Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Web Exclusive)
Edited by Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Duke University Press, 2021. 339 pp. Paperback: $28.95.

Reviewed by Ciara Moloney

When Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term intersectionality in 1989, she was analogizing the double oppression of Black women to traffic at an intersection: just as the traffic can flow in multiple directions, at once or at different times, it does not make sense to think about race and gender oppression one at a time as standalone phenomena. Within Media Crossroads, this analogy is perhaps overloaded with significance, taken as not just illustrative, but instructive. Edited by Paula J. Massood, Professor of Film Studies at Brooklyn College, Angel Daniel Matos, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Professor in the Department of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, this volume is a collection of essays crossing film studies, media, gender studies, and more. Taking their cue from Crenshaw’s use of physical and spatial relations on the street, the book’s contributors apply an intersectional analysis to the ways in which spatial relations are constructed and represented in various visual mediums. Where most existing scholarship on space and media is, as they write in their introduction, “more aptly described as cinema and the city,” Media Crossroads takes on a broad swathe of media, ranging from Instagram selfies, to MGM musicals and network TV shows.

The book is arranged into sections on “Digital Intersections” (dealing with social media and video games), “Cinematic Urban Intersections,” “Urbanism and Gentrification,” “Race, Place, and Space,” and “Style And/As Intersectionality”—each of which contains three or four essays that analyze specific pieces of media through the theories of intersectionality, or, at the very least, using the term, if not the fully developed concept. Although the distinctions between the five sections seem somewhat arbitrary—even the relatively clear-cut sections on digital media or urban cinema include essays that could slip with ease into other sections—such “blurring” could suggest a further, interesting example of intersectionality. The more amorphous sections like “Style And/As Intersectionality” suggest an even greater advantageous or disadvantageous blurring effect.

Its premise is, in places, somewhat strained. At times, “intersectional analysis of space” seems too niche and narrow a topic to merit this collection. At others, it seems too broad—a broad enough concept so that almost anything can conceivably be made to fit within it. The broader approach seems to be the goal, even if it makes the collection as a whole less coherent and less interesting: “It is intended as a course reader and major research tool for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in cinema and media studies, gender studies, and other interdisciplinary fields,” the editors write in their introduction. While there are certainly some very brilliant chapters that I can see fulfilling this goal, the book’s eyes are bigger than its belly, ambition-wise.

But in the book’s most accomplished chapters, intersectionality and space feel strongly and compellingly connected. Jacqueline Sheean’s essay on Spanish video nasty “The Cannibal Man” (referred to by its original title, La semana del asesino, rather than the usual misleading English one) smartly focuses on a topic that naturally lends itself to thinking about intersectional identity and space: gay cruising. Set in late-Francoist Madrid, the film, Sheean argues, takes place on the geographical and social periphery, keenly aware of how the physical boundaries of streets, railroads, and rivers mirror the sharp delineations of class, race, and identity. Cruising becomes a way of mapping, mingling, and subverting these delineations. While Sheean feels the need to justify her thoughtful analysis of a film whose distributors provided sick bags at its premiere—at times attempting to elevate it out of the horror genre altogether—she shouldn’t. Her work justifies itself in its sharp, attentive, and analytical approach. Intersectionality and space, here, feel specific and concrete, illuminating both each other and the Eloy de la Iglesia film.

The same goes for Nicole Erin Morse’s chapter on trans people posting bathroom selfies, which elegantly deconstructs the assumptions on which the reactionary trans panic about public toilets is based—that bathrooms are not private spaces insulated from a threatening public, but inherently spaces of observation, performance, and surveillance, where the line between public and private is constantly negotiated. Morse highlights various social media trends to analyze and reimagine the physical space of the bathroom and the intersecting barriers faced by trans people, disabled people, and people of color.

Other strong essays include Desirée J. Garcia’s analysis examining the trope of a white starlet and her black maid in midcentury backstage musical films like Easter Parade, Somebody Loves Me, and Funny Girl. The dressing room is “the rare space in classical Hollywood musicals,” Garcia writes, “in which we see white and Black actresses sharing the screen.” The figure of the Black maid, Garcia argues, is a symbol of the white starlet’s success, but also the corresponding detriment to her morality and her relationships—elevating whiteness while justifying a check of women’s empowerment.

