Editor’s Introduction (2022)

What if the implications for scholarship of the longstanding, ongoing, and pervasive misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and racist environment are not solely a problem of the archive but also of how we discern evidence and produce history? What if we research and write media history differently? What if we engage in scholarship that recuperates the private musings of our research and makes them the instigating questions? This special issue of Feminist Media Histories, building from the companion issue that preceded it in spring 2022, brings together essays that do just that. Loosening our commitments to what was to ask what might have been? and what might be? allows for repressed narratives to surface and alternative possibilities to emerge. This is especially vital for people and subjects excluded from or denigrated by the historical record and thereby the act of writing history. Indeed, an emphasis on the question, “what if?,” expands what constitutes scholarly inquiry and, importantly, the outcomes it produces. Speculation is such a powerful tool precisely because of its irreverence toward established methods, evidentiary norms, and disciplinary conventions. But this irreverence should not be mistaken for lack of seriousness or commitment. Indeed, speculation is often borne out of the necessity of the exhaustion—or unsuitability—of other approaches. If we are committed to asking certain questions of our past, of our archives, of our cultures, that cannot be addressed through existing disciplinary conventions, we must find ways to ask them differently.Not to be dramatic, but the fate of the world is at stake. This urgency motivates Donna J. Haraway’s expansive method in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. In bringing together a set of SF terms (string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far), Haraway reminds us, “Science fact and speculative fabulation need each other, and both need speculative feminism.”1 Rather than a genre, SF is a “mode” that she calls, after Joshua LaBare, “a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding.” For LaBare and Haraway, this mode offers a means “of imagining and designing alternatives to the world that is, alas, the case.” To access this imagination, “the SF mode pays attention to the ‘conceivable, possible, inexorable, plausible, and logical.’”2 Admittedly, Haraway and LaBare are concerned primarily with averting actual apocalypse, and the stress necessarily lies on futurisms. As Haraway writes, “Instructed in this SF mode, perhaps human people and earth others can avert inexorable disaster and plant the conceivable germ of possibility for multispecies, multiplacetime recuperation before it is too late.”3 And yet, we might more modestly, though no less urgently, think about the generative possibilities of putting “science fact,” “speculative fabulation,” and “speculative feminism” in active dialogue with one another to produce speculative media histories.Speculative media histories can take many forms and have different ambitions. While they might be driven by absences, elisions, and erasures in the historical record, they might also be motivated by a frustration at the very fixity of empiricism. Yet rather than eschew facts and evidence, speculative media histories refigure the grounds of what counts as evidence, implicitly (and often explicitly) acknowledging that the notion of “fact” is itself contingent. In the spring 2022 issue of Feminist Media Histories, the companion to this issue, authors examined the ways power enters, shapes, and obscures the archive and the ways artists and filmmakers have negotiated archival and situational precarity. Here, authors are likewise attuned to evidentiary biases, but they find generative potentialities in criticism, at times unbound by scholarly conventions. For some, this un-disciplining allows a critical freedom that is no less rigorous for shedding the formal trappings of the scholarly essay (Berke, Hastie, Bainbridge). For others, speculation is a critical act of engagement that is found in historical practices (Spiers). And for others, speculation is the only way to access marginalized, lost, obfuscated, or forgotten figures and events in order to write them into history (Russell, O’Malley, Williams). All of the essays share an investment in finding a suitable method and approach to writing about women who, for a range of reasons and in widely different contexts, exist at the margins of media history and to critically and imaginatively situate them, as Annie Berke writes of Paula Strasberg, “center stage.”We might also see speculative media histories as coming full circle. The question what if? might be answered through a return to empirical evidence that, in turn, rewrites the foundations of film history. This is the ambition I see enacted in Jane Gaines’s exciting essay that convincingly does just that. With “Counterfactual Speculation: What if Antonia Dickson Had Invented the Kinetoscope?,” Gaines adopts Catherine Gallagher’s concept of “counterfactual speculation” to ask what