Goldsmiths, University of London – förlag

An illustrated history of the evolution of British women's cycle wear.

The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women's liberation. Less noted is another critical technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives—cycle wear. This illustrated account of women's cycle wear from Goldsmiths Press brings together Victorian engineering and radical feminist invention to supply a missing chapter in the history of feminism.

Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were unworkable, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling in pedals. Yet wearing “rational” cycle wear could provoke verbal and sometimes physical abuse from those threatened by newly mobile women. Seeking a solution, pioneering women not only imagined, made, and wore radical new forms of cycle wear but also patented their inventive designs. The most remarkable of these were convertible costumes that enabled wearers to transform ordinary clothing into cycle wear.

Drawing on in-depth archival research and inventive practice, Kat Jungnickel brings to life in rich detail the little-known stories of six inventors of the 1890s. Alice Bygrave, a dressmaker of Brixton, registered four patents for a skirt with a dual pulley system built into its seams. Julia Gill, a court dressmaker of Haverstock Hill, patented a skirt that drew material up the waist using a mechanism of rings or eyelets. Mary and Sarah Pease, sisters from York, patented a skirt that could be quickly converted into a fashionable high-collar cape. Henrietta Müller, a women's rights activist of Maidenhead, patented a three-part cycling suit with a concealed system of loops and buttons to elevate the skirt. And Mary Ann Ward, a gentlewoman of Bristol, patented the “Hyde Park Safety Skirt,” which gathered fabric at intervals using a series of side buttons on the skirt. Their unique contributions to cycling's past continue to shape urban life for contemporary mobile women.

How forty-one women—including Dorothy Parker, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Lena Horne—were forced out of American television and radio in the 1950s “Red Scare.”

At the dawn of the Cold War era, forty-one women working in American radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. The ostensible reason: so-called Communist influence. But in truth these women—among them Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, and Gypsy Rose Lee—were, by nature of their diversity and ambition, a threat to the traditional portrayal of the American family on the airwaves. This book from Goldsmiths Press describes what American radio and television lost when these women were blacklisted, documenting their aspirations and achievements.Through original archival research and access to FBI blacklist documents, The Broadcast 41 details the blacklisted women's attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to depict America as diverse, complicated, and inclusive. The book tells a story about what happens when non-male, non-white perspectives are excluded from media industries, and it imagines what the new medium of television might have looked like had dissenting viewpoints not been eliminated at such a formative moment. The all-white, male-dominated Leave it to Beaver America about which conservative politicians wax nostalgic existed largely because of the forcible silencing of these forty-one women and others like them. For anyone concerned with the ways in which our cultural narrative is constructed, this book offers an urgent reminder of the myths we perpetuate when a select few dominate the airwaves.

On the visceral engagement of the body in musical performance, and how technological mediation can foster, or break, forms of audience empathy.Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture is a musician's account of the relationship between corporeal movement and musical sound. It examines the conscious and subconscious strategies behind musical expression, and ways in which sound and gesture become the medium of intersubjectivity with the spectator. It looks at the design of technologies that break out of the binary brittleness of the digital to capture subtleties of human movement to create expressive digital musical instrument systems. Drawing from the overlapping fields of phenomenological philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and post-humanist anthropology, the book unwraps the performer as materially and digitally entangled with the sonic. Body Music joins a growing literature in music and gesture and embodied music cognition and responds to challenges posed by the "performative turn" in music theory and aesthetics. It connects these insights with fields of cognitive science and embodied human-computer interaction (HCI) to offer a performer-centric approach to developing new sonic technologies. This becomes then a humanistic response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Theory and practice are interwoven, with vignettes describing seminal concert performances by musicians like Michel Waisvisz, Laetitia Sonami, and Elaine Mitchener. These stories, drawn from personal musical experience, on tour and in the concert hall, situate us in a musical life at the heart of experimental, avant-garde practice.

The history and future of an alternative, oppositional translation practice.The threat of machine translation has given way to an alternative, experimental practice of translation that reflects upon and hijacks traditional paradigms. In much the same way that photography initiated a break in artistic practices with the threat of an absolute fidelity to the real, machine translation has paradoxically liberated human translators to err, to diverge, to tamper with the original, blurring creation and imitation with cyborg collage and appropriation. Seven chapters reimagine seven classic “procedures” of translation theory and pedagogy: borrowing, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation, updating them for the material political and poetic concerns of the contemporary era. Each chapter combines reflections from translation studies and experimental literature with practical guides, sets of experimental translation “procedures” to try at home or abroad, in the classroom, the laboratory, the garden, the dance hall, the city, the kitchen, the library, the shopping center, the supermarket, the train, the bus, the airplane, the post office, on the radio, on your phone, on your computer, and on the internet.

