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.

Jed Samer is Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University and editor of the “Transgender Media” special issue of Spectator.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Living in the Lesbian's Former Future: A Media Historiography of Imagination for When the Present Is Past  1
1. Feminist Media in Movement: The National Women's Film Circuit and International Videoletters  39
2. Producing Freedom: 1970s Feminist Documentary and Women's Prison Activism  90
3. Raising Fannish Consciousness: The Formation of Feminist Science Fiction Fandom  138
4. Tip/Alli: Cutting a Transfeminist Genealogy of Siblinghood  179
Epilogue. Potentiality Born in Flames  216
Notes  231
Bibliography  267
Index  281