Edited by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn

Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series
Edited by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes

Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-767-9 (paperback, $30.00) 978-1-60235-768-6 (hardcover, $60.00) 978-1-60235-769-3 (PDF, $19.99) © 2016 by Parlor Press, with illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. 185 pages.

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About This Book

Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies sketches several possibilities for future texts, those that imagine new pathways through the forms used to express contemporary questions of race, gender, and identity. Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies’ area of investigation is situated within popular culture, not as a place of critique or celebration, but rather as a contested site that crosses an array of media forms, from music video, to games, to global journalism. While there is an established tradition in feminist writing founded on experimental expression that disrupts patriarchal culture, it has too often failed to consider issues of race and class. This is evident in the dilemma faced by black feminists who, alienated from dominant feminism’s failure to consider their experience, have been forced to choose whether they were black or women first. To push back against such identity splintering, Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies begins with the politics and aesthetics of Afrofuturism, which sets the stage for the dialogue around contemporary feminism that runs through the collection. With a paradigm of remix as linguistic play and reconfiguration, the chapters confront the question of narrative codes and conventions. These new formats are crucial to rewriting the relationship between hegemonic and resistant texts.

Praise for Future Texts

Future Texts offers fresh and exciting work by a range of inspiring contributors on the cultural possibilities of Afrofuturism and new media. In these polyvocal essays, the concerns of race, gender and identity are reimagined, expanded, and revitalized, demonstrating (anew) the contemporary relevance of feminist engagement with popular cultural forms. —ANNE BALSAMO

About the Editors

Vicki Callahan is Associate Professor in the Division of Media Arts + Practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to Ireland for 2015. She teaches courses focused on the integration of theory and practice with attention to issues of media history and theory, digital culture, social media + remix, transmedia, and media strategies for social change. She is author of Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State University Press 2005) and editor for the collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Washington State University Press 2010). Her essays on feminist history and theory appear in the journals Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Velvet Light Trap, and Sight and Sound. She is working on a monograph on the silent film star, Mabel Normand. Founder of the Feminism 3.0 website and co-founder of the Transmedia Activism site, she also works with Sarah Atkinson on the Transmedia Database Project, a scholarly resource site for cross-platform storytelling.

Virginia Kuhn is Associate Professor in the Division of Media Arts + Practice, and Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Her work centers on digital rhetoric and visual culture and her current research project, the VAT (video analysis tableau), applies computational analysis to the study of vast video archives. In 2005 she successfully defended one of the first born-digital dissertations in the US, titled Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age, which challenged archiving and copyright conventions, and published the first article composed in the digital platform, Scalar, titled “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate.” She recently edited her second peer-reviewed digital anthology, MoMLA: From Gallery to Webtext, and is now working on a monograph. Her work can be found in a variety of print and digital journals and serves on the editorial boards of several journals.

Contents and Contributors

Acknowledgments
1 Introduction by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn

Part 1: Afrofuturism in Popular Culture
2 The New "Material Girls": Madonna, "Millenial" Pop Divas, and the Politics of Race and Gender by Shelleen Greene

3 A Window Seat to History: Erykah Badu's Dealey Plaza Remix by Vicki Callahan

4 The Possibilities of Liminality: Black Women's Future Texts as Productive Chaos by Nina Cartier

5 Re-Creating Niobe: The Construction and Re-Construction of Black Femininity through Games and the Social Psychology of the Avatar by Nettrice R. Gaskins

6 "Ghana Meets the World": Remixing Popular Culture on OMG! Ghana by Lorien R. Hunter

Part 2: Feminist Disruptions of Gender and Narrative Codes
7 Adapting Lisbeth for Hollywood: The Politics and Franchising Practices behind Sony's GWTDT Reboot by Courtney Brannon Donoghue

8 Recasting The Best Years of Our Lives: Gender, Revision, and Military Women in the Veteran's Homecoming Film by Anna Froula

9 Television's Queer Future? The Possibilities and Limitations of Web Series, Digital Distribution, and LGBT Representation in Husbands by Melanie E. S. Kohnen

10 Sucker Punch and the Aesthetics of Denial: Future Perfect Tense by Virginia Kuhn

Contributors
About the Editors
Index