With the publication of 'The Routledge Queer Studies Reader', we pay homage to the publication, nearly twenty years previous, of 'The Routledge Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader'. Consistent with the notion of performativity that was a grounding concept for one influential strand of theorizing in the 1990s, the appearance on bookshelves around the English-speaking world of the 'Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader' confirmed the emergence of a new scholarly field, in so far as its own chunky materiality 'constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express'. It was less its authoritative heft-weighing in at 666 pages, the 'Reader' drew together forty-two essays, dwarfing every other similar title in the field to date-than the fact that, in laying a claim to the genre of the reader, it also laid claim to the broader existence of a capacious and thriving field of work, sufficiently coherent to be understood as lesbian and gay studies.

Dorothy Arzner's 'The Wild Party' (1929) has been reclaimed for a lesbian cinematic canon, but it is only relatively recently that scholars have engaged more directly with the homoerotics of Arzner's films, and the question of the representability of female homosexuality in late 1920s Hollywood classical cinema. This essay frames its engagement with these concerns in terms of 'The Wild Party's generic history. Often claimed as instituting a new lesbian genre, the all-female college film, 'The Wild Party's innovations can be more persuasively traced to its subtle transformation of an older, nearly exhausted genre: the flapper film. Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate 'The Wild Party' within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. If, as Patricia White has convincingly claimed, the representation of female homosexuality in Hollywood film is more often veiled by 'the public sexualization of the female body', then in the case of 'The Wild Party' it is the excessively feminine and kinetic bodies of the flapper that screen - that is, both project and hide from view - lesbian desire as a new form of cinematic knowledge and pleasure. Rather than isolating certain scenes for their lesbian subtext or their resistance to a contemporary pathologized lesbian reading, I argue that the sexual intelligibility of such scenes is inseparable from the kinetic aesthetics of the flapper that Arzner harnesses to organisze the film's visual schema.

Taking as its starting point a cluster of killings in Auckland in 2003-4, An Ordinary Person investigates and analyses the so-called 'homosexual advance defence' to murder. Interviews with lawyers in the cases, legal academics and a journalist are inter-cut with a stylized dramatization and deconstruction of the homophobic narrative that props up the use of provocation as defence to murder in criminal proceedings.

Released in 1995, 'Safe' (US/UK) seems in many ways radically different from Todd Haynes's earlier work. On one level, the film is a forward-moving story about the increasingly debilitating, unidentified illness of a middle-class, suburban homemaker. Devoid of flashbacks or more avant-garde techniques of narrative disruption or interruption, the film's structure appears deceptively straightforward. Attempting to find a cure for her disease, the central protagonist, Carol White (Julianne Moore), commences a journey that takes her away from her comfortable domestic environs in Los Angeles to a retreat in the desert of New Mexico, where she submits to various New Age-inspired therapies. Despite its apparently conventional content and form, 'Safe' confounded critics with its polysemic openness to multiple interpretations and its refusal to offer audiences any insight into the central protagonist's experience or emotional life.¹ These responses are symptomatic of the film's deployment of seemingly contradictory modes of filmmaking. 'Safe' regularly employs a distanced style of cinematography while constructing sequences that deploy editing techniques ordinarily used to suture viewers into the narrative. The effect of this combination is to withhold the identification with character that such classical techniques conventionally secure, while at the same time foregrounding their usual ideological effects.

On the face of it, 'Illusions in Motion' might seem a niche publication, lavishly illustrated - often from the author's own vast collection of ephemera, commercial apparatuses and toys - and designed to appeal primarily to specialists of an obscure mid-nineteenth-century media technology and entertainment: the moving panorama. It would be a mistake to read the book in this way. As one of the leading proponents of media archaeology, Erkki Huhtamo's achievement is not only to recuperate the forgotten moving panorama to media history, but also to demonstrate how it offers innovative insights into the historical formation of media culture.

How can we introduce first-year students to the skills, procedures, complexities, and pleasures of research in a relatively new interdisciplinary field like media studies? We faced this question-condensed in this dossier's main title 'Beyond Google'-in developing the introductory media studies course that provides the example for this essay. On its own, the phrase 'research skills' has the potential to be interpreted narrowly and reductively. We approached teaching research skills in our introductory media studies course in an enlarged humanistic sense, thinking of 'humanistic' as a placeholder for a bundle of thinking processes and skills, and related techniques of analysis, argument, interpretation, and inquiry. Across the course, learning activities and assessments were designed according to three main ideas or principles. First, as already indicated, research skills comprise interrelated cognitive thinking and research-related capacities, including the ability to read, analyze, describe, and articulate concepts through writing. As we'll explain shortly, this idea led us to teach research skills by disaggregating them initially, in order to help students explore the role each plays, in its own right, and in turn how they work together. Second, what are often referred to as generic research procedures need to be integrated with disciplinary learning. In this regard, strategies for searching, documenting, and organizing sources support interpretation and analysis of what constitutes scholarly writing or argument, and show the value of these procedures for studying substantive topics in media studies. Third, developing opportunities for students to reflect and build on their existing media experience and know-how, while negotiating new concepts and approaches, provides a bridge into disciplinary ways of thinking and working.