn’t like a breed of crops circled by impermeable ideological or physical fences.

This chapter contemplates the ethical dimensions of the specific brand of observational cinema found in China. Because there is no popular understanding of independent documentary—and also because filmmakers almost invariably use amateur video cameras and shoot alone—many subjects are oblivious to the fact that their images are being captured for films being screened around the world. It is in this sense that, while their cameras are perfectly visible, they are also hidden. This enables directors to capture “life unawares,” as if people were being shot by a hidden camera. In this context, directors make the films they want, ignoring the ethical implications of shooting people without being upfront about their intentions or asking for consent. The chapter closely examines a set of films to explore the axiographics of the documentary, in other words how ethics is rendered in the time and space of the moving image.

Taking Hao Jie’s Single Man as a case study, this chapter discusses the effect of globalization on independent DV production—a home-grown phenomenon born out of the availability of DV cameras and computer editing software and the spreading of the internet. Starting as a marginalized practice without access to the domestic market, and expressing a desire to saturate the visual field with obfuscated images and to create a counter-archive (a counter-memory of the Chinese people), it attracted international attention, which in turn allowed it to have access to alternative forms of financing as well as the input of foreign talent. The fluidity of digital modes of production also contributed to an eradication of the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Instead, the real divide lies between “the desire for cinema” and “the desire for documentation.”

Since its beginning in the early 1990s, independent Chinese documentary has steadily built a reputation with its unflinching presentation of the underbelly of China’s economic boom and social sea changes. Individuals and groups whose experiences register the drastic costs of this process have become the most natural and common subject matter of independent documentaries. From the struggling artists who were among the first to quit state employment and go independent in Bumming in Beijing (Wu Wenguang 1990) to the art-aspiring young migrants from the rural area in The Other Bank (Jiang Yue 1995), from the homeless youngsters in Along the

This paper looks at five documentaries on activism around ending the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Africa. All were made by or in partnership with UK and US producers and are distributed by the New York-based non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies. By tracing changing political and representational strategies in feminist documentaries on the issue and the varying terms on which the films engage their subjects and address their viewers, the chapter aims to put the specificity of independent documentary formats, practices, and institutions in dialogue with feminist theoretical critiques of the wider discourse on women's human rights. The chapter looks at Kaplan and Grewal's critique of the neo-colonialism of Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks, the observational strategies of Kim Longinotto's The Day I Will Never Forget, the diasporic dimensions of Mrs. Goundo's Daughter and Sarabah, and the visual rhetoric of human rights models in Equality Now's Africa Rising. The cultural field of documentary constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.