Project MUSE®: The Velvet Light Trap - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Velvet Light Trap.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 51 (2003) through current issueLatest Articles: The Velvet Light TrapTWOProject MUSE®The Velvet Light Trap1542-42510149-1830Latest articles in The Velvet Light Trap. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema by Rick Warner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979610
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A book cover of The Rebirth of Suspense by Rick Warner, featuring a horizontal film still of a person in a car, looking forward contemplatively against a blurred background. Alfred Hitchcock famously distinguished suspense from surprise through the metaphor of a bomb under the table, but Rick Warner’s The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema challenges the Hitchcockian model, offering a helpful intervention that reframes our understanding of cinematic tension by examining its power in the most unexpected of aesthetic territories: minimalist, slow-paced art-house cinema. Operating in two critical registers, this book not only reimagines suspense as a fluid aesthetic phenomenon—critically reframing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallThe Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema by Rick Warner (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USThe Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema by Rick Warner (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®145782026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right by Adrienne L. Massanari (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979611
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A grayscale cover of Gaming Democracy by Adrienne L. Massanari, showing the title and subtitle at the top, the author’s name at the bottom, and a pixelated figure mid-jump. Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right has the potential to become a canonical text in the study of gaming culture and far-right politics in the digital age. Marrying game studies, digital studies, and political studies, Adrienne L. Massanari’s book explores how the ideologies of Silicon Valley have fueled the ascendancy of the far right in digital spaces. Massanari contends that a games studies lens is crucial to understanding political developments in the twenty-first century. After defining the alt-right and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallGaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right by Adrienne L. Massanari (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USGaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right by Adrienne L. Massanari (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®124422026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Old New Woman: Modernity, Self-Reflexivity, and Nostalgia in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979612
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In a 1999 interview in Les Inrockuptibles, Maggie Cheung admits that prior to acting in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (Ruan Lingyu, 1991), she knew very little about the film’s subject, Ruan Lingyu, the Shanghainese silent film star who committed suicide in 1935 at the age of twenty-four.1 Cheung’s admission prompts the interviewer to ask, “Does Ruan Lingyu not have the stature in China of a Garbo or a Dietrich?” In response, Cheung answers bluntly, “The Chinese do not accord much importance to things from the past, whether they are films, heritage, or even clothes or furniture. In Asia, nothing is preserved; turning toward the past is something stupid, aberrant.” Cheung adds that “Ruan Lingyu’s films had been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallOld New Woman: Modernity, Self-Reflexivity, and Nostalgia in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage2026-01-09text/htmlen-USOld New Woman: Modernity, Self-Reflexivity, and Nostalgia in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®820592026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09How “Cracker” Became “Hate Speech”: Content Moderation Logics and Right-Wing Mass Flagging on Twitch
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979613
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In late 2021, Hasan Piker, a popular Turkish American socialist political commentator, received a seven-day ban from the site-wide moderators of the live-streaming platform Twitch for the following insult, which they deemed hate speech:
I show you why [“cracker” is not the same as the N-word] in the video that you refuse to watch and just wrote that argument against. Who are you arguing against? Who asked? Who said this? Did I say: “Oh my god, saltine cracker, like, people are just bitter because it’s saltine cracker.” That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I said—you dumb, cracker bitch.1
The event, which would become known as Crackergate, began when Piker harshly criticized Twitch for banning two of his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallHow “Cracker” Became “Hate Speech”: Content Moderation Logics and Right-Wing Mass Flagging on Twitch2026-01-09text/htmlen-USHow “Cracker” Became “Hate Speech”: Content Moderation Logics and Right-Wing Mass Flagging on Twitch2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®757442026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Trans+ Livability Politics: Euphoria’s Mundane Spaces as Material Care
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979614
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“To look is a kind of love,” the poet Gwen Benaway writes in her collection day/break.1 The history of trans+ people on TV is a history of looking—a classic game of bait and switch, set up with desire and outrage as the punch line.2 Benaway continues: “the camera doesn’t see the body // only the energy around the body … not the girl, but her taste // against the air.”3 When trans+ people are seen on-screen, it is often the energy around them—the presumed reality of being trans—that is captured and not an actual sense of trans+ life embodiment. What audiences do not see are the livable trans+ realities that are built around and within them; they so often only see caricature, pain, trauma. Trans+ characters are asked
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallTrans+ Livability Politics: Euphoria’s Mundane Spaces as Material Care2026-01-09text/htmlen-USTrans+ Livability Politics: Euphoria’s Mundane Spaces as Material Care2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®619862026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Television Directors, Race, and Gender: Written Out of the Story by Jonathan J. Cavallero (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979615
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A grayscale cover of Television Directors, Race, and Gender by Jonathan J. Cavallero, featuring overlapping geometric shapes and the Routledge logo in the bottom-right corner. In Television Directors, Race, and Gender: Written Out of the Story, Jonathan Cavallero argues that a more inclusive television history must be written in which scholars examine the historical diversity of television directing, which often included more women in directorial positions than cinema and larger numbers of BIPOC directors than television showrunner positions typically represent. In taking up this cause, Cavallero’s exemplary case studies demonstrate how television directors’ artistic contributions challenge the field’s often myopic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallTelevision Directors, Race, and Gender: Written Out of the Story by Jonathan J. Cavallero (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USTelevision Directors, Race, and Gender: Written Out of the Story by Jonathan J. Cavallero (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®137522026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979616
