When Sofia Coppola won best director at Cannes on Sunday (for her Civil War thriller The Beguiled), reporters and critics couldn’t help but notice that no woman had won that particular honor since Soviet filmmaker Yuliya Solntseva’s win in 1961 for Chronicle of Flaming Years, and, before that, never.
Swedish director Sara Jordenö was terrified at the prospect of making her first feature. Around the beginning of 2012, she was presented with the opportunity to chronicle New York’s kiki scene, a younger and activistic offshoot of the ballroom scene. Entry into that insular world—which is known in the mainstream…
The percentage of LGBTQ characters expected to appear as series regulars on primetime broadcast TV during the 2016-2017 season is 4.8 (43 out of 895), which is the highest percentage media watchdog/opinion-having organization GLAAD has ever clocked. That number was released in the org’s annual Where We Are On TV…
A new study revealed what we probably all would have guessed about how disabilities are represented in media: Rarely, and usually not by people actually living with those disabilities.
Actor Eddie Redmayne will be playing the trans woman title character of the novel The Danish Girl in an upcoming film adaptation. The novel is a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Lili Elbe, who might be the first recorded transgender woman to have had sex reassignment surgery as it is known today. Not…
Representation matters, and the Emmys, if compared to other award shows (especially the Oscars), have been pretty proactive about identifying LGBT representation. And this year, there is a quite respectable group of seven LGBT actors nominated for playing LGBT characters.
Finally, some answers from the gaming industry! After years of clamoring from female video game fans who just want their existence acknowledged by the billion-dollar industry they dump all of their money into, one game director is speaking out. It's not that video game designers are sexist—it's not that they don't want…
Over on facebook, The Ubuntu Biography Project collects the stories of black LGBT+ people. There's a mix of the uplifting and the tragic, but the biographies are all pretty thorough.
The Women's Media Center has released an update to its annual State of the Media report; its findings are (as always) pretty grim. This year: out of 27,000 pieces of content — a category that includes "TV networks, newspapers, news wires, and online news sites" — reviewed for the study, 63.4 contributors were male.…
George Takei announced that he is hosting an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live (no date confirmed yet). And in his own diplomatic words about SNL's diversity problem: "It will mark only the third time someone of Asian descent has been invited to host SNL...That has left a rather awkward void in representation…
Well, this is unsettling. According to this year's data, not a single female student, black student, or Latino student took the AP computer science exam in either Montana or Mississippi. That means it was pretty much just all white dudes. Not exactly a heartening indicator of all that "diversity in tech" that tech…
Presented without comment (but not without a little bit of heartbreak). (Oh, there's apparently one woman on staff; she was just cut out of the picture.)
We're now in year six of sunny post-racial America, and things are going great, right!?! We have a biracial president, and, uh...Halle Berry won an Oscar that time...and...a vocal contingent of Americans will eagerly whip themselves into a racist frenzy over a kid having a white mom and a black dad in a fucking…
Last year—riffing on a hand-wringy Wall Street Journal article about the thematic "darkness" of YA books—blogger Kate Hart created a "YA Cover Color Wheel," sorting the top titles of 2010 by their literal colors. Then she dug into some more pointed analysis of "where YA covers are most definitely NOT dark:…
As Meghan McCain writes, "to be a powerful woman in politics is to be controversial."