The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women's Contributions to Media Studies offers a fresh perspective on the intellectual history of the field of media studies, a broad scholarly field that encompasses the interdisciplinary and overlapping fields of media studies, cultural studies, and communication studies. By recovering the work of the diverse group of women who labored at the margins of media studies as it took shape during the formative years of communication research between the 1930s and the 1950s, and providing scholarly contexts for this work, The Ghost Reader shows that “intersectional considerations” were key modes of engagement for intellectuals, academics, and activists who happened to be women. They did so decades before feminist perspectives were reintegrated into histories of the field.

Online platforms are theatres of reputation conflict. YouTube celebrity standoffs, Amazon review bombing missions, adulation waves and shame-storms… These events, in their countless variations, permeate e-commerce sites and social media discourse. What do platforms do to reputation, by making it so widely fought for?Many commentators have celebrated online reputation’s potential, lamented its violence, or studied its effects within specific arenas. This book looks more broadly, considering how online reputation reshapes long-standing conflicts over who, and what, is valued within western capitalist societies.Through four chapters – on crowd-sourced credibility, microcelebrity, identity, and campaigning – Rosamond explores how online platforms extend historical conflicts over reputation within capitalism. As platforms make reputation seem more abstract, votable, and valuable than ever before, they also make reputations more volatile. They inaugurate reputational volatility as a widespread orientation of public life.Reputation is the aesthetic expression of the value ascribed to someone or something. It has long been a hinge between financial values, social life, and cultural expression. To understand the politics of online reputation, we must consider how platforms stage the volatility of reputations, and aestheticize conflict as reputation conflict.

Moving beyond John Cage's influential focus on "sound-as-sound," this study explores how installation and media artists reveal the material realities hidden within sonic experience. Sound emerges from material contestation-there can be no sound without the shifting of matter. Yet in our fractured relationship with materials, we have often forgotten these physical origins. Caleb Kelly argues that by listening to the edges of the sonic, where sound is not always aesthetic, we can think differently about both media and matter.Spanning two pivotal periods in art history, Material Sound traces the shift from the dematerialisation of art objects in the mid-20th century to contemporary practices that make tangible our material realities. The book examines artists who are well known for their sound-based practices, including Len Lye, Max Neuhaus and Laurie Anderson, alongside others not typically associated with sound, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Vito Acconci and Nancy Holt. The book also focuses on contemporary artists from the Asia-Pacific region, expanding the critical context for sound studies beyond Western perspectives.Drawing on extensive archival research and critical attention to artworks from both internationally renowned and under-recognized artists, Material Sound offers transformative insights into how mediated art experiences can deepen our understanding of ecological realities by listening to materials.

In Glitterworlds, Rebecca Coleman examines the ubiquity of glitter, following it as it moves across different popular cultural worlds and exploring its effect on understandings and experiences of gender, sexuality, class and race. Glitter is everywhere, from crafting to makeup, from vagazelling to glitter-bombing, from fashion to fish. Glitter also gets everywhere. It sticks to what it is and isn't supposed to, and travels beyond its original uses, eliciting reactions ranging from delight to irritation.Coleman investigates how girls engage with glitter in collaging workshops to imagine their futures; how glitter can adorn the outside and the inside of the body; how glitter features in the films Glitter and Precious; and how LGBTQ* activists glitter bomb homophobic and transphobic people.Throughout, Coleman attends to the plurality of politics that glitter generates, approaching this through the concepts of hope, wonder, fabulation, and prefigurative politics—all of which indicate the making of different, better worlds, although often not in ways that are straightforward or conventional. She develops an original account of future politics, where time is nonlinear and sometimes non-progressive. Coleman's argument brings together feminist cultural theory, feminist new materialisms, and theories on futures and temporality, in order to propose that we should understand glitter as a thing—vibrant, processual, transformational, and traversing boundaries between media and material, culture and nature, bodies and environments.

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change.In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative "unlikely publics" in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the "space of appearance" as the condition for political action and survival.By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.