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In the last decade or so, cinema has revealed itself to be an ideal medium for the transfer and/or remediation of the spoken word as well as stories coming from oral tradition and Indigenous culture. Indeed, cinema is a place of expression which favours cyclical creativity and contributes to the decolonization of stereotyped images propagated by external voices that do not understand the subtleties of languages (real and symbolic) that are anchored in indigenous peoples’ cultural memory. By exploring indigenous cinema as practised by women of diverse nations, this piece demonstrates how cinema can induce the compression and dilation of time, to bring to the audience the fluidity of a story that has been reconfigured according to a new time and carried by spoken words that have chosen to either emancipate themselves from the image or to materialize themselves in it. Furthermore, this article illustrates how a new generation of Indigenous women use cinema to retrace and/or rewrite their personal narrative with the help of autobiographical or collective stories that travel back in time to fill in the blanks left by a fragile memory and to express their will to make peace with a difficult colonial past. Finally, the writings of Lee Maracle (I Am Woman, 1988) and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Manifeste Assi, 2014) are being brought forth to show how films such as Suckerfish (Lisa Jackson, 2004) Bithos (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, 2015) and Four Faces of the Moon (Amanda Strong, 2016) contribute to the individual and community healing of Indigenous peoples of Canada, through an aesthetic of reconciliation. The exploration of these works, therefore allows us to shed light on and better understand the roles/internal mechanisms of visual autobiographies in the larger context of reconciliation with individual and collective stories/memories.

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?

Straight  Skin,  Gay  Masks  and  Pretending  to  Be  Gay  on  Screen  examines cinematic depictions  of  pretending-to-be-gay,  assessing  performances  that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also  offer  depictions  of  gay  selfhood with  more  nuanced  multidirectional identifications. The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to  cultural  construction  of  human sexualities  in  the  face  of  theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual  stability  and  fluidity  in  cinematic  images  of  men  pretending  to  be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics  and  long-term  queer  visibility  in  a  politically  complicated  mass culture  which  is  mostly  produced  in  a  heteronormative  and  even  hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films  and  TV  series  examined  as  part  of  the  analysis  include  The  Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin’s Cruising and many other straight and gay screens. This  is  a  fascinating  and  important  study  relevant  to  students  and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

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 overlap of marginalised race and sexuality is highlighted in the 1990 documentary "Paris is burning" which depicts the life of New York's black and Latino drag queens. The author offers an analysis of the social circumstances that gave birth to this culture which originated in 1980s Harlem.

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.

"African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a "Black Lives Consciousness," which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. The volume includes essays such as Gerald R. Butters's, "Blaxploitation Film," which charts the genre and its uses of violence, sex, and misogyny to provoke a realization of other philosophical and sociopolitical themes that concern intersectional praxis. Dan Flory's "African-American Film Noir" explains the intertextual-fictional and socio-ecological-dynamics of black action films. Melba J. Boyd's essay, "'Who's that Nigga on that Nag?': Django Unchained and the Return of the Blaxploitation Hero," argues that the film provides cultural and historical insight, "signifies" on blackface stereotypes, and chastises Hollywood cinema's misrepresentation of slavery. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike."

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.

Toni Morrison purportedly began her career as a novelist because she noticed a dearth of books about black women. As a result of this limitation, Morrison desired to write books “for people like [her], which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people—people who can’t be faked, people who don’t need to be patronized.”¹ Similarly the writer, director, and filmmaker Coquie Hughes (born Latasha Iva Hughes in Chicago in 1970) has produced narratives that feature an array of queer black women—“Girls Like Us” as she calls them in her web series—who are curious, demanding, flawed, and

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

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.

Deeply grounded in the legacy of Black lesbian artists, writers, and filmmakers, current Black lesbian filmmakers are helping to build infrastructure for a transformed future using deeply interconnected methods to transform the whole world and (while we’re at it) the meaning of life. This chapter looks at two projects, the established and evolving Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project based in San Francisco and the emerging Queer Renaissance and Black Feminist Film School Project based in Durham, North Carolina, as examples of the robust future of Black lesbian filmmaking as a transformative community-building practice. The Queer Women of Color

Around 1994 or 1995 I came across a call for articles for an anthology to be published by the XII Black International Cinema , documenting ten years of the festival and associated activities, 1986– 95. The request asked for articles and film lists from an international and intercultural group of scholars and filmmakers, and I thought this was an opportunity to document the exciting and pioneering work that was being done by a community of emerging Black lesbian and gay film-and video makers at the time.

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.

In mainstream media, gays and lesbians of color are either woefully present or predictably absent. The litany of black gay and lesbian characters in Hollywood films and network television reads like its own form of blackface. They range from the burly, black “bulldagger” as whore house madam in the 1933 film The Emperor Jones (starring Paul Robeson) to the predatory lesbian vamp in Spike Lee’s 1983 She’s Gotta Have It ; from Eddie Murphy’s ultracamp Miss Thing hairdresser on NBC’s Saturday Night Live to the snap! queen duo on Fox TV’s In Living Color. These relentless stereo types are part of

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