Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer
(Duke University Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
The central argument of Samer’s excellent book is that ‘more than a simple identity category’, ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s signified ‘the potential that gendered and sexual life could and would someday be substantially different, the heteropatriarchy may topple, and that women would be the ones to topple it’. The way to reconfigure society would be by erasing compulsory heterosexuality and in such a ‘lesbian future’, ‘the meaning of lesbian existence would not cease but would look, sound, and feel entirely different than it did in the 1970s present’. On one level, therefore, Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s is relevant to contemporary 21C debates on who may and who may not claim to be a lesbian but, more significantly, the range of its scope, imagination, and ambition far exceeds the narrow and prescriptive terms in which such debates are framed by the British media.
Importantly, this book is not predominantly theoretical in orientation but mostly concerned with the 1970s praxis of feminist film making, covered in the first two chapters, and feminist SF fandom, covered in the third chapter. The fourth chapter, ‘Tip/Alli. Cutting a Transfeminist Genealogy of Siblinghood’, examines the life, work, and influence of SF author James Tiptree, Jr/ Alice B. Sheldon. An epilogue brings the two strands of film and SF together in a discussion of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 SF indie feature film, Born in Flames. In the remainder of this review, I am going to focus on the SF content, but I very much recommend the book as a whole.
Samer draws their concept of ‘lesbian potentiality’ from Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘On Potentiality’, which argues that potentiality is central to human struggles for survival and expression. They explain it is a faculty for doing something, that is mostly fleetingly sensed in the very fact of its not being done; an awareness that something can be done without being either sure of having the capacity to do it or certain of the outcome. Potentiality is inherently political because it raises a constant threat to the status quo, which is dependent on everyone following narrowly prescribed lines of action. Becoming aware of this potentiality creates a painful experience of acute existential demand that is simultaneously the possibility of agency and social change. Samer argues that the 1970s feminist media they discuss didn’t only offer representations of lesbian potentiality but actually facilitated experiences of it. The example they give is the scene from Joanna Russ’s The Female Man in which Joanna kisses Laur in the knowledge that Laur will rebuke her and ‘the world will be itself again’, only for Laur to kiss her back, tearing reality for Joanna wide open and allowing her to see that anything was possible; this crucial moment is described in the novel as ‘that first, awful wrench of the mind’.
This wrench of potentiality is not just felt in The Female Man but across a wide range of futures depicted in 1970s lesbian feminist SF literature, including Russ’s ‘When it Changed’, Tiptree’s ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, and Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground; all of which feature women’s societies, or worlds in which the men have died either as a result of what have since become called Y plagues or (possibly) even as the result of losing a war of the sexes. Such texts sometimes seem biologically essentialist from a 21C perspective but, as Samer argues, what they actually do is play with SF’s capacity for temporal flexibility in order to contrast their imagined societies with heteropatriarchal pasts. This allows the stories to ‘work backward’ by exploring ‘lesbian potentiality in actuality, otherwise impossible, and lesbian potentiality gets extended in multiple directions against time’. In this way, the old binary gender divide is rejected so that what it means to be a woman, or a human, is radically altered and new senses of self are created. A close reading shows how Tiptree’s ‘Houston, Houston’ ‘reveals that the creative exercise of envisioning a world without twentieth-century men facilitated the imagination of more genders, not fewer, and opened the potential for more to come’.
In Chapter 3, ‘Raising Fannish Consciousness’, Samer describes how, unable to find a home at the time in either the wider feminist culture or SF fandom, 1970s feminist SF authors and their early readers set up their own ‘counterpublic’ of feminist SF fandom around fanzines such as Khatru, The Witch and the Chameleon, and Janus. Leading to the foundation in 1977 of the first feminist SF convention, WisCon. Samer notes that their own first WisCon (35, in 2011) modelled for them ‘what intergenerational comradery might look like’. Their analysis differs from that of Helen Merrick’s 2009 book, The Secret Feminist Cabal, in that rather than function as a history, it focuses ‘on the self-activity of a counterpublic still very much underway’ and involved in renegotiating and renewing the idea of what form a future beyond compulsory heterosexuality will take, even as it moves increasing beyond its 1970s origins. Chapter 4 on Tip/Alli provides a case study illustrating how the 1970s feminist SF counterpublic was able to adapt and grow into the 21C by showing how lesbian potentiality included the exploration of gender in ways that look nonbinary or transmasculine today. Samer discusses the legacy of Tip/Alli through insightful analysis of the history of the Tiptree/Otherwise award and the 2015 Letters to Tiptree collection.
Overall, Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s makes a convincing and necessary case for the argument that ‘feminist SF authors and fans claimed the genre for 1970s women but also for those folks of future genders who would continue to reconfigure social life’.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.