Books and articles by Lucas Hilderbrand

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.
Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

Published by Duke University Press in 2009

Honorable Mention for the 2010 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

This addition to the Queer Film Classics series is an homage to Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliant and award-winning 1991 documentary that captures the energy, ambition, wit, and struggle of African-American and Latino participants in the 1980s New York drag ball scene. An unlikely hit when it was first released, the film is a lively, touchingly empathetic portrait of urban drag culture, introducing such performers as Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, and Angie Xtravaganza. Paris is Burning generated enthusiastic buzz from audiences and critics, as well as impassioned debate: did the film present a subversive perspective on the crass values of the 1980s, or did it exploit its subjects and pander to privileged movie audiences? Regardless, the film is considered one of the key films of the New Queer Cinema, and resonates with audiences to this day.
Author Lucas Hilderbrand contextualizes the film within the longer history of drag balls, the practices of documentary, the fervor of the culture wars, and issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2013 as part of the Queer Film Classics series

Curated and edited by David Evans Frantz, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Kayleigh Perkov

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Cock, Paper, Scissors and is published in collaboration with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue bring together works by an intergenerational group of fifteen queer artists who explore the collaged page or the scrapbook with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. Cock, Paper, Scissors draws from both archival collections and contemporary practices, focusing on how these artists reuse the pieces of print culture for worldmaking projects ranging from the era of gay liberation to the present.

Cock, Paper, Scissors includes an introduction and essays by the exhibition's curators; interviews with artists in the exhibition: Enrique Castrejon and Jonathan Molina-Garcia in conversation with Lucas Hilderbrand, Suzanne Wright in conversation with Ramzi Fawaz, and Jade Yumang in conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson; and reprints of historical and archival texts by Glenn Ligon, Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro, and two anonymous contributors.

Published by ONE Archives at USC Libraries in 2016

in Todd Haynes: A Magnificent Obsession special issue, Camera Obscura, 57 (2004)

Winner of the 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Art Works, Part 1 special issue, guest edited by Richard Meyer and David Román/AIDS Cluster: Twenty-Five Years, 1981-2006, edited by David Román, GLQ, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 2006)

in Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, eds. Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Co-editor, with Lynne Sachs, special issue of Millennium Film Journal, 51 (Spring/Summer 2009)

in Hilderbrand, ed,, In Focus: The C and M in SCMS, Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (February 2018)

in book forum on Pooja Rangan’s Immediations in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7, no 2 (2020)

Camera Obscura 83 ( 2013)

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 2013)

in Trans/Queer special issue, guest edited by Tavia Nyong’o and Francesca Royster, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol 25. No. 4 (December 2013

Born in Flames 30th anniversary special issue, guest edited by Dean Spade and Craig Willse, in Women & Performance 23, no 1 (2013)

Dossier on Under the Skin in JumpCut 57 (fall 2016)

In Screening Adult Cinema, eds. Peter Alilunas, Desirae Embrae, and Finley Freibert (Routledge, 2024)

Sexualities 19, no 4 (2016)

in The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (New York: Routledge, 2020)

Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Fall 2007)

in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video, edited by Ming-Yuen Ma and Erika Suderberg (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Winner of the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies book award for Best Edited Collection

in cinephilia dossier, guest edited by Jonathan Buchsbaum and Elena Gorfinkel, Framework, Vol. 50, No. 1-2 (fall 2009)

50th anniversary issue of Afterimage 50, no. 4 (2023)

Dossier on José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, edited by Joshua Javier Guzmán and Iván Ramos, Afterimage 49, no 1 (spring 2022)

Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2023, A11

Public Books, April 20, 2020

Flow, 11:12 (spring 2010)

Afterimage 46, no 3 (September 2019)

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 20, no 4 (summer 2018)

The 1970s special issue, WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly) 43, no 3-4 (Fall/winter 2015)

Media Fields 7 (December 2013)

Visual AIDS, April 2015

Divas! special issue, guest edited by Alexander Doty, Camera Obscura, 67 (Spring 2008)

Co-edited with Kate Horsfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press)