Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded 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

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!

Click here to view the embedded video.

“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.

Too many dicks on the dance floor
Too many dicks on the dance floor
Too many dicks
Too many dicks on the dance floor
Too many dicks
Too many dicks on the dance floor
Too many dicks

Going to the party
Sippin’ on Bacardi
Wanna meet a hottie
But there’s Adam, Steve and Marty
There’s Billy, Todd and Tommy
They’re on leave from the army
The only boobs I’ll see tonight will be made of origami

Tell the players, make it understood
It ain’t no good if there’s too much wood
Make sure you know before you go
The dance floor bro-hoe ratio
Five to one is a brodeo
Tell Steve and Mike it’s time to go
Wait outside all night to find
Twenty dudes in a conga line

Too many dicks on the dance floor
Easy to fix
Too many dicks on the dance floor
Spread out the dicks

Too many dudes
With too many dicks
Too close to my shit
Too hard to meet chicks
I need better odds
More broads, less rods
I came to do battle
Scadaddle with the cattle prods

Too many men
Too many boys
Too many misters
Not enough sisters
Too much time on, too many hands
Not enough ladies, too many mans

Too many dicks
Too many dongs
Too many schlongs
Now sing this song

Get a Hi-Res version and see Lim's blip channel.


Click here to view the embedded 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.” 

The show’s original storyline follows two heroic brothers as they rid the world of paranormal events. Week after week, a “chick of the week” is slain by the brothers or supernatural forces. Luminosity & Sisabet ingeniously remove the two main male characters and focus their storyline on these killed-off and often nameless female characters in an effort to show how women are violated and eroticized to further the plot, but are rarely part of it. We think this is an important distinction; women’s mere presence in a story does not equate or signify a meaningful existence for them beyond the roles of monster and victim.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Luminosity and Sisabet decided to construct their vid using content solely from the show “Supernatural”, but they could have easily used footage from other series like “CSI”, “Law and Order”, or “Heroes” because the story lines are often similar: the death or suffering of a female character within the first 3 minutes drives the male main characters to set out on their hunt.

In remix, it’s the visual arrangement of clips and the artist’s intent that makes the video’s message either liberating or oppressive. In addition, a basic understanding of the original show being used is often important for the viewer to understand the context. In “Women’s Work”, understanding “Supernatural”, while not being a weekly fan, allowed us to interpret the vid as critical of the depiction of women as eroticized victims, rather than assembled to glorify the violence against women. Knowing Luminosity and Sisabet’s intention and the basic concept behind their source footage helped us make this distinction. Because the remix, and in this case, vidding, forms can be used to glorify oppressive ideas, it’s important to understand these aspects.

Luminosity’s other meticulously crafted vids can be found on blip.tv.

For a more in-depth analysis of this vid, scroll to the second half of this post on the blog Ambling Along the Aqueduct.

We wanted to post the vid because we think it offers an insightful look at the media portal of masculinity using guns and other weapons as a hilarious metaphor for the penis. We read it to be critical of the violent and phallocentric concepts of masculinity that are driven by the media.

However, we want to note that this was not exactly the creator’s intention. The Media Cannibals did intend to make fun of phallocentric media culture but insist they were not trying to be critical of the violence and guns on TV per se.

While we may project our own points of view, critical or not, onto remixes and vids, it’s often important to understand the original intent for the piece. Because remix and vids are not an necessarily inherently critical form, we viewers can only rely on the visual display of content and the intent of the creators to decide whether or not they are political in nature.

The vid is also available in better quality for DL.

Click here to view the embedded video.

ImaginarySanity also playfully hints at a mass media double standard: while it’s acceptable (and often expected) for men to be sexually available and have multiple partners without “settling down”, women who engage in similar sexual activity are criticized and often portrayed as “sluts”. As the ending credits indicate this vid characterizes Kirk as the “male slut” and portrays his Casanova ways in a more critical light.

ImaginarySanity also makes kirk/spock slash vids which you can see them on her Youtube channel or blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.