“We’d like to see trans people at the very top”

Queer film scholar Laura Horak interviews Ann Thomas, founder and president of Transgender Talent, one of the first management companies devoted to managing openly trans performers. Thomas discusses how the various parts of Hollywood that work in the background—from managers and agents to casting directors and breakdown writers—are changing or resisting change. She states her vision for trans people in Hollywood, an industry admittedly devoted to profit, not social justice.

Sighting the Sound

Characterized by ambiguous sexual energy and resistance to male domination and objectification, the visual idiom of punk rock communicated feminist prospects through the performance of fashion. This essay interprets the creative agency of Alice Bag, Marina “Del Rey” Muhlfriedel, Trudie “Plunger” Arguelles-Barret, and Helen “Hellin Killer” Roessler as Latina and Hispanic sono-spatial artists in the early days of L.A.’s punk subculture. Situating the performance practices of Hispana (Iberian) women alongside the Latina (hemispheric Latin American) artists, L.A. punk is situated within a Spanish-American borderlands matrix of meaning, where non–Western European roots of women in punk gain coherence as a specifically bordered set of historical circumstances. By embodying musical performativity as creators of a relational theatre of musical experience, the study asserts that women punk fans redefined how alternative music was generated, circulated, and consumed.

Pero Like and mitú

In 2016, Buzzfeed announced the creation of Pero Like, a Facebook page and YouTube channel that would “look at the myriad identities under the ‘Latinx umbrella,’” including “[B]laxicans in LA, Tejanos in Corpus Christi, Cubans in Miami (and their abuelitas), and everyone who’s been told they don’t ‘look Latina.’” Pero Like followed the footsteps of mitú, a new media multi-channel network created in 2012 to target younger, bicultural Latinx audiences who are avid internet users and overlooked by legacy media. This article analyzes how Latina millennial digital content creators negotiate, mediate, and contest Latinidad through social media entertainment. It focuses on four of the most popular Latina creators featured on mitú and Pero Like: Jenny Lorenzo, Kat Lazo, Julissa Calderon, and Maya Murillo. In doing so, the article explores how these creators articulate the politics of Latinx millenniality through a focus on cultural specificity, panethnicity, generational differences, language practices, race and racism, and beauty standards.

Sweat, Display, and Blackness

This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of liquidity as a Black feminist analytic. Enlarging the concept of media to incorporate these artifacts, the text links diaspora, blackness, and affect to the violence of colonial rupture, while also using an analytic of sweat to explore forms of expressivity that escape capture. Sweat becomes a way to think between two axes within Black feminist thought: the pornographification of the racialized body that Hortense Spillers and others have described, and the joy and critique embedded in Audre Lorde’s erotic, especially in relation to formations of diaspora and spirituality.

Encoded Perception

Despite her status as an unpaid “resident visitor” for most of her nearly two-decade tenure there, Lillian Schwartz created some of the most important works of early computer art at Bell Labs. This essay unravels the conceptual frameworks of “vision” as they manifest in Schwartz’s early computer films made between 1970 and 1972, with a specific emphasis on vision as “information” and “data.” It argues that these specific films in Schwartz’s oeuvre explored a newly emerging model of vision based on the rendering practices of computers and scientific instruments, while navigating the fraught question of the role of the embodied viewer. Resisting this rationalized order of vision, which would ultimately result in the emergence of information as both a commodity and an asset class, Schwartz’s films instead explore the contingencies of rendering information with the newly developing medium of the computer.

Toward a Trans Method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life

It is reductive yet accurate to assert that Chase Joynt and Jules Rosskam first met because they are both trans people who make documentary films. While the alignment of these affinities does not necessarily prefigure a friendship—in fact, many would argue and experience the opposite—they have found kinship in their shared approach to positions as institutionally embedded academics who are also publicly exhibiting artists. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1997) and the cross-disciplinary, conversational theory making of Lisa Duggan and José Muñoz, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, they use dialogue to extend the intimate interdisciplinary legacies and potentials of thinkers collaboratively discussing social issues. Together, they ask what might be possible in envisioning, theorizing, and enacting a trans cinematic method—a praxis for artists and scholars alike to be in meaningful, mutually supportive, world-sustaining relationships.

Assemblage, Performance, Precarity

Though often named as such in publicity materials, Filipa César is credited not as the director of Spell Reel (2017), but as having undertaken “assemblage.” Part of the collaborative project Luta ca caba inda, films including Spell Reel and Conakry (2013) are built around archival fragments stored in the Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Guinea-Bissau. They were exposed to adverse conditions before being retrieved and digitized. These images, which remain unrestored, are traces of a militant cinema praxis forged during the anti-colonial resistance to Portuguese rule. This essay situates Spell Reel and Conakry (2013) as mobile homes for these images, enabling an audience of Guineans and others to come into contact with them in a context that situates their precarity as not a matter of loss but a method of inquiry. César foregrounds the laborious processes of assembly in place of authorship, thus revealing the potential of the cinematic medium to function as an infrastructural formation.

Affective Cin-aereality

This article explores a kinship between aviation and cinema through the intersection of affective gender, dreams, and flying as expressed across newspaper accounts of women and flight, star discourse related to Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford, and the sexualized scenes of aerial joyriding in Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927) and Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’s Plane Crazy (1928). It argues that in order to fully understand the aviation-cinema nexus, we must dislodge it from its masculinist heritage within high modernist myths. Key to this dislodging is the reinsertion of gendered associations of the body, affect, and the senses into the modernist myth of aerial vision as a weightless, abstracted regime of the eye. The article theoretically frames this historical exploration of aviation and cinema as an exemplary case study for an expanded rethinking of affect, reception, and the senses in Miriam Hansen’s notion of cinema as vernacular modernism.