Shelley Stamp, Editor, interviews guest editor Yiman Wang and contributors Jasmine Nadua Trice, Sangita Gopal, and Erica Ka-yan Poon about the Winter 2019 issue on Asian feminist media. Read the issue at http://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/5/1.

Asian Feminist Media (Vol. 5, No. 1)

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews Elena Gorfinkel, guest editor of FMH's "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media" issue (Vol. 5, No. 2). Gorfinkel is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. Her research explores post-war and post-1960s independent cinema in the United States and histories of marginal filmmaking practices, such as adult films, exploitation, experimental and underground cinemas, as well as the production of cinephilic and critical communities; questions of sexuality, materiality and temporality in cinema; and contemporary global art cinemas.

Interview with Elena Gorfinkel, Guest Editor of FMH's "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media" issue

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributor Kimberly Icreverzi, whose article, "Living as an Onna in Japanese Cinema" appears in FMH's "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media" issue (Vol. 5, No. 2). 

The essay situates the impossible volume of Japanese pink filmmaker Hamano Sachi's more than three hundred films as a reproductive labor, arguing that through its iterative enactments her filmmaking practice performs renewals that invigorate her life as an onna (woman) in cinema and make it possible in the first place. The argument advances that we might understand Hamano's pink cinema as a woman's cinema that rewrites sex in non-phallic terms, borrowing from the artist and social theorist Bini Adamczak's theory of circlusive sex. Reading the visual and aural techniques of Hamano's pink cinema alongside her autobiography, the conflicts and desires Hamano faces as a woman in film, which recruit her reproductive labor to nourish her very existence, are brought into conversation. Because the autobiography implicates structures of value located in legible, visible forms, the essay ultimately advocates for investing in the material articulations of Hamano's pink forms.

Icreverzi is a lecturer in the Critical Gender Studies program and the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, focusing on gender, labor, and value in postwar Japanese cinema. She previously published a short essay in the Genealogies special issue of Feminist Media Histories. She has taught in the programs in Film and Television, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Japanese, and Comparative Literature at Boston University, and Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.

Interview with FMH contributor, Kimberly Icreverzi, author of "Living as an Onna in Japanese Cinema"

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributor Desirae Embree, whose article, "Archive Trouble: Searching for Lesbian Adult Media" is published in the "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media" issue of FMH (Vol. 5, No. 2).

The article reflects on the material history of lesbian-produced adult media as well as the institutional and methodological problems that attend researching it. Denied entry into established adult entertainment markets, lesbian pornographers had to create their own adult media economies and infrastructures. Using archival objects as a point of entry into this history, this essay considers the material dimensions of women's labor as well as the immaterial cost of that labor, ultimately arguing that current approaches to adult media history fail to capture lesbian-produced texts or their unique modes of production, circulation, and reception.

Embree is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation, titled “Private Pleasures / Public Provocations: Dyke Porn in the Late Twentieth Century,” is a cultural history of lesbian-produced sexual entertainment media in the 1980s and 1990s. She currently holds the 2018–19 LGBT Studies Research Fellowship at Yale University.

Interview with FMH contributor Desirae Embree, author of "Archive Trouble"

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributor Darshana Sreedhar Mini, whose article, "The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela" is published in FMH's "Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media" issue (Vol. 5, No. 2).

The paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the 1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela's outsider status and her heavyset body type foregrounded her as the locus of Malayali society's conflicted relationship with sex and desire while also creating a set of parallel film practices that challenged the hierarchies of the mainstream film industry. By 2001 more than 70 percent of the total films produced in Malayalam were soft porn, and a good number of them featured Shakeela. The mainstay of soft-porn productions was the strategic positioning of the female lead as a cultural outsider—a transient figure who is both a threat and a source of exoticized desire. Shakeela's emergence as a “liberated” woman who flaunts her sexuality despite social norms was so strong that it destabilized Kerala's hero-centric mainstream industry for a time, leading to what was popularly called Shakeela tharangam, the “wave of Shakeela.”

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is a PhD candidate in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation explores precarious media formations such as low-budget films produced in the south Indian state of Kerala, mapping their transnational journeys. Her work is supported by the Social Science Research Council. Her research interests include feminist media, gender studies, South Asian studies, and media ethnography. She has published in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Journal for Ritual Studies, and International Journal for Digital Television. An earlier version of this article was Third Prize in the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Awards.

