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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.

Queer cinema, no matter how rebellious, is the child of straight cinema-its bastard child, perhaps, but its progeny no less. Queer cinema must push against decades of tradition to create itself anew. Borrowed genres and hand-me-down narratives have served their purpose. If the (curated though not novel) propositions and (recent though not unique) examples that follow point anywhere, it is to a still-to-be-imagined future where queer cinema can continue to expand while never ceding its right to be "nice" in order to serve those it portrays.

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.

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.

"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

The first time I spoke in public about my work was during the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Festival in 1990. Cheryl Dunye was the only other woman of color on the panel. When I asked a question regarding funding, I naïvely stated that funding was not a prob lem for me considering the fact that my work at that time was of medium to low production quality. I had minimal access to a low-end production facility, and my piece was only five minutes long. I was alluding to the fact that it has been “easy” for me.

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.

The interactive book is a term heard frequently in reference to early experiments in multimedia production. But how to translate the concept of the book into a medium that has no paper, no pages, remains a challenge. Is not a book an object one holds in one’s hands—the cover affected over time by the acids and oils perspiring from the user’s skin, pages turned down and yellowed, torn or marked up? Research could show that the notion of the traditional book has been challenged throughout history. But this challenge has been accelerated with the growing accessibility of new computer

Early in the following interview, Pamela Jennings explains to Yvonne Welbon that her work gradually expanded from an initial and abiding interest in street photography toward working with and through forms of computational media. Jennings equates her move toward what she describes as “computational-based creative expression” with her growing interest in multimedia throughout the early 1990s, and she uses the term multimedia as a way of marking her work in a variety of different media and her interest specifically in computational media because the formulation computational media was not available to her then. The compelling relationship Jennings narrates between her

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.

Much has been written about Nina Simone’s song “Mississippi Goddam” because it lyrically achieves the political consciousness of the embattled community whose experiences and energy it intends to speak to, through, and for. With its curse words, impatient tone, and energetic rhythm, it could never be mistaken for the traditional, Christian-inflected civil rights dirge. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the chorus complains. “Tennessee made me lose my rest, and,” as if its atrocities need not be spelled out, “every body knows about Mississippi, goddam!” The song was banned from radio airplay but still became part of the civil rights sound

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.

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

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.

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.