Associate Editor’s Introduction: Women’s Work

Original art by Sally Jane Thompson (www.sallyjanethompson.co.uk).

Used by permission.

Cinema Journal has been publishing for fifty-five years; this issue is the first in which all of the feature articles are written by women. Only one other issue (22.1, Autumn 1982) published solely women, but, as was occasionally customary for Cinema Journal in the early 1980s, it contained no features, only three items: the editor’s introduction, by Virginia Wright Wexman, the journal’s first woman editor; Kristine Brunovska Karnick’s annotated index of all previous issues of the journal; and E. Ann Kaplan’s “Professional Notes.” Under Wexman, Cinema Journal transformed from a biannual to a quarterly and started to look more like this present issue in terms of content and style. After Wexman, no woman would helm the journal until Heather Hendershot’s term, which began with issue 47.4 (Fall 2008).

While this gendered approach to this issue’s features is intentional on our part, compiling it required only minor shuffling of our normal publication schedule, which is in order of submission. When Will Brooker invited me to write this editorial, I read through the journal’s archives for a sense of its structural and gendered history, much of which was recapped by a lively In Focus in 2010 (49.2): “SCMS at 50.” What began as a small group of “gentlemen scholars” publishing typewritten versions of their conference papers, delivered at the Society of Cinematologists’ first meetings in the early 1960s, has developed into its current iteration and online partner platforms. Some of our newer readers may be interested to learn that in those early days, individuals had to be approved and sponsored to join what became in 1968 the Society of Cinema Studies (SCS) and in 2003 the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).

No woman would publish a feature until September 1970 (9.2), when Chloe Aaron was listed as a second author with a male scholar. In the following issue (10.1), Birgitta Steene, who would become in 1974 the only woman on the editorial board for several years, published the first sole-woman-authored feature essay. Similar gender gaps emerge throughout the decades. In 1971 (11.1), no women were on the masthead except assistant to the editor Linda Provinzano, and the last of several issues of all male-authored features was published in 2007.

Wexman herself became editor after two years as associate editor (and after a guest-edited issue on film acting) under longtime editor Jack C. Ellis, whom she successfully urged to use outside referees to choose the essays for publication rather than selecting them himself. Society membership and circulation doubled under her tenure as she continued the journal’s focus from film history to screen scholarship. In 1985 Vivian Sobchack became the first woman president of SCS, and in the 1980s and subsequently more women became members of both the editorial board and the SCS officers and executive council (renamed from “councilmen” in 1968).

Our editorial team intended to continue the trend of a more egalitarian approach to journal production, beginning with Will’s selection of the masthead team, which initially included only two men, including Will himself. When our term began in 2013, there were twenty-two men and seven women on the editorial board; as of last summer, again because of our conscious efforts to redress the balance, there are thirteen men and fifteen women, and several of the most recent issues have had original covers by women artists, including the image that accompanies this editorial.

But while we are proud of the changes we have made, we cannot be complacent. Although we have been gratified to work with the caucuses that represent and advocate for underrepresented groups within SCMS—inviting many of them to run an In Focus section during our tenure—our own masthead team remains overwhelmingly white. We are glad for the changes in diversity that we’ve helped to make, but there is far more work to be done—not only in the world and the...