UC Press Blog

The editors of Feminist Media Histories (FMH) are excited to announce a Pride Month Special, in which they are re-releasing six essays from the journal's archive for the month of the June. The work spans the first decade of FMH (2015–25), and covers a range of feminist-queer topics, historical approaches, and forms of media. Enjoy!

Proto-Queer Media Criticism: “Cinema Ramblings” from an RKO Secretary
by Candace Moore
from "Feminist Media Histories," edited by Shelley Stamp
Feminist Media Histories (2015) 1 (1)

Lisa Ben's “Cinema Ramblings” in the 1940s underground publication Vice Versa mark some of the first media reviews to focus on homosexual themes, representations, and subtexts from a self-proclaimed lesbian perspective. While still largely unknown, the critical lenses and stylistic methods she employed set a precedent for the kind of radical queer media criticism that reviewers engage in today. Her writings deconstruct heteronormative frameworks by redefining the borders of the “normal” and the “natural”; look to the margins of media texts, often placing more focus on secondary figures than on main characters; rely on intertextual understandings that read films against their adaptation sources; and actively participate in a form of “subtexting,” or, as she puts it, “playing up” suggestive representations. Ben's film reviews present an important and relevant counterframe to cinematic deliberations on the instability of sexual and social relations. This counterframe existed among other counterpublic discourses available at the time and enables a queer reading of 1930s and ’40s film representations such as Children of Loneliness (1934), Club des femmes (1936), and Turnabout (1940). Drawing from reviews and essays published in Vice Versa, I propose a way of reading media representations of transgressive sexuality and gender—an analytic and a vocabulary—that predates queer theory as an institutionalized concern.

Hardcore Style, Queer Heteroeroticism, and After Dark
by Ryan Powell
from "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media," edited by Elena Gorfinkel
Feminist Media Histories (2019) 5 (2)

During the early to mid-1970s, when feature-length hardcore films became a popular cultural phenomenon in the United States, hardcore came to designate more than just a genre or an industry—it became a ubiquitous mode of performance, an ethos, and a style. This article explores how hardcore as a style was taken up by the popular gay-marketed entertainment magazine After Dark. Through a close descriptive analysis of three photo spreads from 1975–76, it illuminates how female, gay male, and otherwise non-straight-identifying performers participated in a hardcore stylistic that, paradoxically, worked to shape queer elaborations of heteroeroticism. Within these vital images of singers, dancers, models, and performance artists, created at the height of hardcore's newfound cultural influence, performances of female-male coupling and group-centered socio-sexual activity both worked with and moved to dissolve normative heterosexist configurations of sex and gender.

“It Feels Right to Me”: Queer Feminist Art Installations and the Sovereignty of the Senses
by Ann Cvetkovich
from "Affect," edited by Jennifer M. Bean
Feminist Media Histories (2021) 7 (2)

Focusing in particular on how affect theory has been informed by art practice, this article develops the concept of the “sovereignty of the senses” through queer and feminist installation projects by Rachael Shannon and Zoe Leonard, as well as Alison Bechdel’s account of retreat from the social in her graphic narrative memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). Aiming to articulate notions of sovereignty, democracy, and freedom in affective and sensory terms, it conceives of sovereignty as an embodied practice and something that must be learned and experienced collectively over time rather than a fixed condition of a discrete individual or nation. It explores tensions between Indigenous notions of sovereignty and queer notions of the antisocial or non-sovereign, as well as recent discussions of the commons as an affective category, to offer an anti-racist and decolonial account of queer feminist affect theory and cultural politics.

The Kiss: Forgetting Film History
by Kiki Loveday
from "Speculative Approaches to Media History II," edited by Allyson Nadia Field
Feminist Media Histories (2022) 8 (3)

The Kiss (1896) is among the most iconic artifacts of American cinema; yet, the film has long puzzled film scholars. At the advent of cinema, why did audiences respond to this seemingly simple kiss with extreme visceral reactions such as hysterical laughter or condemnation of the film as pornography? This paper reconsiders The Kiss in light of the recently rediscovered Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898) placing both these films in relation to actor-director Olga Nethersole’s queer influence on turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular culture. Leaning on foundational texts by Charles Musser, Linda Williams, and Siobhan Somerville and drawing on recent work by Susan Potter, Allyson Nadia Field, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, this paper intervenes in the “presumed innocent” discourse of sexuality during the novelty film period. I argue that The Kiss was so controversial because the sex act it stood in for was a queer act, a lesbian kiss.

Making Trans History through the Otherness Archive and Curating Transmasculine Film
by Iris Pint
from "Curating Feminist Film Archives," edited by Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak
Feminist Media Histories (2024) 10 (2-3)

This essay—part academic paper, part interview, part personal reflection—uses The Otherness Archive (OA) as a starting point to explore the possibilities and limitations in creating a transmasculine film archive. Founded by London-based trans artist Sweatmother, the OA is the first open-access online archive of transmasculine moving image. Open to institutional resources but skeptical of existing historiographic methods and archival structures, the OA aims to create a new transmasc film history, one based on mutual aid and community support—by transmasc people for transmasc people.

Sweatmother refers to the transmasculine community whose work they intend to preserve and showcase as a group of “friends.” I contend that referring to the transmasc community at large as “friends” enables a collapse of past and present, local and global, which in turn allows the OA to dream belonging otherwise—and start a conversation about gender variance across media, genre, space, and time.

Jayaera: The Multimedia Joy of Afro-Caribbean “Cuir Bliss” (2008–2024)
by Celiany Rivera-Velázquez
from "Transnational Latinxs and Digital Media," edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Orianna Calderón-Sandoval
Feminist Media Histories (2024) 10 (4)

The article reflects on the evolution of the Afro-Caribbean neologism “jayaera”—a deeply internal feeling of joy when one can freely be oneself, coined by performer Macha Colón. By conducting a close reading of how, since 2008, Macha popularized “Jayá” (adj.), and by studying D’Chamacas party as a catalyst for “jayaera” (n.), this article analyzes the collectivization of “cuir bliss” and examines its multimedia origins. It also explores how, in 2019, there was a marked shift toward “combative jayaera” (n. with adj. modifier) that escalates “cuir bliss” into “cuir irreverence” through #8M Slut Walks, the Perreo Combativo during #RickyRenuncia protests, and development of the Caribbean kiki scene. The article argues that “jayaera” has gradually separated from its creator through reinterpretations and adaptations, notably through performer Ana Macho’s song “Jayau,” alternative Pride celebrations, and as a strategy for political parties to present themselves as open to LGBTQIA+ issues. Lastly, the article revisits Macha's latest exploration of this Afro-Caribbean multimedia neologism through the Templo de la Jayaera (est. 2021), where participants identify and develop spaces for contemplative experiences, further engaging with the slippery and transient nature of decolonial joy and cuir bliss for Puerto Ricans.

We invite you to read these articles for free during the month of June 2026. POD copies of individual FMH issues can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to FMH, ask your library to subscribe and/or consider an individual subscription.