Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse

Digital Platforms and Feminist Film
Discourse
Rosanna Maule
Digital Platforms
and Feminist Film
Discourse
Women’s Cinema 2.0
Rosanna Maule
Concordia University
Montreal, Québec
Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-48041-1 ISBN 978-3-319-48042-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957404
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my
beloved father Giuseppe (1931–2016)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book came as a natural continuation of my research and interest in

feminist approaches to film and women’s cinema. In particular, it has been
conceived parallel to two projects that I am completing. The first is a book
on women’s relations to cinephilia, including a section on cyberfeminism
and techno-cinephilia. The second is a documentary film on women’s
contributions to fiction feature film-making, originally conceived as an
installation, an archive of women film-makers in the age of digital media.
The research involved in this publication has been made possible thanks
to the support of federal and provincial grants from Canada, as well as
through a series of grants that I received from Concordia University,
individually and in collaboration with research partners. I mean to
acknowledge some of these collaborators, first and foremost the Women
Film Project including my colleague Guylaine Dionne and our research
team, and the research team Groupe de Recherche sur l’Avènement et la
Formation des Institutions Cinématographique et Scénique (GRAFICS),
directed by André Gaudreault at the Université de Montréal.
Dionne and I have been working together at a research/creation project
about the role and visibility of women female directors in the sector of
feature fiction film-making, which we are now completing as a feature-
length documentary film. While I was researching for this book, I was
doing research for our documentary about women filmmakers with
Dionne and I was passing relevant articles about gender disparity in the
film industry to our research assistants and vice versa. None of the material
used for that film appears in this book, except for a short quote from an
interview with Eva Kietzmann, a member of bildwechsel, which Dionne
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
gave me permission to use. With members of the GRAFICS, I have been

giving presentations of case studies included in this book at international
conferences. This book was greatly inspired by conversations I had at these
conferences. I would also like to acknowledge other research teams with
which I have been presenting earlier versions of this project: the Women’s
Global Network, founded in 2013 by Veronica Pravadelli, and the
Women’s Film and Television History Network-The UK/Ireland, estab-
lished by Christine Gledhill, and the Women Film Pioneers Project,
created by Jane M. Gaines.
At Concordia University, I would like to express my gratitude to my
research assistants from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, particu-
larly to Desirée de Jesus. I would also like to thank the generous feedback
and the enthusiastic participation of the graduate students registered in my
seminar Women’s Cinema 2.0, which I offered at Concordia University in
Fall 2016 and was largely based on topics relevant to this publication.
These students also read some excerpts from an early draft of this book and
their comments helped me look at the project from different viewpoints.
This book could not have been possible without the support of the Faculty
of Fine Arts and of the Department of Cinema. Among my colleagues, my
first thought goes to my friend and research partner Guylaine Dionne,
with whom I have shared years of exciting collaborative work which has in
part inspired this new project. At the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema,
I am particularly grateful to Martin Lefebvre, to our new Chair Catherine
Russell, to Peter Rist, Thomas Waugh, Eric Prince of ARTHEMIS, and to
all my colleagues. At the Faculty of Fine Arts, special thanks go to Lyse
Larose and Anne Whitelaw for insightful comments on this project, and to
Nancy Sardella for having helped me keeping my grants’ balance in check.
Within the scholarly context in general, thanks first of all to Veronica
Pravadelli. She founded the Global Women’s Cinema Project, and within
the conferences organized by this research network I gave presentations
related to this book. She also gave me the opportunity to present material
from this study at the doctoral seminar lecture series at Roma Tre
University, Rome, Italy, which she directs. Thanks also to the interna-
tional group of scholars with whom I have been presenting and discussing
versions of this project. I cannot name them all, so I will limit myself to
thank those with whom I shared results of this study at three editions of
the Magis School Forum at Gorizia, as well as at two editions of the
Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference (those held in Seattle
and in Montreal): members of the aforementioned GRAFICS and of the
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
unfortunately no longer existing ARTHEMIS research team, founded and

directed by Martin Lefebvre at Concordia University. Thanks also to
Cristina Jandelli for giving me the possibility of presenting a lecture on
Women’s Studies drawing on this study at the doctoral program lecture
series of the University of Florence, with Monica Dall’Asta as a respondent.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I am most grateful to Lina Aboujieb,
Commissioning Editor for Film and Television Studies at Palgrave, for
assistance during the entire editorial process and to Karina Jakupsdottir
and Nikita Dhiwar for helping in the very last phase.
Finally, I would like to take a moment to thank some of my friends in
Montreal and elsewhere for having been so supportive and close through-
out a difficult time in my life. A special thought first to Lea and Guylaine,
then to Cilia and Michael, Rodrigue, Claudia and Setrag, Norma, Romaric
and Yves, Jennifer, Monica, Narcisa, Giuseppe, the two Chiara, Sandra,
and the two Antonella.
Last, but most of all, thanks to my family and most particularly to my
father, to whose memory this book is dedicated, with all my gratitude and
love.
CONTENTS
1 New Technologies of Gender: Women and Film in the

Digital Era 1
The Geopolitics of Women’s Cinema 2.0 1
Women’s Cinema on the Web as Minor Cinema 3
Feminist Film Discourse in the Digital Sphere 6
Feminist Grass-Roots Practices, Post-Feminism, and Neo-Liberal
Economy 8
Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse: An Overview 12
Notes 14
References 18
2 Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital Platforms as

Alternative Circuits 23
The Internet as a New Resource for Women Filmmakers 23
Digital Networking: The Women in Film and Television
International 24
Women in Crowdfunding Production: Emily Best’s Seed&Spark 28
Sally Potter: Making Films in the Age of Digital Reproduction 33
Ava DuVernay and the Digital Promotion of African-American
Cinema 41
Notes 50
References 53
xi
xii CONTENTS
3 Engendering the Global Market: Women’s Cinema as a

Creative Industry 59
Women’s Film Culture on the Web: Contexts and Debates 59
Promoting Women’s Cinema Today: Film Festivals as Market
Makers 62
Mobilizing Women+’s Cinema: bildwechsel’s Digital Archive 70
Notes 79
References 86
4 Women and Online Porn in North America: New Media,

Old Debates 89
Feminism and Pornography 89
Feminist Porn 2.0: New Practices, New Ethics 94
Anita Sarkeesian and the Pro-/Anti-Porn Feminist Debate 96
Notes 105
References 109
5 Conclusions: Women Film Scholars Online 113

Feminist Film Scholarship and Digital Networks 113
Notes 123
References 124
Index 127
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosanna Maule is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Mel

Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. She
specializes in contemporary film authorship, European contemporary
cinema, and feminist approaches to film and media studies. She is the
author of Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices
in France, Italy, and Spain Since the 1980s (2008), the main editor of In
the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and Cinema (2009), and has written
several book chapters and film journal articles on topics related to her areas
of expertise. She is part of the research team GRAFICS at Université de
Montréal, on the Board of Directors of the Women’s Film History
International, and an active member of the Doing Women’s Film
History Network and the Global Women’s Cinema network. With her
colleague Guylaine Dionne, she is completing a feature documentary on
the role and visibility of female film directors working in fiction film-
making around the world.
xiii
ACRONYMS
AP Adventure Pictures
AFFRM African–American Film Festival Releasing Movement
BEV BirdsEyeView
BFI British Film Institute
CGI Computer–Generated Imagery
DFAP DEEP FILM Access Project
EWA European Women’s Audiovisual Network
ESPN Entertainment and Sports Programming Network
FIG Feminist Improvisation Group
WFTHN Film History Network UK/Ireland
MICA Red de Mujeres Iberoamericánas de Cine y Medios Audiovisuales
VOD Video on Demand
UCLA University of California, Los Angeles
WFPP Women Film Pioneer Project
WIF Women in Film
WIFTI Women in Film and Television International
xv
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 Advertisement of an event sponsored by General Motors for

Women in Film, Los Angeles, 2006 27
Fig. 2.2 Seed&Spark’s signature Logo 29
Fig. 2.3 Ava DuVernay awarded at the Sundance Film Festival for
Middle of Nowhere (2012) 43
Fig. 3.1 Page from bildwechsel’s website 74
Fig. 3.2 Der Schloss (The Castle): The video’s opening page 76
Fig. 3.3 Der Schloss (The Castle): The elevator 77
Fig. 3.4 Der Schloss (The Castle): The screening room 78
Fig. 4.1 Anita Sarkeesian speaking at XOXO Conference, 13
September 2014 99
xvii
CHAPTER 1
New Technologies of Gender: Women

and Film in the Digital Era
Abstract This chapter presents and contextualizes the book’s subject

matter and content. Its purpose is to situate women’s cinema 2.0 within
the uneven configuration of global media and Internet practices, to
illustrate the content of each chapter, and to justify the selection of the
case studies. The chapter also substantiates the use of key terms adopted
such as women’s cinema, globalization, and neo-liberalism, stressing
the difficulty to avoid Western-centred perspectives when dealing with
the simultaneously democratic and geoculturally uneven context of the
Internet.
Keywords Global media Women’s cinema Globalization

Neo-liberalism
THE GEOPOLITICS OF WOMEN’S CINEMA 2.0

Various social actors (both individual and organizational) are using digital
platforms to consolidate professional and cultural networks among
women involved in film in different contexts and roles. The Internet is
also becoming an important resource for the production, the promotion,
and the discussion of films directed by women or with a strong interest for
women, as well as for the development of feminist discourse outside of
academic and specialized circuits. The focus of this book is on some of
these platforms, monitored or administered by individual players, as well
© The Author(s) 2016 1

R. Maule, Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_1
2 DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND FEMINIST FILM DISCOURSE
as groups or organizations within the film industry and in the larger

context of media production and reception. The purpose is to verify if –
and to what extent – these platforms may provide new venues for women
in global cinema today, outside of specialized circuits of production and
reception. Particular emphasis will be given to Web-based platforms such
as websites, Facebook pages, blogs Web series, and other types on
Internet-based projects or services, even though most case studies exam-
ined expand to several other applications.1
This book advances a critical assessment of women’s film culture in its
current digital forms from within a theoretical framework that encom-
passes feminist film theory, cyberfeminism, and new media studies. This
small yet vibrant area of digital production and culture is still vastly
unconsidered from a scholarly viewpoint and calls for further investiga-
tion. The set of practices here referred to as “women’s cinema 2.0”
operates within a global film industry and a public sphere that still dis-
parage women and wherein, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, “feminist activism is
replaced by the less confrontational policy of gender mainstreaming”
(Braidotti 2005: 3). For this reason, the underlying question in this
book is the extent to which a feminist discourse on film may emerge
within a historical period characterized by neo-liberal and post-feminist
ideologies.2 The growing presence of projects, articles, and discussions by
and about women film-makers on the Internet signals the effort to counter
or eschew the systems and channels available within a male-dominated
media industry, market, and culture. Yet digital media do not automati-
cally equal innovation or guarantee dissemination of feminist discourse:
they can help create new spaces for women in cinematic contexts opened
to diverse and broad communities, worldwide. Furthermore, the eco-
nomic interests and the ideological manipulations embedded in network
culture often blur the boundaries between entrepreneurial self-affirmation
and grass-roots cooperation among women that adopt digital platforms as
a means of cultural dissemination or professional advancement. For this
reason, women’s cinema on digital platforms is a phenomenon important
to detect in contemporary online culture and within a media context
dominated by corporate capital and neo-liberal economy, even though
the nature of its manifestations is difficult to discern as either a resistant or
a co-opted form of cultural participation.3
The first step is to acknowledge the Internet’s implication in neoliberal
ideology and economy.4 The boundaries between radical and conservative
positions on the Web are difficult to identify. Cyberfeminism has been
1 NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER: WOMEN AND FILM IN THE DIGITAL ERA 3
investigating these issues for over two decades, “track[ing] the ways in
which gendered subject are produced and defined in transnationally net-
worked, media-saturated environments” (Hedge 2011: 1).5 This scholar-
ship examines the articulation of identity and agency in women’s use of the
Internet. In contributing to this literature, this book scrutinizes women’s
presence in digital culture less as consumers than as producers, thus
implementing an aspect that within these studies has been only recently
evaluated and mainly from the perspective of fandom creativity.6 From this
perspective, the aim is less to distinguish between feminist and non-
feminist positions in the digital generation of women’s cinema than to
point at embedded actions of grass-roots counterculture and social resis-
tance that Web-based practices, projects, and discussions by and about
women generate.
While most case studies here observed do not make reference to femin-
ism or women’s cinema as a category, they follow the mandate initiated
forty years ago within the context of the women’s movement: to make
space for women in film culture and society through aesthetic production,
cultural activism, and critical theory. To be sure, Web 2.0 manifestations
of women’s cinema are not always in opposition to a gender-blind culture
industry or public sphere: instead, they document the shifting and
dynamic positions of women within global cinema and mark new forms
of resistance to gender discrimination within it.
Some of the recurring and key concepts in this book – such as
women’s cinema, minor cinema, neo-liberal economy, globalization,
and post-feminism – are among the most frequently evoked and proble-
matized terms within the humanities and the social sciences. In the
awareness of the inflated and often ambiguous status that these terms
have within their own fields, their adoption comes with an effort to
account for their specific occurance in different technological, socio-
economic, and geopolitical circumstances. This intent underlie the next
sections of this chapter, which illustrate the place of women’s cinema 2.0
in global media practices.
WOMEN’S CINEMA ON THE WEB AS MINOR CINEMA

Alison Butler, in her book Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (2002),
stresses the difficulty in defining the concept of women’s cinema, which
“suggests, without clarity, films that might be made, addressed to, or
concerned with women, or all three” and does not indicate genre, lineage,
or geocultural boundary (2002: 1). Women’s cinema is also a problematic

term insofar as it subsumes two, almost oppositional types of films: those
associated with women film-makers’ subjective and authorial work and
those conceived in mainstream modes of production for female spectators.
Hilary Radner stresses this dichotomy in the essay “‘In extremis’: Jane
Campion and the woman’s film”, noting the “two competing definitions
within women’s cinema: as a cinema for women or by women” (2009: 5).7
Women’s cinema is an unpopular category among many women film-
makers, producers, and cultural promoters, who consider it either reduc-
tive or professionally counterproductive within a film industry notoriously
biased against gender-specific genres or labels. Even film directors asso-
ciated with feminist cinema have occasionally taken their distance from
this category. At the 1987 edition of Festival de Films des femmes de
Créteil, Chantal Akerman declared that women’s cinema was an “out-
dated” concept.8 Two decades later, Agnès Varda refused to present her
film at the same festival to protest against its “all women” policy and
accepted the invitation to an open debate with Jackie Buet – the festival’s
founder and director – to discuss the matter.9 In 2003, the Spanish film
director Icíar Bollaín (whose films often address women’s issues) wrote a
short article entitled “Cine con tetas” (“Cinema with Tits”) in a special
issue of the feminist journal Duoda, in which she defined sexual difference
as a biological detail with no bearing on cinematic practices as a way to
eschew general categorizations of women’s cinema (Bollaín 2003).
The concept of women’s cinema has been the object of critiques and
debates even within feminist film discourse and since its emergence within
the women’s movement. Some scholars have been rejecting its general-
izing and essentialist undertones and some film-makers have taken their
distance from it.10 The German feminist theorist Gertrud Koch, in the
article “Ex-changing the gaze: re-visioning feminist film theory”, argues
that differences within women’s cinema result from the juxtaposition
between the pragmatic political orientation of the women’s movement
and the claim to autonomy of feminist film-makers (1985: 150).11 Teresa
de Lauretis, in an essay published in the same issue of the journal New
German Critique, proposes that women’s cinema subsumes a split
between “two types of film work” within feminist cinema, one that “called
for immediate documentation for purposes of political activism” and one
that “insisted on rigorous work on the medium . . . understood as a social
technology” (1987: 128).12 More than twenty years later, Allison Butler
goes back to de Lauretis’s observation in her aforementioned book about
women’s cinema to conclude that “the influence of this division has been
formative, insofar as the need for these two tendencies to re-join has
shaped theoretical and critical debate around women’s cinema even
since” (2002: 3).
The concept of women’s cinema will provide the conceptual framework
for the practices and projects here considered. The vague contours of this
unclassifiable film category complement the generalized endorsement of
women in the cinematic realm often found in digital platforms. Even
though some of these platforms do not align with a feminist tradition or
invoke women’s cinema as an operational concept, their intent to produce,
distribute, and circulate women’s films and to open new opportunities for
women in the film industry is coherent with the spirit of women’s cinema.
B. Ruby Rich, in her article “The confidence game”, describes women’s
cinema as part of feminism’s “broader strategy to claim a larger world for
women” (2013: 160). From this perspective, paraphrasing Teresa de
Lauretis, women’s cinema 2.0 also rearticulates the double purpose of
feminism: to expose dominant technologies of gender and to encourage a
micropolitics of gender formation (de Lauretis 1989: xi).
In particular, this book assumes digital platforms about women in film
today as an instance of women’s cinema close to the definition that Alison
Butler gives of this concept in her quoted book, that of “minor cinema”.13
Butler contends that women’s cinema as minor cinema brings together
common positions among women within global film practices, even
though it lacks a coherent and unifying definition (2002: 20). For
Butler, “to call women’s cinema a minor cinema, then, is to free it from
the binarisms (popular/elitist, avant-garde/mainstream, positive/nega-
tive) which result from imagining it as parallel or oppositional cinema”
(Butler 2002: 21). Patricia White does not adopt minor cinema as a
conceptual framework in her book Women’s Cinema/World Cinema:
Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, even though she embraces “Butler’s
account of the plurality and irreducibility of transnational women’s
cinema” (2015: 13). According to White, while “[m]inor cinema captures
the crucial deterritorializing work of women’s cinema, its resistance to
totalizing narratives of the world system – the category of gender cuts
through every whole, if unpredictably” (2015: 13). White prefers to “take
as a pressing research question the way that women’s work is reterritor-
ialized through contemporary film culture – for example, as the persona
of the female director is allied with a notion of art cinema that transcends
politics” (2015: 13). In my book, the notion of minor cinema also
implies geocultural reinstatement. As minor film forms, digital platforms

devoted to women’s films or film projects developed or promoted on the
Internet have a limited impact on mainstream or regular contexts and
circuits of global cinema. Yet they deflect globalized digital practices and
technologies provided by globalized corporate media to the advantage of
non-profit, anti-capitalist approaches to film-making conceived by women
and addressing women as a minority group. These digital approaches to
women’s cinema encourage creative film industries, as well as professional
or cultural networks that are independent and separated from mainstream
contexts and circuits of media production and distribution, even though
they may share the same technologies, formats, and audiences.14
FEMINIST FILM DISCOURSE IN THE DIGITAL SPHERE

The geocultural distribution of the case studies sampled in this book is a
pointer to the inequalities existing within the allegedly democratic nature
of the Internet. While preference has been given to cultural and ethnic
diversity, the majority of websites, blogs, and digital projects by or about
women’s cinema here investigated is produced within Western regions,
especially North America and Europe, and reflects what is mainly available
on the Internet today. The geocultural position and the social level of
individuals involved in these platforms – mainly middle-upper class – are
expectable, given the fact that gender and social gaps among Internet
users are still unresolved issues, both within developing countries and
economically affluent or technologically advanced areas.15 This holds
true even though Arjun Appadurai stresses that mapping globalization
according to Western/Eastern or class divides may be relative in a world
that is now classified through “electronic mediation and mass mediation”
(1996: 4), while Jessie Daniels reminds us that “[c]onceptualizing digital
technologies exclusively in terms of either economic oppression or lack of
access is overdetermined and does not allow for women’s agency with
regard to the Internet” (2009: 106).16
Indeed, as Rahda S. Hedge notes in her book Circuits of Visibility:
Gender and Transnational Media Cultures, gender and sociocultural
divides are still predominant within digital media and even produced by
them (2011). For Hedge, “[m]edia technologies, systems of representa-
tion, and information networks constitute the circuitry that transport
modalities of power producing what Grewal and Kaplan term ‘scattered
hegemonies’” (2011: 1).17 Many studies have demonstrated that these
inequalities play an important part in the variables influencing the gender

divide on the Internet.18,19 Hedge, for instance, warns against the increas-
ingly regulated constitution of gender and sexuality on the Internet, pro-
moted “within the new cultural, political, and economic configurations”
(2011: 6). Specific habits also accentuate gender disparity in global access to
the Internet, as Cindy Royal specifies in her article “Framing the Internet: a
comparison of gendered spaces”, bringing as examples “frequency and
quality of usage, the different ways and purposes in which the technology
is employed, and the ways women’s usage of technology is represented”
(2008: 152).
Within this context, digital platforms promoting women’s cinema
may simultaneously partake into the privileges of global cinema as a
social technology and advance a critique of its dominant traits through
micro practices of self-orientation, professional advancement, and cul-
tural critique. Those considered in this book contribute to define chan-
ging notions of women’s identity, knowledge, and participation in the
social sphere and within globalization. The main criteria of selection have
been the transnational profile of the people responsible for the platforms,
the independent and grass-roots nature of the platforms, and the actual
impact of the projects, services, and discourses that these sites produce or
promote on the public sphere. Whether their objective is to endorse the
role of women film-makers in global cinema or to bring feminist dis-
course into new contexts of cultural debate, these platforms engage
women in a virtual community involving collective sharing and
exchange. As it often happens in networked culture, their cultural level
varies and so does the approach to their definition of women’s cinema,
both from within and outside feminist frameworks of discourse. Some of
the grass-roots initiatives aiming at advancing women’s cinema through
the Web may also raise doubts with regard to the radical position or the
grass-roots nature of the individual and the organizations behind them.
In part, these reservations result from ambiguities and limitations impli-
cit in the potential of the digital media to serve as a democratic arena for
political and critical discourse. Blogs, websites, and other types of plat-
forms always point at the conceptual and geopolitical positions among
members or participants of the organizations and groups behind them,
even when linked to non-profit organizations and to individuals not
aiming at raising funds or distributing or selling products. As Tatiana
Pudrovska and Myra Marx Ferree argue in an article about the use of
websites for NGO organizations,
[T]he analysis of Web sites provides a new and useful form of data about an
organization’s identity and priorities because, unlike media representations
of the group, it is self-directed and, unlike many structural features of the
organization, it is relatively resource-neutral. Thus a Web site provides an
open space for self-presentation to the rest of the world. (2004: 19)
For this reason, in examining these platforms particular attention will be
drawn on the role of individuals and organizations behind them as social
actors within specific types of social networks. From this viewpoint, my
approach reflects what the sociologist Robert Ackland defines “a social
science view of the web” that is, “of a network of people and organizations,
rather than a collection of hyperlinked documents” (2009: 484).
This publication brings together content analysis, critical theory, and the
use of secondary literature such as published interviews or media reports.
From the point of view of gender, this book privileges what Susanna
Paasonen, in her book Figures of Fantasy: Internet, Women, and
Cyberdiscourse, identifies as a crucial series of questions when addressing
the category “women” in cyberdiscourse (2002: 121). According to
Paasonen, women have traditionally been disparaged both as “underrepre-
sented in technical skills, in content production and until the early 2000s,
also as in Internet usage” (Paasonen: 2002: 122). As a feminist media
researcher, Paasonen notes how gender in cyberspace has been limited to
demographics and oftentimes problematically approaches biological essen-
tialism (2002: 127). These trends encourage the proliferation of commer-
cial websites reiterating “the over-emphasized connection between women,
consumerism, and femininity” (Paasonen 2002: 127–128). Countering the
analytic tendency reproved by Paasonen, this book places women’s cinema
within the diverse communities and practices of the Internet, stressing the
geocultural, ideological, and economic differences and specificities of its
manifestations at a time when notions of public sphere, sociocultural iden-
tity, and filmic experience are constantly changing.
FEMINIST GRASS-ROOTS PRACTICES, POST-FEMINISM,

AND NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMY
This section examines the status of digital practices as resistant forms to

global corporate media and neo-liberal economy. The central question is
whether grass-roots activism and post-feminism neo-liberal ideology can
be distinguished within a digital sphere marked by the uneven formation
of global cultures and gendered subjectivities. Can we clearly identify

instances of “globalization from below” (as Arjun Appadurai defines
grass-roots globalized practices) from phenomena of neo-liberal and eth-
nocentric determinism? (Appadurai 2000: 15)
Some of the individuals or the groups responsible or involved in the
platforms here evaluated even reject feminism and many are, to varying
degrees, enmeshed with mainstream or integrated film systems and mili-
eus. Hester Baer, in an article about digital feminism within the context of
neo-liberalism entitled “Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics,
and neoliberalism”, acknowledges the difficulties in identifying “the poli-
tical investments of digital feminism, which has emerged in tandem with
the global hegemony of neoliberalism” (2016: 18). Her strategy to iden-
tify feminist solidarity in spite of “the toxic environment of in online
spaces or feminist “microrebellion” from “neoliberal subjectivities”
implies “contextualizing contemporary feminist protest actions within
the framework of neoliberalism and outlining the stakes of their body
politics in this context” (2016: 18). For Baer, these instances of micro-
rebellion “in the absence of alternatives to global capitalism” . . . can best
be understood as process-based political actions” (Baer 2016: 30).
Following Baer’s method, this book inquires into the possibilities for
radical action even in Web-based projects or discourses by or about
women in film conceived or shared within privileged contexts.
Raising and expanding visibility for women’s filmic expression on the
Web is a core goal and concern, particularly at a time when women’s
culture and feminist resistance are challenged by the emergence of neo-
liberal post-feminism. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, introducing
their co-edited book New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and
Subjectivity, note “a powerful resonance between postfeminism and neo-
liberalism, that operates at least at three levels”, including individualism,
self-regulating subjectivity, and self-management (2011: 6). Gilll and
Scharff conclude that, because of the pressure put on women to change
the self, “neoliberalism is always already gendered, and that women are
constructed as its ideal subjects” (ibid.). According to Rosi Braidotti, neo-
liberal post-feminism also marks the return of master narratives at the end
of postmodernism and produces a dismissal of radicalism and a moral
apathy inviting neoconservative political liberalism (2005: 3). In her
essay “A critical cartography of feminist post-postmodernism”, she cites
as examples of these neoconservative master narratives in Europe those
that reify the notion of cultural difference into deterministic beliefs about
national, regional, or provincial parameters of identity formation (ibid.).