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The phrase “representation matters” has become a popular idiom encapsulating the value of media representation as a locus of social, cultural, and economic change. Representative inquiry serves as a mirror to understand and critique systemic structures and social relations in which mediated identities emerge, and from which explicit and implicit cultural meaning is made. Renewed focus on media representation (from audiences and media producers) has generated new industry and activist initiatives, quantitative and qualitative studies, and material interventions seeking to change long-lived inequalities in industrial production and cultural experience. As viewers, we also employ our reception to mediated images as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-01-09text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®93262026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09French B Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood by David Pettersen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979617
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A grayscale cover of French B Movies by David Pettersen, with the title curved at the top and an illustrated urban scene of two cartoon figures suspended between apartment buildings. In providing a broad overview of the various strands of films taking place in the French banlieues (suburbs of Paris), David Pettersen’s French B Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood makes an important contribution to the field of French film studies in foregrounding the banlieue as a key setting in contemporary French cinema. Focusing on a vast, genre-spanning corpus of films made from the mid-1990s to the late 2010s, Pettersen demonstrates how contemporary French films set in the banlieues “use the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallFrench B Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood by David Pettersen (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USFrench B Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood by David Pettersen (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®138712026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09The Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s by Reem Hilu (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979618
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A grayscale cover of The Intimate Life of Computers by Reem Hilu, with the title at the top, subtitle around a central pixel-art family, and small floppy disk icons. In The Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s, Reem Hilu offers a valuable contribution to feminist media histories that reanalyze predominantly masculine narratives of the development of home-computing technology. Such narratives, the book argues, cannot adequately explain how these technologies became as integrated into the American middle-class home as they are now; rather, the mass adoption of computing in the domestic space needs to be situated in the evolving discourses on sex, romance, family, and the home that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallThe Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s by Reem Hilu (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USThe Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s by Reem Hilu (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®138422026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror by Kartik Nair (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979619
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A grayscale cover of Seeing Things by Kartik Nair, with a subtitle below and the author’s name at the bottom, featuring a haunting of women’s faces and a ghostly eye. In Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, Kartik Nair explores the popular yet critically dismissed cycle of Bombay horror films from the 1980s. He sets them against the backdrop of the Bombay film industry’s transition from the poststudio era of the late 1970s to the corporatization of the late 1990s. Nair reexamines these films, which were often criticized for their cheap production, incoherent editing, and excessive prosthetic makeup, through the lens of “spectral materialities.” In his reading, the films’ apparent “failures” act
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallSeeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror by Kartik Nair (review)2026-01-09text/htmlen-USSeeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror by Kartik Nair (review)2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®129152026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Performing Positive Energy: Mediated Self-Representation of Chinese Migrant Workers on Douyin
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979620
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In a short video created by the vlogger A Minmin—a rural-to-urban migrant worker with 101,000 followers on Douyin as of February 2023—she shares glimpses of her after-work life in a rented room, showing everyday activities such as buying groceries, cooking, and cleaning (fig. 1). The two-minute video begins with a shot of her entering the room and employs preset cameras to document the routines from various angles, using smooth transitions and seamless editing techniques that create a natural flow. In a cooking sequence, A Minmin utilizes close-up shots to highlight ingredients and sets up a tripod to film herself preparing the meal. Like many of her other videos, this one is accompanied by voice-overs and upbeat
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallPerforming Positive Energy: Mediated Self-Representation of Chinese Migrant Workers on Douyin2026-01-09text/htmlen-USPerforming Positive Energy: Mediated Self-Representation of Chinese Migrant Workers on Douyin2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®703812026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09Mockumentary Television’s Participant-Subject: Naturalizing Surveillance Through Clip Shows and Cutaways
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979621
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Mockumentary increasingly treats documentary as a source of strategies to be applied to fictional subjects for humorous ends, rather than as the subject of its critique.1 As a result, many critics have argued that mockumentary has lost “its subversive edge,” ultimately becoming a visual style adopted by existing traditions such as fiction film and sitcom, rather than a mode of political critique.2 Representative of this shift, Richard Wallace points out that the mockumentary auteur Christopher Guest’s films “look increasingly less documentary-like” both across his oeuvre and within each film, tending to begin with more classic documentary features and ending up looking like traditional fictional film.3 The net
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/230/image/coversmallMockumentary Television’s Participant-Subject: Naturalizing Surveillance Through Clip Shows and Cutaways2026-01-09text/htmlen-USMockumentary Television’s Participant-Subject: Naturalizing Surveillance Through Clip Shows and Cutaways2026-01-092026TWOProject MUSE®744922026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-09