Jonathan and I have had interesting and exciting experiences with political remix video over the last few months. While our stories differ, they represent the shifting dynamic between gatekeepers and creators.

I was recently featured on the front page of the Boston Globe in an article on activists using video as a voice (excerpt below). It focused on my Sex and the Remix series and how activists are using video to create instant political commentary and disseminate alternative messages to the main stream media.

QueerCarrie, Sex and the Remix Season 2

Two weeks later I received DMCA violations for my Queer Housewives of NYC remixes. The videos were reinstated on YouTube last week, without an acknowledgment of Fair Use.

Read more…

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: activism, fair use, gender, hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality

REMOVED 03/20/2010- NBC Universal has ordered youtube to remove these two fair-use remixes. You can read about the ongoing battle to get them back online on Elisa’s website and you can also watch the videos from there.

The Queer Housewives of New York City (Real Housewives Remix) series follows Bethenny, the only single housewife, through her conflicts with coming out.

Why Queer the Housewives? Those familiar with the Real Housewives of NYC know that there is very little male presence throughout the show. The women vocal about their successful  partnerships (ie Simon + Alex) are shunned and mocked  by the other housewives. What’s ironic is that the other women don’t even pretend to endorse the idea that their hetero relationships are all that fulfilling. Real Housewives of NYC had the unintentional effect of making compulsory heterosexuality actually appear compulsory, rendering the “Housewives” distinction  inaccurate.

Thinking about the significance of this I wondered what Real Housewives of NYC would look like if it related to a totally different audience. Instead of following white, owning class housewives in a feminism-lite, low-calorie liberation, what if the story line  stayed true to it’s lack of male presence and inaccuracy of the “housewife” distinction? I think this is a much more interesting storyline.

more of my remixes can be found here.

*thanks to Dr. Suzanne Leonard for her theory, “Do Men Matter: Real Housewives as a Post-Romance”

Category: televison show
Topic Tags: gender, hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, REMOVED, sexuality

There are literally hundreds of Brokeback Mountain trailer parodies online but we think this Harry/Ron slash remix, by 19 year old vidder MissSheenie, is one of the best. The fusion seamlessly re-casts the stars of the Harry Potter films as characters from Brokeback Mountain.

This process of slash fusion, particularly using the Brokeback Mountain trailer as a foundation, allows artists to queer virtually any on screen relationship and is especially important for LGBTQ fans who have so few options of characters to identify with in mass media.

MissSheenie‘s trailer is one of our favorites because it offers us a convincing queer-positive re-interpretation of the heteronormative Harry Potter universe using careful editing and audio manipulation as visual evidence.

Although we would not normally classify remixed trailers as “vids” MissSheenie is an avid vidder so we think its appropriate. She also makes Kirk/Spock slash which you can see on her other YouTube Channel at spirksmistress.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, slash, vidding

Another in our series of vidding cross genre posts, this vid was made by Charmax in honor of International Day of Femslash. We have talked a bit about slash vidding in previous posts, and the term femslash specifically refers to female/female same-sex pairing of TV and movie characters that are placed into sexual or romantic relationships by vidders.

Using 48 different visual sources, this remix gives the viewer a full range of gendered media clichés meticulously organized and edited to successfully mock the notion of true gender identity. Using footage from TV’s stereotypical gestures of masculinity and femininity, Charmax parodies our concept of gender through the repetitive images of drag, cross-dressing and stylizations of butch/femme identities. Charmax packs an additional parody punch by using the song “I’m Your Man”, sung by a female performer, Patricia O’Callaghan.

It’s is a critical look at gender representations in mass media through a celebration of the rare moments when marginalized or alternative gender and sexuality make it into the pop-culture.

Be sure to check out Charmax’s blip.tv account and website for more vids.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, queering culture, sexuality, television, vidding

As of June 30th 2009 Imeem has unilaterally removed all user generated videos including this one. Their reason for decimating 1000s of people’s creative work and the communities around it? “There is no ROI for UGV”. That unbelievable answer makes us nauseous. When this video is available again on another sharing site we will re-post it.