New technologies and the new market economy are the key factors
contributing to revamp master narratives about identity, producing a
neo-liberal post-feminist ideology wherein “women are the losers of the
current technological revolutions” (ibid.). Against this trend, Braidotti
welcomes the emergence of a third-wave feminism bringing together post-
humanist, phenomenological and post-phenomenological philosophy and
neo-Marxist-informed political theory (ibid.).
As it will be further illustrated, third-wave feminism encompasses a
complex and varied set of conceptual and ideological views. These posi-
tions produce new versions of feminism, including, on the one hand, the
articulation of identity within contexts of racial and social discrimination
and, on the other hand, the radical reconceptualization of feminine sub-
jectivity involving a different approach to the female body, variously
associated with political and social activism.20
Some of the practices for the production, promotion, and reception of
women’s cinema proposed on digital platforms articulate such new forms
of feminist discourse.
Another difficult task in theorizing the radical potential of digital
platforms about women’s cinema is the status of globalization within
digital media production and consumption. As Doris Baltruschat
reminds us in her book Global Media Ecologies: Networked Productions
in Film and Television, global media production are being modified by
new dynamics of globalization (2010: 14). This study proposes a con-
structive reading of women’s 2.0 as an instance of grass-roots globaliza-
tion, taking into consideration the geocultural context of the social
actors involved in the production and the promotion of film by and
about women from a perspective informed by transnational feminism
and new media theory. Transnational feminism tries to maintain the
historical modalities within which feminist discourse is situated within
different geocultural areas. Women’s cinema, either as a feminist type of
film work or as a specific film genre, is per se a transnational phenom-
enon, all the more as it is conveyed through digital platforms connecting
the multiple temporalities and geocultural positions of Web users.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty views transnational feminism as an approach
“attentive to the micropolitics of context, subjectivity, and struggle, as
well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political systems and
processes” (2003: 501). Mohanty recommends “a comparative feminist
studies/feminist solidarity model . . . set[ting] up a paradigm of historically
and culturally specific ‘common differences’ to address non-Western

women from a transnational perspective” (2003: 523).21 According to
Mohanty, transnational feminism needs to chart and monitor not only
the visible struggles of Third World women involved in social or political
movements, but also the hegemonic developments of global capitalism,
which is subordinating women in neo-liberal ideology and religious
fundamentalism (Mohanty 2003: 502–03). Marianne H. and Anne
Sisson Runyan, in their collection Gender and Global Restructuring:
Sightings, Sites, and Resistance, propose transnational feminism as a
strategy of resistance against a neo-liberal, imperialist notion of globali-
zation (Marchand and Sisson Runyan 2011: 12–13). According to fem-
inist historian Tani E. Barlow, transnational feminism is the only
theoretical framework capable of addressing non-Western women within
a postcolonial and global scenario (Barlow 1998: 121).
With regard to this project, transnational feminism entails a meticu-
lous deconstruction of late-capitalist mechanisms of gender formation in
world-globalized media, drawing attention to the historical and the
geocultural modalities within which women’s cinema is situated. The
purpose to suture “women” as historical subjects and “women” as
gendered identities into present-day film practices and culture is a
major issue in feminist film theory and the premise for any discussion
of women’s cinema. As mentioned earlier, some initiatives claiming to
advance women film-makers through Web 2.0 services may have a lim-
ited and selective reach or may otherwise develop grass-roots feminist
practices from Western-centred perspectives, as it is the case of many
international organizations for the development of women and gender
equity in media based in North America or Europe. Nevertheless, these
organizations still provide useful models for articulating women’s parti-
cipation in the global sphere, fostering local, interactive, and cross-
cultural forms of transnational feminism. A case in point is the non-profit
organization Women’s Media Center, funded in 2005 by three feminist
activists all equally famous in their respective areas: the actress Jane
Fonda, the poet and writer Robin Morgan, and the journalist and essayist
Gloria Steinem (http://www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/about-
us). Women’s Media Center monitors sexism in the media, inviting
online petitions and calls for campaigns, offering professional experts
and advisers for women in the media business, and developing blogs
about women being subjected to violence around the world. The orga-
nization also offers workshops and sponsors Web-based movements
inviting women to take action against violence and discrimination in the

media and in the public sphere (http://www.womensmediacenter.com/
pages/media-programs-for-girls). Another instance is the institute on
gender and media See Jane, established by the US actress Geena Davis,
which organizes symposia, research studies, and educational workshops
for parents and educators within the USA, with the purpose of making
children gender-aware when exposed to media (http://seejane.org/).
Even though these two organizations might not be instances of what
Appadurai describes as forms of “globalization from below”, they con-
tribute to widening the spectrum of feminist film discourse on film in the
public sphere (2000: 15).
In their introduction to their collection Cyberfeminism 2.0, Radhika
Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh argue that within a digital culture where the
boundaries between self-empowering and market-driven narratives are
blurred and cyber classes are simultaneously the ruling classes and the
working classes, the challenge for “cyberfeminist scholars and activists [is
how to] respond to the pleasing discourses of women’s empowerment
through blogging, networking, financing, or entrepreneurship when
[they] suspect that digital technologies, intertwined with neoliberal mar-
ket logic, exercise subtle, indeed invisible, power” (2012: 2). The purpose
of Gajjala and Ju Oh’s book is to address questions of entrepreneurship,
post-feminist neo-liberalism, and cultural identity in women’s relations to
techno-mediated environments (2012: 2). The same purpose informs my
analysis of digital platforms on women’s cinema. My interest is to demon-
strate how these platforms can activate micro practices of self-orientation,
professional advancement, and cultural critique for women in global media
production and reception.
DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND FEMINIST FILM

DISCOURSE: AN OVERVIEW
This book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 contextualizes
the subject matter, illustrates the theoretical framework, and presents the
content of each chapter. The chapter also justifies the selection of the case
studies within the different technocultures, socio-economic contexts, and
geopolitical areas in which they are embedded. Theoretically, Chapter 1 also
explains the use of key terms adopted in the publication, such as “women’s
cinema”, neo-liberalism, or globalization and puts feminist and post-
feminist approaches to film into a historical perspective, particularly as they

relate to the concept of women’s cinema in the transition to digital technol-
ogy and culture.
Chapter 2 focuses on digital platforms as a complement to women’s
work in film production, distribution, and promotion. The first part
examines the proliferation of platforms for the professional advancement
of women film-makers, through two case studies: Seed&Spark, one of the
few crowdfunding agencies in the world directed by a woman, and the
transnational association Women in Film and Television International
(WIFTI), which advances women in the film industry around the world.
The second part of the chapter considers women filmmakers’ adoption of
digital platforms as means of professional advancement through the ana-
lysis of the websites created by two major figures within women’s inde-
pendent cinema: the British film director and multimedia artist Sally Potter
and the US film director, producer, and distributor Ava DuVernay.
Chapter 3 focuses on the use of digital platforms by collectives and
organizations such as professional groups, independent distribution com-
panies, and film festivals, with the purpose to rearticulate women’s posi-
tion in film culture through formal and informal channels of distribution
and promotion. Two examples will help demonstrate the increasing role of
digital platforms in these institutions. The first is the BirdsEyeView film
festival, established in London in 2002, ended in 2014 for lack of funds
and now still active as a resource centre for women filmmakers with
activities promoted through its website. The second example is the digital
platform of the umbrella organization bildwechsel, originally created as a
multimedia feminist collective in 1979 in Hamburg and one of the oldest
feminist organizations still operative in Europe especially through a crea-
tive deployment of digital technology, whose mandate of collecting and
circulating films and videos by women is facilitated by the organization’s
website.
Chapter 4 tackles one of the most controversial topics in digital culture
today – pornography – concentrating on the debates emerged among
feminist activists variously positioned vis-à-vis women’s production of
sexually explicit and pornographic material through non-narrative Web
series and platforms. This section of the book situates some of the most
recent manifestations of feminist approaches to pornography on the
Internet within the cultural series of the “porn wars”, which divided
feminist activists and women film-makers within North America between
the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. More recently, these disputes have
been revived by the polemic about “porn empowerment” movements

within the context of third-wave feminism. The focus of this chapter will
be on the porn festival Feminist Porn Awards, based in Toronto yet mainly
developed online, and the Web-based activities of the feminist journalist
Anita Sarkeesian, whose criticism of women’s representations in various
media provoked a violent campaign of harassment against her and the
outrage of some pro-sex feminist activist who disagreed with her discus-
sion of sexual workers in media representation.
Chapter 5 considers Web-informed platforms about women film-
makers or feminist issues in film proposed by scholarly organizations and
individual scholars. This final section considers the role of scholarship
produced and disseminated through digital platforms in shaping the dis-
course on women’s cinema. The examples include two research groups,
the US-based Women Film Pioneer Project and the Women and the Film
History Network UK/Ireland, and a platform African women film-makers
created and monitored by the independent US scholar Beti Ellerson.
The scope of this book is purposefully limited. One of the many paths
that it could have taken is the survey: this was not the intention, for a
number of reasons. Given the quantity of platforms and the proliferation
of Web-based projects and services nowadays, this type of analysis would
have inevitably resulted both partial and superficial. Furthermore, a limited
corpus allows to maintain discursive consistency and to better develop a
theoretical framework for case studies. Most importantly, the selection of
digital platforms does not mean to be comprehensive: its geocultural
boundaries have been justified at the beginning of this chapter and reflect
an actual imbalance in the practices and discourses by ad about women’s
cinema on the Internet. Starting from these premises, this book offers a
reading of initiatives by and about women’s cinema on platforms, whose
egalitarian and sharing predicament is progressively co-opted by capitalist
and neo-liberal interests and logics.22
NOTES
1. Dal Yong Jin, in his book Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political
Culture (2015), notes that the emergence of multiple platforms is challen-
ging “the dominant position of the Web in the networked society” (2015: 1).
Quoting Joss Hands (2013), he adds: “platform is a useful term because it is a
broad enough category to capture several distinct phenomena, such as social
networking, shift from desktop to tablet computing, and smart phone and
app-based interfaces, as well as the increasing dominance of centralized cloud-

based computing” (ibid.). A contentious point in the scholarship about
digital platforms is the understanding of these platforms’ functioning as social
systems. Olga Goriunova, in her introduction to a collection about art plat-
forms on the Internet, provides a definition of platforms as network systems,
drawing on various network theories and concepts of network production
(2012: 5). For Goriunova, “art platforms compel one to think about the
organizational forms of culture – and, as such, organizational aesthetics”
(2012: 6). Goriunova daws on theories of network by Bateson, De Landa,
Deleuze and Guattari, Fuller, Prigogine, yet prefers the definition “media
ecology” to that of network to approach media platforms as a reflection upon
their way of functioning (2012: 6).
2. Braidotti situates this position within neo-liberal post-feminism (2005:
1–3). On post-feminism in postmodern culture and present-day popular
culture, some significant contributions include the aforementioned article
by Genz (2006); Gill and Sharff (2011); McRobbie (2009); Modleski
(1991); Projansky (2001); and Tasker and Negra (2005).
3. I will further elaborate on this topic in this chapter. For a general discussion
of the progressive co-optation of Web 2.0 users into capitalist and consu-
merist mechanisms, see, among others, Cosenza (2008) and Jenkins (2009).
4. The literature on this subject is quite vast. For some essential references, see
Cammaerts (2007); Cosenza (2008); Crow (2010); Crow and Petty
(2008); Lessing (2004); and Poster (1995).
5. Besides Hedge, some significant publications touching on feminist film
culture and cyberfeminism within a transmedia global film culture include
Blair et al. (2008); Carstensen (2009); with (2008a); Daniels (2009);
Everett (2004); Flanagan and Booth (2002); Fernandez, Wilding and
Wright (2003); Gajjala (2004) and (2012); Harcourt (1999); Lynes
(2016); Gajjala and Ju Oh (2012); Martinho (2012); Chen (2013);
Richards and Schnall (2003).
6. Some significant studies about women’s relation to the Internet as produ-
cers are Hawthorne and Klein (1999); Mia Consalvo and Susanna Paasonen
(2002). About vidding as a manifestation of female fandom creativity, see
especially Coppa (2008); Coppa and Tushnet (2011); and Tralli (2014).
7. For Radner, Campion is an instance of how the term can encompass both
definitions, especially since “women directors, feminist and nonfeminist,
entered increasingly the world of mainstream narrative” (Radner 2009: 4).
8. About Akerman’s declaration on women’s cinema at the Créteil Films de
Femmes, see Ginette Vincendeau’s article on feminist film theory in France,
published in Screen in the same year (Vincendeau 1987).
9. The debate between Varda and Buet took place at the 2008 edition of the
festival and can be accessed on the Europeana portal at the following
address: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/2022116/urn_axme
dis_00000_obj_0c547ef7_bf3f_4d64_a59b_cb7d821c7c19.html.
10. For an exhaustive treatment of the debates about women’s cinema within
feminist film studies, see, among others, Mayne (1990) and Butler (2002).
11. In her essay, Koch summarizes the distinctive position of German feminism
regarding questions at the core of Frauen und Film, the feminist journal
that she co-founded in 1974. She thinks that “the contradictions and the
conflicts involved in the reception – including theory – of films made by
women by and for their female audiences” are at the centre of the feminist
debate (1985: 151).
12. The essay was written initially for the art catalogue Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn
(edited by Silvia Eiblmayr, Valie Export, and Monika Prischl-Meier) accom-
panying an international exhibition of contemporary women’s art held at the
Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna in 1985.
13. According to Butler, women’s cinema as minor cinema reflects “displace-
ment, dispossession . . . deterritorialization; a sense of everything as politi-
cal; and a tendency for everything to take on a collective value” (2002: 20).
14. Butler notoriously derives her definition of women’s cinema as minor
cinema from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature
(who, in their turn, apply this adjective to the work of Franz Kafka, to
denote a literature written by a minority using a majority language)
(2002: 21).
15. About gender gap on the Internet, see, among others, Cooper and Weaver
(2003); Everett (2004); Martinho (2012); Royal (2008); Wilson, Wallin,
and Reiser (2006).
16. In her article “Rethinking cyberfeminism(s): race, gender, and embodiment”,
Daniels specifies that many women – especially girls – adopt the two most
alluring ideas for cyberfeminism – identity tourism and disembodiment – “to
transform their material, corporeal lives in a number of complex ways that both
resist and reinforce hierarchies of gender and race” (2009: 101). Daniels pre-
mises that, “[f]or many women including themselves in these new technologies
means including themselves in internetworked global feminism” (2009: 101).
For more literature on cyberfeminism, see the list of references at the end of this
chapter.
17. Hedge makes reference to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s notion of
“scattered hegemony”, which the two scholars coined in 1994 in their
eponymous book to transpose onto a transnational media environment
“the constructions and contradictions that underwrite globalization”
(Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 1).
18. About this topic, see, in particular, Christian Fuchs’ article “The role of
income inequality in a multivarieted cross-national analysis of the digital
divide” (Fuchs 2009) and Cindy Royal’s article “Framing the Internet: a
comparison of gendered spaces”, significance of issues such as “race, class,

income, sexuality, and education” among the divides that affect women’s
technology’s usage (Royal 2008), and E.J. Wilson’s book The Information
Revolution and Developing Countries (2004). Jan van Dijk, in The
Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society, places gender
among the personal categories that contribute to the digital divide, which
also include age, sex, race or ethnicity, cleverness, and to which one should
add positional categories such as labour, household, nation, and education
(Van Dijk 2005: 18).
19. In their study, Pudrovska and Marx Ferree examine the website of the
European Women Lobby to assess the role of this non-profit organization
within the overall context of transnational NGO organizations associated
with women’s movements. In their analysis, the two scholars apply a quan-
titative content analysis of this lobby’s website, using some key words
associated with women’s activist movements and subsequently compare
the results with those of websites of transnational feminist movements
(Pudrovska and Marx Ferree 2004: 118). As Pudroska and Marx Ferree
note, even though Web-based analysis is a partial indicator, Web 2.0 plat-
forms provide an alternative to global media resources.
20. For a general discussion of third-wave feminism, see, among others, Evans
(2015); Gillis et al. (2007); Heywood (2006); and Snyder (2008).
21. In 1984 – when she was still a PhD student – Mohanty wrote “Under
Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourse”, a widely cited
article in which she claims that the relation between Western- and Third
World feminism is inevitably constructed through power relations informed
by colonialism (Mohanty 1984: 334–335) In her essay, Mohanty argues
that Western feminist scholars inevitably appropriate and colonize the com-
plexities of the Third World woman, even when they try to produce differ-
ences within the representation of Third World women (Mohanty 1984:
334–335). As a consequence, concludes Mohanty, the Third World woman
in feminist Western eyes [remains] “an image which appears arbitrarily
constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of
Western humanist discourse” (ibid.). Mohanty’s insistence on the specificity
of local, community, economic, and racial differences within global femin-
ism colludes with the views of transnational feminism proposed by other
scholars, among whom she cites Sylvia Walby (Mohanty 2003: 501).
22. About questions of capital and agency within the allegedly democratic and
sharing context of global and digital culture, see, among others, Benjamin
Lee and Edward LiPuma article “Cultures of circulation: the imagination of
modernity” (2002) and Giovanna Cosenza’s book Semiotiche dei nuovi
media (2008). Lee and Li Puma, in their Marxist-informed critique of the
digital-based culture of circulation, denounce “the advent of circulation-
based capitalism, along with the social forms and technologies that comple-
ment it [ . . . as] a new stage in the history of capitalism, in which the national
capitalisms . . . are being simultaneously dismantled and reconstructed on a
global scale” (2002: 2010). Other Marxist-informed critiques of global
culture include Lazzarato (2007) and Negri (2003). Cosenza points at the
increasingly profitable and high-priced market of Web 2.0 services based on
the principle of sharing within virtual communities peer-to-peer exchange
(2008: 140–145).
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CHAPTER 2
Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital

Platforms as Alternative Circuits
Abstract This chapter illustrates the role of digital platforms for the
production and distribution of women’s films. The purpose is to present
women’s cinema 2.0 as an instance of grass-roots globalization developed
through crowdfunding initiatives and other Web-based forms of produc-
tion, distribution, and preservation of films. Case studies include the
global network for women working in the film industry Women in Film
and Television International, Emily Best’s crowdfunding company
Seed&Spark, Sally Potter’s artist’s website and digital archive SP-Ark,
and Ava DuVernay’s professional website, as well as the website associated
with her distribution company, ARRAY.
Keywords Crowdfunding Network Grass-roots globalization Digital

distribution Seed&Spark Emily Best Sally Potter Ava DuVernay’s
THE INTERNET AS A NEW RESOURCE FOR WOMEN FILMMAKERS

This chapter describes the benefits of Internet-based services and projects
for women working in film and media through four case studies linked
both to organizations and individuals. The organizational examples are
the Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI), a network for
women within the film industry across the world established in Los
Angeles in 2011, and Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding company founded
by the American producer Emily Best in 2011. The individual cases relate

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_2
to two independent and internationally multi-awarded film-makers: the

British film director, screenwriter, and multimedia artist Sally Potter and
the US film-maker, film producer, and distributor Ava DuVernay.
The two professional organizations examined in the first part of the
chapter advance a gender-specific mandate within film culture through
digital platforms that establish professional connections, organize work-
shops and special events, and faciliate film production or exhibition.
Emphasis will be given to the services, the infrastructures, and the films
offered by these organizations through their respective websites, with the
purpose to verify what audiences and communities they target and within
what geocultultural contexts.
DIGITAL NETWORKING: THE WOMEN IN FILM

AND TELEVISION INTERNATIONAL
The Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI) organization is

a successful example of grass-roots globalization within women’s film
culture insofar it provides women film-makers real-time access to indus-
try-related matters, contacts, and information. The organization defines
itself as a “global network”, with a mandate to facilitate “matching profes-
sional members with experienced practitioners” through programmes
such as systems of mentorship with senior members or workshops about
outreach, marketing, and promotion, as well as funds for completing or
preserving films, and scholarships (http://www.wifti.net/overview.aspx).
Standard features provided through WIFTI platform include calls for
festival competitions and awards, social screenings, newsletters, social
events for members, supporting networking receptions at international
film and media festivals associated with the organization (e.g. Berlin,
Cannes, and Sundance), and participation in the organization’s biannual
summit and conference (http://www.wiftichapters.org/class_index.cfm).
The organization is especially established in North America, in areas
that have a strong tradition of women’s independent film-making and
contribution to the media industry such as Los Angeles and New York
within the USA and Montreal, Vancouver, and some provinces (e.g.
Alberta and the Atlantic regions) within Canada. Outside of North
America, WIFTI has its largest and most active network in New
Zealand, led by a strong Board of Directors.1 In 2012, Petrina
D’Rozario – a film and television producer who moved to Mumbai in
2 WOMEN MAKE MOVIES ON THE WEB: DIGITAL PLATFORMS AS . . . 25
2002 after having worked as a journalist and graduated in film production

and documentary in New Zealand – founded the India chapter.2 For a
couple of years, WIFTI India offered members the standard benefits of the
organization at affordable fees and promoted an animated short (Keli, by
Ranijtah Rajevan) at the 2014 edition of the Berlin film festival. Yet the
programme appears not to have been active since.
A major concern within the organization is to enable members to
navigate the complicated process of production. Workshops, mentoring
programmes, lectures, and special funds are among the initiatives offered.
In Los Angeles, for instance, where the corporate pressure is especially high,
the local WIFTI chapter, Women in Film-Los Angeles (WIF-LA), has put in
place a special programme in association with the Sundance Institute “to
educate approximately one hundred female film-makers in all aspects of
seeking, securing, and managing funding for their films” (http://womenin
film.org/ffi/#fi). Another priority for the WIFTI organization is to inform
audiences about women’s achievements in film. The New York chapter has
been forwarding cultural dissemination since the beginning, thus continu-
ing the purpose of the organization on the basis of which the local WIFTI
section was created.3 The Los Angeles chapter is particularly concerned
about educating larger audiences to watch films directed by women. One
of the latest projects launched on the WIF-LA website is a pledge to watch
fifty-two films by women, through which the online subscriber commits to
watch a women’s film a week and to post about it on Facebook or Twitter,
anonymously or not, and even to curate a list of favourites on GoWatchit
with the purpose “to increase awareness about women’s existence and
talent” (http://womeninfilm.org/52-films/).4 Within Canada, the website
of the Montreal chapter stresses its entrenchment in the city’s tradition of
women’s cinema. An example is the promotional video produced by local
members for the twentieth anniversary of the Multicultural Festival of
Montreal, co-sponsored by WIFTI, which summarizes the history and the
work of a number of Montreal-based women film-makers, producers, and
media representatives (www.fctnm.ca).
In spite of its global aspirations, WIFTI is problematically distributed
mainly in North America. The organization’s Board of Director reflects
this concentration, as it is almost exclusively composed of North
American members (http://www.wifti.net/board.aspx).5 In South
America, WIFTI is present only in Brazil and in the Caribbean in the
Dominican Republic. WIFTI’s incidence in Europe is equally minimal,
possibly because of the strong mobilization of European film-makers
within national and pan-European organizations.6 As well as these, even

though most of WIFTI chapters derive from grass-roots organizations
and involve independent players within the film industry, many board
members are corporate figures within the film industry. This is especially
the case of chapters situated in contexts with a large film industry, such as
Los Angeles, New York, and New Zealand. The Chair of the Executive
Board of the Los Angeles Women in Film, Cathy Schulman, was Head of
Production at STX Entertainment until July 2016 and other members of
the same board are successful producers and talent agents (ibid.). The
director of the Board of the New Zealand chapter, Kelly Martin, is the
CEO of South Pacific Pictures, one of the country’s leading film and
television companies and one of the board members, Robin Laing, is one
of the country’s most experienced producers.7 New York vaunts a
prestigious Honorary Board, including stars and film-makers from
different areas of the industry (http://www.nywift.org/article.aspx?id=
ADVBOARD)8 Furthermore, in contrast with the grass-roots spirit of
the organization, access to WIFTI is not free. The organization requires
annual membership fees, which may vary from $50 to $1,500, depending
on the number of members per chapters. While the costs for students are
rather low even in economically advanced and urban areas (e.g. $35 in
New Zealand and $50 in Los Angeles), the cost of standard memberships
ranges from $130 to $200 and may go up to $500 for executive members.9
The Los Angeles chapter annually hosts prestigious awards, which include
the WIF’s own awards, the WIF Film Festival – founded in 1989 – and
cocktail parties held during major awards held in the city such as the
Academy Awards and the Emmy Awards. These events have fundraising
purposes and a social mandate. The Crystal Award, for instance, was founded
by the actress Nancy Malone and WIF member in 1984 as a “Humanitarian
Award for Women of Courage” to acknowledge women “whose achieve-
ments go beyond career goals to issues such as – poverty, education, or
medical advances” (http://womeninfilm.org/history/0). Yet the Crystal
Award and the Lucy award (named after Lucille Ball and recognizing
women working in television) are also highly mediatized events that pay
homage and parade top female stars and executives within Hollywood
and are backed by the organization’s partners, as well as corporate
sponsors (Fig. 2.1).10
The glamour of these events is in contrast with the grass-roots purpose
of other initiatives organized by the chapter through its platform to
disseminate women’s film practices within the Los Angeles community.
Fig 2.1 Advertisement of an event sponsored by General Motors for Women in

Film, Los Angeles, 2006
The American-centred leadership, the corporate composition of some

boards of directors, and the membership average rate are pointers to the
industry-oriented nature of this organization. Indeed, the aim of WIFTI
is to facilitate women’s professional improvement and equal treatment
within the various contexts of the film and media industry around the
world. The emphasis on self-improvement and achievement and the
career-focused content of the organization bring back to the underlying
arguments of this book: the difficulty in setting apart grass-roots feminist
activism from post-feminist neo-liberal ideology in many Web-based
initiatives and discussions for women in film. Stuart Hall, introducing a
special issue of the journal Cultural Studies dedicated to neo-liberalism,
defines neo-liberalism as “only one operative trends in the culture . . .
which locates itself in a complex cultural field in which several tendencies
compete” (Hall 2011: 722). In trying to identify the “neo-liberal
trends . . . around the ideas and cultural practices of commodification
and individualism”, Hall highlights some if its recurring themes, such as
wealth, marketing, self-address, technological desire, and celebrity (Hall

2011: 722–723).
While it would be wrong to view WIFTI as an exclusively corporate-
driven organization, it is true that the organization is market- and
technology- driven. Furthermore, even though WIFTI is a non-profit
organization based on collective collaboration and exchange with boards
of directors democratically elected, it maintains a rather hierarchical
structure in which decisions are made by board members and above all
by an all-American general board. As many feminist critics remark, the
danger implicit in subordinating socio-economic and geocultural differ-
ence and women’s solidarity in favour of the ethnocentric individualism
of neo-liberal economy is to fall into a post-feminist paradigm that
purposefully entangles feminist and anti-feminist positions (McRobbie
2009: 11; Gill and Scharff 2011: 3).
WIFTI risks to reproduce what Rosi Braidotti identifies as the liberal,
ethnocentric, and money-driven individualism of neo-liberal culture
(Braidotti 2005: 3–6). The organization tries to ensure women’s cultural
and economic autonomy within a film industry that leaves them very few
margins of operation through the creation of a global professional net-
work. While this is an important goal for women within the film industry,
it should not be the main one. Instead, WIFTI should also encourage a
system of transnational co-operation among women filmmakers informed
by the principles of grass-roots globalization, which include, in Arjun
Appadurai’s words, “mobilizing highly specific local, national, and regio-
nal groups on matters of equity, access, justice, and redistribution”
(Appadurai 2000: 15). The potential of WIFTI to re-establish gender
equity in global cinema needs to carefully monitor the compatibility of
neo-liberal narratives of self-affirmation and collaborative initiatives
among women active in different contexts and systems of film production.
WOMEN IN CROWDFUNDING PRODUCTION: EMILY BEST’S

SEED&SPARK
In 2013, the freelance writer Yvonna Russell posted a blog in the
Huffpost Women, in which she presented crowdfunding platforms as a
new “money bomb” for independent film directors (Russell 2013).
A couple of years earlier, the crowdfunding company Kickstarter had
promoted the number of successful campaigns for films directed by
women awarded at important film festivals, including Pariah by Dee Rees

(2011), which won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at
Sundance Film Festival. Crowdfunding campaigns are arguably an
increasingly important source for women film-makers. This is true even
though in this area of film-making gender disparity is already emerging:
in 2014, the organization crowdfundproductions.com revealed that “[n]
one of the top most successful campaigns had women among their
founders. Among 82 Kickstarter projects that raised over a million dol-
lars, only 6 were created by women; the most funded female-led cam-
paign holds the 37th place [ . . . and by category] Film and Design have
had ONE female-led campaign among the top ten most funded projects”
(Mikhaylova 2014).
Seed&Spark is a platform for independent film-makers that offers “end-
to-end” services, from production to virtual screening, whose concept is
to give audiences decisive power by voting and funding projects on the
website being asked the lowest fees in the industry (Fig. 2.2).
Seed&Spark is also one of the few platforms founded and directed by a
woman, Emily Best, a former stage actress based in New York who started
this company while she was trying to raise money for the independent film
Like the Water in 2010, in which she was also acting (Gamse 2013).11 Best
initiated the company in partnership with two associates, Caroline von
Kuhn (who was the director of Like the Water) and the film-maker Liam
Brady. The company has since grown to a team of fifteen people, as well as
a sixteen-member advisory board including Liam Brady as director at
large, some independent producers, a digital platform’s manager, a film
festival director, and a financial partner (https://www.seedandspark.
com/who-we-are).
Besides helping film-makers strategizing their campaigns, the company
acts as a streaming platform with dozens of titles, many developed through
the organization and available at 0.99 cents or 100 sparks (funding units)
Fig. 2.2 Seed&Spark’s signature Logo

(https://www.seedandspark.com/cinema). Another feature of the platform

is the magazine Bright Ideas, dedicated to profiling US indie film-makers
(https://www.brightideasmag.com/). In its opening page, the magazine
defines itself as a complement to the “ecosystem” Seed&Spark and identifies
its primary goal as the fight against “four primary obstacles plaguing
creators: lack of funding, unavailability of transparent distribution, sexism,
and racism” (ibid.).
What makes Seed&Spark different from other crowdfunding platforms
is firstly the high rate of completion of films (75 %) (https://www.see
dandspark.com/faq#mostfrequent). Other benefits of the platforms are
low rates and full credits left to film-makers. As Best specifies in a 2013
interview with the blogger Laura Gamse: “[o]ur fees on crowd-funding
are the lowest in the industry, and our distribution platform allows film-
makers to keep 80 % of the profits and 100 % of their rights” (Gamse
2013). Yet the platform’s real key to success is the ability to reconfigure
the production–distribution–exhibition chain outside of the industry’s
traditional schemes. According to Best, “crowdfunding requires that you
not only know who they are, but where you can reach them, and then
requires that you make something interesting and sharable to get their
attention” (ibid.). She further explains that, by joining a funding cam-
paign for one of the company’s sponsored films:
Audiences become players in show business, gathering rewards points called