Interview with FMH contributor Darshana Sreedhar Mini

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributor Yingzi Wang, whose article, coauthored with Sabina Mihelj, "A Socialist Superwoman for the New Era: Chinese Television and the Changing Ideals of Femininity" is published in FMH's "Transnational Broadcasting" issue (Vol. 5, No. 3).

This paper examines changing representations of women in Chinese television dramas since the early 1990s and interprets them within a framework of global socialist media cultures, considering both domestic developments and transnational trends. Drawing on the analysis of three selected dramas, it traces the trajectory of televised femininity from exemplary socialist worker-citizens devoted to family and community, to more individualized middle-class urbanites. It is tempting to see this transformation as an outcome of China's integration into the global capitalist economy, the attendant retreat of the party-state from the private realm, and the infusion of Western cultural gender ideals. Yet this interpretation downplays important continuities, and misses intriguing parallels with TV dramas produced in socialist Eastern Europe. The argument pays particular attention to the enduring appeal of the socialist-style superwoman who shoulders the double burden of a professional career and unpaid domestic work while also acting as a discerning citizen-consumer.

Yingzi Wang is a doctoral researcher at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. Her PhD research examines the transformation of Chinese television in the post-reform era through a temporal comparison of prime-time Chinese TV dramas. This research maps changes and continuities in the narrative content and forms of Chinese TV dramas resulting from intersecting political, economic, social, and cultural forces in post-reform China. Wang's research interests include television entertainment, political communication, the politics of media representations, propaganda, and gender studies.

Interview with Yingzi Wang, contributor to FMH's Transnational Broadcasting issue

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributor Christine Ehrick, whose article, "Buenas Vecinas?: Latin American Women and US Radio Propaganda during World War II" is published in FMH's "Transnational Broadcasting" issue (Vol. 5, No. 3).

During World War II, US–Latin American relations were shaped by the noninterventionist Good Neighbor policy and the projection of soft power via US government-orchestrated public relations and propaganda campaigns. This included extensive film and radio propaganda overseen by the US Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and disseminated throughout the region. One dimension of that campaign involved radio propaganda aimed specifically at women, who were regaled with stories of heroic Latin American women and carefully curated female perspectives on life in the United States during wartime. In much of this material, the United States was presented as a dominant yet gentlemanly hemispheric partner, offering Latin America protection and material abundance in exchange for loyalty and deference. As the war wound down, such propaganda took a sharp turn toward the Cold War, when Good Neighbor chivalry gave way to more strident rhetoric, prefiguring a return to US interventionist politics of the prewar era.

Christine Ehrick is a professor of history at the University of Louisville, where she teaches classes in Latin American history and the history of mass media. Her second book, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), is a sound studies–informed examination of women's radio voices in two of Latin America's most important (overlapping) radio markets. Ehrick is currently researching border radio and military rule in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. She also works with the Radio Preservation Task Force, affiliated with the Library of Congress.

Interview with Christine Ehrick, contributor to FMH's Transnational Broadcasting issue

FMH editor Shelley Stamp interviews FMH contributors Jeannine Baker and Kate Murphy. Baker's article, "Australian Women Working in British Broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s"  and Murphy's article, "Relay Women: Isa Benzie, Janet Quigley and the BBC's Foreign Department, 1930–38" are both published in FMH's "Transnational Broadcasting" issue (Vol. 5, No. 3).

Jeannine Baker is a historian and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She researches the history of women's labor in the media industries. She is the author of Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam (NewSouth, 2015), and she coedited (with Justine Lloyd) the special issue of Media International Australia devoted to “Gendered Labour and Media” (2016). In 2018, while a British Academy visiting fellow at the University of Sussex, she coedited (with Kate Murphy) a website on the pioneering women of the BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/women-pioneers.

Kate Murphy is a principal academic at Bournemouth University, where she has worked since 2012. Prior to her academic career she worked for the BBC for twenty-four years, primarily as a producer on Radio 4 Woman's Hour. She is the author of Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Interview with Jeannine Baker & Kate Murphy, guest editors of FMH's Transnational Broadcasting issue

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