Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478018025)

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Jed Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called "lesbian potentiality"--a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex's racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of "lesbian" and the lesbian's former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

Author: Jed Samer
ISBN-10: 147801802X
ISBN-13: 9781478018025
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/18/2022
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d