Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer Cait McKinney (bio) Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer. Duke University Press, a Camera Obscura Book. 2022. 304 pages. $107.95 hardcover; $28.95 paperback; also available in e-book. Feminist theory and queer cultures often locate lesbian feminism a bit out of time, a formation that is over(ish) but drags on, affecting present movements. In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer enters this fray with a metaphor about being tongue-tied. Lesbian is a hard word to say, they suggest, both technically—as the transition from the slow, smooth les- to the hard, quick -bian requires a sudden shift in embouchure—and also conceptually, in that some associate the term lesbian with transphobia and white feminism. For Samer, speaking the word lesbian "always feels like molasses," because there is urgency in uttering the word but its lineages are a mouthful. This image is bound up with the author's emphasis on the gendered body, located in time, as what we always think and theorize from.1 The slow, careful being with 1970s lesbian media that unfolds in this book is geared toward a different kind of historiographic opening, which Samer names lesbian potentiality. With this concept, Samer puts forward a new theory of lesbian media history as offering alternative visions of sexual and gendered life, visions that emerge from concrete experiences of lesbian conviviality, including the film screening, video workshop, and fan newsletter. Lesbian documentary and science fiction, they assert, enact worlds without patriarchy, prisons, or binaries that wound. These visions are "potentialities" because they present former [End Page 209] futures that were never realized, that are indeed unrealizable, but that generate ideas scholars and activists committed to liberation "may want to imagine within the ongoing project of forging freer futures."2 Samer emphasizes that potentiality has implications for historiographies of media and of social movements, which are freed from the burden of making something progressive and linear out of the past to revel in historical contingencies as they either resonate onward or don't. "What happened and what did not happen" is as important in Samer's method as "what could have not been but was and what could have been but was not."3 As Samer puts it, sounding a bit weary of trends in media history, "there are historiographical alternatives to simply converting past potentialities into a resource in the service of our imagined future."4 Freed from the burden of being a precedent for feminists and queer people "today," lesbian media in this book are allowed to be expansive, messy. In this process, Samer paints lesbian as a structure of feeling more than an identity category and a capacious concept for which people who might call themselves trans today have always had affinity. Samer builds on the work of Giorgio Agamben to carefully contextualize lesbian potentialities as existing and concrete rather than generic. Unlike related theories such as José Esteban Muñoz's aesthetic focus on queer futurity, potentialities are not abstract or utopian.5 Rather, they emerge from grounded conditions of lesbian feminist collaboration across media, politics, and affective life. Samer finds these lesbian potentialities in counterpublics formed around documentary film and video and science fiction fandoms, each of which take up one-half of the book. In the first two chapters on documentary, Samer begins with a study of film distribution, an under-theorized aspect of 1970s lesbian feminism's cultural infrastructure. Investigating the origins of Women Make Movies and some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Samer frames the traveling film screening as an eventful space where audiences labored to generate, negotiate, and revise meanings between their local contexts and the feminist politics of the films they watched together. Feminist distribution is a culmination of activist-artist labor, technologies and systems, and routines through which audiences are invited to encounter media. Returning to the concreteness of lesbian potentiality, Samer shows how film distribution as a system combines with dialogic consciousness-raising as a practice. This conjuncture happens in and through a political vision of what an end to compulsory heterosexuality...