Sparks for funding and sharing film projects they can redeem to watch
movies in the Cinema. Users gather followers, allowing filmmakers to
build their brand and engaged audiences to become community curators.
(http://nofilmschool.com/2013/07/interview-with-seed-and-spark-foun
der-emily-best)
As the high rate of completed projects per year (15) at Seed&Spark demon-
strates, Best has been extremely effectual in producing this synergy, which
should be the premise of any crowdfunding initiative. Seed&Spark is a
customized platform, where each project is developed following, on the one
hand, the film-maker’s needs and, on the other hand, the type of audience
suitable for the film. As Best suggests in an interview with Forbes in 2012:
A filmmaker with a project submits a crowdfunding campaign plan, includ-

ing itemized budget – or “wish list” – of things required for the completion
of the film, with their costs. The crowd can either choose to donate to fund
the filmmaker’s needs or loan items, for which the donor can receive a
shout-out in the credits or other gifts. Capital is released to the filmmaker
once 80 % of the desired sum is in place. (Strauss 2012)
Since 2014, the company has been expanding and building important part-
nerships with corporate sponsors. The platform signed contracts first with
American Express to distribute films on AmexNow, a large service company
of interactive TV channels and streaming platforms, and in 2015 with
Manitou Investments, a large investment fund (Dalenberg 2015). In March
2015, Seed&Spark established other important partnerships with Verizon,
Emerging Pictures, and Quiver to start distributing films on cable. By ventur-
ing into distribution, the company is now also opening new venues to film-
makers and giving film-makers access to major online retailers, such as iTunes,
Google Play, Amazon Instant Video, and Netflix. Furthermore, through its
collaboration with Emerging Pictures – an all-digital film and alternate con-
tent – the company has become eligible for theatrical release in the USA.
These new links give the company a different leverage within media produc-
tion and distribution in North America, while maintaining optimal conditions
for film-makers and guaranteeing their control on their films (ibid.).
Even though Seed&Spark does not present itself as an all-women or a
feminist company, it promotes a majority of films directed or co-directed by
women and with gender-specific content. These choices are the product of an
explicit intention from the part of Best, which she inferred from the producer’s
statements and interviews, as well as from her managerial and artistic decisions.
As she explains in an interview about Hollywood bias against minorities:
I got into filmmaking because I was tired of the way women were repre-
sented on screen. But in making my first film – “Like the Water” – I faced
what distributors still consider an inflexible fact: There’s no audience for a
film about strong female friendships that doesn’t have sex and, according to
one sales agent, “at least a little lesbian erotica”. (Seed&Spark 2016)
Answering a question on the feminist blog by Rebecca Fernandez regard-

ing what is “the biggest obstacle women face in film today” in 2014, Best
replied “numbers”, specifying:
We’re pushed so far to the margins we have to fight to be heard, the

percentages are dismal. But those numbers don’t represent the number of
women out there making meaningful content, building meaningful busi-
nesses and business models. (Fernandez 2014)
Best’s company is gender-friendly, with a board composed by two-third by

women (https://www.seedandspark.com/who-we-are). Also, Eight out
of the twelve film projects presently sponsored on the company’s website
are directed by women, and the percentage of women directors among the
films recently “greenlighted” or completed and featured in the screening
section of the platforms are by female directors (https://www.seedand
spark.com/cinema). What Best is doing with her platform is “attempting
to speak to an under-served audience of women interested in complex
stories about women, whose very existence conventional wisdom ques-
tioned” (ibid.). Most of the films directed by women film-makers spon-
sored by the platform go in this direction.
This is the case of films developed through Seed&Spark by the Alabama-
born and Atlanta-based film-maker, screenwriter, and producer Jen West,
who has completed five short films, including three films directed by her:
Crush, 2011; Bubble, 2013; and Little Cabbage, 2015; all with female char-
acters. Seed&Spark has been following West’s latter projects, Little Cabbage
(2015) and Electric Bleau (in production). The first short film, selected at
several film festivals and the winner of the FlyWay award, stars an eccentric
female composer and is set in an atmospheric reconstruction of Louisiana
during the 1950s. Electric Bleau is West’s first feature film project, presently
in advanced stage of pre-production. The film tells the story of a biracial punk
rocker (interpreted by the real indie musician AJ Haynes) during the 1980s,
with music from the homonymous music band led by Haynes (https://
www.seedandspark.com/studio/electric-bleau-1#updates). As it does with
most of its projects, Seed&Spark has been following the development of
West’s feature film since the beginning through a blog, which the film-maker
periodically updates. In one of the latest postings, West reports to have raised
one million of the one million and half necessary to go into production
(https://www.seedandspark.com/blog/whose-film-is-this-anyway). West’s
blog realistically chronicles the difficulties that many women film-makers
experience when trying to approach production companies: exhausting wait-
ing times, rejections, and endless appointments with evasive producers. In
one of her latest posts, West reports one of the many frustrating meetings
with a Hollywood producer, this time enthusiastic about the project yet
asking her to step down as a director because she was “too green” (ibid.).
Seed&Spark’s gender-friendly orientation is also well conveyed
through the site’s personalized style of presentation, which encourages
the film-maker to pitch the film and present the campaigns. Projects
proposed on Seed&Spark are typically promoted by the film-makers
themselves using a voice-over or a direct address to the camera. A typical

example is Angel Kristi William’s coming-of-age story Charlotte, which
follows the friendship of two adolescent girls from Baltimore, Williams’
home town (https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/charlotte#up
dates). In the promotional clip, the film-maker introduces the film giving
some context (e.g. the settings, the Afro-American community where she
grew up, the suburban lifestyle of the neighbourhood), before filming the
testimonies of the actors participating in the project, who give their
insights on their roles, as well as on the story. This type of pitch is
leveraged, paraphrasing Best, to “build a lasting, sustainable, direct rela-
tionship with their audiences” (De Reeper 2016). Both Williams’ and the
actors’ insistence on the two adolescent girls propose the film for a specific
niche of young adult, female spectatorship. As other films proposed by
women film-makers, the details provided about the two protagonists’
experience and milieu also help place the film through cross-gendered
criteria such as geocultural context, ethnicity, class, and cultural interests.
These are just two examples of the many projects that feature women’s
stories on a platform that is becoming a leading example in crowdfunding
initiatives. The company’s gender-specific orientation has more recently
become more explicit since 2015, when it started a partnership with
Tangerine Entertainment, a production company and a community builder
for women directors funded by Anne Hubbell (Bernstein 2015). Best explains
that the partnership involves “co-promotional efforts on campaign, as well as
coaching projects from inception through distribution” (ibid.). As Paula
Bernstein stresses in an Indiewire article that year, this crowdfunding merging
is “good news” for female directors since the two companies “have partnered
with the goal of funding and supporting women content creator” (ibid.).
Seed&Spark is a significant counterpart to statistics that signal a male
predominance of success rate in film crowdfunding today. Mostly, it is a
significant instance of how digital production can open new venues for
women in film production.
SALLY POTTER: MAKING FILMS IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL

REPRODUCTION
In 2009, British film-maker Sally Potter asked eight actors, including
the international stars Dame Judi Dench, Jude Law, Steve Buscemi,
John Leguizamo, David Oyelowo, and Dianne Wiest, to perform
individual monologues in front of a digital camera against the back-

drop of a green screen projected with different colours for a period of
about two days each. As Potter explains in a short video conversation
with her assistant producer completed the day after the shooting wrap
up and included in the DVD version of the film, Rage’s minimalist
aesthetic aims to achieve the most within the small budget of an
independent production or, using Potter’s own words, “to think big
within an apparently small canvas”12 (Rage 2009). This philosophy
punctuates Potter’s entire career and distinguishes this multitalented
artist, whose films challenge the boundaries between independent and
mainstream film circuits, experimental and conventional modes of
representation, and national and transnational contexts of production
and distribution.
As Annette Kuhn notes in her entry for Sally Potter included in the BFI
Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors,
Sally Potter is exceptional among directors in having made both successful

commercial features and experimental films. Besides filmmaking, her career
incorporates dance, choreography, music and performance art; these ele-
ments are interwoven in her films, all of which – while very different from
each other – confront issues around performance, gender and genre and
appeal to the significance of musicality and movement in a medium which is
in essence non-verbal. (Kuhn 2003–14)
As Catherine Fowler writes in her monograph about the film-maker Sally

Potter, “ . . . Potter’s career shows that she has remained an exemplary
independent director who has relentlessly struggled to make only the
films she wants to make” (2009, 3). Patricia Mellencamp, in her book A
Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film Feminism, delineates Potter’s artistic
trajectory as follows: “Sally Potter moved from avant-garde cinema to
feature films without sacrificing formal, aesthetic, political concerns, some-
thing only a few have accomplished before her” (1995: 159). Drawing on
Mellencamp’s reading of Potter’s career as an embodiment of Virginia
Woolf’s last and most mature phase of feminism based on economic
independence, one can safely say that digital technology gives new incen-
tive to Potter’s aspiration to balance high-quality film-making and artistic
autonomy (Mellencamp 1995: 191–288).
Since the late 1960s, Potter has been exploring the conjugation of
multimedia arts and body performance to deconstruct fixed notions
of subjectivity and self-representation. Her involvement in experi-

mental film-making practices at the London Co-Op produced several
shorts films, which investigate cinematic space and time through
expanded cinema techniques such as multiple screens with lived per-
formances and double screen images.13 Potter’s multimedia work
continued throughout the 1970s, when she toured as a dancer, a
choreographer, a musician, and a performance artist with the Alston’s
Strider dance company, the Limited Dance Company, the perfor-
mance artist Rose English, and fellow musicians in the Feminist
Improvisation Group (FIG). These experiences culminated in the
experimental short film Thriller (1979), which imposed her within
the scene of avant-garde as well as of feminist cinema. The film
deploys still photography, image/sound disjuncture, and draws on
opera, dance, and stage performance to deconstruct the heroine’s role
in Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème.
Catherine Fowler, in her above-mentioned book about Potter, views
the film-maker’s engagement with multiple disciplines as in part due to
the lack of “an available female role model” as well as “her own artistic
origins as a latecomer to dance and a talented musician and performer”
(2009: 4). For Fowler, Potter’s transdisciplinary background results into
forms of expanded cinema, in the sense that the film-maker does not only
create connections among different arts, but also enlarge the boundaries
of aesthetic and narrative conventions (2009: 4–8). The quintessence of
Potter’s expanded cinema is Orlando (1992), an adaptation of Virginia
Woolf’s playful homage to the androgynous Vita Sackville-West, inter-
preted by Tilda Swinton, and Potter’s first venture into narrative art
cinema. The film, which entailed eight years of production, was made
with a relatively small budget (less than five million in US dollars) in spite
of its complex and luscious mise en scène (Dowell 1993: 17).14 Orlando
is Potter’s most successful film to date, a multiple award-winner produc-
tion unanimously praised by critics that showcases the film-maker’s
adventurous approach to the medium of cinema and command of a
range of art forms.
Potter’s engagement with multimedia practices and body perfor-
mance continues with the transition to digital media and changing
concepts of cinema emerged during the first decade of the millen-
nium.15 Sophie Mayer, in her article “Expanding the frame: Sally
Potter’s digital histories and archival futures”, also adopts the concept
of expanded cinema to describe Potter’s “medium-shift not only to
digital cinema but also to a sophisticated artist’s website and the Sally
Potter Online Archive (SP-ARK)” (2008). The digitally informed pro-
jects that Mayer highlights besides SP-Ark are the website for her film
Yes (2004), inclusive of “a postproduction blog by Potter and a trans-
nationally active talkboards” and “a mini-site hosted by the English
National Opera for Potter’s production of Carmen (2007)” (2008:
196–197). As Sara Atkinson also remarks, these early blogging experi-
ences foreshadow Potter’s later investment in developing a digital
archive of her work as a way to establish a different type of commu-
nication with her audience, as well as to respond to requests for pro-
duction material and/or to inquiries from scholars and students
interested in her work (Atkinson 2012).
Potter’s 2009 feature film Rage marks another turning point in
Potter’s mobilization of digital technology in her work. On the surface,
Rage is a conventional who-done-it thriller, structured through the
narrative gimmick of providing a multiple, discording point-of-view
perspective on the same event made famous by Akira Kurosawa in
Rashomon (1950). Yet, while remaining within the conventional form
of narrative storytelling, Potter in Rage adopts a series of self-reflexive,
inter- and extra-textual strategies of address that place this film not only
within her practice of expanded cinema, but also within the framework of
post-cinema. To be sure, Rage’s post-cinematic traits differ from those
that Jihoon Kim, in his book Between Film, Video, and the Digital:
Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age, identifies as “hybrid mov-
ing images . . . an array of impure image forms characterized by the
interrelation of the material, technical, and aesthetic components of
existing moving image media – namely, film, video, and the digital”
(2016: 3). Indeed, Rage goes in the opposite direction, using a single
medium (a digital camera) and even mainly a single type of image (a
frontal, medium close-up shot of the eight characters), alternated with
some close-ups and interspersed with a full-screen shot of a computer
screen, where the diegetic film-maker/off-screen narrator keeps his diary
of shooting. Potter’s purpose in adopting a conventional aesthetic is to
give the impression of “a faux-naif style designed to look like something
that could conceivably have been knocked out by a teenager on their
Mac” (Shoard 2009). The film’s post-cinematic hybridity is activated
through its aesthetic association with similar types of images typically
found in social media other media or forms, the most obvious being,
besides the mobile phone image that it is supposed to recreate, the photo
studio shoot (in which most of the action is supposed to take place), the
talking-head interview found in documentary films or TV reportages,
and possibly Andy Warhol’s screen tests.
Rage’s intentionally minimalist aesthetic also opens up to a series of
self-reflexive references to cinema’s own conditions of production, hinting
at the new possibilities that new media offer to independent film-making
practices and is a meta-critique of the digital age. As the film-maker
explains in an interview during the promotion of the film, Rage’s real
target was less the fashion trade than some problematic behaviour
emerged within the Internet. Instead, as the journalist puts it,
Rage is an examination of the power of the internet and the age of compul-
sive confession; a warning shot at an info-saturated environment which
confers power on cyber-savvy youngsters, leaving adults hostages of their
own ignorance, and their desire to bare their souls. (Shoard 2009)
Other critics have stressed this aspect of the film, also from a feminist
viewpoint. Sophie Mayer, for instance, in her article “The art of (feminist
film) work in the age of digital reproduction”, suggests that Rage and 52
Tuesdays (Sophie Hyde 2014) are
interventions into the new temporality and new labour conditions of digital
media, but they share a commitment to reflexive ethics and feminist politics
that can be traced back to Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Chantal
Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), and Barbara Kopple’s pioneering fly-
on-the-wall documentary Harlan County USA (1976) (2014).16
Most importantly, the inter- and extra-textual virtual hybridity of the

film was further implemented at its release. Rage was distributed
through a series of media platforms, which also use the film’s fictional
pretence to have been shot on a mobile phone as a promotional pitch
(Ramachandran 2009). The film was in fact distributed not only
theatrically (in the UK and worldwide, blown into 35 mm copies),
but also and simultaneously on a multiplatform including a DVD for
the UK and the US markets and a seven-episode mobile release on
mobile phones (Knegt 2009).17 Potter explains her self-conscious
conception of Rage as a post-cinematic project in the blog about the

film posted on her website:
Rage has had to make its way into the world against the prevailing view of
what constitutes “cinema”. Releasing it on mobile phones and the internet
sparked enormous interest but also provoked fear and hostility in some parts
of the film industry. And financially speaking it has not been an easy ride . . .
To know that those people who inhabit the world of the web with con-
fidence can appreciate what we were doing aesthetically (images designed to
work small or large) and politically (looking at the ethics of the internet,
branding and so on) and can relate to the sheer exhileration I felt about
exploring ways of telling a story that embraced both the new technology and
the reality of how many people are now experiencing the moving image.
(http://sallypotter.com/blog/browse/rage)
Perhaps the most significant evidence of Potter’s ability to experiment

with digital technology are her digital platforms, most significantly her
professional website (sallypotter.com) and the online education resource
SP-Ark (http://sallypotter.com/sp-ark), a digital archive in which she
has so far completed the digital preservation of her film Orlando and
begun adding information about her latest released film, Ginger and
Rosa (2012). Potter’s website includes a variety of informational and
illustrative features such as a weblog, news, images, trailers, virtual
announcement, making off from her films, a curriculum vitae in various
formats, a bibliography with links to scholarly and non-scholarly articles
and publications about her work, a visual filmography with blurbs and
information about each film, information about her teaching, a list of the
publications, a forum, and contact details (http://sallypotter.com/).
While being highly informative, the website also activates features that
enhance Potter’s career-long commitment to a collaborative and partici-
pative art practice and a continuous exchange with her audiences. The
interactive features of her website bring together some of the distinctive
features of Potter’s work, which Mayer, in her above-cited 2008 article,
synthesizes as “the connection between Potter’s multimedia and multi-
modal boundary-crossing feminist practices such as making process visible,
open-ended narratives and making the means of production available to all”
(2008: 196).
Anne Friedberg, in her last book The Virtual Window: From Alberti
to Microsoft, uses the expression “virtual window” to define the
computer image, which she views as the end point within a genealogy
of apparatuses, techniques, and philosophies going back to Leon
Battista Alberti’s metaphor of the window in his discussion of the
perspectival view (2006: 1). Friedberg suggests that “the computer
‘window’ shifts its metaphorical hold from the singular frame of per-
spective to the multiplicity of windows, frames within frames, screens
within screens” (2006: 1–2). The computer image, she concludes,
points not only to the multiplicity of virtual spaces experienced with
the advent of computer technology, but also to the intermedial and
convergent context of image production and consumption dramatically
increased with the advent of digital technology (Friedberg 2006: 3–4).
With her website, Potter intervenes in the changing practices of global
cinema through the circulation of liminal, immaterial images, docu-
ments, and testimonies.
Simultaneously, her website is also an important intervention in the
sphere of world cinema and in the notoriously gender-disparaging con-
text of global film culture. Patricia White, in her book Women’s Cinema,
World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, praises “women
directors’ decisive participation in the changing formations of global
cinema” (2015: 4). White considers the categories “authorship, aes-
thetics, and address . . . vital, yet . . . insufficient at this conjuncture”
to define women’s cinema within a global context (2015: 13). Making
reference to Teresa de Lauretis’ theorization of women’s cinema in terms
of address within “the wider public sphere of cinema as a social technol-
ogy”, she reminds us that “[t]wenty-first-century cinema incorporates
new technologies, new forms, new spaces, new subjects”, to be addressed
from the theoretical framework of transnational feminism (White 2015:
14). Potter’s digital platform substantiates White’s definition of the
practice of women’s cinema within a global context as “the imaginative
public space that might belong to women (women’s cinema) and what
can be seen in and of the world (world cinema) [ . . . engaging] the
medium as a referential, narrative, social, and audiovisual experience”
(White 2015: 27).
With SP-Ark (http://sallypotter.com/sp-ark), Potter has once again
ventured into unexplored territory both in terms of her imaginative
approach to digital media and of her cross-disciplinary practice, this time
adding her interests in teaching and archiving into the equation. Sarah
Atkinson, in her article “Sparking ideas, making connections: digital film
archives and collaborative scholarship”, traces Potter’s original motivation
to create this virtual archive of her work back to the film-maker’s positive
experience with post-productions blog for Yes (2004), from the frustra-
tion of not being able to respond to behind-the-scenes access to materials
request through her small production company Adventure Pictures (AP),
as well as her intention to better respond to archival material solicited by
higher education students and scholars interested in her films (2012). In
developing the project with her production partner at AP, as well as a team
of collaborators and contributors including scholars and students, Potter
adopts state-of-the-art techniques in digital archiving, which Atkinson has
underlined in her close analysis of the project:
the latest version of SP-ARK was released to include a revolutionary “Visual

Browser” which, for the first time in a film archive, allows users to visually
analyse the film’s original rushes, from single frames to complete shots, and
incorporate these in their pathways. (ibid.)
Regarding the participatory, interactive feature of SP-Ark, Sophie

Mayer pointedly argues that it further explores a central element in
her work, reflexivity, so as “to make transparent, in her own voice, the
process of filmmaking” (2008: 196). This definition resonates with
Wolfgang Ernst’s conceptualization of the digital archive as a collec-
tive, time-based metaphor, based less on memory than on data circula-
tion and transmission (2012).
Another, related function of SP-Ark is didactical and comes both from
Potter’s own investment in teaching and, as mentioned earlier, from being
frequently solicited by academics and students doing research about her
films. Drawing on archival, historical, and feminist methodology, SP-Ark
gives access to more than 4000 assets, including external contributions of
users uploaded on the Pathways section, which allows participants to
develop specific research topics using existing assets.18 The project has
been closely associated with universities and opened to students’ colla-
borations and internship.19
As Atkinson observes at the end of her quoted article, “The SP-
ARK archive provides a unique example of the successful marriage
between the principles of open educational resources and open
archives” (ibid.). Regarding this aspect of Potter’s archive, Atkinson
asks how such a project may expand academic research and university
curricula “beyond the closed analysis of the finished film”, making
reference to a further extension of SP-Ark’s purpose that she herself
is developing at the University of Brighton, a pilot project to build a

Large-Scale Video Analytics on Potter’s latest feature film released,
Ginger and Rosa (2012) (ibid.). This research project, still in progress
today, is part of the DEEP FILM Access Project (DFAP), aiming “to
unlock latent opportunities that exist within big and complex data sets
generated by industrial digital film production” (http://arts.brighton.
ac.uk/projects/deep-film-access-project-dfap).20
Finally, SP-Ark is a unique instance of feminist-informed digital archi-
veology developed on the Internet. Jacqueline Wernimont, in her article
“Whence feminism? Assessing feminist interventions in digital literary
archives”, justifies the need to reclaim feminist practices in digital archiv-
ing with the following argument:
Digital archives unite two historically gendered fields – computer and archi-
val sciences. Literary scholars who depend on archival or rare book materials
still confront, whether they acknowledge it or not, the legacy of an institu-
tional form through which patriarchal power exercised the authority to
determine value, classification, and access. (2013)
Wernimont’s demand for a reaction to a tradition of gender-related power

relations within the archive through digital technology also warns against
the gender-biased milieus associated with the “specialised technologies of
digital humanities – computer science in particular” (ibid.).
This is an important consideration to retain when considering the
significance of SP-Ark for women’s digital practices online. As Sophie
Mayer underlines in her quoted article about Potter’s digital practice, the
“unique interactive online research environment” offered by SP-Ark
points towards a “socialist-feminist politics of collaborative making in
which there is no originary or superior text or textual reading” (2008:
201). From this perspective, Potter’s digital archive is a perfect applica-
tion of a socially aimed model or digital archiving for women’s cinema.21
AVA DUVERNAY AND THE DIGITAL PROMOTION

OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN CINEMA
In 2015, Ava DuVernay made the following statement during an interview

with an NBC journalist, mainly commenting on the overlook of her
critically acclaimed film Selma both at Golden Globes Awards and at the
Academy Awards22:
. . . that’s all Hollywood is, is locks. A whole bunch of closed doors. Any
film that you see that has any progressive spirits that is made by any
people of color or a woman is a triumph, in and of itself. Whether you
agree with it or not. Something that comes with some point of view and
some personal prospective from a woman or a person of color, is a
unicorn. (Ava DuVernay 2015)23
The film, a biopic about the 1965 voting right marches originated in
Selma and led by African-American activist Martin Luther King played
by David Oyelowo, was rejected in three important categories for which it
had been nominated at the Golden Globes Awards and ignored for the
same categories at the Academy Awards, causing many complaints and a
heated debate on the media.24
The US film-maker, screenwriter, producer, and distributor is
indeed a Hollywood maverick. After some years spent working as a
journalist and a publicist, she founded her own marketing agency in
the 1990s, which became a reference point for some of the most
important film-makers in Hollywood including Steven Spielberg,
Clint Eastwood, Robert Rodrigues, as well as the English film-maker of
South Asian origins Gurinder Chadha (http://www.avaduvernay.com/
about/). DuVernay started her career as a film director in 2008, first in
documentary film-making with a film about the hip-hop movements,
This Is the Life (2008), and then in fiction feature film-making. Her
first two feature films, I Will Follow (2010) and the breaking-through
Middle of Nowhere (2012), both focusing on female protagonists, were
made independently on very low budgets. The second film, funded
with her own capital, won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival
(ibid; Fig. 2.3).
With Selma, DuVernay moved on to direct a major Hollywood
production. Originally hired as publicist for this film, she eventually
took on the role of director five years into the film’s long and difficult
production (Edwards 2015). After the critical success of the film,
DuVernay became one of the most prominent Afro-American female
film-makers of the new generation and – in part due to the huge
controversy originated at the Oscars – a media celebrity.25 DuVernay
is a very prolific, gendered-focused film director within a variety of film
and media forms. Before Selma, her narrative films focused on
women’s experiences of loss (her debut film, I Will Follow, 2010)
and estrangement (Middle of Nowhere, 2012). DuVernay also gives
Fig. 2.3 Ava DuVernay awarded at the Sundance Film Festival for Middle of
Nowhere (2012)
prominence to female subjects in her documentaries, in which she has

been covering topics as diverse as the US female hip-hop culture (in
My Mic Sounds Nice, 2010), gang life from girls’ point of view (in the
short film Comtpon in C Minor, 2009, set in the Los Angeles suburb),
and sport (VenusVS, a TV documentary about the top tennis player
Venus Williams directed and produced for a series devoted to women
in sports commissioned by ESPN in 2013) (http://www.avaduvernay.
com/). Besides fiction and documentary films, DuVernay has been
directing television series, TV episodes, and music videos (ibid.). She
is also one of the most important distributors for independent African-
American cinema within the USA, especially since the founding of her
distribution company ARRAY in 2010.
DuVernay uses digital and social media to promote her work and to create
alternative circuits for the dissemination of African-American independent
cinema.26 Her professional website (http://www.avaduvernay.com/)
and the website for her distribution company ARRAY (http://www.

arraynow.com/) are effective instruments of professional development
and networking, both for herself and the film-makers promoted by her
distribution company. Simultaneously, these platforms point to
DuVernay’s commitment as an African-American activist, community-
oriented, feminist film-maker, producer, and distributor. Her websites
combine visually compelling aesthetic and highly informative and con-
stantly updated content, which reflect DuVernay’s past experience as a
publicist and head of a marketing agency. These websites also stress her
position and perspective as an African-American woman film-maker
within one of the world’s most competitive and mainstream milieus in
the film business. As she says in an interview in 2015: “That is my gaze.
I’m proud of it. I don’t feel like it’s any less or limiting. I’m a black
woman filmmaker and my films are just as valid as the white man film-
maker and whoever else” (Williams 2015).
As the reception of Selma has recently demonstrated, minority
politics are still an unresolved issue in Hollywood.27 Even though
DuVernay is said to have broken the “hundred-dollar million club”
with her new film project, Disney’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle of Time, she still considers herself an independent player
within that industry and does not miss an opportunity to voice her
standpoint as double minority within Hollywood. Her digital plat-
forms give her this opportunity: on them, DuVernay keeps a meticu-
lous record of her public appearances, interviews, and circulations of
media information about her work and the activity of her company – a
publicist-informed strategy that was only intensified at the time of the
release and then of the award snub of her film Selma. At that time,
DuVernay’s media exposure was multiplied and became especially
targeted at discussing racial discrimination in Hollywood (Edwards
2015; Siegel 2015).
ARRAY, the distribution company associated with her website, was
created as a companion to DuVernay’s African-American Film Festival
(AFFRM), inaugurated in 2010 in Los Angeles in association with
the Philadelphia-based black film presenter Reelblack (http://www.
arraynow.com/our-story/). The company accomplishes DuVernay’s
commitment to the promotion of African-American film-makers and
film-makers of colour in general. Conceived as a crowdfunding enter-

prise open to fans’ donations online with the goal “of empowering
black, independent filmmakers with theatrical and multi-platform
distribution”, ARRAY is also the achievement of DuVernay’s distri-
bution strategy to reach black audience through community-directed
promotional campaigns (Larios 2016).
ARRAY is based on an international collective “dedicated to the ampli-
fication of films by people of colour and women filmmakers, based on the
‘African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement’ collective and has
an activist-informed and grassroots organization” (http://www.avaduver
nay.com/array/). The company is a 100 % female enterprise, composed of
a core team of four people [besides the founder DuVernay, Tilane Jones,
as executive director, Mercedes Cooper as marketing director, and
DuVernay’s younger sister Tera as public programme director, as well as
seven other women (referred to on the website as “the mavericks”) in
various other organizational roles] (http://www.arraynow.com/our-
story).28 ARRAY counts on the partnership of film festivals and indepen-
dent production companies within Los Angeles and the USA, all specia-
lized in the production and promotion of African-American films (http://
www.arraynow.com/our-rebels/). These partners (defined “the rebels”)
include the LA-based multicultural film festival Urban World Film, the
Harlem-based media arts group dedicated to progressive media by and
about people of colour, Imagenation, the Philadelphia-based film and
video production company for “Black Folks” Reelblack, the Langston
Hughes Film Festival in Seattle, and the BronzeLens Film Festival in
Atlanta (ibid.).
On its website, ARRAY encourages an activist, community-minded
type of crowdfunding, asking potential partners (in ARRAY jargon
named “rebels”) to “power” the collective through their contributions
that may vary from $40 to $100 (http://www.arraynow.com/our-
rebels/). The community, grass-roots spirit of the company is stressed
by images of ARRAY members at festivals and screenings organized by
ARRAY partners, as well as by the typology of benefits provided to
partners/rebels. For the $40 “Digi-Perk” contribution, these include
obtaining music soundtracks from films, passes to special event invites in
select cities, ARRAY film-makers’ scripts, and access to online panels, for
the $100 “full Rebel Perks” all of these, plus a Nike Hoodie (http://
www.arraynow.com/our-rebels/).
While ARRAY mainly concentrates on independent African-
American cinema, it also promotes films by people of colour world-
wide and has a specifically gendered focus. As a crowdfunding pro-
ject, ARRAY offers a variety of possibilities to “fellow filmmakers,
actors or fans” that want to give a free donation or become “either a
‘Digital Rebel’ for $40 or a ‘Full Rebel’ for $100” (http://www.
arraynow.com/our-rebels). The initiative has been rather successful
from the beginning, as DuVernay stresses in an interview with
Indiewire in 2015. During its first year the organization received
more members than what it had aimed for, 750 instead of 500
(Cipriani 2015). Out of the fourteen projects distributed until now,
seven are directed by women, including DuVernay’s two first feature
films, I Will Follow (2010) and Middle of Nowhere (2012); Ayanda
(Sara Blecher, 2015); Echo Park (Amanda Marsalis, 2014); Vanishing
Pearls (Nailah Jefferson, 2014); Mississipi Damned, directed by Tina
Mabri in 2015 and available on Netflix and on the platform Video
on Demand (VOD), and the most recent acquisition, Honeytrap
(Rebecca Johnson 2014).
DuVernay started AFFRM with the goal of connecting film-makers
who are under-represented in mainstream film distribution with audi-
ences that want to see their work. Films produced by ARRAY are social
dramas and comedies, set in socially disparaged contexts, both in the
USA and worldwide. At a panel organized at the 2016 edition of the
Los Angeles Film festival where DuVernay had just been awarded the
Spirit of Independence Award, the film-maker talked about her inten-
tion to reach particular audiences, together with two other members of
her team:
It’s not just the fact that a film can do well, it’s the fact that a movie can have
community around it, have conversation around it, can push a national
moment forward, can be a piece of art. Yet all the things that surround
films of color seem to be a surprise. (Larios 2016)
Los Angeles and some of its most ethnically connoted areas feature in
many of the film promoted by ARRAY. This is the case of the inter-
racial and inter-class romance Echo Park, set in the homonymous
location in East Los Angeles, and of DuVernay’s Sundance-awarded
film Middle of Nowhere, about a woman’s separation from her jailed

husband. Rural Mississippi features in Mississippi Damned, where
three little girls try to overcome a family history of abuse and violence
(Nicholson 2015). At the international level, ARRAY has distributed
the South African film Ayanda (Sarah Blecher, 2015), a coming-of-
age story of a woman trying to keep the car repair shop inherited
from her father set in the vibrant community of Johannesburg, and is
distributing the British film, Honeytrap (2014), Rebecca Johnson’s
debut drama about a fifteen-years-old girl from East London involved
in gang culture, which premiered at the 2014 edition of the BFI Film
Festival.29
Each of the films distributed by ARRAY gets a fairly extended
circulation within partner festivals, the African-American film festivals
circuits, the independent festival circuit worldwide, as well as in
independent and art theatres within the USA and North America,
and can be requested online. The average of screenings per film
fluctuates and also depends on a film’s critical reception at festivals
or with the media. On the presentation page of each film, ARRAY
includes headlines of media coverage and the list of screenings at
festivals and in theatres. Echo Park (2013) has had ten screenings
throughout the USA until now (http://www.arraynow.com/echo-
park/). DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere had more than 100 screenings
in North America and was presented at some international film festi-
vals in Europe and Asia (http://www.arraynow.com/middle-of-
nowhere/). The South African film Ayanda (2015) was released in
over twenty theatres within the USA and Canada (http://www.array
now.com/ayanda/).
The graphic style of ARRAY’s website differs radically from that of
DuVernay’s professional website. The latter uses an elegant back-
ground, alternating black and white, with a minimalist list of menu
options on the top (e.g. work, about, press, and contact) and below a
series of gloss stills each one referring to one of DuVernay’s films,
television, or video productions, to which one can access by clicking
on them.30 Quite the opposite, the ARRAY website deploys a colour-
ful, flashy, agit-prop-looking graphic style, alternating photographs
and announcements of different size and position, and rotating
announcements about special events, invitations to join the move-
ment, and information regarding social media where to join the
company. On the bottom of the opening page, the website includes
a long list of news headlines (about twenty) about newspaper or

magazine articles featuring Ava DuVernay or ARRAY-fed blog entries
(http://www.arraynow.com/). This stylistic clash resonates with the
contrast between, on the one hand, the political content of most of
her work and her role as an African-American activist and the very
polished quality of her work, most obviously stressed in some of her
television or advertisement contributions (e.g. the episode directed
for the TV series Scandal in 2013 or the publicity short video for
Miu Miu, Say Yes, 2013). This apparent contradiction should be put
into the context of the cultural history of black female film-makers
and their role in film culture. Writing in 1998, Jacqueline Bobo, in
her book Black Women and Video Artists, draws on Gloria J. Gibson-
Hudson’s framework for analysing the films of black women film-
makers, retaining the following commonalities:
The films evolve form similar and historical circumstances and clear goals of
promoting survival strategies for Black women and transforming them into
socially committed viewers . . . The films are not “art” for art’s sake, nether
should Black women’s critical practice become mere “theory” for theory’s
sake. (xiii)
DuVernay’s commitment as a film-maker and distributor of African-

