Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970S

Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970S - A Camera Obscura Book

Paperback (18 Mar 2022)

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Publisher's Synopsis

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.

Book information

ISBN: 9781478018025
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Imprint: Duke University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 791.436526643
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 312
Weight: 499g
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine width: 16mm