Between the ominous acapella version of the classic Mary Poppins song performed by Suzanne Vega and the skin crawling subject matter in this vid, Laura Shapiro has expertly remixed and brought to light a reoccurring problem in women’s science fiction representations. All to often female characters in science fiction and fantasy television narratives are forcibly impregnated with some supernatural being that will bring destruction/salvation to the world. The demonic/alien pregnancy plot device is so pervasive that the remix artist almost had too much source material to work with.

Laura uses scenes of women who have been forcibly knocked up, had their ovaries harvested or otherwise reduced to their basic biological functions, ultimately becoming nothing but baby making machines.  And it’s not only forced pregnancies that Laura is critiquing but also women carrying natural, wanted fetuses whose wombs are being used as sites of torture.  She used clips from science fiction and fantasy television shows to explore what she sees as reproductive terrorism, “the way women’s reproductive capacity is used to colonize them and made to seem unnatural, spooky, disgusting, and horrifying.” Laura has created a stunning visual critique that exposes this sexist TV trope that can only be described as “creepy”.

To see her original post visit her Dreamwidth blog and watch her other vids at laurasha.com.  We have previously featured Laura’s “Wouldn’t it be Nice” vid.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist media literacy advocate, pop culture critic and fair use proponent.  She maintains an ongoing web series of video commentaries from a fangirl/feminist/anti-oppression perspective at her website www.FeministFrequency.com.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, pregnancy, reproductive rights, sexism, vidding, women

This remix by Anita Sarkeesian of FeministFrequency.com appropriates the sexist song “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” by Flight of the Conchords to critique the male domination, hyper masculinity and glorification of violence in popular video games. The video uses source material from 39 different games and was inspired by Sloane’s “Star Trek Dance Floor” vid which comments on the lack of women in the Star Trek movie re-boot released last year. (Incidentally, Sloane’s vid also holds the distinction of being the most viewed post on our blog.)

Once paired with the misogynist lyrics, the games’ imagery of guns, swords and chainsaws become phallic representations of patriarchal power in a virtual world where few women exist. Especially lacking are female characters who are not hypersexualized and/or simply replicating the intense violence of male game heroes. Anita’s remix uses the lyrics to highlight two games in particular (both with women of color protagonists) that help counter the genre’s male dominance: Portal, a first person action puzzle game which utilizes non-violent problem solving strategies, and Mirror’s Edge, a less-violent adventure game involving the navigation of a dystopian city maze. You can also see a list of all the games used in this remix on FeministFrequency.com

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, masculinity, sexism, vidding, video games, violence

Public Knowledge has just released their new series of four video interviews called “We Are Creators Too” that focuses on artists who push the boundaries of copyright law. First to be featured was Nina Paley whose Sita Sings the Blues feature film (set to music from the Public Domain) reveals the timelessness of an old Indian folk tale while simultaneously exposing the archaic nature of copyright. Francesca Coppa, fan, academic and keeper of women’s vidding herstory is also featured along with Jonathan and myself.

Public Knowledge is a great resource for remix artists and vidders because they acknowledge that Fair Use is a right, not a privilege. As artist, we can only continue making new work with the hopes that the product and process decreases copyright confusion and encourages the use of new media technologies to sustain media literacy and critical thinking about popular, and proprietary, culture.

Part 4 – Francesca Coppa

Part 3 – Jonathan McIntosh

Part 2 – Elisa Kreisinger

Part 1 – Nina Paley

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: activism, copyright, corporations, fair use, REMOVED, rights, television, vidding

Please note this vid deals with issues of rape and consent. More specifically, it’s a playful yet critical look at the troubling presentation of these issues in the Fox television show “Dollhouse”. Because these topics are intense, we feel viewers should  be aware of the content before viewing.

The vid is fittingly titled “It Depends on What You Pay” by vidder Gianduja Kiss who expertly combines clips from the first season of Joss Whedon’s new television show “Dollhouse” with music from the 1960′s off-Broadway musical “The Fantasticks”.

For those unfamiliar with the premise of the show, it’s set inside a secretive corporation called the Dollhouse. People are coerced into handing over their bodies to the Dollhouse which then rents out those bodies for profit. The “actives” or “dolls” have their minds wiped and are then re-programed with the personalities and skills desired by each new “client”.

Gianduja Kiss’s vid brilliantly exposes the fact that these “dolls” have no way to consent to any of their “engagements” – sexual or otherwise – an issue the show ignores. The vid names this disturbing lack of consent for what it is – rape. This calling out of the show’s narrative is an important step in countering the current rape culture and its place in our culture of violence.

