[Commlist] CFP - The Women of IMAX - Feminist Media Histories

Call For Papers
/Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal/
**
*Special Issue on the Women of IMAX*
Guest Editors: Jessica Mulvogue and Allison Whitney
https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/pages/cfp 
<https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/pages/cfp>
In 2022 the International Union of Cinemas named IMAX Corporation as 
sponsor of their Womens’ Cinema Leadership Programme, tasked with 
addressing pay disparities among cinema operators. While this form of 
industrial recognition, and the goals it represents, might seem like the 
most modest of feminist endeavors, it points to a deeper history of 
women’s technical, creative, and emotional labor that has created and 
maintained the largest film format in history. IMAX is a corporate 
entity, but it is also an array of film production and exhibition 
systems and spaces, and it has produced an extensive giant-screen 
filmography. Not only is IMAX a relatively under-studied phenomenon, but 
the origins of the format in experimental and documentary practice, 
state-sponsored filmmaking institutions, and World’s Fairs allowed for 
women to have unusually prominent roles in its conceptualization and 
proliferation. Further, unique structures of the industry, such as the 
rare power of largely museum-based exhibition venues, often directed by 
women, as well as the prominence of filmmaking families with all of the 
gendered dynamics therein, invite the particular analytic frameworks 
offered by feminist historiography. Althea Douglas, Phyllis Ferguson, 
Diane Carlson, Sally Dundas, Toni Myers, Emma Thomas, Diane Roberts, and 
Zaha Hadid are among the many women who played crucial roles in the 
development, production, distribution, and exhibition of IMAX cinema.
This issue of FMH will illuminate the intersections of women’s labor in 
industrial processes, professional organizations, and screen cultures. 
We welcome pieces that locate IMAX within lineages of women’s work and 
gendered discourses in immersive media, production and exhibition 
technologies, educational film, audience and reception studies, industry 
studies, and more. While article topics may address the careers of women 
directors and producers, we will also transcend auteurist frameworks in 
favor of a more holistic view. We are especially interested in global 
and transnational perspectives, and we welcome scholars from every 
sub-field of media studies to contribute. As IMAX and other giant-screen 
exhibition systems become increasingly prominent in the global film 
industry, we believe it is important to foreground women’s key positions 
in IMAX’s history, such that critical frameworks grounded in 
intersectional feminist historiography can better inform future 
scholarship in this growing field.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- Profiles of women filmmakers, with a broad understanding of the work 
of making films
- Gender analysis of IMAX audiences
- Sound studies, including Voice-Overs, IMAX acoustics, and more
- Women and IMAX cinema architecture
- Gender and reception of IMAX films
- Women theater managers and technicians
- Commentaries on gender in specific IMAX films and/or categories of 
documentary
- Women and IMAX as educational cinema
- Women’s contributions to IMAX experiments at World’s Fairs and Expos
- Animation and IMAX
In addition to standard essays of 7000-8000 words, we are interested in 
photo and video essays, roundtables, oral histories, and other 
alternative forms of media scholarship. We encourage prospective 
contributors to contact the editors with ideas for this volume, and to 
discuss topics before proposal submission.
Proposals should be roughly 300 words, include a short bio, and be 
submitted no later than *September 30, 2024* to Allison Whitney 
((allison.whitney /at/ ttu.edu) <mailto:(allison.whitney /at/ ttu.edu)>) and Jessica 
Mulvogue ((jsm38 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) <mailto:(jsm38 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>). 
Contributors will be notified by *October 15, 2024*; article drafts will 
be due *January 15, 2025 *and then will be sent out for anonymous peer 
review. There are no submission or author fees involved in this publication.

/Feminist Media Histories/ publishes original research, oral histories, 
primary documents, conference reports, and archival news on radio, 
television, film, video, digital technologies, and other media across a 
range of historical periods and global contexts. Inter-medial and 
trans-national in its approach, Feminist Media Histories examines the 
historical role gender and sexuality have played in varied media 
technologies, and documents the engagement of women and LGBTQ 
communities with these media as audiences, users and consumers, creators 
and executives, critics, writers and theorists, technicians and 
laborers, educators, activists, and librarians. Feminist Media Histories 
is published quarterly by the University of California Press. More 
information is available here: online.ucpress.edu/fmh 
<http://online.ucpress.edu/fmh>.
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