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Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work.

Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.

 

Examining how Latinx identity reimagines and connects communities through social media.

The very idea of Latinidad flattens identities, subsuming diverse peoples under a single racialized framework useful for corporate and political marketing. But it is not only ethnic identity that Latinidad tends to erase. In the first-ever study of Latinx social media, Urayoán Noel shows how historically marginalized Latinxs—including Black, Trans, undocumented, and disabled people—have used digital platforms to challenge hegemonic Latinidad and to build alternatives communities.

Incorporating elements of history, ethnography, and performance studies, Virtually Latinx traces the evolution of Latinx social media and blogging since the early 1990s, focusing on creative movements and vocabularies emerging and consolidating online. From Chicano/LatinoNet, Latina Lista, and Remezcla, to activists and performers on TikTok, online creators and platforms have spurred modes of art and activism that counter both Latinidad’s essentialized body politics and Big Tech’s domination of the information sphere. In dialogue with scholars of media, virtuality, and identity, Noel theorizes how hashtags like #Afrolatina, #Latinx, and #Latine have not only facilitated online exchange but also nurtured new knowledge formations surrounding Black, feminist, undocuqueer, Trans, and disability poetics and politics.