if William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s prodigious sister, Antonia, invented the Kinetoscope? What would be the outcome if we gave more credit to Antonia rather than William? Inviting the imaginative what if? to run alongside established historical research enables Gaines to move beyond piecing together what happened, to think about what would have happened if we consider, in a gesture of “feminist counterfactuality,” Antonia Dickson as inventor. After all, close attention to the aspects of film history that are hidden in plain sight reveals the blind spots that have nonetheless shaped our discipline (Gaines, Loveday). Each of the essays collected here follow, in different ways and to varying degrees, what I’ve called elsewhere “rebellious unlearning.”4 We might also see them as “troubling”—in the sense of stirring up—the discipline (after Haraway). What possibilities emerge, we might ask after Kiki Loveday, when we forget film history?Forgetting film history galvanizes the act of remembering other—overlooked, silenced, or ignored—histories. Annie Berke’s essay, “Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment: A Play in Five Acts,” innovates a Method reading to access the “conflicting traces” of Strasberg’s life and career, including her relationship with Marilyn Monroe, specifically by adapting the “Private Moment” acting exercise to critical writing. Berke reminds us that the way Strasberg has been remembered, that is, the “conflicting ephemeral traces” of her, tells us more about the way women, motherhood, and ethnicity were conceived in and around postwar culture. To “reinstate” Strasberg as a “thinking, feeling subject,” one that has been disallowed by the documentation of her life and work, Berke adopts a “critical-creative” approach, offering a speculative account “rooted in theatricality and play.” In this turn to fictocriticism, Berke combines experimentation with a critical rereading of the extant historiographic traces of Strasberg’s life. The result is, as she offers, “the performative resurrection of a neglected historical figure and a rereading of a cultural narrative, one of male genius and female obscurity at mid-century.”Amelie Hastie offers a different kind of performative engagement with film history, one that enacts a close attention to a set of scenes from American feature films of the 1970s through creative criticism. Her piece, “Wandering around the ’70s: Glimmers of a Feminist Practice,” offers evocative, analytic descriptions of particular filmic moments that center on women’s experiences. As a method of writing, Hastie’s approach involves a series of descriptive vignettes arranged on the page as if “driven by film form itself.” Inspired by the “interlocking” feminist texts of Lesley Sterne, Agnès Varda, and Nathalie Sarraute, Hastie’s “glimmers” resist academic modes of exposition and argumentation, allowing description to open interpretive “wanderings” through this period of film history beyond the parameters imposed by a cannon of predominantly white, male filmmakers. The result is a form of speculative criticism that invites readers “to engage in further acts of speculation—of association, of connection, of filling in the gaps.”Hastie’s writing invokes an afterimage in the minds of her readers of the scenes she so evocatively describes. Memory—and remembering—also serve as the critical point of entry for Danielle Bainbridge’s essay, “Sylvia Wynter, Maskarade and Performing the State.” Here, Bainbridge uses archival recovery and critical fabulation in her approach to Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter’s play Maskarade, first written in 1973 and then published—with some key differences—after the 1983 performance staged by Sandra Richards at Stanford University. Interweaving her historical analysis with fragments of personal memory, Bainbridge explores the state’s investments in Jamaican tradition and folklore in nation building and individual memory in identity formation, and importantly how the two intersected in the “integration of the state into the quotidian lives of Black women across the island.”Rethinking “the nature of stardom as a speculative hermeneutic,” Catherine Russell turns her critical attention to a figure who appears across American studio-era films, mainly on the narrative margins. What happens when we pay attention to a so-called extra and treat her, instead, like a star? As Russell shows through close attention to the film appearances, credited and uncredited, of Theresa Harris, “Once Harris is made visible, and respected as a body and living presence in the archive, everything changes all around her.” Russell’s essay does just this. In “The File on Theresa Harris, Black Star of the Archive,” Russell revisits Harris’s career and closely analyzes an array of scenes in which she appears, reconsidering the implications of mise-en-scène, or framing, or depth of field and refocusing the visual dynamics between Harris and Barbara Stanwyck, for instance, or Harris and Bette Davis, among the recognized stars with whom she shared the screen. The result is a “reparative reading,” after Eve Sedgwick, that mobilizes Harris’s film appearances in an alternative historiography in which Harris is the star. Further, through this process of critical attention, Russell offers alternative readings of the films in which Harris appeared.Attention to the racial and gendered constructions of stardom is also at the heart of Mark Williams’s essay, “Passing for History: Ina Ray Hutton, Television, and Speculative Historiography.” Here, Williams reconsiders the “blonde bombshell of swing” and her stylization in the context of the restrictions of the music industry, especially jazz and swing, for women and African American performers. Williams opens the lens on Hutton beyond music history, considering her from the perspective of television history, affording a new look at Hutton’s career and her personal and professional modes of racial passing. Williams pays special attention to an unaired episode of her NBC series from the 1950s that also includes Hutton’s sister and mother, and he considers both the representational valences on display and the consequences of its never-aired status. What methodological demands does footage from unaired television episodes make on the media historian? What are the implications of Hutton’s familial associations in an episode that no one could see? How might hidden media history be brought into productive dialogue with the complexities of racial passing? These are the important questions driving Williams’s work on Hutton.If Williams looks at the never aired as an ephemeral media event, Hayley O’Malley considers a singular film festival as another subject that eludes historical research. In her essay, “The 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts: A Speculative History of the First Black Women’s Film Festival,” O’Malley marshals participant testimonies and fragmented documents to access the festival and assess its legacies. Surviving largely through personal recollections, the festival has left only fragmentary traces. And yet, the confluence of key filmmakers, poets, artists, and writers that came together at the Women’s Interart Center in New York City in May 1976 was a major event of Black feminist “artistic community-building” whose impact far exceeded its material trace.Like O’Malley, Hastie, and Bainbridge, Aurore Spiers considers the 1970s as a crucial moment for feminist media practices and historiography. With “My Name Is Alice Guy: The “Musidora” Collective and Women’s Film History,” Spiers looks at the 1970s French feminist collective “Musidora” and what she understands as their speculative approaches to recovering the work of early French filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché. This group of feminist activists, journalists, filmmakers, and cinephiles was especially invested in researching, championing, and imaginatively recuperating Guy Blaché as the first woman filmmaker and even the first fiction filmmaker in the history of cinema. The group also organized a film festival in Paris in 1974 to promote unsung French women film- and videomakers. Through these activities, the group imaginatively claimed earlier women filmmakers, especially Guy Blaché, as “ancestors” and models of perseverance in a misogynistic industry.Prior to the CFP that resulted in two special issues (the first was published in spring 2022) on speculative approaches to media histories, Kiki Loveday’s essay “The Kiss: Forgetting Film History” was awarded best essay in the 2021 graduate writing competition (jointly sponsored by Feminist Media Histories and the Gender and Feminisms Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). I am thrilled to include her magnificent article in these pages not least because of the affinities between our work rethinking The May Irwin Kiss (Edison, 1896) in the light of archival rediscoveries and intermedial archival research.5 Loveday’s award-winning essay is the product of keen historical research that undergirds her important arguments about queer sexuality as screened at cinema’s earliest instances. She offers a fresh and convincing reconsideration of a film at the origins of the discipline’s canon (whether or not one ascribes to a canon of film history, The Kiss is inescapably a foundational title of both film history and historiography).The act of speculating is, by definition, risky stuff. It is always a gamble that might, or might not, pay off. But regardless of outcome, it is most importantly an aspirational process. It is a wager that things might be otherwise, including the often-stifling modes of academic argumentation, and the media historian’s armored methodologies. Emphatically, the leap elsewhere taken in the essays that follow reveal the feminist, antiracist imperative of asking, what if? Returning to Haraway’s SF terms and highlighting the imbrication of speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, and science fact in particular, we have “a method of tracing, or following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure,” a means of envisioning the past to allow for a future we might speculatively conjure.6