Discussing The Wire and The Long Good Friday, meanwhile, Erica Stein offers compelling insights into the race and class dynamics at play in the trope of gangsters going straight by getting into real estate—a topic that merits a longer analysis encompassing the gangster genre more widely.

In discussing Shirley Clarke’s 1961 experimental film, The Connection, Paula J. Massood acknowledges the value of “blurred boundaries” as a concept central to Crenshaw’s, work, which Massood explicates with polished precision. Massood like Sheean examines visual representations of urban space, arguing that “Clarke’s films are a product of an intersecting network of people, aesthetics, and industrial practices located in New York during the mid-twentieth century.” Based on Jack Gelber’s experimental play staged by New York’s Living Theater Company in 1959, The Connection transcends both direct cinema and cinéma vérité—forms in which Clarke had earlier worked in collaboration with Willard Van Dyke and D.A. Pennebaker, among others. In its layered reflexivity The Connection “ultimately disallows viewers the voyeuristic pleasure enabled by this seemingly unfettered gaze,” Massood perceptively observes. Characters not only address the camera but The Connection also draws attention to the presence of two filmmakers—the fictional filmmaker of a film-within-Clarke’s-film and Clarke herself—through intersections of on-screen and off-screen space, densely layered sound, and the complex choreography of camera movement and editing, no doubt arising from Clarke’s own background as a dancer

The highpoint of Media Crossroads is Wojcik’s essay on what she dubs “slow death cinema”—a cycle of films focused on the precariat from the last decade or so, including Sean Baker’s The Florida Project and Tangerine, the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Heaven Knows What, and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. Despite the name Wojcik bestows on them, these films are hyperkinetic, portraying the marginalized outer edges of post-Great Recession America in a fizz of anxious movement. Here, more than anywhere else, the issues of intersectionality and space feel not just relevant and well-reasoned, but vital.

Where previous generations of youth films, like American Graffiti, represented mobility as freedom and stability as stagnation, Wojcik argues that these associations are reversed in slow death cinema. Stability would be a welcome escape from the characters’ restless, rootless mobility, reflected in the episodic structure of these films and their frequent sequences of walking or getting the bus. She links them back to tramp films from the Twenties and Thirties, like those of Charlie Chaplin—portraying “forms of mobility that do not have hope of social mobility, wherein mobility stems from insecurity and does not have an end point.”

Wojcik’s essay is so good that it left me wistful. By exemplifying the possibilities of the book’s concept, it underlines how infrequently Media Crossroads lives up to those possibilities. “Intersectionality and space” is, in the book’s weakest sections, a couple of academic buzzwords to hit on mandate, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be a genuinely fresh and insightful perspective, illuminating films or other media in new ways. Wojcik’s chapter on mobility and marginalization in slow death cinema is the one most specifically about intersectionality and space and, thanks to its readability and insight, the one with the widest appeal.

While Wojcik’s and other chapters are both insightful standalone essays and fruitfully mine the premise of Media Crossroads, other inclusions work less well. In Joshua Glick’s essay on grey power activism in the documentary Number Our Days, his efforts to fit the film into a progressive, intersectional, antigentrification slot rest on the assumption that opposition to young people skateboarding is a righteous cause of the marginalized, rather than the cornerstone of conservative regulation of public space. The book’s weakest essay, Angel Daniel Matos’s chapter on Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda game series, distills many of the collection’s larger issues. Here, “intersectional” comes off feeling like a jargony buzzword inserted with blunt force rather than a framework to think through the topic at hand. Is Legend of Zelda really “saturate[d]” by “a queer impulse” because you can use magic to change your avatar’s body, or can travel through time? It’s an approach that you find in the worst kind of academic writing, in which specific, useful terms are applied so broadly and in such disparate contexts that they’re no longer describing anything, just alienating the reader.

And that’s a shame, because as Massood, Matos, and Wojcik highlight in their introduction, the interactivity of video games offers a whole different perspective on spatiality. In its attempt at breadth—to be an all-purpose humanities textbook—Media Crossroads, while offering some truly valuable essays, loses that specificity, and in the process, that insight.

Ciara Moloney is a PhD candidate at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Her film and television criticism has appeared in Fangoria, Paste, Current Affairs, and Crooked Marquee. You can follow her on Twitter @_ciaramoloney.

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