Here is the original vid post on dreamwidth where you can get a hi-res version.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

For more on these issues and “Dollhouse” check out this post on The Angry Black Woman “The problem with Dollhouse is not that I don’t understand subtlety” and this one on Feminist SF “Working in the Dollhouse” as well as Gianduja Kiss’s insightful posts on the topic.

In closing we would like to echo a recent tweet on the  Feminist Frequency blog about “Dollhouse” that links to Joss Whedon’s inspiring 2006 Equality Now speech and reads:

Dear Joss, you should rewatch this video because I think you may have forgotten your principles, you might learn something from yourself. Love, Anita http://bit.ly/lBvP3

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, sexism, television, vidding, violence

YouTube’s January 2009 Massacre hit many vidders using that video sharing site particularly hard because their Content ID system can not decipher between a copyright violation and a fair use of the original material. Last week fannish vidders found themselves caught in the midst of yet another online video massacre. Much of the vidding community had been using the media sharing site imeem which, until recently, had been a safe space for them to post fan works and share in fan communities. But imeem recently announced they were ‘simplifying’ their website and deleting all use- generated video (UGV), again leaving vidders without a community to upload and share their works. Imeem is now “de-emphasizing” UGV because of costs and concerns over their return on investment (ROI). They say “Simply put, there’s no ROI for us in UGV.”

We feel this is an insult to the vidding and other photo/video communities that helped build imeem as a service. We think that to simply jettison user generated creative works in this way due to profit margins is shameful and abhorrent.

The end of the vidding community on imeem does not just stop with the loss of the vids but also a deletion of all comments and playlists, loss of the cumulative hit counts and vidding network disruptions. To add insult to injury, imeem continues to prohibit users from downloading their own content. Some of the startling experiences and over-all mistreatment of content producers are documented here.

What this means for our blog is that many of our favorite vids will be offline until they can be relocated to other sites. Many of our favorites will be on blip.tv since they’ve implemented a fair use policy, this despite their recent vidder-targeted takedowns for posting “copyrighted material”. Others will be moving to BAM. A comparison of the two sites’ hosting capacities is posted here.

In caution to vidders transitioning away from imeem, Morgan Dawn has outlined the copyright policies of various video services. She adds “how they will handle the transformative nature of fan vids is still anyone’s guess.”

Please be patient with us as we try to find the new location of vids we have posted here over the past few months and update our posts accordingly. If you’ve found a vid’s new digital home, please let us know!

Category: News
Topic Tags: copyright, fair use, imeem youtube, vidding

Sloane’s first vid is a visual critique of the “re-booted” Star Trek movie selectively edited to the sexist, misogynistic song, “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” by Flight of the Concords. While “Too Many Dicks…” was originally about having too many men on the dance floor and not enough women to court, Sloane reclaims it by editing together multiple images of the largely male Star Trek cast to critique it’s male dominated storyline.

“When I saw the Star Trek movie, I was disappointed that J.J. Abrams had dramatically rewritten so many elements of Star Trek canon – and had largely ignored women. I was surprised how many people didn’t seem to think that was a problem, or even that the issue existed.” — Sloane

Her vid eloquently proves her point: it is hard to ignore the male to female ratio in the new updated Star Trek movie. Uhura has the heavy burden of being the only female character with any significant dialog and, to further the disappointment, is written into “the girlfriend” role. The vid is extremely popular in the fan/vidding community, emphasizing the huge demand to see more women in prominent roles on television and in the movies.

This vid also serves as a strong argument for the importance of cam recordings used for visual criticism and critique. It is essential that these types of critiques be made in a timely fashion while films are still fresh in the mind collective consciousness of the public. If vidders and political remixers have to wait to make their visual arguments until a film’s DVD release, than the window for sparking public debate and discussion will often have past.

Because a song’s lyrics are often the critical lens through which the viewer can read the commentary in a vid, we have pasted them below the fold.
Read more…

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: bootleg, fandom, gender, hollywood, music, sexism, vidding

This multifandom vid by British vidder Lim is self-referential to the vidding process and community. The metavid integrates iconic fandoms such as “Star Trek” and “V for Vendetta”, along with fans, including Henry Jenkins, to the song “Us” by Regina Spektor. With tight editing and a depth of references, the vid comments on how vidders interact with texts, fandoms, and media, comparing the compulsory “under-the-radar” work of fans and vidders to the insider and exclusive works of academics. The collective power of the vid’s imagery seems to be a metaphor for the history and dynamics of vidding whereby groups of fans collaborate to share technology and access to source materials, taking back ownership of and commenting on popular culture.

Get a Hi-Res version and see Lim's blip channel.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Lim’s not only articulate through her videos but through her comments on the media as well.

“The media seems to think they own the things they’ve pumped into my brain in 27 years. It seems to me ludicrous that television spends so much time and so much money carefully colonizing my mind. But it is my mind.” 

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: hollywood, television, vidding