American women’s cinema resonates with these goals and is placed
within the context of African-American popular culture. DuVernay, a
graduate of UCLA, has often stressed the fact that she could not afford
to go to film school: instead, her formation as a film director was made
first as a film publicist and marketer, and then on the set (Martin 2014:
60–61). Her audience-informed, community-based approach to film-
making and distribution situates DuVernay in what Michael T. Martin,
in the introduction to his interview with the film-maker published in
2014 in Black Camera, defines “the vanguard of a new generation of
African American filmmakers who are the busily undeterred catalyst for
what may very well be a black film renaissance in the making” (2014:
17). As Martin contends, “DuVernay subscribes to the ethos that art
serves a social purpose, debunks demeaning and normative assumptions
about black people, and renders black humanity in all manner of genres
and complexity” (2014: 57).
DuVernay’s closeness to black popular culture is evident in her

exploration of the African-American hip-hop culture, which she did
both in This Is the Life and in My Mic Sounds Nice, in the latter
stressing the importance of hip-hop singers as self-empowering female
icons for black women. Her concern for the social representation of
African-American women is also present in her intimate dramas (I
Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere), in which she addresses with
subtlety the problems of young women confronted with personal
and societal challenges. Finally, she embraces the grass-roots ethics
of African-American culture in her promotional campaign for
ARRAY, inciting people and individuals to support films for indepen-
dent black cinema and cinema by women of colour bringing together
marketing strategies and activist slogans (http://www.arraynow.
com/our-rebels).
David Crane, in his 2000 article “In medias race: filmic represen-
tation, networked communication, and racial intermediation”, exam-
ines four mainstream Hollywood films from 1995 featuring African
Americans in which “race itself plays a significant role in each film’s
narrative presentation of networked technology” (2000: 87).31 Crane
notes how in these films cyberspace and cyber-networking are asso-
ciated with racially connoted characters. As he argues at the begin-
ning of his article:
. . . blackness functions to authenticate – and envision – oppositional iden-

tities and ideologies associated with cyberspace. Moreover, this authenticat-
ing function negotiates between the networked communication of
cyberspace and the “reality” diegetically framed in cinematic space; but the
reality, as we shall see, is not so neat. (ibid.)
The trope of blackness as authentication of radicalness may easily apply to

DuVernay’s cyber practice and radical posture on the Web. Similarly than
as in the reality framed in the mainstream films discussed by Crane, the
application of cyber radicalness to reality is a complex matter for
DuVernay, especially since her reality is situated in the mainstream con-
text of film and media production par excellence. While DuVernay
remains an independent player within the film and media industry,
especially since Selma she has also been involved in modes of production
wherein, paraphrasing Crane, the interplay between visibility, invisibility,

and the performative representation of reality can be especially tricky.
NOTES
1. The New Zealand chapter will be discussed later in this chapter.
2. The Board of Directors of the India chapter includes Uma da Cunha, a
senior screenwriter and film critic who for many years represented Indian
cinema at international film festivals, and Riddhi Wallia, specialized in public
relations (http://wift.co.in/board-members).
3. The New York chapter is based on an organization established in 1977
by a group of women led by producer/director Lenore Dekoven and
the Hollywood Reporter’s bureau chief Morna Murphy-Mortell, “who
felt New York needed a networking and education forum for women in
the entertainment industry” (http://www.nywift.org/article.aspx?id=
HIST).
4. The chapter also vaunts one of the richest resource maps of programmes
available for women film-makers (mainly within the USA), which in 2015
only presented 108 events ranging from the AFI conservatory directing
workshop to master classes at the Athena film festival, to various screen-
writing programmes, to conferences, funds and fellowships programmes,
screening and awards (http://www.sundance.org/initiatives/womenat
sundance/resource-map). The advocates of the LA chapter are prominent
film and academic institutions, as well as independent production and
distribution companies or festivals in the USA and California. The list of
its “allied organizations” includes, among others, the Women Make
Movies distribution company, the Women’s Media Center, founded by
Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem and the Geena Davis
Institute on Gendering Media (both mentioned earlier in this chapter),
the Tribeca Film Institute, the San Francisco Film Society, the Time
Warner Foundation, the USC universities, a series of independent film
companies, and the Athena Film Festival, co-run at Barnard College in
New York by the feminist blogger Melissa Silverstein and Kathryn
Kolbert, of the Athena Centre for Women’s Studies at Barnard College
(http://womeninfilm.org/ffi/#fi).
5. The Board of Directors, run by thirteen volunteer members, is composed by
a Canadian director (Elleen Hoeter, from the Vancouver Chapter in
Canada), three main representatives from the USA, and a majority of US
members (http://www.wifti.net/board.aspx).
6. WIFTI chapters in Europe are in Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, and
the UK.
7. All things being equal, the rest of the New Zealand chapter’s Board of
Director is composed of a Maori independent film-maker and producer
(Desray Armstrong), an actress, a digital media expert, and other members
whose professional profiles are not specified.
8. Among the most well-known names figures, some of the most committed
actresses, film-makers, and producers within art, independent, and Hollywood
cinema, such as Ellen Barkin, Angela Bassett, Annette Bening, Candice
Bergen, Glenn Close, Claire Danes, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, Holly
Hunter, Barbara Kopple, Lucy Liu, Julianne Moore, Mary Tyler Moore,
Rita Moreno, Mira Nair, Gena Rowlands, Susan Sarandon, Susan Seildeman,
Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Liv Ulmann, Christine Vachon, and Robin Wright.
9. The data refer to the New Zealand and the Los Angeles chapters,
respectively.
10. An example of a corporate-sponsored event is reported in Fig. 2.1, which
illustrates the advertisement for a GM-sponsored backstage party event
organized for the Women in Film, Los Angeles, in 2006.
11. Best was able to raise $23,000 for the film in only thirty days (ibid.).
12. The statement comes from a conversation between Sally Potter and her
production assistant James Morrison, the day after completing the shooting
of Rage, included in the DVD copy of the film (Rage 2009).
13. For references about Potter’s career, see particularly the two mono-
graphs on the film-maker published in 2009, one by Catherine Fowler
and one by Sophie Mayer, and the section “about” on Potter’s own
website, available at sallypotter.com. The website also contains an accu-
rate bibliography, divided into academic and non-academic sources and
updated to 2015.
14. Or, as Potter précises in the same interview with Cinéaste, “four million plus
rubles”, a currency used as the film was a pan-European co-production also
involving Russia (ibid.).
15. The literature on this topic is too vast to be fully accounted here. Some of
the most recent and significant contributions include Casetti (2016);
Gaudreault and Marion (2013); Kim (2016); Rodowick (2007).
16. The title paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1970).
17. Specifically, the distribution deal involved “a multi-platform, multi-territory
release that includes the US DVD release on September 22nd through
Liberation Entertainment; an interactive satellite premiere in the UK on
September 24th; the online release via Babelgum beginning September 28th
and the Adventure Pictures DVD release in the UK and Ireland, also on
September 28th” (ibid.).
18. The feminist scholar Annette Kuhn, for instance, posted a pathway on
reviews and reception, asking “How was Orlando reviewed on its release,
is there any evidence of audience response, and what have academic critics
and scholars written about the film?” (http://www.sp-ark.org/
viewPathway.php?puid=6&uuid=11). Pathways are posted once completed
and can be crossed, asking permission to another user (http://www.sp-ark.
org/FAQ.php). This function of the website seems now to be unavailble,
possibly due to a reconsolidation of the platform.
19. Both Mayer (2008: 201) and Atkinson (2012) comment on the partnership
with the Screen film College at Goldsmith University. This and other
university-related associations (e.g. the University of Brighton) are docu-
mented on the archive’s website in the blog section (https://sparkarchive.
wordpress.com/).
20. The DFAP aims at generating data during filming by interrelating compu-
ter-generated imagery (CGI) and shooting in Stereoscopic 3D and making
the data available for archival work through an integrated process. The
DFAP standardizes the data and enables them to be openly accessible
online, using all records and interrogating the data generated by the cameras
and the data generated by the creative process.
21. Mayer reads Potter’s reflexive use of digital media through a conceptual
framework inspired by Donna Haraway’s model of socialist-feminist cyborg
politics, arguing “ . . . whether on stage, on film or online, her work has
consistently played with form to generate open-ended texts that address the
viewer directly, expanding the frame not only in terms of formal and
narrative experimentation, but expanding it into the audience, breaking
the ‘fourth wall’ to create a feminist cyber-network” (ibid.).
22. Selma has a long complicated production history. A number of produc-
tion companies participated in the film, including Cloud Eight Films
and Plan B Entertainment (co-founded by Brad Pitt and Jennifer
Aniston). The film had a 20-million budget and was distributed by
Paramount Pictures.
23. From an NBC interview with NBC News (Lee 2015).
24. Specifically, at Golden Globes Awards Selma was turned down in the
Best Motion Picture, Best Director, and Best Performance by an Actor
categories and received an award only for Best Original Song. At the
Academy Awards, the film was ignored for nominations in all the main
categories except for Best Motion Picture of the Year and received the
same award as at the Gold Globes, for Best Original Song. Outside the
African-American circuit of US festivals, the film received the American
Film Institute award as Movie of the Year and two awards by the
Alliance of Women Film Journalists, one for Best Woman Director
and one for Best Female Icon of the Year. DuVernay also received
awards at three African-American awards, including for Best Director at

the African American Film Critics Association, at the Black Film Critics
Award, and at the Black Reel Award (http://www.imdb.com/title/
tt1020072/awards).
25. Her fame grew to the point that a Barbie doll Ava DuVernay was created in
December 2015 and sold out in a few days by Mattel (Kozicka 2015).
26. Some of the social media that DuVernay uses are Instagram page, a Twitter
account, and a Facebook page.
27. Hollywood’s bias towards the African-American community is a well-
known phenomenon, frequently pointed out by the media and scholars.
Regarding this issue see, among others, Erigha (2015). Most recently, the
issue has come up following the exclusion of the actors playing in
DuVernay’s Golden Globe-winner Selma from the list of nominees in the
2015 edition of the Academy Awards discussed in the body of the chapter
and the following year the absence of African-American nominees, which
caused the boycott of the ceremony by many African-American stars as well
as other stars and inspired the harsh irony of the African-American host
Chris Rock during the awards.
28. Tilane Jones has been working with DuVernay since 2008 in the film-
maker’s former marketing and publicity company The DuVernay Agency
and is known as DuVernay’s “right hand”.
29. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival in the
World Fiction Competition in 2015.
30. One of the links describes her company ARRAY and another one (which
opens by clicking on her image on the bottom left of the page) opens to her
profile page.
31. The films are Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995), Hackers (Iain
Softley, 1995), Virtuosity (Brett Leonard, 1995), and Strange Days
(Kathryn Bigelow, 1995).
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CHAPTER 3
Engendering the Global Market: Women’s

Cinema as a Creative Industry
Abstract This chapter investigates the promotion of women’s films on

the Internet within the context of women’s cinema and as an instance of
creative industry. The premise is that the 2.0 generation of women’s film
culture is keeping true to the social mandate that during the 1970s and the
1980s inspired new forms of social participation for women through the
creation of women’s film festivals, and film and video collectives or coops,
even though its manifestations are not always framed within a feminist
discourse or exclusively framed within feminist ideology. The examples
examined include the adoption of the Web and other digital platforms by
two types of institutions promoting women’s films and audiovisual art-
work: the BirdsEyeView film festival, founded in 2002 in London and
closed in 2014 for lack of funds yet still active as a resource centre for
women film-makers and bildwechsel, a transnational umbrella organiza-
tion active since 1979 and originated in Hamburg, Germany.
Keywords Women’s cinema Creative industries Umbrella organiza-

tions Women’s film festivals Virtual archive
WOMEN’S FILM CULTURE ON THE WEB: CONTEXTS AND DEBATES

At the press conference for the 2014 Cannes film festival, the jury director
Jane Campion – the only woman filmmaker to have ever won the top award
at that festival – made a bold statement about gender inequality within the
film industry.1 The Cannes film festival was not new to this type of

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_3
interventions. In 2012, the feminist group La Barbe had rallied in front of

the Palais du Cinéma to complain about the absence of female film directors
in the main competition.2 The controversy had made the headlines for days
in France and internationally, stimulating the French film magazine Cahiers
du cinéma to publish a dossier about gender inequality in film.3 Soon before
this episode, the International Women’s Film Organization, with the sup-
port of prominent female film-makers and media personalities such as Jane
Fonda, Barbara Albert, Isabel Coixet, and Xiaolou Guohad, had held a
meeting on 12 February 2012, entitled “Strategies for gender equality” at
the Berlinale film festival.4 Many women from the industry participated in
the meeting and more than 100 women film-makers from all over the world
signed a letter in support of the initiative.5 Campion is only one of the many
female personalities to have publicly denounced gender discrimination in
the film business. Lately, women film-makers, producers, actors, screen-
writers, and media personalities have been organizing meetings and
panels at film festivals in response to the persistent gender bias in the
film industry, establishing national and international groups such as the
European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA) and the Red de Mujeres
Iberoamericánas de Cine y Medios Audiovisuales (MICA).6 Gender bias is
being especially monitored in Hollywood, the mainstream film industry
par excellence. Two prominent advocates of women’s rights there are
Geena Davis – spokesperson of the Institute on Gender in Media, which
she herself established – and Jane Fonda – co-founder of the Women’s
Media Center.7 In 2015, some of the most prestigious female stars of
Bollywood (including, among others, Shabana Azmi, Vidya Balan, Sonam
Kapoor, Kangana Ranaut, and Anushka Sharma) made statements at
public events or in the media about the unfair treatment of women in
one of the world’s largest film industries.8
This chapter deals with festivals and organizations that adopt digital
platforms to give women’s cinema more visibility in what Patricia White,
drawing on Lúcia Nagib, defines “the current circulation of world
cinema . . . as the aggregate of feature films made everywhere at least in
part for festival and at least in part is classed special exhibition elsewhere”
(White, 2015: 4).9 In return, in embracing digital technology these
institutions maintain what has been a priority of women’s cinema since
its inception in the heyday of the feminist film movement: to provide
workshops, cooperatives, and supporting networks for women so as to
reduce the technological gap of a gender-biased film industry and an
educational system. Even though, as B. Ruby Rich acknowledges in “The
3 ENGENDERING THE GLOBAL MARKET: WOMEN’S CINEMA AS A CREATIVE . . . 61
Confidence Game”, “the access gap has narrowed through technological

advances, equalized access to film schools and training, and the activism
of organizations like WMM” (2013: 160), these initiatives are important
to keep within gender-specific film circuits so as to guarantee training
and mentoring to aspiring or new film-makers who do not have access to
film schools or the film industry.
One of the major goals of women’s cinema since the 1970s has been
to forward collective action and to enhance women’s conscious participa-
tion and presence in society and culture. Providing film and video literacy
to women and creating social change through visual representation
were primary objectives for most women’s video collectives that emerged
in Europe and North America during the 1970s and 1980. These are
the same objectives of the Hamburg-based film and video collectives
Medienladen and bildwechsel (later discussed in this chapter), the
Feminist Film Collective in Rome, the Nemesiache group in Naples, the
150-h educational workshops for working women organized in Milan, the
workshops offered by the Swiss-Born activist Carole Roussopoulos through
her collective Les Insoumuses in Paris, the UK London Film Co-op, the
Leeds Animation Workshop, and the Kitchen Collective and the Women
Make Movies distribution company, both based in New York.
One of the manifestations that tried to make the point about women’s
film culture in this period was the Cinema and Feminist Event held at the
1979 edition of the Edinburgh Film Festival, which brought together
feminist film scholars and film-makers variously associated with feminist
practice from Europe and the USA. Claire Johnston presented the essay
“The subject of feminist film theory/practice” at the festival, in which she
identified the purpose of the meeting as an opportunity to clarify “the
terms in which we could talk about the emergence of a ‘feminist film
culture’”, further recommending that
. . . feminism, while it must contain and presence a heterogeneity of social

practices, must at the same time involve a form of imaginary unit for it to be
all effective. The struggle to maintain the women’s movement as an auton-
omous movement around a network system and a platform of political
demands for social change bears witness to this. (1980: 27; 29)
The 2.0 generation of women’s film culture is reconfiguring a variety of

social practices associated with world cinema. In this chapter, these prac-
tices will be discussed as instance of “creative industry” or “cultural
industry”, a concept that touches upon the complex interface of art and
commerce. The term originates from the Marxist critique of art and
culture under capitalism especially undertaken by the Frankfurt School,
which produced different readings and theories.10 Within today’s digital
environment, this concept also refers to the convergence of individual
talent and systems of production and distribution within the gift economy
of Web 2.0 platforms.11 The challenge for festivals and other organiza-
tions such as those investigated in this chapter is to identify forms and
spaces capable of transposing the activist and critical trends that have been
characterizing feminist cinema since its inception in the 1970s onto a
public sphere that Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn redefine “global
public life”, with reference to “the difficulty of separating politics and
aesthetics, and cognition and affect” (2006: 11).
This chapter places the shift to digital platforms for the distribution and
the promotion of women’s films within a theoretical framework informed
by media archaeology and feminist historiography. The first case study is
the BirdsEyeView (BEV) film festival, established in London in 2002 and
closed in 2014 for lack of funds. The second case study is bildwechsel, a
transnational umbrella organization originally established in 1979 in
Hamburg as a local group. Both examples reveal the advantages and the
difficulties implicit in maintaining a space for women’s cinema through
digital technology within a public sphere dominated by neo-liberal econ-
omy and post-feminist discourse.
PROMOTING WOMEN’S CINEMA TODAY: FILM FESTIVALS

AS MARKET MAKERS
Women’s film festivals are among the most significant instances of social
practices emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s within the framework of the
women’s movement. During this period, a number of gender-specific film
and video festivals and screening events were inaugurated especially in
North America and Europe, including the Toronto International Festival
of Women’s cinema, founded in 1972 and then discontinued; the Créteil
Films de Femmes festival, inaugurated in 1979 in Scéaux and still
ongoing; the Feminale festival in Köln, which opened in 1984 and the
Femme Totale festival in Dortmund, active since 1987 (these two recently
merged into the Frauen Film Festival); and the St John’s International
Women’s Film festival, active since 1989.
Women’s film festivals emerged throughout the 1970s and the 1980s
as part of the grass-roots activities associated with women’s cinema and the
women’s movement, which also included the organization of workshops
to teach women film and video production and the creation of alternative
circuits of film distribution and exhibition.12 The intention to advance
women’s cinema through niche audiences and grass-roots networks is a
critical aspect of women’s film festivals, still prominent today even though
differently articulated. As Skadi Loist stressed in a keynote address at the
Frauen Film Festival in Dortmund, the mandate of women’s film festivals
is to “provide a space for work by, for and about women . . . create a
community, . . . offer a place for networking, discussion and collaboration
[a] counterpublic sphere [which] has the advantage of setting women’s
work apart” (2012). Throughout the years, women’s film festivals have
been consolidating an alternative platform for women film-makers, sepa-
rate from dominant or traditional networks of film promotion and dis-
tribution and mainstream media.
The fragmentation of practices and directions within women’s cinema
and the politics of the women’s movement have also been contributing
to marginalize women’s film festivals within the festival circuit and in
film culture in general, including film scholarship.13 The practice of
selecting films exclusively directed by women film-makers – rather fre-
quent among women’s film festivals – has especially been the subject of
criticism or debate among women film-makers, even some of those
typically associated with feminist or gender-specific themes.14 Chantal
Akerman at the 1987 edition of the Créteil Films de Femmes festival
declared that women’s cinema was an “outdated” concept.15 More
recently, Agnès Varda criticized Créteil’s gender policy and was invited
by the festival’s founder and director Jackie Buet to address the matter
with her in an open debate on stage.16 Finally, the disaffection with
women’s film festival in social and professional milieus manifests not
only a legitimate disengagement from essentialist or limitative labels,
but also a widespread post-feminist stance.
Women’s film festivals today rely more and more on social media to
open new spaces and links for women in the film industry. These objec-
tives inform the film festival examined here: the BirdsEyeView festival
(better known by the acronym BEV), based in the UK and founded in
2002. The structure and the purpose of this festival typify those of many of
the women’s film festivals emerged during the past two decades in the
international scene.17
Brian Moeran and Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen, in their introduction

to the collection Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries: Fairs,
Festivals and Competitive Events (2012), suggest that festivals and fairs
“provide a venue for the (re)enactment of institutional arrangements in a
particular industry’s field and for the negotiation and affirmation of the
different values that underpin them” (2012: 6). Richard E. Caves, in his
book Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, stresses
the marketing function of film festivals since the emergence of indepen-
dent film-makers and small-scale distributors, the earliest and most sig-
nificant examples being Cannes and Sundance (2000: 100). These and
many other film festivals today advance audiences’ knowledge and access
to films while increasingly acting as market makers. Cindy Hing-Yuk
Wong, in her book Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the
Global Screen, considers the central role of the film markets in interna-
tional film festivals (2011). According to Wong, while the success of a film
festival can be assessed quantitatively or qualitatively, from the point of
view of festival management it “is indeed all business, the business of
selling art and culture” (2011: 143). Other scholars suggest that film
festivals bring together heterogeneous actors and create distinctive forms
of production and distribution. Bill Nichols points at film festivals’ inscrip-
tion at the interface of local and global activities, actors, and interests
(1994). Ramon Lobato, in his book Shadow Economies of Cinema:
Mapping Informal Film Distribution, defines film festivals as formal sys-
tems of distribution marked by “a complex of networks with their own
logics, strategies, and ambitions” (2012: 3).
Marijke de Valck, in her book Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics
to Global Cinephilia, applies Bruno Latour’s model of actor-network –
that is, an organization involving human and non-human actors to pro-
duce activities and meanings that are both concrete and discursive – to
argue for the interdependence of different actors within international film
festivals (2007: 31–34). De Valck, in her article “‘Screening’ the future of
film festivals? A long tale of convergence and digitization”, both joins and
challenges what she defines the “contemporary convergence debates” to
address the impact of “the increasingly multimedia corporate environ-
ment” on film festivals (2008: 17). While de Valck does not believe that
digital distribution may substitute film festivals’ rituals and real-time
events, she acknowledges that it is a more economically viable platform
and an alternative business model for promoting films.18 Regarding this,
she auspicates that developments in this direction may keep the balance
between the sharing culture of digital economy and the niche offer of film
festivals (22). Yet, according to de Valck, “we are faced with the contra-
dictory situation that the physical characteristics of the film festival net-
work are at the same time its weakest link – keeping film–makers captured
in a subsidized ghetto – and indispensable to its success as an alternative
distribution and exhibition circuit for films that have (niche) artistic value
and/or socio-political relevance” (ibid.).
Women’s film festivals have profited from the opportunities that media
converge offer to reconfigure women film-makers’ visibility in the film
industry and in the public sphere. Yet what is at stake for women’s film
festivals’ foray into media convergence and on the Internet is not just the
safeguard of a target audience or content, but that of their identity
altogether. Skadi Loist, in her aforementioned article, identifies some
sociocultural factors associated with the sustainability of women’s film
festivals today, such as social and societal surroundings, local and regional
politics, the particular trend of feminist discussion in each place, the
conditions for women in film in each production context, the availability
of resources, and the commitment of women to start and continue to
run a festival (2012). Loist also suggests five keywords that characterize
women’s film festivals: (1) counterpublics, (2) feminist movement,
(3) networking, (4) ghetto, and (5) professionalization.19 Loist’s key-
words resonate with the “bedrock properties” of creativity through
which Richard E. Caves sets creative industries apart from other areas
of industrial production and economy (2000). These properties are the
variety of products vis-à-vis an uncertainty of the demand, the close local
and temporal coordination related to specific skills, the care that creative
people bring to their work, and the presence of intellectual property
rights with durable rents (ibid.). If applied to women’s film festivals,
Loist’s keywords and Caves’ properties for creative industries translate
into women’s film festivals’ attempts to offer the widest range of films
made or produced by women in order to supplement for a lack of a niche
market about and for women through grass-roots and alternative net-
works and platforms of promotion and distribution.
All things being equal, women’s film festivals operating today are quite
consistently following this agenda, which has been at the heart of women’s
cinema since its emergence during the years of the women’s liberation
movement. The problem is that, in adopting social media to create more
effective and extensive network of activities within their organizations,
women’s film festivals may also become the object of ideological and
economic manipulations. An explicit example of this is the Luna film

festival, sponsored by Cliff Bar and Company, producers of “LUNA:
The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women”. This festival showcases short
documentary films by women film-makers while simultaneously raising
money for women’s causes as they relate to health and social issues (e.g.
environment and breast cancer). The Luna film festival has an all-women
advisory board composed of professional film-makers, curators, producers,
and activists, who select the films and help organize the festival tour at
universities and community centres. Kelly Hankin, in her article “Lunafest
on campus”, synthesizes the contradictions implicit in this festival’s com-
mitment to women film-makers and gender issues through corporate
sponsorship (2012). Having hosted the programme at her university,
Hankin denounces the methods of Lunafest, which do not allow any
participation or interaction with the programme of the packaged tour
(ibid.). The festival committee does not ask “organizers or festivals audi-
ences to become activists on behalf of environmental causes of breast
cancer. Rather, it asks them to their part by volunteering and consuming”
(2012: 165). Hankin concludes that the Lunafest film festival has been a
lesson for “a feminist teacher to help students challenge cause-related
marketing and neoliberal ideologies” (ibid.). The case study here illu-
strated, rooted in grass-roots and activist positions, reveals the difficulty
of maintaining non-profit organizations completely outside of corporate
or industrial interests.
The BEV was an all-women film festival based in the UK, co-founded in
2002 by Rachel Millward, an independent researcher for film and television,
and Pinny Grylls, a documentary film-maker who had studied anthropology
and archaeology (http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/about-us/history-people/).
The two women met in Oxford during their studies and in 1999, when
they were in their mid-20s, founded “Invisible Films”, a production com-
pany dedicated to booster the presence of women film-makers in the film
industry (Mees 2014). Millward and Grylls launched the first edition of
BEV in 2002 as a showcase of short films by British women film-makers.
They filled out mail list of potential contributors, to which they sent out a
call for submission. At the same time, they solicited funds to various
institutions and commercial companies (Millward 2011). As Millward
recounts, “the purpose of the BEV was ‘to address the imbalance in the
film world, without falling in to the trap of being very exclusive and
becoming ghettoized’ and ‘to create a new platform for [their] peers’”
(ibid.). The screening took place at the Curzon Soho theatre in London.
The initiative was a big hit, and the audience’s response was impressive.
While Grylls soon decided to abandon the festival to continue her career as
a documentary film-maker, Millward went on and has been directing the
festival until 2014. The BEV became a national event in 2003 and an
international competition in 2005, and has been running yearly every
spring, with a hiatus in 2012 as a result of the government’s cut in public
funding.
As the festival’s web page foregrounds, the BEV’s mandate was to “show-
case and explore the outstanding contribution of women film practitioners
to cinema . . . and to deliver the best of international film creative vision to
audiences across the UK” (http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/). The BEV
remained faithful to this mandate, selecting films from women film-makers
working within an international context, mainly feature fiction films, but also
shorts films, documentary films, and animation films, as well as a series of
women’s films from the past including a silent films series with live scores
commissioned to female composers (ibid.). The BEV used to take place in
prestigious film theatres in London, as well as in selected theatres through-
out the UK (http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/about-us/history-people/).
The BEV gained popularity and visibility throughout the years, espe-
cially thanks to its very proactive use of digital platforms. Progressively, the
BEV also followed the trend of big international film festivals to serve as a
market place and a site for media events or professional networking, even
though it always remained outside of the major promotional circuits and is
still mostly unknown to general audiences. To these days, the festival
supports professionalizing initiatives such as screenwriting and project
development labs or master classes, business training programmes, an
international delegate programme, and a monthly screening club held in
London (http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/training/). Even after its closure
as a festival, the BEV has been continuing its industry-related pro-
grammes, using the website and social networks as a main source of
information. These activities mantain one of the most significant aspects
of the women’s film movement in the UK, which inspired organizations
such as the London Film Coop, founded in 1966, or the London Film
Group, established in 1972.20 Simultaneously, they illustrate the festival’s
progressive turn towards the industry and the media market as necessary
partners to ensure its survival. The workshops and panels offered at the
BEV address young female practitioners with the purpose of introducing
them to various aspects of film production and distribution through
the testimonies of representatives of various sectors of the film industry,
from film-makers, cinematographers, and screenwriters to executives of

important film companies and institutions. Panels also involve women
working in film criticism and publicity such as editors and journalists of
film magazines and journals, film publicists. In 2013 the festival launched
the “Filmonomics” programme, conceived to “bridge the gap between
development and distribution” and teaching participants “to gain an
understanding of the business behind film”, a program still active today
(http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/training/). As the BEV website explains,
Filmonomics “is supported by Creative Skillset, a company that offers
customized digital platform for creative industries ‘to develops film
finance, marketing and distribution knowledge’” (http://creativeskillset.
org/about_us). The panels, labs, and workshops proposed at Filmonomics
come with registration or entrance fees that vary from a few pounds to 30
or 100 pounds, depending on the nature of the activity, yet are also then
made availble on the festival’s website.21
As Millward explains in the above-mentioned blog, finding subsidies
has been the real challenge for the BEV and the government cuts justify
the festival’s progressive links with the media industry (2011). Until 2007,
the festival received a quite generous amount of public funding, which
reached the top in that year, when the UK Film Council’s Diversity Grant
Aid awarded the BEV 30,000 pounds and the UK Art Council Film
Festival Fund 58,500 pounds (ibid.). Yet, as Millward herself explains,
this achievement “came at the same time as the credit crunch, when our
growing corporate sponsorship disappeared. Over the years we have con-
stantly worked at commercial partnerships – not easy when you can’t
afford team consistency to fully develop them, and have begun to find
the confidence to court individual giving – a long and time consuming
process” (ibid.). Millward publicly denounced the government politics
and in 2012 decided to discontinue the festival, explaining on the blog
of festival’s website that the closure of the Film Council and the transfer of
the festival funds to the BFI had cut 90 % off the BEV’s total budget.22
The festival’s need to be more marketable also explains the festival’s
adoption of strategies to attract a larger audience such as, for instance,
Q/A sessions with prestigious film-makers featured at the festival, special
appearances by female stars opening and closing galas or silent screening
with special music accompaniment, screening presentations on themes
such as fashion, video music, or children’s films, and popular screening
series on female stereotypes or countertypes (e.g. the blonde, the tough
woman) or women in film genres (e.g. the horror).23 In spite of this, the
BEV festival was also able to keep true to its original commitment to
showcase women’s films from all over the world through grass-roots
globalized practices, featuring films that showcased the work of women’s
cinema from different areas of the world.
Since its closure in 2014, the BEV festival has been maintaining its
website, still available at the usual address, with information regarding past
editions, an active blog providing information about women’s films pro-
duced and distributed, as well as updates regarding activities offered
through Filmonomics.
The founder Rachel Millard commented the decision in an official note
posted on the festival’s website as follows:
I am proud that the Birds Eye View Film Festival has been such a dynamic
part of the conversation around women filmmakers over the last decade.
I think it’s a loss to British film that we will no longer have an annual
celebration of international talent, but we simply have not been able to
find a way financially to sustain the work of the festival any longer. The
journey for women filmmakers continues and progresses, and I am delighted
that Birds Eye View will turn its attention to equipping women filmmakers
to succeed in film through brilliant new initiatives like Filmonomics.
The former artistic director turned new director Kate Gerova provided her
opinion on the decision, stating.
… filmmakers want to be judged by their work and not their gender. Lack of
equality and diversity is an industrial problem and addressing this will be to
the benefit of audiences everywhere when they see better representation on
screen facilitated by a more diverse filmmaking community. At BEV we have
turned our resources into developing training to address some of the barriers
that seem to come up repeatedly. (Rosser 2015)
The trajectory of the BEV shows how dominant and counter politics may
often converge in cultural film industries. For instance, while the BEV’s
penchant for media glamour or industrial sponsors might not have had
much impact on the feminist content of its programming. Conversely, the
festival’s progressive concentration on industry-sponsored workshops such
as those offered by Filmonomics reveals an insistence on leadership and
business management less inspired by solidarity among women in the film
industry than by core values within neo-liberal ideology.24
As the BEV demonstrates, festivals operate across the formal and infor-
mal channels of the international film distribution and media industry.
They are instances of creative industry within a media industry where the
interface between grass-roots resistance and corporate control has become
a heated subject of political debate. Their only chance to survive the global
market is to maintain their position as counter-spaces for critical debate
and activism for women in film and media, becoming platforms for critical
orientation as well as professionalization.
MOBILIZING WOMEN+’S CINEMA: BILDWECHSEL’S DIGITAL

ARCHIVE
bildwechsel (http://bildwechsel.org) is an umbrella organization for
women involved in media culture and art, founded in 1979 as a local
group by students at the Hamburg College of Fine Arts (http://www.
bildwechsel.org/info/en/index.html).25 In 1986, bildwechsel became a
transnational organism for short- and long-term activities linked to a com-
mon infrastructure and is now an umbrella organization with agents spread
all over Europe and the world.26 The organization is dedicated to the
circulation and preservation of films, videos, and artworks by women and
for women both in Germany and internationally. bildwechsel is also as an
instance of grass-roots globalization that brings together various tendencies
in feminist and queer media art. Since the late 1970s, bildwechsel has been a
successful example of a creative industry for women film-makers and artists
within Europe and worldwide. The organization’s latest archival practices
are forms of grass-roots globalization that move the legacy of women’s
cinema onto the global dimension of digital platforms.
bildwechsel owes its long-standing presence within feminist and LGTB
media arts scene to its extra-institutional and autonomous profile. The group
was one of the collectives emerged within the context of the New Left move-
ments in West Germany during the 1970s. bildwechsel has an especially low
profile in Germany’s film culture, even though important film-makers of
feminist and LGTB cinema such as the film-makers Monika Treut and
Claudia Willke, and the multimedia artist durbahn are among the co-founders
and the multimedia artist.27 In spite of being one of the most significant cases
of feminist and LGTB interventions in European culture of the past three
decades, the organization has been relatively ignored by the literature about
German cinema and art, including the one conceived within a feminist
framework.28 Its discrete status in Germany’s post-war cinema and in the

scholarship about it reflects the coherence of its members and participants,
who prioritize the work of the collective over that of individual personalities.29
The concentration on programming, exhibition, and archiving, rather than on
production, has also been contributing to maintain the organization behind
the scenes of German film history and women’s cinema.30 Even within these
sectors, bildwechsel never emphasizes well-known films film-makers or art-
works, carefully eschewing auteur- and canon-oriented terms or categories in
its catalogues and programs, as well as on its website.31
bildwechsel (a German word literally meaning “image shift”) promotes
resistant forms of image-making or image-dissemination by and for women.
Its commitment to “shifting images” is a concrete example of feminist
historiography pursued by different generations of women that keep return-
ing their gaze onto the world. The organization’s foray into digital archiving
proposes a model of live archive preserving the history of feminist media art.
bildwechsel came into being within the framework of the feminist
movement as a place for women’s cultural and political orientation
(http://www.bildwechsel.org/info/en/about.html). bildwechsel’s inter-
vention in the community complies with the self-determining orientation
of these groups. bildwechsel was conceived as a women’s media centre
with facilities for printmaking, graphic design, photography, and, later on,
video – one of the many Leftist movements active in Hamburg in those
years.32 Dagmar Brunow, in her article “Before YouTube and Indymedia:
Cultural memory and the archive of video collectives in Germany in the
1970s and 1980s”, also situates this shift within the idiosyncratic milieu of
Hamburg’s counterculture (2012). This context was punctuated by the
foundation of the experimental Hamburg Filmmaker Coop in 1969, the
boom of the New Left video collectives during the 1970s, and the return
to film as a protest against the progressive de-politicization of video in the
mid-1980s (Brunow 2012: 177). According to Brunow,
… especially since the early 1980s the works of the video collectives became
increasingly experimental. In this process collectives such as bildwechsel or
die thede had to negotiate issues of collectivity versus auteurism for example
when applying for funding and had to position themselves within (or out-
side) the art context and the gallery circuit (2012: 173).33
Film and video collectives in Germany were a well-established phenomenon,

locally organized, set outside of public institutions or political parties, and
with a distinctively social matrix that distinguished them, for instance,

from those emerged in the USA.34 During the first years of its operations,
bildwechsel interprets the autarkic spirit of German collectives within the
context of the women’s project movement. As specified in the historical
section of the organization’s website, the conception that the found-
ing members had of themselves “was oriented on artistic or political
‘groupings’” (http://www.ilovebildwechsel.org/?page_id=17%29.#). These
groupings offered “professional workshops infrastructures and screenings at its
headquarters of the city, reconciling art practice and social intervention for
women within the context of community groups, trade unions and political
movements” (ibid.). The intention was to raise awareness about women’s
issues in various art forms and in return to encourage art experimentation as a
form of struggle.35 As some of the group’s early publicity material hints at, the
collective’s priority in these years is to give women the possibility to represent
reality through various media and, most of all, to represent themselves pub-
licly. One of bildwechsel’s earliest documentation of one of these activities (a
photo–video–graphic workshop) is the front page of a 6-page “founding”
paper explaining the group’s objectives during its first three years of activity.36
The page includes two photos: in one, an ordinary-looking woman is taking a
photo, her purse, and a camera bag strapped across her chest; in the other, two
women in factory outfits operate a camera set on a tripod, while standing on a
narrow bridge that overlooks a large factory plant (http://www.bildwechsel.
org/info/en/history.html).37 These images symbolize both the typology of
working-class women that these workshops were trying to attract and the
autarkic spirit of video collectives in this period.
The autarkic nature of the group soon started to cause problems for
bildwechsel members. In her above-mentioned discussion of the women’s
project movement, Ferree discusses the difficulty involved in legitimating
the collectives’ principles of autonomy in a corporatist and capitalist
system still very much organized according to a patriarchal mentality
(2012: 92). These soon became issues at bildwechsel, too. At the begin-
ning, the group was self-funded and relied on volunteers: it functioned as a
women’s centre and a public space, where the work of other women could
be shown and members shared production equipment (www.ilovebild
wechsel.org/?page_id=17). Yet bildwechsel did not offer proper jobs or
paid work to its members, making it difficult for them to be responsible for
many projects at the same time (www.ilovebildwechsel.org/?page_id=17).
In 1986, bildwechsel had to abandon its local formula to become an
umbrella organization due to the fact that “the group had dwindled in size
and was no longer willing or able to act as a base for the various associated
activities” (www.ilovebildwechsel.org/?page_id=17). bildwechsel describes
its adaptation to the larger context of queer art and media in Europe as a
transformation into a European network, with its “main base in Hamburg
and bases in different cities, agents and friends making connections
and collecting work” (www.bildwechsel.org/info/en/about.html). The
group also diversified its resources through government funds and dona-
tions from participant artists and galleries, without however changing its
independent and grass-roots configuration and its non-profit profile.38 The
government funds that bildwechsel receives are not binding in terms of
organizational or creative decisions.
As Christine Gledhill correctly notes, “the example of bildwechsel sug-
gests beyond university resources what can be done through more informal
transnational circuits [continuing] the voluntary practices and personal
investments of time and expense associated with the women’s collectives
and workshops of the 1970s” (2010: 280). Overall, bildwechsel is a suc-
cessful instance of feminist grass-roots activism, bringing together art and
intellectual groups and Leftist movements open to local/global commu-
nities of women from different social strata and cultural contexts.39
Over the years, bildwechsel has been assembling a large number of
women’s film videos, artworks, and media productions. The archive contains
more than 9,000 audiovisual titles and over 300 magazines and zines about
queer feminist music and girl subjects (http://www.bildwechsel.org/info/
en/collections.html). The collection is predominantly national, with mate-
rial from institutions such as the Feminale film festival in Köln (donated in
2014), the political films about the women’s movement or the Medienladen
collective (of which durbahn was a member and which, when the “medien-
laden” was dissolved, was transformed into bildwechsel in 1979), the Berlin-
based TV magazine Läsbisch, the magazine for lesbians Lis (Lesben in Sicht),
and bildwechsel’s own e-zine qunst.mag. The archive also contains works by
international artists, acquired through a grass-roots system of exchange and
cooperation.40 Especially since the 1990s, bildwechsel has been further
enhancing its preservation programming and exhibition activities, making
the content of its collection more widely available through the new organi-
zation’s website at http://www.bildwechsel.org/.41 The website gives
access to various areas of the organization, which includes films and videos,
artists’ personal archives, a collection of early videos of political movements
in Germany, and a Video Museum that is both the repository of the organiza-
tion’s equipment and a laboratory for media transfers.42
The organization’s creative adoption of digital technology especially

through the development of its website to implement and promote its activ-
ities is crucial for a number of reasons: it ensures the survival and circulation of
works by female film- and video-makers and artists; it creates alternative
circuits of distribution and exhibition; and it consolidates professional and
organizational networks for women film-makers and multimedia artists within
Germany and transnationally (Fig. 3.1).43 bildwechsel’s platform has also been
facilitating the expansion of the organization’s archive. The information about
the organization’s archival resources accessible on the website reflects bild-
wechsel’s mission “to strengthen the presence of women in the audiovisual
media arts” by assuring them more visibility in the public sphere.
Fig. 3.1 Page from bildwechsel’s website. (Courtesy of bildwechsel.org)

Simultaneously, the website betrays the local/global nature (and some limits)
of the bildwechsel archive, which are the primary national origin of its collec-
tion and the accessibility in German of many of its catalogues and items.44
One of the most interesting sections of the organization’s website is the
Video Museum. As explained on the website, the Video Museum keeps true
to the aim of the umbrella organization to represent women in media
culture and art (http://www.bildwechsel.org/info/en/video_museum.
html). This section of the archive showcases the history of bildwechsel,
updates ideas, form films, offers a space to attract artists, and a starting
point for projects and events (http://videomuseum.bildwechsel.org/).
Through the Video Museum’s archival facilities, artists may request trans-
fers of their works from film to video formats or from video to digital form,
as well as from original equipment – cameras as well as recorders (ibid.).
Yet the Video Museum’s effort to preserve its archival collection through
digitization also conflates with bildwechsel’s strict policies about digital
dissemination. As one of bildwechsel’s curators, Eva Kietzmann, reminded
to Guylaine Dionne and myself in a video interview some years ago, copy-
right for bildwechsel is an issue which has prevented the organization from
making videos accessible online (Dionne and Maule 2010).45 In return, the
organization opens its archives to on-the-spot viewing and has been activat-
ing various forms of archival mobilization such as the aforementioned travel-
ling screening programmes across Germany (the bildwechsel-bus) and the
possibility to design and ship ad hoc screening programmes to requesting
institutions (ibid.). The archive has also been progressively putting online
some of the videos in its main collection in Hamburg through the recently
completed Video Castle, an animated virtual tour of the organization’s
archive designed by durbahn.
The Video Castle is an animated platform conceived as a homage to the
collective’s own video production from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s.
The intention for the future is to present as many videos as possible from
the different sections of the video collection, including animation, doc-
umentary, fiction, drama, home videos, and art videos. The videos
are accessible through a step-by-step trajectory that starts at an opening
page representing a flamboyant building, the imaginary recreation of
bildwechsel’s headquarters (Fig. 3.2). The building’s entrance door leads
into a big hall with an elevator in the middle, which recreates the ride up to
the four floors of the building and down to a basement level (Fig. 3.3).
The latter space reproduces bildwechsel’s archive, with a TV set in the
middle where the hyperlink to a 4-min video piece shot by durbahn in
Fig. 3.2 Der Schloss (The Castle): The video’s opening page. (designed by dur-
bahn, Courtesy of http://bildwechsel.org)
bildwechsel’s Hamburg’s archive is embedded. The video is a sensorial

exploration of this space, entirely filmed from a subjective point of view
using a smooth, handheld camera technique. In her short piece, durbahn
first zooms in onto her hand that activates a moviola, then wanders about
the room, panning through shelves of videotapes and DVDs, showing various
pieces of equipment, and desks full of papers, films, and equipment. She lingers
for a moment on the images in one of the TV monitors and ends on a long,
establishing shot of the archive revealing other rooms in perspective, with more
shelves full of videos, more equipment, and computers. The video is a poetic,
absorbed tribute to the heart of bildwechsel and to the patient, unseen work of
the organization’s archivist, accompanied by a quiet piano jazz score.
On each of the four other levels of The Castle an entrance hall reveals a film
theatre or an arcade showing video programmes (Fig. 3.4). The screening
selection samples the variety of media and forms produced at bildwechsel.
Odilia Piel’s conceptual video Merkzeichenkomplex Künstlerinnen (Noticeable
Signs: Complex Female Artist, 2011: 14ʹ) is the recording of an installation
recreated by the artist in 2011, based on a magazine issue produced by
Fig. 3.3 Der Schloss (The Castle): The elevator. (http://bildwechsel.org, designed
by durbahn and viktoriya levenko)
bildwechsel in 1987 and gathering statements by female artists about their

work (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/dritter-stock/videos_3stk/merk
zeichenkomplex-kuenstlerinnen/info.html). Ich und Frau Berger (Mrs
Berger and I, Heidi Kull 1991, 4ʹ) is a humorous animation piece, narrated
in voice-over by the film-maker through a ballad that recounts a bittersweet
love story between two women and was the first TV lesbian series aired in
1991 within the first edition of “Läsbisch” – the Berlin-based lesbian pro-
gramme on the community TV station (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/
zweiter-stock/kino_2stk.html). Bad 1 (Agnes Handwerk 1989: 8ʹ) decon-
structs the black-and-white images taken with Camcorder Video8 camera at a
swimming pool, combining extreme close-ups, freeze-frames, and slow
motion images with a soundtrack mixing ambience sound and music to
recreate the excitement and the fear of a group of girls thrown into the cold
water (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/erster-stock/videos_1stk/bad1/
info.html). The animation shorts vary from the abstract Fünf einfache varia-
tionen (Five Simple Variations, durbahn 1985: 6ʹ), which uses geometrical
figures, to the more linear Une année d’artiste (An Artist’s Year, Lena
Eriksson 2015: 13ʹ), a sort of artist’s diary resulting from a selection of her
Fig. 3.4 Der Schloss (The Castle): The screening room. (http://bildwechsel.org,
designed by durbahn)
drawings from 2014 to 2015 (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/erd

geschoss/raum1_eg.html).
The videos available in The Castle section also offer a memory of the
collective’s history. This is the case of Memory- Eröffnung der Aufstellung
(durbahn 1990: 5ʹ), a clip from durbahn’s 1990s recording of one of her
exhibitions (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/untergeschoss/videos_ug/
die-memoryausstellung/info.html). In the video, durbahn and members
of the collective are captured during several moments of the vernissage.
During the montage sequence, the artist sets several panels on the floor,
which she subsequently turns upside down. The panels reveal a series of
drawings, photographs, and writings selected from bildwechsel’s archive
that the collective members watch and comment in a sort of commem-
orative and self-celebrating happening, an experience that becomes itself a
collectible item in the organization’s archive, now available for online
viewers (http://durbahn.net/videoschloss/untergeschoss/videos_ug/
die-memoryausstellung/info.html).
The Castle is the latest example of the organization’s commitment to

archiving “as an artistic practice”, using Dagmar Brunow’s definition
(Brunow 2015: 121). From this perspective, bildwechsel also anticipates
of about three decades what Hal Foster in 2004 perceived as an “emerging
archival impulse in art practices: archival artists seek[ing] to make historical
information . . . the artist as curator . . . and the artist as archivist” (Foster
2004: 4). bildwechsel has in fact been bringing together this impulse since
the late 1970s and is now exploring its potential through new media.
Yet, as mentioned earlier, bildwechsel’s foray into digital archiving also
reveals some limits, mainly due to the local content of its archive.
Moreover, most of the information regarding the collection and the
history of the archive available on the website is in German and so are
the majority of the videos now accessible in some of the sections. The
concentration on European (specifically German) collections and artists in
the bildwechsel’s archive does raise questions regarding the geocultural
inclusiveness of the umbrella organization. Aware of these problems, the
organization has been expanding its sections in English and is widening
the geographical boundaries of its collection through “agents” that make
connections across continents, as well as through an intense work of
international networking drawing on members’ connections.
This is bildwechsel’s present commitment to implement a truly transna-
tional feminist platform for women+, integrating a system of exchange and
cooperation among agents and partners within different contexts and cultures.
Acknowledgement Thanks to Sage and the European Journal of Women Studies

for letting me publish a modified version of the article I published on bildwechsel
in EJWS. Thanks to bildwechsel.org and the umbrella organization, durbahn and
eva kietzmann in particular.
NOTES
1. About Campion’s declaration, see, among others, Sage (2014) and Smith
(2014). The New Zealand film-maker won the top award at the Cannes film
festival in 1993 for her film The Piano, exaequo with Chen Kaige.
2. Some days earlier, the same collective had published an open letter in the news-
paper Le Monde, denouncing the festival’s sexist politics. Details about the
collective’s action at Cannes are available on La Barbe’s website. Some of the
people who signed the open letter are the American feminist Gloria Steinem,
the Australian film-maker Gillian Armstrong, the French film-makers Virginie
Despentes and Coline Serreau, the producer Rachel Ward, the founder of the
feminist distribution company based in the USA Women Make Movies Debra
Zimmerman, as well as several feminist film organizations, including the
Montréal-based group of women film-makers Résalisatrices Équitables, and
the association Women in the Picture from Israel (ibid.). The British newspaper
The Guardian published a translation of the letter on May 15, entitled “Men of
the Cannes film festival, keep defending those masculine values”, available online
at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/15/cannes-
film-festival-men-open-letter. The letter was co-signed, among others, by the
film-makers Dominique Cabrera, Virginie Despentes, and Coline Serreau, as
well as the writer Nancy Houston, the founder and director of the Créteil Film
Festival Jackie Buet, and by some feminist organizations. The letter is available
on the collective’s website at the following address: http://www.labarbelabarbe.
org/La_Barbe/Actions/Entries/2012/5/12_Festival_de_Cannes.html
(http://www.labarbelabarbe.org/La_Barbe/Actions/Entries/2012/5/20_
Festival_de_Cannes2.html).
3. The dossier included testimonies from an international range of female film
directors, as well as articles about the issue (dossier Où sont les femmes?
Cahiers du cinéma, n. 681, September 2012).
4. Reported in Barnard on 19 February 2012, available at http://athenacen
ter.barnard.edu/news/international-womens-film-organizations-present-
strategies-gender-equality.
5. Ibid.
6. The European Women’s Audiovisual (EWA) network was originally set in
motion during a conference of pan-European film-makers in 2010. The
result of this meeting was the Santiago Declaration, a document which
outlines the basic strategies for the company to act in the industry.
Between 2010 and November 2012, EWA was managed by the Spanish
association of female audiovisual professionals, CIMA. MICA was estab-
lished in 2012 to further the professional relationships among women
within the visual media in Latin America and to find resources and oppor-
tunities for young female talents in film. The company, which has between
100 and 5000 employees, mainly relies on its website (http://www.micar
ediberoamericana.com), as well as on various social media).
7. In January 2015, Jane Fonda condemned the studios for maintaining a
gender-biased policy during a public appearance at the Sundance Film
Festival (Child 2015).
8. Kapoor – a well-known actress and fashion icon in India – spoke at a Youth
Forum panel in Chandigarh on 23 November 2015 (http://www.browngirlma
gazine.com/2015/12/anushka-sharma-on-genderdiscrimination-and-female-
roles-in-bollywood/). Sharma, an upcoming star in Bollywood, shared her con-
cerns about sexism in Bollywood during a YouTube interview with Anupama
Chopra on the Film Companion Channel (Deonath 2015). The three Indian
actresses Shabana Azmi, Vidya Balan, and Kangana Ranaut participated in a

panel about Women in Film organized at the Mumbai film festival with the
Indian film-maker Kiran Rao and the US film-maker and distributor Ava
DuVernay, moderated by the Indian stand-up comedian Anuvab Pal (Nair
2015).
9. About feminist film and video collectives in different geocultural contexts, see,
among others, Jeanjean (2011) and Murray (2016) for the French context; for
collectives in the UK Dickinson (1999) and the web page about women’s
video collectives on the BFI’s website at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/
film/id/824000/; about Italian activist cinema, see Bonifacio, Mandolfo, and
Miscuglio (1982); Bruno and Nadotti (1988); Filippelli (2015); about film
and video collectives in the USA, see Rich (2013) and Warren (2008).
Speaking about the same event at the Edinburgh festival, the American scholar
Leslie Stern appreciates the fact that it was “not exclusively an academic
conference, a women’s movement platform, a film education function, a
film-makers forum or a festival of new films. And yet in a sense it was
simultaneously – although not harmoniously – all these things” (1979: 90).
10. Each representative of this group proposed a distinctive approach to culture
industry, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s idea that cultural
industry is a tool of ideological control on the masses to Hans-Magnus
Enzensberger’s belief in the democratizing potential of mass media. The
literature on this subject is rather vast. See, among others, Davies and
Sigthorsson (2013: 77–78).
11. For a definition of creative industries, see, among others, Caves (2000);
Davies and Sigthorsson (2013); Flew (2013); Hartley (2005); Hartley,
Potts, Cunningham, Flew, Keane, and Banks (2013).
12. About film festivals within the context of women’s cinema’s grass-roots initia-
tives, see, among others, Armatage (2009), Barlow (2003), and Loist (2009).
13. Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist stress this overlook in their review of
literature on film festivals posted on the moderated website for the Film
Festival Research Network, available at http://www.filmfestivalresearch.
org/index.php/ffrn-bibliography/9-specialized-film-festivals/9-1-iden
tity-based-festivals/9-1-2-womens-film-festivals/.
14. Teresa de Lauretis cogently comments on the split between activist and formal
purposes in women’s cinema in her book Technologies of Gender (1987: 128).
According to Shilyh Warren, one of the reasons for the waning of the distribution
networks of women’s films active in the 1970s is feminist film theory and feminist
theory’s difficulty to identify with the women’s film movement and embrace
“cultural and theoretical feminist production from the early seventies” (2008).
15. About Akerman’s declaration on women’s cinema at the Créteil Films de
Femmes, see Ginette Vincendeau’s article on feminist film theory in France,
published in Screen in the same year (1987).
16. The debate took place at the 2008 edition of the festival and can be accessed
on the Europeana portal at the following address: http://www.europeana.
eu/portal/record/2022116/urn_axmedis_00000_obj_0c547ef7_bf3f_
4d64_a59b_cb7d821c7c19.html.
17. To name just a few: The Mostra internacionàl de Film de Dones in Barcelona,
established since 1993; the Turkish itinerant festival Flying Brooms Women’s
Film Festival, founded in 1997; the Seoul-based Women’s International Film
Festival, also founded in 1997; the Vancouver International Women in Film
Festival, which opened in 1999; the Moondance Film Festival, also inaugu-
rated in 1999 in Boulder, CO, as a response to Sundance; and the more
recent San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival, created in 2004
and Athena film festival, inaugurated at the female Barnard College in 2009.
A Wellywood Woman blog posting recently identified 95 women’s film
festivals active in 2013 around the world, including some lesbian and LGBT
festivals (http://wellywoodwoman.blogspot.it/p/womens-film-festivals-
around-world.html, last updated on 20 October 2013).
18. de Valck, “‘Screening’ the Future of Film Festivals? A Long Tale of
Convergence and Digitization”, (22).
19. As instances, Loist cites some niche film festivals which simultaneously fore-
ground a lesbian, regional, and race agenda, including the Queer Women of
Color FF (SF), the Black Women’s FF (SF), the Images of Black Women:
African Descent Women in Cinema (London, UK), the Network of Asian
Women’s Film Festival; and the Bluestocking Film Series in the USA, which
features films that must pass the Bechdel Test (ibid.).
20. On the London Film Coop, see, in particular, the Aural History Project,
available online at http://www.studycollection.co.uk/auralhistory/index.
htm. The London Women’s Film Group was founded in 1972 after a
screening of the women’s liberation films at the London Film School. The
collective was composed of female artists from various disciplines including
Esther Ronay, Susan Shapiro, Francine Winham, Fran MacLean, Barbara
Evans, Linda Wood, and Midge McKenzie.
21. For an overview of the panels and workshops offered in 2013, see the
festival’s website at the following address: http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/
film-festival/industry-events/. Some of these panels have been recorded
and are available on the festival’s website in the section “Watch & Learn”,
accessible at http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/training/watch-learn/.
22. Millward’s announcement, posted on 11 October 2011, is accessible at
http://birds-eye-view.co.uk/2011/10/26/no-festival-in-2012/.
23. Examples of prestigious guests and sponsors include, among others, the
film-makers Margarete von Trotta, Mira Nair, and Susan Bier, the actresses
Drew Barrymore (who presented her first feature film at BEV in 2011),
Gillian Anderson, and Kerry Fox, and the former top model Jerry Hall.
24. For instance, see the description of some of the Filmonomics workshops on
the festival’s website, available at the following address: http://birds-eye-
view.co.uk/training/.
25. I use the non-capital annotation of the organization’s name used by the orga-
nization on its website and promotional material. I mean to thank the organiza-
tion, and particularly the following bildwechsel members for their generous
contribution to this portion of the book with information and photos and for
having given permission to use material from the organization’s website: Eva
Kietzmann, bildwechsel_berlin; durbahn, bildwechsel_hamburg; stef. engel,
bildwechsel_hamburg; kate henderson, bildwechsel_glasgow; viktoriya levenko,
bildwechsel_hamburg. Thanks also to Eva Kietzman for letting the author
reference a video interview that the author and Guylaine Dionne did with her
in New York in 2010, unpublished. A printed version of this interview has been
published by Sage in November 2016 issue of the European Journal of Women’s
Studies, written by Maule, but not used in this chapter.
26. Within Europe, bildwechsel is represented by two twin cities, Hamburg and
Glasgow, and has agents in various other cities including Berlin, Basel, Vienna,
Amsterdam, and London. Internationally bildwechsel is active in New York, San
Francisco, Chicago, New Mexico, Los Angeles, Cape Town, and Cuba.
27. Julia Knight identifies Monika Treut as one of bildwechsel’s co-founders in her
book Women and New German Cinema (1992: 209). Helke Sander is a mem-
ber-donator. Chris Regn is a curator and a member-donator. More recently,
some of the most important film-makers of the New German Cinema such as
Margarethe von Trotta and Ulrike Ottinger have been featured in a series of
digitized portraits developed by the organization (Dagmar 2015: 121).
28. Brunow, in the article mentioned earlier, notes that this lack concerns
collective film-making practices in general (2015: 172).
29. The organization’s main focus has been since the beginning the distribution
and the conservation of films, video, and other types of artworks by women.
30. Julia Knight, in her aforementioned book, specifies that while bildwechsel
“facilitates production work, the organization has always identified the
distribution and exhibition of women’s films as an important aspect of its
work and in 1982 set up a Women’s Film Archive by transferring films onto
video” (1992: 119).
31. As other film and video archives, the organization does not divulge online
titles of films or names of the film-makers included in its collection.
32. The early history of the group appears on the organization’s older website,
still available at the following address: www.Ilovebildwechsel.org, in the
background section of the general information page (http://www.ilovebild
wechsel.org/?page_id=17), as well as on tour web page under http://
bildwechsel.org/info/en/about.html. The Video Museum section of bild-
wechsel’s website dedicates a long essay to the memory and the appreciation
of Hamburg’s Political Video Movements since the 1970s (https://video

