Call for Papers – Special Issue of Feminist Media Histories on Asian Media

We invite proposals for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on Asian Media. This issue probes the contested sites of practicing and theorizing feminist media in Asia. We encourage proposals that interrogate the concepts of “feminism,” “media” and “Asia” as interconnected historical categories that contribute to each other’s formation and reconfiguration.

What we now know as “Asia” is the result of centuries-long, global-scale economic, cultural and political transactions and contentions, including colonization, warfare, nationalist movements, and border-crossing alliances. The emergence of film at the turn of the twentieth century and later analogue and electronic media forms all afford potent techno-cultural resources that have been mobilized for variegated local commercial, cultural and political agendas. This special issue explores the ways in which women’s media practices and theorizations of these media forms participate and intervene in the discourses of colonialism, nationalism, modernity and globalization in the geopolitical zone known as Asia, from the early twentieth century to the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Given the inherent entanglement of gender with other vectors of power, we welcome an intersectional approach that analyzes gender in interaction with race, sexuality, class and national politics. We also welcome studies that trace how a gendered perspective helps to shape media practice and theorization across shifting historical eras in the Asian context.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Female film and media practitioners working within and across Asia’s geopolitical borders in different eras
• Histories of feminist media works, ranging from film, television, video to internet media culture, social media, activist media; commercial, independent and the spectrum in between
• Female film and media historians and critics in the Asian context
• Gender in intersection with race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, national and transnational politics in varied media contexts
• Gender-conscious re-readings of female representation and performance in film and media works

Interested contributors should contact guest editor Yiman Wang directly, sending a 300-word proposal no later than October 1, 2017 to yw3@ucsc.edu. Contributors will be notified October 15, 2017. Article drafts will be due by February 1, 2018 and will then be sent out for anonymous peer review.

Feminist Media Histories is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to feminist histories of film, video, audio, and digital technologies across a range of periods and global contexts. Inter-medial and trans-national in approach, Feminist Media Histories examines the historical role gender has played in varied media technologies, and documents women’s engagement with these media as audiences and users, creators and executives, critics and theorists, technicians and laborers, educators and activists. Feminist Media Histories is published quarterly by the University of California Press.