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.

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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.