In celebration of LGBTQ History Month this October, enjoy free access to articles from Feminist Media Histories, a journal that examines the role gender has played in media technologies across a range of historical periods and global contexts. These must-read articles will be freely available throughout the month of October.


"Poster for Club de femmes (1936)." (From article)
Poster for Club de femmes (1936). (From article)

Proto-Queer Media Criticism: “Cinema Ramblings” from an RKO Secretary
Candace Moore
(Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2014)

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.

Mod Pop Methods: This Year’s Girl
Quinlan Miller
(Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2014)

This article reconstructs queer popular culture as a way of exploring media production studies as a trans history project. Miller argues that queer and trans insights into gender are indispensable to feminist media studies. The article looks at The Ugliest Girl in Town series (ABC, 1968–69), a satire amplifying a purported real-life fad in flat chests, short haircuts, and mod wigs, to restore texture to the everyday landscape of popular entertainment.

"Figure 5. FIGURE 5 11, 3, 5, 9, Lesbians are mighty fine' in Home Movie." (From article)
“11, 3, 5, 9, Lesbians are mighty fine” in Home Movie (1972). (From article)

Lesbian Feminist Cinema’s Archive and Moonforce Media’s National Women’s Film Circuit
Roxanne Samer
(Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2015)

This essay offers a microhistory of the feminist film distributor Moonforce Media. Between 1975 and 1980, Moonforce Media built the National Women’s Film Circuit, a lesbian feminist distribution system that circulated preconstituted packages of multigeneric feminist films through as wide a nontheatrical feminist U.S. market as possible.

“Feeling-Images”: Montage, Body, and Historical Memory in Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses
Alessandra Chiarini
(Vol. 2, No. 3, Summer 2016)

This essay investigates the ways in which Barbara Hammer’s film Nitrate Kisses (1992) traces stories about homosexuality throughout the twentieth century. Inspired both by the concept of “vertical cinema,” as theorized by Maya Deren, and by the historical-philosophical reflections of Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, Hammer realizes a montage process in Nitrate Kisses that resurrects a forgotten historical memory through the juxtaposition of archival materials and original images. It is a memory that is reappropriated through the film as an experiential, tactile, and emotional moment.


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