museum.wordpress.com/seite-2/).
33. According to Brunow, bildwechsel also proves the difficulty of distinguish-
ing art and activism as durbahn (one of the founders of bildwechsel) was a
former member of the feminist film collective Medienladen (1974-1978)
(2012: 176).
34. The American sociologist Myra Ferree, in her book Varieties of Feminism:
German Gender Politics in Global Perspective, “juxtaposes mainstream US fem-
inists [following] the African American model of demanding equal rights and
political social and economic opportunity [to] West German Feminists [who]
remained adamant in embracing women’s outsider political role” (2012: 84).
For Ferree, the core issue for German feminist activists was autonomy and self-
emancipation, the main slogan being women help women (ibid.).
35. bildwechsel welcomes and incorporates various media and art forms besides
film and video, such as painting graphic design and photography.
36. As the Political Video Movements section of its Video Museum web page
explains, bildwechsel had to produce its own promotional material because
the media (e.g. television and newspapers) were ignoring these types of
collectives (https://videomuseum.wordpress.com/seite-2/).
37. The top of the document announces the opening of a new “frauen-medienla-
den” in Hamburg, which literally means “women’s media-store”, which is how
the group defined itself at the beginning. “Medienladen” was also the name of
the feminist collective based in Hamburg of which durbahn was a member,
which was active from 1974 to 1978 and which, when the “medienladen” was
dissolved, was transformed into bildwechsel in 1979. The document could not
be reproduced here for copyright reasons, but can be found at the above-
mentioned link: www.bildwechsel.org/info/en/history.html.
38. Dagmar Brunow – the scholar who has written the most about bildwechsel
and similar groups and to whom this article is greatly indebted – in her article
“Before YouTube and Indymedia: Cultural memory and the archive of video
collectives in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s”, specifies that during the
1980s bildwechsel resorted in part to local project-based funding systems
such as the Filmförderung Hamburg (Film Fund Hamburg) or the
Hamburg Cultural Authority (2012: 176). As the organization members
themselves specify, bildwechsel was self-financed at the beginning and for an
interim period it was allowed reasonable support from the arts council in
Hamburg. This changed with the millennium. Today the organization has to
rely largely on individual donations and can annually apply for specific addi-
tional support from the arts council. This mixture has enabled the group to
keep up with the running costs for the rooms of the archives. bildwechsel
receives donations from a number of artists featured on the organization’s
website in the “Hall of Fame” section, which includes some of the founders of
the group (e.g. durbahn) and continuing collaborators (e.g. Eva Kietzmann,
responsible for the Berlin section of bildwechsel, and Chris Regn).
39. Stephanie Gilmore’s concept of feminist grass-roots activism, which she illus-
trates in her book on the US context, Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism
in Postwar America, is a useful model for the German context (2013: 5–6). In
her analysis, Gilmore laments the tendency to reduce the meaning of grass-roots
to women’s commitment to a series of social or subordinated dichotomies (e.g.
urban/elite, non-poor/poor, colonizer/indigenous, urban/rural) (2013: 4).
Gilmore instead takes “a grassroots approach to feminist activism, which offers a
view into the context or . . . fields in which feminists created political change . . .
[and situates] activists within their own local milieu and their political and
cultural environment” (2013: 5–6). On US activism and feminist movements,
see also Baxandall and Gordon (2000), Deckard (1979), and Mulvey and
Backman Rogers (2015). On German activism, see especially Ferree (2012).
40. Among the international artists featured on the website are the Mexican-
born multimedia artist Paloma Ayala, presently living in Switzerland; the
Swiss video and performance artists Geneviève Favre, based in Lausanne,
and Muda Mathis; and the Ukrainian painter Helen Kishkurno.
41. Brunow, in her aforementioned book, summarizes the significance of bild-
wechsel’s archive as follows: “a) it offers plurimedia memories of artist
practices b) it enables interventions into the audiovisual archive … and c)
it contributes to reworking the cultural memory of various feminist projects
(libraries archives film projects) by showing the diversity and the multitude
of feminist practices from the late 1970s until today” (2015: 121).
42. The lab is also developing an archive of digital transfers of films by German
women film-makers such as Monika Treut, Claudia Richarz, and Maria Lang
(Dagmar 2015: 121).
43. Some of the new initiatives developed by bildwechsel include the media
detective agency, a system commissioning searches for films or video not
available in Germany within regular circuits of distribution; the archive bus,
a travelling screening programme bringing films and videos from the bild-
wechsel archive to requesting institutions nationwide; and the VALIE
PLUS- pocket archive, an ongoing screening series proposed by the Berlin
section of bildwechsel, which brings queer and feminist films and videos by
international artists and film-makers to Berlin (http://www.bildwechsel.
org/info/en/history.html).
44. I will further comment on this point.
45. Brunow considers bildwechsel’s reluctance to publish online the hundreds
of digitized videos now available in their collection of one of the conse-
quences of the organization’s view of archiving as an artistic practice, a
position which distinguishes this collective concept of countersphere from
that commonly found in digital culture (2015: 121).
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CHAPTER 4
Women and Online Porn in North America:

New Media, Old Debates
Abstract This chapter situates some recent approaches to pornography in

North America within the context of the feminist “porn wars”, as well as
of different positions within the wide spectrum of feminist discourse on
pornography. The two case studies are a digital-based porn festival based
in Toronto and a Web series criticizing women’s images in video games,
including that of sex workers.
Keywords Pornography Feminism porn Anti-porn feminism Sex wars

Porn festival Sex workers
FEMINISM AND PORNOGRAPHY

What is feminist porn? As Lisa Sloniowski, English Literature Liaison
Librarian at York University, in Toronto, reminds us, “there is no unified
perspective on pornography within the feminist community, despite
media coverage which tends to emphasize the anti-porn side of what
has proven to be an ongoing and arguably ruinous debate within the
feminist community since the late 1970s” (2012: 14). The concept of
feminist porn emerged in response to mainstream porn in the USA
(Duggan and Hunter 2016). The feminist porn movement countered
the extremisms developed since the mid-1970s within the women’s film
movement, which demonized porn altogether and ended up colluding
with the conservative Reagan administration and the Christian Right.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_4
The so-called “porn wars” or “sex wars” juxtaposed anti-pornography

activists such as Andrea Dworkin, Katharine McKinnon, and Susan
Griffin and pro-pornography feminist activists such as Gayle Rubin and
Ellen Willis. Feminist porn also came into being as a niche area of the
porn industry during the 1980s, when some porn female stars and
performers including, among others, Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle,
Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart started to make porn films aimed at a
female audience.
Lately, a reference point for the definition of feminist porn has been The
Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (2013). In an editor-
ial published in Porn Studies about the publication, Giovanna Maina cor-
rectly points out that the collection “formalizes a sort of canon, describing
what feminist porn is and why it is different from other pornographic forms,
helping to place it within contemporary media landscapes and social con-
texts as a genre, as a market sector, and as a political position” (2014: 182).
This chapter draws on two sets of issues within feminist porn discourse.
The first is the identification of feminist porn as a specific concept advocat-
ing pornography primarily produced by women and aiming at women
spectators, as well as pornography diversifying the canons of mainstream
pornography in general. The second is the role of the Internet in promot-
ing pornography both as a niche market and as a contentious subject
within various discursive fields.1 The purpose is to examine recent feminist
approaches to pornography in North America, situating some of their
most recent manifestations within feminist film discourse as well as in
the context of debates emerged within the public sphere. The case studies
considered include two distinctive instances of activism within the wide
spectrum of feminist positions on pornography: a digital-based porn festi-
val based in Toronto and a Web video series released by a Canadian-
American Web journalist who criticizes the misrepresentation of women
in video games, including that of sex workers. Before concentrating on the
specifics of my case studies, an illustration of feminist pornography as a
concept within the context of women’s cinema and the women’s move-
ment is in order.
Linda Williams – whose book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the
Frenzy of the Visible (Williams, 1989) inaugurated the feminist discourse
on pornography – made her contribution to the first issue of the new
journal Porn Studies (published by Routledge since March 2014) with an
overview of the field (Williams, 2014). Williams’ article (as she herself
specifies) is grounded on a critique of her anthology Porn Studies
4 WOMEN AND ONLINE PORN IN NORTH AMERICA: NEW MEDIA, OLD DEBATES 91
(Williams, 2004) and of the scholarship about pornography. In her piece,

the scholar calls for an approach acknowledging the contradictory nature
of pornography (Williams, 2014: 36–37). As she specifies at the end of the
essay, “Pornography on film, video, or the internet is always two contra-
dictory things at once: documents of sexual acts, and fantasies spun
around knowing the pleasure or pain of those acts. Pornography studies
needs to remember that it must always exist at the problematic site of this
limit.” (Williams, 2014: 37).
For their part, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, co-founders and
editors of Porn Studies, introduce the first two issues of the journal noting
that while “pornography is now of interest for academics working across a
range of disciplines”, it remains a controversial subject (2014: 1). In their
editorial, they stress two elements that have been driving porn discourse in
the public sphere and in academia since the 1980s and caused its resur-
gence since the advent of the Internet: on the one hand, the basic
disagreement about pornography’s putative harmfulness; on the other
hand, the increased accessibility and diversification of the offer and
consumption of pornography, and the renewed scholarly interest for
this topic.2 The two scholars conclude:
These developments also raise important new questions, potentially opening

up the study of pornography to a broader consideration of the ways in which
sex, technology and the self are represented and experienced in contemporary
societies. Furthermore, to pursue the study of pornography in a meaningful
way requires the close and contextualized study of different facets and aspects
of specific pornographies. In this way, it becomes possible to understand a
variety of porn practices in their particularity. (Attwood and Smith, 2014: 2)
The pro-porn activism proposed by the new generation of feminists and sex
workers both originates and differentiates itself from that promoted during
the porn wars. The latest forms of feminist pornography maintain the
purpose of countering mainstream porn, offering women’s perspectives on
sexuality and high production values, yet also advocating diversity within
sexual representations. Giovanna Maina further elaborates on this aspect of
new pornography in a forum published in Porn Studies (2014) about the
aforementioned collection The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing
Pleasure (2013). Quoting from the collection’s introduction, she reminds
that “feminist porn is articulated around some pivotal (and sometimes
controversial) concepts: ‘authenticity’ and the ‘real’; the emergence of
non-standard bodies, genders and sexualities; performers’ agency and con-

sent; and ‘industry within an industry” (Maina, 2014: 182).
As specified above, this chapter situates practices and discussions
regarding sexual representation developed on digital platforms by feminist
activists within the cultural series of feminist approaches to pornography.
For this reason, before illustrating the mandate of the Feminist Porn
Awards, I situate the role of this event within the history of porn debates
within Canada.
The porn wars had ramifications in Canada, less defined by geographical
or cultural boundaries than by different legislations applied to pornogra-
phy.3 The Supreme Court’s decision about the adult store owned by
Donald Butler in 1992 is the most obvious and cited case in point.
Butler’s Supreme Court decision is the most famous case of victory of the
anti-pornography activists in Canada. The sentence modified the country’s
legislation about pornography in Canada and gave way to a systematic
confiscation of porn and queer publications and audiovisual material at
bookshops, video stores, and at customs, with a violence which appalled
even feminists. Some of the books written by anti-porn feminists (including
two books by Andrea Dworkin) were confiscated at the border and the
Ontario Censorship Board even rejected Not a Love Story: A Film About
Pornography (a film denouncing pornography produced by Canada’s
National Film Board, discussed below) for public exhibition.
During the sex wars, while academics such as Thomas Waugh at
Concordia University were offering courses on sexuality, intellectual and
academic milieus were extremely hostile to pornography, as Waugh him-
self recalls. According to Waugh, “the anti-pornography writing of noted
late-’70s second-wave feminist writers and scholars – including Andrea
Dworkin and University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon –
ended up influencing, directly or indirectly, the use of obscenity laws and
state censorship to combat pornography” (Braganza, 2015).
While the history of Canada and US sex wars is culturally enmeshed, they
take distinctive forms and strategies depending on state laws about obscenity,
as well as developments of the women’s movement, women’s cinema, and
feminist film discourse within each country. Within Canada, the anti-porn
campaign culminated with the release of Not a Love Story: A Film About
Pornography (Bonnie Sherr Klein, 1981), produced at the all-women run
section of the National Film Board, the Studio D.4 As Kelly Walsh argues in
her 1994 article “The difficulty in defining obscenity along feminist lines:
rethinking Canada’s Butler decision”, “Canadian history shows that some of
the most effective control of obscene materials have come not from the
judiciary or the legislature, but from the community itself.”5 I would like to
pick up from the observation of this law scholar (who supported Butler’s
decision, only considered it difficult to apply) to address today’s discourse on
pornography and to situate feminist pornography within Canada’s feminist
tradition. Within Canada (and North America in general), the proliferation
of pornography on the Internet has been reviving questions at the heart of
the porn wars some thirty years ago. The public and political campaign
against pornography on the Internet evokes scenarios and coalitions very
similar to those frequent during the sex wars: debates and petitions initiated
by individuals (mostly women, not necessarily self-identified as feminist),
with the endorsement of feminist activists and politicians from the
Conservative Party.
In 2013, Kristine Podewska, from Nova Scotia, filed an online petition
against online porn, inspired by David Cameron’s opt-in anti-porn filter
proposal for an “automatic block of any and all pornographic material
from Canadian households” through government’s intervention.
Podewska’s request for government censorship of the Internet denounces
pornography’s “horribly addictive effects” on children. Podewska’s peti-
tion was soon followed by a political initiative by Winnipeg Conservative
MP Joy Smith, who formulated a private member’s bill that would auto-
matically block access to online pornography.6 As in the UK and many
other national contexts in the world, Canada’s intellectual, academic, and
political circles are taking active part in the campaign against pornography.
The new anti-porn campaign launched by individuals, politicians, and
feminist activists promotes state control of porn on the Internet through
automatic filters and new regulation on pornography, primarily with the
purpose of protecting minors from accessing pornography on the Internet
and denouncing the negative effects of pornography on the young. This
campaign recalls the feminists’ rejection of pornography as degrading for
women back in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Hence some thirty years later, the rhetoric regarding pornography
among anti-porn feminists remains virtually unchanged, only the targets
are diversified. One of the main endorsers for the campaign towards the
censorship of Internet is Gail Dines, a US-based anti-porn feminist scholar
an activist. Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our
Sexuality (2009), follows the path of the US feminist activist Robin
Morgan, whose slogan “Porn is the Theory, rape is the practice” heralded
the anti-porn positions in the porn wars in the 1980s.
The anti-porn rhetoric in Canada is countered by a pro-porn discourse

that brings together academic, intellectual, and grass-roots circles and
milieus. Universities are very active sources of feminist porn study and
discourse. Cases in point are housed at Concordia University, with
Marielle Nitoslawska’s 2001 documentary film Bad Girl and Tom
Waugh’s work in the area of sexual representation. In Toronto, Lisa
Slonioswi and Bobby Noble’s Feminist Porn Archive is another example
of recent approaches to feminist pornography within academia. The
Feminist Porn Awards is one of Canada’s most prominent cases of a
grass-roots activity involving producers, participants, and spectators from
a very vast and diversified sociocultural spectrum.
FEMINIST PORN 2.0: NEW PRACTICES, NEW ETHICS

The Feminist Porn Awards (FPA) takes a distinctive position within the
larger context of the porn debates that have been dividing North
American and worldwide feminists since the 1980s. The purpose of the
awards is twofold. On the one hand, the event recognizes and promotes
professional and amateur pornographic works available in digital formats
such as DVD, Blu-Ray, as well as various forms of digital platforms. On
the other hand, the ceremony forwards “feminist sensibility” and “high
aesthetic standards” within the largest framework of the porn industry, as
the mandate page featured on its website clearly recites.7 In June 2006,
Good for Her – a sex shop dedicated to women based in Toronto –
launched the first edition of the Feminist Porn Awards. Since then, the
event has been taking place every year in Toronto. Having just celebrated
its tenth anniversary edition, the Feminist Porn Awards bolstered the
tradition of Canada’s feminist porn culture in the digital age, opening an
alternative platform to women as online porn producers and consumers.
The Feminist Porn Awards’ criteria for what constitutes feminist porn
include the depiction of women’s genuine pleasure and agency; focus on
connection, communication, and collaboration among performers and/or
between performers and filmmakers; and expansion beyond the bound-
aries of sexual representation on film, challenging stereotypes and present-
ing a vision apart from mainstream porn (www.feministpornawards.com).
Simultaneously, the Feminist Porn Awards is a successful instance of a
grass-roots film industry. The ceremony provides a niche venue and a show-
room for gender-aware, sex-positive, anti-mainstream, and anti-discriminatory
representations of adults’ sexuality within the global framework of mainstream
porn. All things being equal, Good for Her makes its own profit out if this
initiative, as it assures the rights for exploitation and distribution of all the
works submitted. In return, the award is a professional trampoline for women
active as amateur or independent film-makers, as well as for small studios
within the porn industry and provides an accessible platform to women as
Internet porn consumers.
The Feminist Porn Awards in fact supports a variety of independent and
studio-based videos and porn genres made by women LGTB, queer, and
transexual filmmakers with the purpose of representing a “diversity of
desires, types of people, bodies, sexual practices, and/or an anti-racist or
anti-oppression framework throughout the production”.8
The Feminist Porn Awards has had an important role within the fem-
inist porn movement, which has been for decades fuelling debates about
“the role of sexualized representation in society” among feminist activists,
feminist film-makers, and women.9 As the co-editors of the aforemen-
tioned collection The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing
Pleasure (2013) stress, the Feminist Porn Awards relies on three criteria
of submission: (1) a woman needs to be the producer, the director, or the
writer; (2) genuine female pleasure must be depicted; and (3) boundaries
of sexual representation and stereotypes found in mainstream porn must
be challenged (2013:12). These criteria “simultaneously assumed and
announced a viewership, an authorship, and industry, and a collective
consciousness” (ibid.).
The Feminist Porn Awards is not exempt from critiques. One of them is
the award’s concentration and insistence on women and feminism, while
the orientation is more and more towards queer and transgender produc-
tions. Bobby Noble observes:
Even more troubling is the nature of the work accomplished by porn’s

methods when hailed as feminist. What is it that makes anything feminist,
especially if we are committed, as we should be, to trans-feminist practices of
thinking, writing, and talking – in ways that at least try to refuse the
categorical shorthand of differentiating “feminist” porn from “mainstream”
porn by arguing that “women had a hand in the making, selling, distributing
of the product” or “women’s desires are featured prominently in the form”.10
Beside being attacked for being ambivalent in the application of gender

politics, the Feminist Porn Awards has also been accused of no longer being
a successful example of a creative film industry and a grass-roots globalized
activity within the context of mainstream porn practices.11 Emma Ealey,

in an article posted in 2015 on The Daily Dot, addresses some the criticism
surrounding “the way the event’s organizers have been handling the
transition from a smaller, more industry-oriented event to a larger, more
outward-facing one” (2015). Specifically, Ealy points at the objections raised
to the awards’ inclusiveness by two filmmakers (Courtney Trouble and Kitty
Stryker), concluding that “for activists like Trouble and Stryker who want
more than a generalized commitment to diversity, the Feminist Porn Awards
might not be able to give them what they want any longer” (ibid.).
Looking at the variety of genres and typologies of films lately featured
at the Feminist Porn Awards, these critiques do not seem to be
unfounded. While the event still keeps true to its grass-roots purposes, it
is gradually opening up to a variety of independent players within the porn
industry. This move assures a wide selection of genres and typology of
films, but also creates discrepancies among the works proposed, further
stressed by the inclusion of production quality in some of the award
categories. Furthermore, Good for Her is no longer making the winning
films available online for free, but for a rental fee. This request might very
well be the result of the economic difficulties, but it is in contradiction
with the awards’ spirit.
ANITA SARKEESIAN AND THE PRO-/ANTI-PORN

FEMINIST DEBATE
The second case study places the recent confrontation between Anita
Sarkeesian, a thirty-three years-old Canadian-American journalist and self-
proclaimed feminist Web activist, and some porn workers and pro-porn
activists within the cultural series of the “sex-wars” revived by disputes
about “porn empowerment” movements within third-wave feminism. The
purpose is to discuss the polemic within the framework of feminist
approaches to the representation of women’s body and sexuality in video
games and other audiovisual media. Sarkeesian launched her website
Feminist Frequency in 2009 to criticize the stereotypical representation of
women in pop culture narratives across various media. Yet it was the Web
video series “Tropes vs Women in Video Games” that made her famous,
particularly because of the harassment campaign against her that the series
provoked from the moment when it was announced in May 2012. In
iIlustrating this case, specific attention will be drawn to the polemic raised
by some female porn stars and pro-sex feminist activists against Sarkeesian.
Before I get to these issues, an illustration of Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency
and of its related harassment campaign is in order.
The first trope addressed by Sarkeesian in her Web video series is the
“damsel in distress”, translated from the French “demoiselle en dêtresse”
(damsel in distress), which goes back to ancient Greek mythology
(https://feministfrequency.com/2013/03/07/damsel-in-distress-part-
1/). The prototype is Andromeda, the young woman who in the myth of
Perseus is rescued by the hero when she is about to be devoured by a sea
monster after having been chained to a rock as a human sacrifice.
Sarkeesian traces the presence of the trope in popular culture, from
Middle Age literature the Keystone comedy shorts (ibid.).12 In her intro-
duction to the first episode of the series, Sarkeesian is careful to remind the
viewer that “it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously
enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious
aspects”. As she herself insightfully suggests in an interview she did with
Rolling Stone in December 2014, the key to her popularity is accessibility.
This aspect of her work is emphasized in the presentation section of
Feminist Frequency, where she explains that the platform “largely serves as
an educational resource to encourage critical media literacy and provide
resources for media makers to improve their works of fiction” (http://
feministfrequency.com/about/). As Sarkeesian herself specifies, her goal
since she founded Feminist Frequency when she was still a graduate student
at the Communication Program of NYU has been to use new media as a
way “of pulling feminist theory out of academia into a more public space
and for a wider audience”(Sarkeesian 2014).
Sarkeesian’s effectiveness in disseminating media literacy is remarkable:
in her video Web series, for instance, she manages to explain the meaning
of “trope” and its potential development into a stereotype using just three,
schematic and effective sentences.13 Besides using very clear explanations,
the journalist provides her Web videos with abundant examples. As she
admits, she has been video games geek since very young. The impressive
number of clips that she brings up in her video Web series gives a sense of
her solid background in the field. Cases in point are the first two episodes
of the series, dedicated to the above-mentioned trope of the damsel in
distress, which provide an almost chronological history of the video
games. In some promotional gifs posted on Tumblr, Sarkeesian speaks
while peeking out from a pile of game characters or tries to push them
aside.14 As her website points out, “game reviews and editorials constantly
reference her work when discussing the treatment of women in games”,

and she has become an authority within academic circles associated with
game culture, frequently invited at symposia and public events within this
sector.
To date, the “Tropes vs Women in Video Games” series has produced
eight episodes in Part I and six episodes in Part II, addressing a number of
tropes including role reversal, women as background decoration, and posi-
tive female characters.15 While simultaneously announcing the imminent
wrapping up of the series on 19 January 2016, Sarkeesian launched the first
episode of Part II, entitled “Strategic butt coverings”. As usual, the episode
is about the objectification of female characters in video games, specifically
through the hypersexualization of their bodies.16 The scope and the struc-
ture of Part II have changed, becoming shorter and more focused, as
Sarkeesian herself explained on the day of the launch (https://www.you
tube.com/watch?v=ujTufg1GvR4).
Coherent with her accessibility policy, Sarkeesian makes all episodes of
the Web series available on YouTube for free and relies on volunteer
donations for her Feminist Frequency project. The series “Tropes vs
Women in Video Games” was made possible through a kick-starter cam-
paign, whose initial goal of $6000 was reached within 24 hours.17 In
2015, Feminist Frequency had about 5000 followers and almost 2000
users. In 2014, her YouTube channel totalled 5.7 million viewers, with
the highest demographic (25/34 %) within California, the US state where
Sarkeesian lives and works. Sarkeesian’s media visibility is increasing day by
day. On January 2015, The Times included Sarkeesian among the 100
most influential people in the USA, describing her as a “feminist for the
digital age, using modern tools and platforms to engage thousands of
people who want to hear her thoughts and respond to the challenges she
raises . . . determined to ensure that video games are inclusive and repre-
sentative of everyone who plays them” (Wheaton 2015).18
Sarkeesian’s popularity is among the factors responsible for the violent
response of so many gamers and game developers to her video series.
These threats have been escalating especially since 2014, when the hashtag
“#gamergate” was created. Allegedly, the purpose of “#gamergate” is to
respond to ethic concerns in game culture. De facto, “#gamergate” has
been mainly proactive against media critics and developers addressing
feminist or gender issues in video games.19
In 2014, the FBI opened an investigation regarding “#gamergate”’s
death threat against Sarkeesian. The reference was especially to some email
messages that Sarkeesian received earlier that year, obliging her to cancel an
appearance at Utah State University. The messages, as she specifies, used
words reminiscent and even mentioning the massacre of female students at
the Polytechnique School of Montreal in 1989 and that at a sorority house at
UC Santa Barbara, which had occurred only a few months earlier (Hern
2014).20
Especially since the escalation of the harassment campaign, Sarkeesian
has become a national and international media celebrity, one of the very
few feminist celebrities at a time when feminism is certainly not at the
centre of public discourse. As mentioned above, she is frequently invited as
a special guest or lecturer at academic institutions, as well as game or
feminist conventions (Fig 4.1).21
Mia Consalvo, one of the most authoritative scholars in the field of
video games and among the most outspoken feminist within this area of
studies, was one of the earliest supporters of Sarkeesian since the very
beginning of the harassment campaign against the journalist in 2012. In
an article published that year eloquently entitled “Confronting toxic
gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars”, Consalvo
Fig. 4.1 Anita Sarkeesian speaking at XOXO Conference, 13 September 2014

traces a somber picture of the misogynist atmosphere prevalent in the

video game industry and culture (2012).22 Using the intimidations against
Sarkeesian as the latest case in point of gender discrimination in game
culture, she argues that the first task of video game scholars is to provide
evidence of bad practices in gaming culture (ibid.).23 This is arguably what
Sarkeesian is trying to do in “Tropes vs Women in Video Games”.
Sarkeesian’s Web series and discussion of game culture on Feminist
Frequency have in fact been contributing to enhance the general awareness
regarding the sexist ideology pervasive in video game culture. Positioned
outside of academia, Sarkeesian uses her digital platforms to disseminate a
grass-roots feminist discourse within video games studies. In return, she is
inevitably exposed to a vast and unpredictable range of critiques and
threats on the Internet.24 Her intervention on sexisms in video games
has been the object of attacks not only from a majority of anti-feminist
gamers, but also from female porn stars and feminist pro-sex activists, who
consider Sarkeesian’s critique of the exploitative and violent representation
of female characters – particularly sex workers – in video games to be
highly problematic.
The examples considered are two porn webcam performers and porn
activists based in the USA, Princess Kora and Mercedes Carrera, and a
Canadian media personality and sex-positive feminist, Liana Kerzner.
These women’s responses to Sarkeesian are considerably more articulate
than those of the random game fans linked to “#gamergate”. This might be
because these women’s affiliation to the hashtag is less motivated by the
passion for video games or ethic concerns about game culture than by
personal agendas.25 In contesting Sarkeesian, these porn activists and
media journalists are expressing their irritation against Sarkeesian’s use of
the term “prostituted women” to define sex workers on Feminist Frequency,
as well against her definition of violence done to women in video games.
In her Web video series, Sarkeesian contends that in video games like
Hitman: Absolution, Saints Row, and Grand Theft Auto, sex workers are
objectified. In episode two of the series, she especially comments on
violence exerted to women (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_
RPr9DwMA).26 Noah Berlatsky, in his article “Pixelated prostitution:
feminist sex debate bleeds into video games”, points at a contradictions
inherent in Sarkeesian’s intervention on the phenomenon, since many sex
workers argue that Sarkeesian’s videos rather contribute to the objectifica-
tion and stigma that she is criticizing (2014).27 In response to Sarkeesian,
sex workers and pro-sex activists have adopted different strategies.
Kora, a 29-year-old PhD student who performs as Princess Kora on the

Web and is a sex work advocate, has chosen parody. Profiting of her
resemblance to Sarkeesian, in 2014 Kora launched BoobFrequency, a series
of paying webcam parodies of Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency produced
by “#gamergate”. Copying Sarkeesian’s logo and make-up, BoobFrequency
takes inspiration from video game female characters to offer hard-core
performances on the Web. BoobFrequency has had an enthusiastic recep-
tion and some media attention.28
In spring 2015, the porn and cam performer Mercedes Carrera joined
“#gamergate” to publicly manifest her indignation regarding feminists’
silence surrounding the vicious rape of Cytherea, a porn star based in San
Francisco brutalized by three young men in her home in the presence of
her children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWQcqabG0J8) In
her vlog, Carrera takes Sarkeesian’s anti-video game campaign against
violence done to women as an instance of feminist hypocrisy, missing
the point about the real violence done to women today. While Carrera’s
rant against feminists and Sarkeesian would seem quite generic and at
points rambling, it is more justifiable if seen from the perspective of
Carrera’s claim that mainstream media and Sarkeesian would not have
responded to her request to back her up on a fundraising campaign for
Cytherea and her family.29 In an interview published on the neomasculine
website published by the anti-feminist blogger Roosh Valizadeh, Return
of Kings, Carrera claims that a case of “rape culture” in which the attackers
were “disadvantaged young black men” would be “too complex of a social
issue for feminists to want to delve into”, as “issues of race, socioeco-
nomics and rape cannot easily be deconstructed into the binary paradigms
of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘misogyny’” (2015).30
In her vlog, Carrera also announced the launch of the adult webcam
fundraising initiative for Cytherea, involving her and some fellow cam
performers “fisting for charity”. Later on, she would expand this initiative,
making it into a Porn Charity devoted to a scholarship for young women
trying to enter STEM programmes (an acronym standing for studies in
science, technology, engineer, and mathematics) which for Carrera are
“less likely to be pursued by women or minorities” (Chandrachud 2015).
The choice is not random, given that Carrera, before starting her career as
a porn star, studied and worked for five years as an aerospace engineer.
The last example of a porn activist joining the “#gamergate” debate
against Sarkeesian is that of the Canadian journalist Liana Kerzner.
Kerzner’s profile is very similar to that of Sarkeesian: both women identify
themselves as media feminists and video game experts and have long been
writing about video games on the Web. On 9 and 10 February 2015,
Kerzner published the two-parted article “Why feminist frequency almost
made me quint writing about video games”, in which she exposes her
rebuttal to Feminist Frequency and specifically to the Web series on video
games, basing her argument on her expertise in feminist film theory and
video games. Starting from the premise that in video game too you need
to have a pluralist perspective, Kerzner first proceeds to denounce Feminist
Frequency’s and Sarkeesian’s own bully strategies, overlooked by the media
because of the harassment campaign conducted against Sarkeesian
(ibid.).31 According to Kerzner, Sarkeesian herself is an instance of a
feminine trope: “Sarkeesian personifies the ‘damsel in distress’”, that she
so frequently criticizes (Kerzner 2015).
While the instances of women speaking against Sarkeesian on sexism in
video games are not many, they are significant insofar as they recall some
of the arguments within the feminist debate about women’s alleged
exploitation in the pornographic film and video industry. Especially since
the shift of the porn industry to global, digital platforms and the spread of
neo-liberal economy and post-feminist ideology, women’s agency and
exploitation of the porn industry is becoming a contentious issue. Sex
workers and porn stars have for years been partaking in what is generally
referred to as “porn empowerment” movements or “sex-positive” move-
ments. Nina K. Martin, in her article “Porn empowerment: negotiating
sex work and third wave feminism”, situates sex work activism within
feminist approaches that “emphasize the agency that [sex workers] enact
in choosing sex work, purposefully pulling away from the representations
of sex workers as victims of coercion and sexual exploitation” (2007: 37).
Yet she, as other feminist scholars, warns against the “mainstreaming and
degstimatization of porn and sex work” that third-wave feminism has been
encouraging, creating a post-feminist “Tyranny of Sexiness” (ibid.).
Within this framework of discourse, telling who is the damsel in distress
within the Sarkeesian/porn activists controversy – using Sarkeesian’s
trope – is almost impossible: Is it the sex workers portrayed in the video
games denounced by Sarkeesian? Is it Sarkeesian harassed by the video
game fans? Is it the sex workers misrepresented by Sarkeesian in her Web
series? Or are all instead social actors involved in this controversy equally
partaking in the same system of mediatic display? In privileging the
last hypothesis, we should consider the Sarkeesian vs. porn activists debate
as a reinstatement of the situation that Linda William, more than a decade
ago in the introduction to her collection Porn Studies, defined the regime
of on/scenity, that is, “both the controversy and scandal of the increas-
ingly public representations of diverse forms of sexuality and the fact
that they have become increasingly available to the public at large”
(Williams 2004: 3). Today, this “paradoxical state of affairs”, as Williams
defines it (ibid.), is all the more accentuated, given the degree of porno-
graphic offer available on the Internet and social media and the number of
debates about pornography and sexuality circulating on the blogsphere.
The Sarkeesian/sex activists case is particular in this regard as it involves
feminist activists’ different interpretation of women’s agency within dif-
ferent regimes of sexual and bodily representation. From this perspective,
this conflict falls into the long series of the “sex wars”, which divided
North American feminist activists and film-makers some decades ago.
While not inscribing themselves into this heritage, both Sarkeesian and
the pro-sex activists criticizing her adopt the same rhetoric as their pre-
decessors. Sarkeesian denounces mainstream and misogynist representa-
tion of women’s sexuality and sex workers, whereas Carrera or Kerzner
follow the logic that has been for decades fuelling pro-porn feminist
activists regarding women’s sexualized representation.
The debate pro- or against pornography may seem dated in terms of the
arguments raised: what is different today is the degree to which these
issues are enmeshed with questions of personal interest and agency.
Cases in point are the two major opponents in the Sarkeesian vs. porn
activist dispute, Anita Sarkeesian and Mercedes Carrera. Both are feminist
activists associated with non-benefit organizations, Sarkeesian with
Feminist Frequency and Carrera the Porn Charity Organization and most
recently a subsidiary co-created with the Fine Young Capitalists, a self-
defined radical feminist group supporting unrepresented labour in the
media industry. These women’s work on digital media has been – to
varying degrees – extremely profitable, to the point of raising doubts
regarding the non-profitable nature of their respective organizations.
Sarkeesian has been reprimanded for not being completely clear in mana-
ging the funds received through donation for her platform.
In January 2015, the respected US economy magazine Forbes commen-
ted on the public release of her kick-starter breakdowns (Kain 2015). In his
article, the reporter Eric Kain praises Sarkeesian on her latest kick-starter
fundraising campaign, which had raised $440,000 ($230,000 of which
were sent in December 2014, after the escalation of the Gamergate hate
campaign against Sarkeesian) and notes that 44 % of the $160,000 she had
made in her first fundraising campaign in 2012 had been devoted into salary
(Kain 2015). Yet he also complains about the fact that she would not invest
more into new Web series, given that only six episodes had been posted
until the beginning of the fundraising campaign (Kain 2015). Furthermore,
according to Kain Sarkeesian was becoming a “media talking head”, who
had had twenty media appearances only in 2014 (Kain 2015). In the same
year, other articles attacked Sarkeesian more explicitly, casting doubts about
how she would actually retain only a minimal salary out of the amount made
with her fundraising (Kulze, 2015; Myers, 2013). Furthermore, Sarkeesian
makes money out of her public appearances at public and private
institutions.
Carrera’s Porn Charity involved a three-hour webcam show featuring
Carrera and fellow adult entertainment stars Paisley Parker, Holly Heart,
Mia Austin, Selma Sins, and Nadia Styles. Online users would have left
donations after watching the webcam streamed show. The initial goal of
the Indiegogo campaign was $1000, which was easily matched in a few days.
The scholarship was managed by the Young Fine Capitalists, the organiza-
tion behind “#gamergate”, associated with computer game companies such
as Autobotica and Afterlife Empire. By January 2015, the porn charity
organization had reached as much as $11,000. The stream, now available
at $20 in digital, and Carrera’s “unmentionables”, packed with a couple of
underwear, can also be purchased for $40 and includes “feminist” articles,
such as a T-shirt with a gaming heroine figure logo posted and a Gloria
Steinem cup for $40, problematically promoted together with a Hugh
Hefner cup, the latter 10$ more xpensive than the Steineim cup, a baby
rib top, a Skype conference with Carrera herself - who promises to “tease,
joke, and make you yearn for more” -, and a $400-worth, 15-minute video
featuring Carrera talking directly to the viewer. While feminist speculations
about Carrera’s alleged uses of the donations for personal income has proved
untrue, those that remain more substantial concern Carrera’s association
with “#gamergate”, which is also accused to “weaponize” pornography.
Sarkeesian’s and Carrera’s feminist discourse on pornography on digital
platforms seems to be set in-between counter practices of resistance and
neoliberal statements of self-affirmation. The central question in this regard
is: How can we disambiguate feminist grass-roots activism and post-feminism
ideology within their projects and intents? Is it possible, in other words, to tell
who is the damsel in distress in their debate? The point is not so much to
decide whether digital technology facilitates their activist agenda regarding
women’s sexual representation in the media or is inevitably compromised
with the interests and ideologies in which the pornographic industry and even
the Internet are involved. What is important to note in this debate is that new
opportunities for self- expression and cultural criticism can easily turn into
forms of personal promotion and economic exploitation.
NOTES
1. According to Michel Foucault, discursive fields (i.e. the law, the family, the
church) encompass competing and contradictory discourses organizing
institutions and processes. Discursive field brings together language,
power, institutions, and subjectivity (Foucault, 1969).
2. Ibid.
3. About state legislation and censorship associated with pornography, see,
among others, the special issue on censorship in the aforementioned journal
Porn Studies, Vol. 1, no. 3, (2014). Canada’s distinctive genealogy of
feminist porn discourse is now the subject of archival research and preserva-
tion at York University, thanks to the initiative of feminist scholars Bobbly
Noble and Lisa Sloniowski. While the archive does not exclusively concen-
trate on Canadian porn history, it does provide a comprehensive account of
the country’s complex approach to pornography.
4. The complex history of the film’s production and distribution was recently
investigated in a book by Rebecca Sullivan, published in 2014.
5. Walsh concludes: “The current feminist approach to pornography adopted
by the Butler Court has proven difficult to interpret, apply, and enforce.
Canada’s national obscenity standard is ineffective because it promotes
censorship but fails to protect the women that are allegedly harmed by
pornography. . . . The Committee recognized that the harm to women as
defined by the feminist perspective was so pervasive in the media that the
“re-orientation” of values necessary to improve conditions for women was
beyond the scope of legal effectiveness” (1994: 1020–1021).
6. In December of the same year, Smith hosted a meeting for parliamentarians
and stakeholders in Ottawa. At the meeting, she invited as guest speakers
and supporters Gail Dines, a feminist and a sociology professor at Boston’s
Wheelock College who founded the Stop Porn Culture group, and Julia
Beazley, a policy analyst at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. The
proposed Bill never became a Law. Browne, Rachel, “Conservative MP,
Radical Feminist and Evangelical Christian Come Together to Block
Online Porn in Canada.” National Post, December 9, 2013, Web, http://
news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/09/conservative-mp-radical-feminist-
and-evangelical-christian-come-together-to-block-online-porn-in-canada/,
accessed 16 March 2015.
7. Feminist Porn Awards-Mandate, http://www.goodforher.com/feminist_

porn_awards Web. February 27, 2015.
8. http://www.goodforher.com/feminist_porn_awards.
9. Taormino, Parreñas Shimizu, Penley, and Miller-Young, 2013: 10.
10. Noble, 2012.
11. The reference is to Appadurai, Arjun “Grassroots Globalization and the
Research Imagination.” Public Culture 12(1) (Winter 2000): 1–19 (3).
12. As Sarkeesian puts it, the trope appears “as a common feature in many
medieval songs, legends, and fairy tales” and then again in the twentieth
century as “a sensational plot device for the silver screen, notably in
Keystone comedy shorts” (ibid.). Sarkeesian quotes “the 1913 Keystone
Kops short ‘Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life,’ featuring ‘the now iconic
scene of a woman being tied to the railroad tracks by an evil mustache
twirling villain’” (ibid.).
13. While explaining the purpose of Feminist Frequency in an interview with
Rolling Stone in plain words, Sarkeesian even jokes about it, saying that she
knows that what she’s saying may sound like an introductory lecture in
communication studies (Anita Sarkeesian 2014).
14. The gifs are accessible on Feminist Frequency, at the following address: https://
images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=feminist+frequency+gifs+tropes+ver
sus+women&fr=yhs-adkadk_sbnt&hspart=adk&hsimp=yhsadk_sbnt&imgurl=
http%3A%2F%2F24.media.tumblr.com%2F146cb4b193c6371a8b84430903
aa8e1a%2Ftumblr_mqw966rmuE1sznwkuo1_500.gif#id=3&iurl=http%3A%
2F%2F24.media.tumblr.com%2F146cb4b193c6371a8b84430903aa8e1
15. Instances of such characters are the Scythian figure from the Sword and
Sorcery and EP and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil.
16. As Sarkeesian explains in her introduction:
“This episode examines the ways in which designers often employ camera
angles and clothing choices as tools to deliberately sexualize and objectify
female protagonists of third-person games. To illustrate that this is no
accident, we contrast the ways in which women’s butts are frequently
emphasized with the great lengths often taken to avoid calling attention
to the butts of male characters. We then present some examples of
female-led third-person games that humanize rather than objectify their
protagonists” (http://feministfrequency.com/2013/03/07/damsel-
in-distress-part-1/).
17. The Web video series was launched on 7 March 2013.
18. Significantly, the magazine ends her profile with this remark: “As her
detractors grow increasingly unhinged, we have proof that her efforts are
working” (ibid.).
19. “#gamergate”’s harassment campaigns, including that against Sarkeesian, have

made the headlines in international media. In 2014, the British newspaper
The Guardian commented on the movement’s dubious politics and the
French newspaper Libération presented “#gamergate” through one of the
hashtag’s bashing, that against a female game developer, initiated as a revenge
action within a classic love triangle involving a gamergate member. As Rolling
Stone writes in the above-cited interview with Sarkeesian, while the journalist’s
recognition of sexist tropes in video games might be “hardly controversial
stuff”, it suffices to “#gamergate” to have the feminist cultural critic to be
“treated like Public Enemy Number One” (Anita Sarkeesian 2014).
20. The British newspaper The Guardian covered the incident and showed
students on campus manifesting against “#gamergate”’s action (ibid.).
21. This is something she is very comfortable doing, being an articulate speaker
and having explored these issues in her studies (she holds a bachelor’s degree
in social communication studies from California State University and a
master’s degree in political thought from NYU). Sarkeesian’s successful
foray in academic and gamer circuits is all the more surprising, given the
low cachet of feminism and gender studies within game studies.
22. In her article, Consalvo prompts her field colleagues – especially those embracing
a feminist approach – to counteract the sexism widespread within the gaming
milieu (2012). According to Consalvo, what feminist media studies can offer to
assure “an equal treatment of women” is an opportunity to “engage with the
problematics of game culture” for all (ibid.). In other words, she suggests that in
order to understand the reasons of so much anxiety-ridden hatred from the part
of players within the video game context, one has first to give evidence of the
sexist stereotypes dominant in the field (ibid.). For Consalvo, what is missing
within game scholarship is first of all some account and evidence of sexism in
video games, to help create better practices through the documentation and the
archiving of “toxic” models and usages within the field (ibid.).
23. Leigh Alexander, an authoritative video game journalist and former editor at
large of the prestigious and influential website Gamasutra, frequently touches
on the issue of sexism in gaming culture. In 1012, Alexander published a long
article on this topic. In her piece, Alexander welcomes the trend of “game press
and hobbyst bogsphere alike . . . to address prejudice and imbalance in game
culture, particularly as concerns the portrayal and representation of women”
(2012). She depicts this as a “most passionate” debate, featuring “from educa-
tion and discussion on rape culture and male gaze to personal stories from
women whose experience of the game industry has been impacted by sexism”
(ibid.). She also praises the proliferation of writings in reaction to things like
“half-bake tacky plot points for their female heroines” and the troublesome
response of video gamers to Sarkeesian’s, “culminating in a game where the
object is to beat Sarkeesian in the face” (ibid.).
24. As Sarah Perry notes in the article “Digital media and everyday abuse”, as a
victim of online harassment Sarkeesian has “a degree of celebrity that made
her a target for abuse but also provided a base for supporters to help bring
that abuse to light and (to some extent) expose their identities of online
persecutors” (2014: 81).
25. Carrera and Kerzner, while remaining faithful to the hashtag, later on
expressed some concerns and taken their distances from some of the
“#gamergate” members’ most extreme manifestations. For a discussion of
this, watch the interview with Kerzner and Carrera on David Parkman
Show, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9L7JLnsruU.
26. The episode where Sarkeesian especially condemns the representation of
sexual workers in video games is Women as Background Decoration. In Part
2 of the series she insists on the topic of violence, concluding: “Violence
against women is a serious global epidemic; therefore, attempts to address
the issue in fictional contexts demands a considerable degree of respect,
subtlety and nuance. Women shouldn’t be mere disposable objects or sym-
bolic pawns in stories about men and their own struggles with patriarchal
expectations and inadequacies” (http://feministfrequency.com/2013/
05/28/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/).
27. He writes: “Violence against sex workers is a serious problem, both nation-
ally and internationally, and Sarkeesian makes a good case that the games she
discusses treat that violence as fun, enjoyable or even laudable. But
Sarkeesian’s videos have not garnered much praise from those most directly
affected by these tropes” (ibid.).
28. Asked about the success of her project by the media platform Vocativ in
2015, Kora admitted that her initial motivation was her reaction to
Sarkeesian’s characterization of sex workers (Kulze 2015). She also
expressed her satisfaction at seeing that so many people enjoyed “a sexually
liberated, libertarian-leaning, pro-freedom-of-speech woman delivering the
product that she promised” (ibid.).
29. Several online articles have been published about this.
30. For Carrera, “Feminists that get media attention these days are the same ilk
as the wealthy Victorian era suffragettes: wealthy white women whose
panties are in a bunch over imagined slights and imagined injustices” (ibid.).
31. For Kerzner, the main problem with Sarkeesian’s view of video games is the
univocal focus on women: Sarkeesian ignores violence done to men on
games and her position both patron of games and gamers’ abusers and
victim of abuse provides a distorted and manipulated version of a more
complex situation. Without denying “the industry’s abusive path”,
Kerzner denounces Sarkeesian’s Manichean standpoint, which according
to her reinforces rather than criticize the same female stereotypes and tropes
that she points at.
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CHAPTER 5
Conclusions: Women Film Scholars Online
Abstract The chapter illustrates some examples of scholarly contributions

to women’s cinema on the Internet through the analysis of digital plat-
forms monitored both by individuals and groups or organizations. The
purpose is to illustrate the function and the impact of these platforms on
feminist approaches to film and within contemporary discussions about
global knowledge and new media.
Keywords Digital platforms Database Research network Academic

resource Virtual archive
FEMINIST FILM SCHOLARSHIP AND DIGITAL NETWORKS

In 2015, Sophie Mayer published the article in the British film magazine
Sight & Sound about the migration of female film critics online (2015). In
her piece, the journalist reveals how a great number of journalists, espe-
cially within the US context, are now active almost exclusively on the Web
(Mayer 2015).1 Three months later, Variety’s “feminist” contributor
Thelma Adams made a similar comment about this phenomenon in the
editorial “The curious case of the missing women in film criticism”
(2015). In her piece, Adams also denounces the widespread discrimination
happening within the large (and much more publicized) phenomenon of
“film criticism’s demise . . . eulogized by endless film festival panelists —
mostly male, mostly white” (ibid.). As Mayer, Adams starts by asking

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_5
where “the heavyweight professional critics have gone”, concluding that

“[m]ost are still writing, but their perspective are harder to find as they
navigate the passage into the digital seas and, in many cases, the loss of
salary and benefits” (2015).2
Female film critics and journalists are not the only women profession-
ally writing about cinema whose work has been mostly entirely relocated
on the Internet. More and more female academics prefer digital and open
access platforms to publish their articles or books as faster and more widely
accessible forms of scholarly dissemination and academic promotion.
Many feminist scholars also make frequent use of websites and other
platforms to consolidate research networks and team projects and/or to
circulate information about women’s film and feminist approaches to
cinema within and outside of university circles.
Interesting examples are the websites associated with the two research
groups the Women Film Pioneer Project (WFPP), based in the USA, the
British-located Women and the Film History Network UK/Ireland
(WFTHN), and the independent scholar Beti Ellerson’s Digital Centre
on African women film-makers (http://www.africanwomenincinema.
org/AFWC/About.html) and blog about African film-makers (http://
africanwomenincinema.blogspot.ca/).3
The WFPP was first established as a multivolume book, conceived by
the film scholar Jane M. Gaines when she was visiting professor at Vassar
and divided into vast geographical areas (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.
edu/about/). As specified on the WFPP website, “The project was caught
in the transition from print culture to online publishing” (https://wfpp.
cdrs.columbia.edu/about/). Selected as a pilot project for the new
Columbia University Centre for Digital Research and Scholarship, it
launched in September 2013 as an online resource instead (ibid.). Since
then, the project has been housed at Columbia University, monitored
through an eponymous website accessible at https://wfpp.cdrs.colum
bia.edu/ and managed at the Centre for Digital Research within the
Film Division, where Gaines presently teaches (ibid.). The title of the
project comes from the idea of challenging “the idea of established great
male film pioneers” (ibid.).
The WFPP specializes in women from all areas of the film industry
within the silent era, although it occasionally accepts material from the
early sound period (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/about/). Through
its website, the WFPP makes available “career profiles” of women working
in various areas of film-making, written according to Annette Föster’s
5 CONCLUSIONS: WOMEN FILM SCHOLARS ONLINE 115
concept of “careeerography”, that is, a reconstruction of women early

film-makers’ professional itinerary through existing sources (Förster
2005). These career profiles are the products of specialists in early cinema,
many of whom – although not all of them – are feminist historians. Each
entry is complete with a bibliography, a filmography, and a citation if the
entry is taken from another source. Individual profiles are accessible by
clicking on the main page of the pioneer’s menu, which offers a patchwork
of photographic portrayals of the pioneers (when the photo is available),
arranged in alphabetical order. Other iconographic material completing
the entry includes film stills, publicity photos, and images of script pages,
screenplays, or other printed material associated with films (ibid.). The
opening page contains links to various highlighted features (e.g. contribu-
tions, featured videos, and a selected featured pioneer), news (e.g. calls for
papers for relevant and associated conferences or festivals), as well as
samples of selected resources and citations form the site.
The WFPP is first and foremost a database resource, providing rare
sources and information on a still largely unknown period of film history.
Furthermore, as its above-mentioned information page specifies, the
WFPP is a “freely accessible, collaborative online database”, whose
goals are:
to jumpstart historical research on the work of women filmmakers from the

early years of cinema, ending with the coming of sound; to facilitate a cross-
national connection between researchers; to reconfigure world film knowl-
edge by foregrounding an undocumented phenomenon: these women
worked in many capacities. (ibid.)
The WFPP deploys digital technology to foster scholarly collaboration on

the international level based on ‘big data’ collection and exchange. From
this perspective, its scope is virtually boundless. At the official launch in
2013, Kathy Gray (WFPP’s project manager together with Kate Saccone),
commented: “The combination of the global scope of the project and the
volume of the work to which so many scholars and students have con-
tributed is, I think, both the greatest strength and the greatest challenge
for the project” (Ismail 2013).
The first consideration in assessing the impact of WFPP in present-day
film and media culture is its usefulness as an academic resource outside of
traditional channels of research access and dissemination. From this per-
spective, one of the project’s main assets is its website. The WFPP website
includes four sections: “Overviews”, “Pioneers”, “Resources”, and

“About”. The “Overviews” section presents essays selected from the
volume about the project co-edited in 2013 by Jane M. Gaines, Radha
Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, Women Film Pioneers Project.4 The
“About” section includes a “background” essay, in which the curators
trace the scholarly trajectory that has been leading to the “rediscovery” of
women within the film industry (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/
about/). The “Resource” section of the website is divided into various
typologies of sources (e.g. reference work, archival material in different
formats from all over the world, with links to the websites of international
archives, distributors, external resources and organizations, and finally a
link to “unhistoricized” women film pioneers, divided per geographical
areas with relative names). The latter feature also functions as an indirect
of “call for contributions” for scholars, historians, and archivists willing to
contribute to the project (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/resources/
appendix-f-unhistoricized-women-film-pioneers/).
The WFPP website provides a variety of iconographic resources, with
images and documents obtained from contributors, as well as from differ-
ent institutions and individuals. As explained in the guide for contributors,
the WFPP requests each collaborator to provide a statement of copyright
clearance and all images on the WFPP website are protected by different
copyright agreements and come from a variety of sources (both public
archives and institutions and private collections, listed on the website), of
which the project does not hold responsibility (https://wfpp.cdrs.colum
bia.edu/resources/key-to-abbreviations/image-attributions-key/).5
As the guidelines for contributors specify, the editors discourage ency-
clopaedic approaches, suggesting instead to further research and propos-
ing a list of specific questions, so as to “encourage writers to think
creatively about the challenges of silent era motion picture research and
to question previously published historical accounts” (https://wfpp.cdrs.
columbia.edu/about/). The suggestions to potential contributors are also
to “[m]ake concrete references to film print and paper archives as much as
possible, highlighting not erasing the conditions of research” (ibid.).
While the WFPP remains a great resource for feminist research, it leaves
some methodological issues opened, such as the tension between the
ambition to contribute to feminist historiography with original essays
and the fact that the WFPP remains mainly a database, sticking to its
mandate to “jumpstart historical research”. The project is also unique in
its effort to gather data from all over the world. Yet the project should
enable more collaborative participation scholars and researchers operating

within non-Western areas and publish translations of scholarship on early
cinema within these contexts. From this perspective, the WFPP is only at
the beginning of a long trajectory to the implementation or research
dissemination and collaborative exchange.
The Women and the Film History Network (WFTHN) was founded
and is coordinated by Christine Gledhill since 2009. As the network’s
initial web page states, “The Women’s Film and Television History
Network-The UK/Ireland exists as a means of encouraging, supporting
and disseminating research into women’s participation in screen media,
and exploring their wide range of roles” (http://wfh.wikidot.com/). The
network brings together “researchers, teachers, archivists, collections
managers, students, professionals, and enthusiasts engaged in exploring
the contributions women have made to the emergence and development
of film and television” (ibid.). Its purpose is to increase “the visibility of
women’s past and present relationship to cinema and television” (ibid.).
As the website explains, the WFTHN was initiated to fill a gap within
British research in this area of film history (ibid.). The founding member
of the network, Christine Gledhill, assisted from the beginning by Julia
Knight and other faculty at the University of Sunderland, succeeded in
obtaining funds from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to set up
the network in 2009. The Centre for Research in Media and Cultural
Studies at the University of Sunderland also gave an institutional home to
the Women’s Film History Network-UK/Ireland award.
The WFTHN is the product of a synergy among academic and non-
academic institutions, including “archival collections and websites relevant
to women’s filmmaking and television production such as the Women and
Silent British Cinema (WSBC) website, Screenonline, the British Film
Institute, The Women’s Library, WiFT (UK)” (ibid.). The WFTHN is
extremely active through its social media (e.g. blogs, Facebook page,
twitters), which send information regarding activities organized within
the network or request from members of the network of various nature,
from calls for paper for conferences to job offers, to announcements of
interesting screenings, festivals, or conferences, to promotion of women’s
films. Furthermore, the WFTHN’s website has a section dedicated to its
own conference, which until now has held three editions, a listserve, and a
board of news and announcements.
What distinguishes this network is its focus on women’s various con-
tribution to film in different contexts of film production, authoritative,
distribution, and reception.6 The accent is on labour issues, and is coher-

ent with the mandate of the organization, which is to enhance women’s
presence and recognition in film in the past and in history through various
strategies and initiatives.7 This goal makes the research collaboration
within this network cohesive and, most importantly, projects the historical
research of the network within the reality of present-day film industry,
creating important links between film academics and female players within
the British film industry.
Like the WFPP, the WFTHN is mainly a database and a source of
information for relevant events and calls for publications within the areas
of feminist film historiography. Similarly to the WFPP, WFTHN also
publishes short essays, from past editions of its workshops and confer-
ences. The difference with respect to the WFPP is its marked interactivity.
The WFTHN is a wiki platform to which participants can contribute with
ideas, blogs, articles, and virtual archives (http://wfh.wikidot.com/con
tribute-your-ideas; http://wfh.wikidot.com/create-a-biog-database;
http://wfh.wikidot.com/develop-a-virtual-archive).
One of the scholars that have been putting one of the conspicuous
amount of research about women film-makers on the Internet is Beti
Ellerson. Her blog and online centre devoted to African women film-
makers are among the most important sources for African cinema.
Ellerson’s platform offers a peer-to-peer, global, participatory use of the
Web with the purpose of creating connection and information about
African women film-makers active around the world. Ellerson is an inde-
pendent scholar and a feminist activist based in Washington DC. Her
blog, launched in 2009, includes links, contributions, testimonies, and
articles about, and by, African women film-makers. Through her blog,
Ellerson wants to “encompass spectatorship and advocacy … so as to see
African Women Cinema Studies discourse go beyond the classroom and
conferences, but also out to the general public who may find these kinds of
issues of interest” (http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.ca/). From
this perspective, Ellerson, defines “‘African women in cinema’ as a con-
cept-which includes theory and practice” (ibid.). Ellerson’s double com-
mitment to research and feminist activism stands behind the Study and
Research of African Women in Cinema, a digital platform.
The purpose of Ellerson’s blog, developed in partnership with the
website Africulture (http://www.africultures.com/php/), is “to pro-
vide a space to discuss diverse topics relating to African women in
cinema–filmmakers, actors, producers, and all film professionals”
(http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.ca/). The blog is conceived as

a public forum and associated with Ellerson’s Centre for the Study and
Research of African Women. The centre has two goals: to incentivize
professional networking among African women working in the film
industry and to open a virtual space for discussion about African women’s
cinema (http://www.africanwomenincinema.org/AFWC/Home.html).
The database of the centre includes information about African women in
cinema, with links to dozens of web pages of African women film-makers
active all over the world, as well as to scholarly and media publications about
African women film-makers. Ellerson’s platform makes the best of what is
the advantage – as well as the flaw – of global digital culture: giving access to
a vast amount of data and documents. Ellerson’s digital centre sets the
premises for a dialogical knowledge about African female film-makers.
In her blog, Ellerson posts information about the Fespaco biannual
film festival (e.g. the most important film festival of African cinema). As
the centre’s mission statements underline, the purpose is “to work clo-
sely with and support other institutions that have similar objectives”,
seeking funds facilitating this collaboration. However, this dialogical
dimension rests less on institutional or academic links than on interper-
sonal connections. Likewise, Ellerson’s digital library mainly relies on
Western-based scholarly and institutional resources. What makes the
difference in Ellerson’s platform is the contribution of film-makers,
archivists, and scholars posting on her blog, via “Twitter, Facebook
and Channels on Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion” (ibid.). From this
perspective, Ellerson’s digital platform represents an effort to address
women’s productive relations to global cinema from within a non-
Western framework of discourse.
The goal of the Research Centre is “establishing a virtual environment
available to everyone across the globe . . . through a series of activities
promoted via various social network (e.g. the African Women in Cinema
Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and channels on Youtube,
Vimeo and Dailymotion)” (http://www.africanwomenincinema.org/
AFWC/Mission.html). The centre offers an online database with informa-
tion relevant to African women’s cinema. One of the richest resources of
the centre is the blog, which contains postings about African film-makers
including conversations, interviews, profiles, divided by year, country,
theme, and dialogue. Beti Ellerson offers a unique instance of an online
women’s cinema resource connecting different players within film culture
and the industry. Unfortunately, its media exposure is limited and
circumscribed to expert within the area of study, in spite of the fact that
Ellerson herself is a featured documentary film-maker included in the
Women Make Movies catalogue.
The blogs, websites, and platforms examined here foster women’s
varied relations to film using women’s cinema as a content-driving topic
and a key concept. An important element to take into consideration in
addressing the political efficacy of scholarly research about women’s
cinema on the Web is the nature of the digital sphere and the ways in
which forms of resistance may be developed in it. In her contribution
about Feminist Media to Camera Obscura’s series Archive for the Future –
a special issue that some editors of the feminist film journal did to celebrate
the journal’s thirtieth anniversary through “an archive for the future of
‘feminism, culture, and media’” – Alexadra Juhasz reports:
. . . feminists make mainstream narrative films and HBO documentaries,

they run distribution companies and film festivals (granted, usually gay and
lesbian or experimental; the American women’s film festival is largely a thing
of the past), they teach media-production skills to younger feminists, and
they show their media work at festivals, college campuses, and on the
Internet. Yet this substantial activity occurs beyond the sight lines of domi-
nant feminist media scholarship. (Juhasz 2006: 53–54)
For Juhasz, this tendency is the result of “three understandable moves

made by the field . . . : a marked turn to and embrace of theory in
isolation from practice, a preoccupation with mainstream forms, and a
detachment from feminist politics” (Juhasz 2006: 54). For the future of
feminist media, Juhasz recommends an active commitment outside of
the traditional channels of academia, intervening in “practice, main-
stream media, and politics”, to consolidate “an integrated feminist
media community committed to alternative media and its practitioners
and political applications” (2006: 56). The research networks and scho-
lars that are generating new collaboration and producing information
about women’s cinema for academic and non-academic communities
through digital platforms are moving in this direction. Their intervention
in the fields of film and media studies on the Internet brings the vibrant
contribution of feminist scholarship to film history – which during the
past thirty years has been radically modifying the gender-blind canons of
film studies – into the still male-dominated sphere of new media and
digital publishing.8 As Alice Cati, Maria Grazia Fanchi, and Rosanna
Maule write in their introduction to a special issue of Comunicazioni

Sociali about gender and creativity, since the 1990s:
. . . although gender issues do not completely disappear from media studies,

they end up taking a marginal role in the field and in research for almost a
decade. It is only at the end of the first decade of the new millennium that
the topic of gender resurfaces vigorously even outside safeguarded areas.
(2014)
With the digital turn, feminist scholarship is migrating outside of academic

institutions into a public sphere where the boundaries between politics
and aesthetics, cognition and affect are blurred. The presence of scholarly
run projects about feminist film historiography on digital is especially
significant as it expands an area of film and media studies historically and
institutionally ghettoized into the larger context of visual culture. The
advancement of women’s images and feminist activism on the Internet
also continues the legacy of feminism to facilitate women’s political and
professional agency and visibility through social action. What seems to
be still missing from women’s intervention in film culture via digital
platforms is the implementation of a critical and experimental approach.
In 2009, Tara McPherson edited a special issue of Cinema Journal
on “Media Studies and Digital Humanities”, denouncing in her introduc-
tion the slow development in this area of scholarly publication and wel-
coming a new generation of “blogging humanists” (2009: 119).9 In her
introductory essay to the issue, McPherson commends “the multimodal
scholar” who
complements rather than replaces other types of digital humanists, expand-

ing the scope and reach of the field. She aims to produce work that
reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology while
investigating the computer simultaneously as a platform, a medium, and a
visualization device. She thinks carefully about the relationship of form to
content, expression to idea. (2009: 120)
In an article in the same issue, the late Anne Friedberg opines that “[w]
riting in the Digital 2.0—we rely on new tools of access and creation for
new forms of scholarship: composing with moving images, with sounds,
with hyperlinks, and with online connectivity” (2009: 152).
The multimodal and creative dimension of digital scholarship would not

only be coherent with the tradition of formal experimentation within fem-
inist scholarship and discourse, but also open new possibilities for the impact
of this area of studies and criticism within and outside academic circuits.
Digital media provide different models for thinking the relation between
identity, culture, and participation in the global sphere and open a new
forum for feminist approaches to film. The case studies considered are
significant insofar as they bring together academic communities and create
new discursive formations and professional networks related to women’s
cinema. What is still missing from digital scholarship on women’s cinema is
a more decisive effort to create a new type of knowledge through digital or
new media technology and a more effective exchange between academic
and non-academic communities. Yet a new forum on women’s cinema,
conceived for hybrid communities and suturing the historical gap between
the grass-roots and the formalist trends of feminist film-making, can only
happen if creative and collaborative work is further implemented.
In winter 2009, the late Anne Friedberg contributed to a special issue of
Cinema Journal about digital culture with an article on digital scholarship.
Friedberg drew attention to what she defined “the elephantine paradigm shift
in the room” . . . that is, the fact that while “we are in the midst of a profound
change in our scholarly environment . . .” through digitization, not “every
media scholar [might] want to follow the Godardian imperative and ‘write’
with images and sounds”.10 In her article, Friedberg calls for a rhizomatic
approach to digital writing and scholarship, a method that she herself had
attempted in her aforementioned book. Her interest was the advantages of
digital scholarship for writing about media. The advantages of developing
digital scholarship for feminist approaches to film and particularly the conten-
tious concept of women’s cinema anew should be a major concern in feminist
scholarship. Another aspect that needs to be implemented within the scholarly
development of women’s cinema 2.0 is geocultural diversity. Ann Everett, in
her article “On cyberfeminism and cyberwomanism: high-tech mediations of
feminism’s discontent”, published in the aforementioned special issue Signs in
2004, stresses the contradictions inherent in women’s relations to new media
technologies, particularly the Internet, including geographical, class and racial
disparity (Everett 2004: 1278–1279). Everett points at the importance of
cyberfeminism and cyberwomanism to readdress all types of feminisms to
counter patriarchal and post-feminist ideologies predominant on the Web
through what she calls “high-tech” mediations capable of “reconfiguring
and reimagining the public sphere” (Everett 2004: 1283).
As well as these, feminist online intervention on film needs to expand

the geocultural boundaries and methodologies of affiliated websites or
blogs. Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn warn against the patronage of
Western-based research, genealogies, and classifications for global knowl-
edge, based on a broader epistemological framework of analysis (2006:
3–5, 13–14). Web-based research projects on feminist historiography
should move in this direction.
Finally, scholarly approaches to women’s cinema on the Web should
expand the definition of sexual identity beyond both feminist and queer
formulations through techno-mediated strategies of identity formation.
This intersectional approach to gender may help women address issues
associated with the new media environment in a digital culture that is both
a cultural framework and an important area of feminist praxis.
NOTES
1. Mayer writes: “. . . female film critics proliferate on the large US culture sites
such as Salon.com. popmatters.com (whose film/TV editor is Cynthia
Fuchs), Indiewire and Cinematical, even contributing to stereotypically
masculinist sites such as Ain’t Cool News. Jen Yamamoto is a Senior
Editor at Rotten Tomatoes. com, and Katey Rich is the managing editor
of Cinema Blend.com” (2015).
2. These are just two examples from two of the most prestigious milieus within
female film criticism which find resonance in other geocultural contexts in
the world.
3. The Women Film Pioneers Project and the Women’s Film and Television
History Network-The UK/Ireland have often been often collaborating
together, notably through the organization of symposia and through their
common connection to the Women and Film History International
(WFHI), an umbrella organization now housed at the University of
Sunderland, which supports the Women and Silent Screen conferences.
The WFHI was founded in 2003 as the Women and Silent Screen
International Association and was based on the scholarly network and
experience of the Women Film Pioneers Project. Until then, the WFPP had
been connected with the first two editions of the WSS conferences, held in
Utrecht and St. Cruz in 1999 and 2001, respectively. The Women and Silent
Screen Association, which sponsored the third edition of the WSS conference
in Montreal, became “Women and Film History International Association”
(WFHI) in 2005, during the Guadalajara edition of the WSS conference.
The WFHI has had various editions at different universities around the
world, including St. Cruz, USA, in 2001, Montréal, Canada, in 2004,
Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2006, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2008, Bologna, Italy,

in 2010, Melbourne, Australia, in 2013, and Pittsburgh, USA, in 2015.
These conferences involved hundreds of scholars and students from these
and other countries (https://wssviii.wordpress.com/).
4. The collection of essays was published by the Center for Digital research and
Scholarship at Columbia University (2013).
5. A number of sources are indicated with an acronym starting with PC
(standing for contributor or family member), which, as the website specifies,
“indicates private holding, designed to discourage inquiries” (ibid.).
6. The website lists as areas of study “scriptwriting · producing · directing · design-
ing costumes, sets, props · acting, dancing, singing · cinematography · sound
design & recording · editing · music · distributing · trade reviewing · exhibition &
cinema managing · audiences & fans · journalism, criticism” (https://womens
filmandtelevisionhistory.wordpress.com/about-us/about/).
7. The organization’s informational web page highlights the following pur-
poses: ensure women’s work is recognized in the writing of screen histories;
make a case for the preservation and availability of women’s films and
television programmes; increase programming choice in film theatres, tele-
vision channels, DVD outlets; encourage new approaches to film and tele-
vision that are sensitive to gender, class and race; impact on the teaching of
screen media in schools and colleges; raise the aspirations of young women
who might seek careers in the media (https://womensfilmandtelevisionhis
tory.wordpress.com/about-us/about/).
8. Many scholars have been commenting on the gender gap in digital media.
I discuss this issue in the introductory chapter of this book. For further discus-
sions about gender gap in information culture, see, among others, Cooper
(2006), Cooper and Weaver (2003), and Dixon et al. (2014), Van Dijk (2005).
9. McPherson specifies: “Faced with severe cutbacks at academic presses and
dated systems for peer review, this second breed of digital humanists port
the words and monographs of humanities scholarship to networked spaces
of conversation and dialogue. They envision new modes of connection and
peer-to-peer conversation, and text often remains the lingua franca of their
scholarly productions” (ibid.).
10. Anne Friedberg. “On Digital Scholarship”. 150.
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Gender: Reflections on a Non-Obvious Combination. In Comunicazioni
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Fanchi and Rosanna Maule, 349–356.
Cooper, Joel. 2006. The Digital Divide: The Special Case of Gender. Journal of
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INDEX
A international, 24
Adventure Pictures (AP), 40 Golden Globes, 42, 52n24
African-American, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49 women’s, 28
African-American Film Festival Ayanda, 46, 47
Releasing Movement, 45, 47 Azmi, Shabana, 60, 81n8
Albert, Barbara, 60
Amazon Instant Video, 31
American, 60, 25, 28, 42, 103, B
94, 103 Babelgum, 51n17
AmexNow, 31 Balan, Vidya, 60, 81n8
Andromeda, 97 Best, Emily, 23, 29
Archive, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 71, 73, BFI, 34, 47, 68, 118
74, 75, 76, 78, 94, 116, 116, 120 Bildwechsel, 13, 59, 61, 70–79
ARRAY, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49 Binary, 101
Associations binarisms, 5
grassroots, 63 BirdsEyeView, 13, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67,
international, 123n3 68, 69, 70
transnational, 13 Black
women’s, 13, 61, 73 Black film Renaissance, 48
Avant-garde, 5, 34, 35 cinema, 49
Awards folks, 45
academy, 26, 42, 52n24 Blog, 2, 6, 7, 11, 28, 32, 36, 40, 48,
African-American Film Critics 68, 69, 117, 118, 119, 120
Association, 53n24 Bobo, Jacqueline, 48
Black Film Critics, 53n24 Body performance, 34, 35
Black Reel, 53n24 Bohème, La, 35
excellence in Cinematography, 29 Bollaín, Icíar, 4
Feminist Porn, 14, 94, 95, 96 Bollywood, 60, 80n8
flyWay, 32 BoobFrequency, 101

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8
128 INDEX
Brady, Liam, 29 Leeds Animation Workshop, 61

Bubble, 32 Nemesiache, 61
Buet, Jackie, 4, 63 radical
Buscemi, Steve, 33 social, 61, 72
video, 61, 71, 72
women’s, 73
C Columbia Universiy, 114
Cam performers, 100, 101 Computer Generated Imagery, 52n20
Campion, Jane, 4, 59 Comtpon in C Minor, 43
Capitalism, 9, 11, 18n22, 62 Consalvo, Mia, 15n6, 99, 107n22
anti-capitalism, 6 Cooper, Mercedes, 45, 124n8
Carrera, Mercedes, 100, 101, Corporate, 2, 6, 8, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31,
103, 104, 64, 66, 68, 70, 91, 106
Centre for Digital Research and industry, 27, 66, 70
Scholarship, 114 Corporation,
Chadha, Gurinder, 42 Creative industry, 61, 70
Cinema Créteil, 62, 63
African, 118, 119 Crowdfunding
African-American, 42, 44, 46 companies, 23, 28
digital, 35 production, 28–33
expanded, 35, 36, 39 Crush, 32
and Feminist Event, 61 cyber, 12
global, 3, 6, 7, 28, 119 digital, 3, 12, 118, 122, 123
mainstream, 2, 4–6, 120 feminist, 60
minor, 3–6 film, 2, 3, 5, 13, 13, 24, 39, 48,
women’s, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 39, 62, 63, 70, 119, 121
41, 60, 61, 62, 68, 71, 92, 119, global, 8
120, 122, 123 mainstream, 4
Circuits, 1, 2, 6, 34, 43, 47, 61, 63, rape, 101
67, 74 Cyber
Class culture, 12
inequality, 17n18 feminism, 2, 12, 122, 122
inter-, 46 technology, 7
middle, 6 womanism, 122, 122
upper, 6 Cytherea, 101, 101
Coixet, Isabel, 60
Collectives
feminist, 13 D
Feminist Film Collective Rome, 61 Dailymotion, 119
film, 13, 61, 81n9 Dall’Asta, Monica, 116
German, 72 Debates, 4, 7, 13, 59–62, 89–108
Hamburg, 61, 75 Demoiselle en dêtresse, 97
INDEX 129
Dench, Judi, 33 34, 39, 41, 61, 84n34, 95–96,

Digital 99, 102, 104, 107n21, 120–122
blog about African filmmakers, 114 Feminist
digital centre on African women anti, 28, 100, 101
filmmakers, 114 Athena, 50n4, 82n17
era, 1–14 Berlinale, 60
humanists, 121, 124n9 BirdsEyeView (BEV), 13, 59
technology, 13, 34, 36, 38, 41, 60, Black Women: African Descent
62, 74, 104 Women in Cinema, 82n19
Dionne, Guylaine, 75, 83n25 Bluestocking Film Series, 82n19
Disney, 44 BronzeLens Film Festival, 45
Dissemination cannes, 59, 25, 64
cultural, 2, 25 cyber, 12
digital, 74 de Films des femmes de Créteil, 4
D’Rozario, Petrina, 24 discourse, 1, 2
DuVernay, Ava, 13, 24, 41–49 Edinburgh, 61
DuVernay, Tera, 45 Feminist Frequency, 96, 97, 98, 100,
DVD, 34, 37, 76, 94 101, 103
Femme Totale, Feminale, 62
festivals, 14
E Flying Brooms, 82n17
Eastwood, Clint, 42 Frauen film festival, 62, 63
Echo Park, 46, 47 German, 4
Electric Bleau, 32 International, 11, 70, 85n40, 99
Ellerson, Beti, 14, 114, Langston Hughes Film Festival, 45
118, 119 LGTB, 70
Emerging Pictures, 31 mainstreaming, 2, 102
English, Rose, 35 Moondance Film Festival, 82n17
ESPN, 43 Mostra internacionàl de Film de
Ethnic Dones, 82n17
culture, 6, 33 movement, 60, 65, 71
diversity, 6 Network of Asian Women’s Film
identity, Festival, 82n19
Ethno online, 9, 14, 94, 121
digital, 8, 12 politics, 120
women’s, 12, 29 post, 2, 9, 12, 13, 27, 28, 62, 63,
102, 122
Queer Women of Color FF, 82n19
F St John’s International, 62
Facebook, 2, 25, 117, 119 San Francisco International
Feminism, 3, 5, 8–12, 14, 15n2, Women’s Film Festival, 82n17
16n11, 16n16, 17n20, 17n21, Second-Generation, 61
130 INDEX
Feminist (cont.) Global, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,

Sundance, 25, 29, 64 25, 28, 39, 39, 59–79, 94, 102,
techno, 12, 123 118, 121
theory, 2, 11, 61, 97, 102 Globalization
Third Wave, 10, 14, 96, 102 from below, 9, 12,
US, 93 grassroots, 24, 28, 70
women’s, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 28, 60, 94, neo, 3, 12
103, 114, 123 Google Play, 31
Feminist Frequency, 97, 97, 98, 101, GoWatchit, 25
102, 103 Grand Theft Auto, 100
Film History Network UK/ Grassroots
Ireland, 14, 114, 117, 117 globalization, 8–9, 24, 70
Films networks, 63
transnational, 7, 34, 36, 70 organizations, 26, 28–29, 45
women’s, 2, 5, 6, 9, 24–25, 59–69, practices, 8–12, 69
73, 81n14, 82n17, 82n19, Groups
83n28, 114, 116, 117, 123n3, feminist, 60
124n7 women’s, 79n2, 50n3, 82n20, 114
Fonda, Jane, 14, 60 Guohad, Xiaolou, 60
Föster, Annette, 114
Framework
context, 9, 12 H
critical, 2 Harassment, 14, 96, 99, 102
epistemological, 123 Her Film Project, 4, 35, 38, 40, 44
Friedberg, Anne, 38, 121, 122, History
124n10 dominant, 120
feminist, 71, 118
film, 14, 71, 115, 117, 120
G new, 17n22–18n22, 42
Gaines, Jane M., 114, 115 media, 25, 71, 117
Gamergate, 98, 100, 101, 104, historiography, 62, 71, 116, 118,
107n19 121, 123
Gamers, 98, 99 Hitman: Absolution, 100
Gaudreault, André, 51n15 Hollywood, 60, 26, 31, 42, 44, 49
Gender Huffpost Women, 28
en-gendering, 59–85 Hyperlink, 75, 121
-politics, 84n34
transgender, 95
Geopolitics, 1–3 I
Gibson-Hudson, Gloria J., 48 Identity, 3, 7–10, 12, 16n16, 65,
Gledhill, Christine, 73, 117 122, 123
INDEX 131
politics, 9, 10, 65, 110 Leguizamo, John, 33

Imagenation, 45 Liberation Entertainment, 51n17
Indian Like the Water, 29
cinema, 50n2 Limited Dance Company, 35
organization, London Film Co-op, 61
stars, 60
Indiewire, 33, 46, 123n1
Instagram, 53n26 M
Institute on Gender in Media, 60 Macropolitics, 10
Institutions Madeleine L’Engle, 44
cultural, 73, 117 Market
film, 13, 60, 64, 66, 68, 70, 116, digital, 2, 12
117, 119, 121 mainstream, 2, 44
non-profit, 66, 73, 103 media, 2, 67, 90
Internet, 1, 2, 6–8, 14, 14n1–15n1, new, 9–10
15n6, 16n15, 16n18–17n18, Media, 2, 3, 6–8, 10–14, 14n1–15n1,
23, 37, 41, 59, 65, 90–95, 16n17, 17n19, 17n22–18n22,
100, 103, 105, 114, 118, 24–26, 31, 36–38, 39, 42–45,
120, 121, 122 47–49, 50n4, 52n21, 53n27, 60,
62, 63, 65, 67–74, 76, 79, 80n6,
81n10, 84n37, 85n43, 89–91,
J 96, 97–106, 105n5, 106n14,
Johnston, Claire, 61 107n19, 107n22, 108n24,
Jones, Tilane, 45, 53n28 108n28, 108n30, 115–123,
124n7, 124n8
celebrity, 42, 99, 108n24
K Micropolitics, 5, 10
Kapoor, Sonam, 60, 80n8 Microrebellion, 9
Kerzner, Liana, 100, 101–102, 103, Middle of Nowhere, 42, 46, 46–47, 49
108n25, 108n31 Milieu, 9, 33, 41, 44, 63, 71, 85n39,
Keystone comedy, 97, 106n12 92, 94, 107n22, 123n2
Kickstarter, 28–29 My Mic Sounds Nice, 43, 49
The Kitchen Collective, 61
Knowledge, 7, 64, 68, 119, 122
global, 122 N
Neoliberal
economy, 2, 3, 8–12, 28, 62, 102,
L 103–104
La Barbe, 60 ideology, 8, 11, 27, 104–105
Law, Jude, 33 market, 10, 28
Leeds Animation Workshop, 61 Neoliberalism, 9
132 INDEX
Neomasculine, 101 Post-feminism, 3, 8–12, 15n2, 104

Netflix, 31, 46 Potter, Sally, 13, 24, 33–41, 51n12
Network, 2, 14, 14n1–15n1, 24, 28, Princess Kora, 100, 101
50n3, 52n21, 64–66, 73, 82n19, Project, 11, 14, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41,
114, 116–117, 119, 44, 46, 67, 72, 84n38, 98,
123n3–124n3 108n28, 114–116, 118, 121,
NGO, 7, 17n19 123n3–124n3
DEEP FILM Access Project
(DFAP), 41, 52n20
O Promotion, 1, 13, 25, 37, 41–50, 62,
Online, 9, 11, 14, 25, 31, 36, 38, 41, 63, 65, 67, 114, 117
45–47, 51n17, 52n20, 52n21, Puccini, Giacomo, 35
75, 78, 85n45, 89–109, 113–124
Organizations
feminist, 13, 79n2–80n2
Q
grassroots, 45
Queer, 70, 73, 82n19, 85n43,
non-profit, 7, 11, 17n19, 28, 66,
92, 95, 123
73, 103
Quiver, 31
transnational, 17n19, 62, 70, 74
umbrella, 13, 62, 70, 72–73, 75, 79,
123n3
Orlando, 35, 38, 51n18–52n18 R
Oscar, 42 Ranaut, Kangana, 61, 80n8
Oyelowo, David, 33, 42 Rashomon, 36
Reelblack, 44–45
Representation, 6, 14, 17n21, 34–35,
P 49, 61, 91, 94–96, 100,
Pariah, 29 102–104, 107n23
Penley, Constance, 106n9 Return of Kings, 101
Platform, 13, 14, 14n1–15n1, 24, 26, Rodrigues, Robert, 42
29–33, 39, 44, 46, 60, 63, 64, 67, Roussopoulos, Carole, 61
70, 74, 75, 79, 81n9, 94, 95, 97,
98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 108n28,
118, 119 S
digital, 13, 39, 60, 70, 100, 102, Sackwille-West, Vita, 35
104, 118, 119 Saints Row, 100
Popular, 15n2, 48, 49, 68, 97, 98 Sarkeesian, Anita, 14, 96–105,
Porn Charity, 101, 103, 104 106n12, 106n13, 107n16,
pornography 107n19, 108n23, 108n24,
debates, 13, 90, 92, 93, 103 109n31
anti/pro, 91, 92, 93 Scéaux, 62
INDEX 133
Scholars Twitter, 25, 117, 119

digital, 39, 114, 120, 124n8 2.0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11,
feminist, 17n21, 92, 102, 115 12, 62, 122
Scholarship
digital, 3, 14, 15n1, 39–40,
113–124, 124n9 U
feminist, 17n21, 120–122 UCLA, 48
Seed&Spark, 23, 28–33 Urban World Film, 45
Selma, 41–44, 49, 52n22,
52n24, 53n27
Sharma, Anushka, 60, 80n8
V
Silverstein, Melissa, 50n4
Valizadeh, Roosh, 101
Spielberg, Steven, 42
Varda, Agnès, 4, 63
STEM programmes, 101
Vatsal, Radha, 116
Stereoscopic 3D, 52n20
VenusVS, 43
Suture, 11
Verizon, 31
Swinton, Tilda, 35
Vidding, 15n6
Video on Demand (VOD), 46
Video game
T culture, 100
Taormino, Tristan, 106n9 developers, 107n19
Technology platforms, 97, 98, 100, 102
digital, 12, 34, 36, 38, 41, Vlog, 101
60, 62, 74, 104 Von Kuhn, Caroline, 29
new, 34, 37, 122
of gender, 11, 81n14
social, 4, 39 W
This Is the Life, 42, 49 Web
Thriller, 35, 36 migration, 113
Transdisciplinary, 35 platforms, 6, 7, 10, 13–14,
Transnational 14n1, 17n19, 23–53,
cinema, 5, 39 62, 97, 100, 118–119
culture, 6, 11 series, 14, 67, 90,
feminism, 10–11, 17n19, 17n21, 98–102, 104
39, 79, 122 projects, 6, 9, 14
identity, 3, 7, 11 videos, 73, 75, 78–79, 97
market, web video series, 96, 97, 100
practices, 7, 11, 39, 73, 104 Western, 6, 17n21, 119,
Trope, 49, 96–98, 102, 103, 106n12, culture, 6
107n19, 109n27, 108n31 Wiest, Dianne, 33
Tumblr, 97 Williams, Venus, 43
134 INDEX
Women women’s film, 2, 24–28, 59–67, 73,

Women in Film and Television 81n14, 82n17, 82n19, 82n20,
International (WIFTI), 24–28 83n30, 114, 117, 123n3
women’s cinema, 1–8, Women and Film History Network
10–14, 16n10, 16n14, UK/Ireland, 123n3
25, 39, 41, 48, Women Film Pioneers Project, 116,
59–85, 92, 119–120, 123n3
122–123 Women and Hollywood, 26
women’s movement, 3, 4, Woolf, Virigina, 34, 35,
17n19, 62, 63, 73, Women Film Pioneer Project, 14, 114
81n9, 90, 92 Wrinkle of Time, A, 44

Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse

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Digital Platforms and Feminist Film

ISBN 978-3-319-48041-1 ISBN 978-3-319-48042-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957404

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book came as a natural continuation of my research and interest in

gave me permission to use. With members of the GRAFICS, I have been

unfortunately no longer existing ARTHEMIS research team, founded and

1 New Technologies of Gender: Women and Film in the

2 Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital Platforms as

3 Engendering the Global Market: Women’s Cinema as a

4 Women and Online Porn in North America: New Media,

5 Conclusions: Women Film Scholars Online 113

Rosanna Maule is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Mel

Fig. 2.1 Advertisement of an event sponsored by General Motors for

New Technologies of Gender: Women

Abstract This chapter presents and contextualizes the book’s subject

Keywords Global media Women’s cinema Globalization

THE GEOPOLITICS OF WOMEN’S CINEMA 2.0

© The Author(s) 2016 1

as groups or organizations within the ﬁlm industry and in the larger

WOMEN’S CINEMA ON THE WEB AS MINOR CINEMA

or geocultural boundary (2002: 1). Women’s cinema is also a problematic

implies geocultural reinstatement. As minor ﬁlm forms, digital platforms

FEMINIST FILM DISCOURSE IN THE DIGITAL SPHERE

inequalities play an important part in the variables inﬂuencing the gender

FEMINIST GRASS-ROOTS PRACTICES, POST-FEMINISM,

This section examines the status of digital practices as resistant forms to

of global cultures and gendered subjectivities. Can we clearly identify

national, regional, or provincial parameters of identity formation (ibid.).

and culturally speciﬁc ‘common differences’ to address non-Western

inviting women to take action against violence and discrimination in the

DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND FEMINIST FILM

feminist approaches to ﬁlm into a historical perspective, particularly as they

been revived by the polemic about “porn empowerment” movements

app-based interfaces, as well as the increasing dominance of centralized cloud-

comparison of gendered spaces”, signiﬁcance of issues such as “race, class,

Gajjala, Radhika. 2002. An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography:

Royal, Cindy. 2008. Framing the Internet: A Comparison of Gendered Spaces.

Women Make Movies on the Web: Digital

Keywords Crowdfunding Network Grass-roots globalization Digital

THE INTERNET AS A NEW RESOURCE FOR WOMEN FILMMAKERS

© The Author(s) 2016 23

to two independent and internationally multi-awarded ﬁlm-makers: the

DIGITAL NETWORKING: THE WOMEN IN FILM

The Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI) organization is

2002 after having worked as a journalist and graduated in ﬁlm production

within national and pan-European organizations.6 As well as these, even

Fig 2.1 Advertisement of an event sponsored by General Motors for Women in

The American-centred leadership, the corporate composition of some

wealth, marketing, self-address, technological desire, and celebrity (Hall

WOMEN IN CROWDFUNDING PRODUCTION: EMILY BEST’S

women awarded at important ﬁlm festivals, including Pariah by Dee Rees

Fig. 2.2 Seed&Spark’s signature Logo

(https://www.seedandspark.com/cinema). Another feature of the platform

Audiences become players in show business, gathering rewards points called

A ﬁlmmaker with a project submits a crowdfunding campaign plan, includ-

Answering a question on the feminist blog by Rebecca Fernandez regard-

We’re pushed so far to the margins we have to ﬁght to be heard, the

Best’s company is gender-friendly, with a board composed by two-third by

themselves using a voice-over or a direct address to the camera. A typical

SALLY POTTER: MAKING FILMS IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL