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The Return of the Dark Lord
Full text linkCD review of A 2nd Shape, The Wolfgang Press (Downwards Records), Songs of a Lost World, The Cure (Fiction), The Cleansing, Peter Perrett (Domino
Exploring Attitudes Towards Gender Diversity Initiatives in Portuguese Esports
Full text linkIn Portugal, women are significantly underrepresented in esports (Monteiro 2021) and game development (Gil 2022; WPGI 2022). Yet, Portuguese game design students typically hold conservative views towards gender roles and disinterest in prioritising equity (Lima and Gouveia 2020; Lima et al. 2021). These might be attributed to gender stereotypes, which are prevalent in Portuguese culture (Tavares 2020). Non-profit advocates such as AnyKey have recommended practices to help esports to become more inclusive and promote diversity (AnyKey 2015). However, these works often generalise findings without further consideration for cultural differences in attitudes towards social justice and diversity. This work forms part of a larger ongoing project that explores how national esports communities navigate gender diversity. The current work explores the disposition towards gender diversity initiatives in the Portuguese population. Here, we will extend the initial work with a questionnaire to assess the representativeness of the previous findings. Drawing on actor-network theory (Latour 2005), the work follows the actors to explore the views of individuals involved in esports when it comes to incorporating social justice in esports spaces, i.e., representation of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals in games, promoting marginalised individuals in esports, and moderation practices. This research will yield several insights into the Portuguese esports’ ecosystem, which remains understudied. With recent campaigns promoting esports in Portugal, it is crucial to understand the best way to ingrain gender diversity in an emerging esports scene. This work will also strengthen the esports literature by exploring a local ecosystem, and how its aspects embrace and resist gender diversity. Findings from a cross-section of the data collected in 2024 will be discussed at the conference
MAI Feminism & Visual Culture: Focus Issue Thirteen: Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History
No full textLaunching this dossier of ‘Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History’ feels ground-breaking. It is a collection of articles from authors situated all around the world. They cover non-canonical film titles, offering visibility to some genre films that have never reached the centres of Western criticism or academia.
If Zygmunt Bauman believed that ‘[g]lobalisation divides, as much as it unites,’ this focus issue testifies that despite all our resistance to a globalisation primarily associated with neoliberalism, this unity can be both possible and precious. Perhaps, within our feminist community—and particularly with this issue—we can genuinely demonstrate how to forge connections above divisions and cherish engagement with what Appadurai calls ‘the grassroots’ global knowledge—something that has been systematically marginalised by Western scholarship.
Whether you are a horror fan or not, we invite you today to embark on a journey to watch and read unconventional, decolonising analyses of films that speak to the fears of women today. Many of the movies selected by our authors for their close readings are pretty recent and timely, especially as regards their storylines and character development pathways. With this globalised world once again stricken by wars, violence, oppression and still-existing gender inequalities, the horrors we face are no less real now than they have ever been, and this is why women still make and watch this genre.
If Julia Kristeva’s philosophical thoughts on ‘the power of horror’ and ‘the abject’ never lost their meaning, this project makes them resonate with us again, no matter where we are. Therefore, we are grateful for working with Alison on this issue and for being able to edit with her such a myriad of unconventional academic talents. Servicing the project participants, she designed and facilitated a true transnational feminist collaboration.
As our standard practice, at the end of this volume, we’ve added some miscellaneous pieces which we find most topical. There, you’ll find a short story, critical articles, book reviews, a report from a Black feminist event and one unique animated film, Why Women Don’t Jump (2023), which was exceptionally well received at the La Femme International Film Festival (Los Angeles) in the autumn last year. Having collaborated with a podcaster Helen Ledwick and a group of student animators, its producer, Rosa Mulraney, draws our attention to a different fear, or a horror, most women dread at one point in their lives—the aftermath of childbirth. Instead of drowning in misery, the film and the article are a praise for some of our sisters for their courage to speak up against medical and cultural negligence
Mr Soft
Full text linkBook review of 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock (hbck, 224pp, Constable
Lives of the Saints
Full text linkA satircal poem about sainthood, from a collaborative sequence about (the fictional) Recuperative Theology
Site Revealed
Full text linkToday, research on the ‘character’ of urban places is often conducted from a top-down aerial perspective, particularly ahead of construction or regeneration processes. These lofty viewpoints result in a certain detachment from the daily experiences of city-goers and life at ground-level. Computer assisted technological apparatuses such as land-sat and LiDAR further segregate the image of urban space from the eyes of the citizen, instead generating a patchwork likeness of the city out of polygons and pixels. This research project presents a framework for exploring the ‘character’ of urban areas as engaged with by human beings. A range of arts-based surveying processes, undertaken in sites of renewal in European cities, demonstrate how photographic practices of locative searching and spatial exploration can provide an underutilised human vision of places in cities. The outcomes of this research evidence how such imagery is especially relevant in situations where change or redevelopment is soon to occur. Building upon the human-focused methods of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch and Gordon Cullen, the intention of these methods is not to shield urban landscapes from reconstruction or rally against the ongoing political upheavals caused by physical change. Instead, this research seeks to determine a photographic stratagem for understanding the experiences, memories and character embedded within sites of renewal. This paper outlines how the visual data gathered through such methods might provide much-needed perspectives of people, which can help to convey aspects of their relationship with the built landscapes that they inhabit before these places are forever altered
Making Connnections
Full text linka review of David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, Nicholas Royle (Manchester University Press) and Modern Fog, Chris Emery (Arc Publications