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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

While video is our voice as remixers, there’s no guarantee it will be heard or if it will be there tomorrow. The experience represents a shifting power dynamic in the entertainment industry: as the audience, our collective intelligence grants us more creative power than ever, yet copyright holders are desperately trying to hold on to their role as gatekeeper.

QueerHousewives of NYC Remix

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When Elisa Kreisinger wanted to protest the newly diminished visibility of gay characters and story lines on television, she didn’t launch a petition drive or write an angry op-ed piece. Instead, like many other members of the YouTube generation for whom the visual language is a native tongue, she found a way to have her say with video rather than words.

Kreisinger remixed scenes from “Sex and the City’’ into a pair of pro-gay narratives, and uploaded the resulting videos to her blog, drawing 21,000 hits.

“I wouldn’t have done it if it was text-based,’’ said Kreisinger, a 23-year-old Simmons College grad from Cambridge. “Things are more easily communicated through video . . . And there can be more powerful statements.’’

A growing number of young activists are turning to video as a forum for instant political commentary or an eye-catching tool to mobilize on behalf of social change. They might create videos and spread them through social-networking sites such as Facebook. They might remix existing video clips into mashups-with-messages. They might borrow from the tropes of the most popular videos on YouTube, which turned five years old last month, marrying serious substance with lighthearted style. – The Boston Globe, 3/5/2010

Jonathan will be posting his experiences with Buffy Vs. Edward tomorrow and then it will be back to our regularly scheduled remix program!

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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”

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.”

Note: Above the word queer is used as a positive verb meaning to reevaluate or reinterpret a work with an eye to sexual orientation and/or gender.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: Above the word queer is used as a positive verb meaning to reevaluate or reinterpret a work with an eye to sexual orientation and/or gender.

Click here to view the embedded video.