In this slash vid, thingswithwings uses famous slash paring from popular speculative fiction TV shows and movies. She relies on subtext to read between the lines within her source material and imply a romantic relationship between two characters of the same gender. While the source material and its authors may have had no original intention of hinting at their character’s sexual orientation, this vid deliberately slashes the character relationships in Star Trek, BSG: Razor, Babylon 5, Homicide, due South, The West Wing, Buffy, Lost, Stargate Atlantis, Starsky & Hutch, The X-Files, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, Primeval, Angel, Doctor Who, and Xena to reveal what happens when these relationships are reinterpreted by fans.

thingswithwings sites Henry Jenkin’s quote “slash is what happens when you take away the glass”, as the inspiration for this vid. What Jenkins was referring to was the social barriers in traditional masculinity that prevent men from articulating emotions or expressing intimacy.

The discussion in the vidding community regarding slash, its meaning and usage, is ongoing. Check out our previous posting for more on slash. Through the vidding process, fans become participants in media and culture creation by changing or queering story lines and characters, taking ownership over corporate owned media to make it their own. We think this is a very political act.

Read thingswithwings original livejournal entry.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: queer positive, queering culture, sexuality, slash, television, vidding

In this, our second post showcasing the remix form vidding, we present an example of a “slash” vid playfully set to Wouldn’t It Be Nice? by the Beach Boys. It’s an older vid by Laura Shapiro paying homage to some of the most famous fan slash pairings by remixing characters form many popular movies and TV shows. She not only highlights slash and femslash relationships but also celebrates existing on-screen gay and lesbian relationships. Check out Laura’s Blip Channel and website more of her vids.

The term “slash” refers to a same-sex pairing of TV and movie characters placed into sexual or romantic relationships by fans in their own fan fiction, art or vids. The first slash works were created in the 1970s by fans re-imagining a queer relationship between Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock. Typically slash refers to male/male stories, but depending on who you ask it can also mean female/female pairings (which are also called femslash). In the current heteronormative mass media landscape we definitely consider slash vids like these to be queer-positive forms of remix.

Here is a much more detailed description of slash from the FanLore site.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: femslash, hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality, slash, vidding

This mashup has become hugely popular on Youtube, viewed over a million times. The remixer re-imagines a trailer for the 1980′s blockbuster hit Top Gun creating a new narrative in which the very straight macho fighter jet pilots Maverick and Iceman have a romantic and sexual relationship. We consider this remix “queer-positive” because it subverts the fictional “all heterosexual” world of Top Gun by imposing queer relationships into the story.

By now we are all familiar with this remix phenomenon where creators take heterosexual TV and movie characters and than re-cut the footage to create queer relationships. These videos come in many forms but by far the most popular are the remixed Brokeback trailers, of which there are literally hundreds online. Although this remix is not really classified as a “vid”, in the vidding world this type of sexuality re-framing is called slash or femslash (which we will talk about in more detail in a later post).

We think these works are of political importance because they are critical of and expose how the mass media makes straight characters and relationships the standard social norm while queer relationships and lifestyles are often excluded, marginalization or demonized.

On this site we look critically at these remixes and place them in two camps, queer-positive and queer-negative. We define “queer-negative” remixes as those that encourage the viewer to laugh at the re-framed sexuality frequently by queering oddball, weird or quirky fictional characters (like the Brokeback to the Future mash-up). We don’t often post these because they are often tinged with homophobic humor. In contrast, we define “queer-positive” remixes as those that invite the viewer to identify with, sympathize with or celebrate the newly created queer relationship. Often these works remix the stereotypical and highly gendered roles of straight characters in mass media. Its a very fine line with a lot of gray area and not always clear but we at least use this as our lens for viewing these types of remixes.

So in short, queer-positive remixes attempt to subvert heteronormativity, while queer-negative ones mocks characters that aren’t portrayed as “normal.”

Category: movie trailer
Topic Tags: hollywood, masculinity, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality