How
has feminist media shaped the future?
A
new book by a visual and performing arts professor, Rox Samer, questions
conventional wisdom about changing gender standards during a crucial decade in
American history's culture and politics and adds new perspectives to the
debate.
The
Duke University Press book "Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the
1970s" explores how feminist media and culture facilitated analysis of
radical feminist futures. Samer, who employs they/them pronouns, claims that
"lesbian potentiality" refers to the various ways that women in the
1970s were recreating society through their exploration of lesbian life in
their personal and political lives, as well as in their art, media, and
culture.
According
to Patricia White, professor of film and media studies at Swarthmore College,
"[the book] uses the concept of potentiality to analyse media practises,
including film screenings, prison-based activist media, and science fiction,
that opened up multiple futures at a time of exciting political change. This
goes against conventional narratives that place 1970s lesbian feminist culture
firmly in the past. It provides us with fresh accounts of transgender activism
and cultural creation.
In
contrast to the frameworks we're most accustomed to using to think about gay
and lesbian issues, Rox SamerSamer, an expert in feminist, trans, and queer
media studies, describes the 1970s as a time when "women and queer people
were thinking a lot about the ways in which society and culture can be
radically reorganised."
The
book, which is the result of 10 years of research by Samer, describes how
feminist audiences would congregate to watch and debate women's films.
Samer
looks at movies and videos that were not commonly studied at the time, like
feminist prison documentaries, which are "rare and barely archived video
and film projects, made collectively by women in prison, in collaboration with
women outside of prison... under the auspices of prison reform and educational
programmes," according to the authors. Samer looks at how jailed women
challenged societal norms of gender conformity through the very material they
produced, as well as the strong bonds and allegiances they created in the
process.
Samer
points out that feminist science fiction, whose writers frequently depicted a
future or alternate world in which conventional concepts of gender no longer
applied, is another perhaps surprising source of lesbian potentiality in the
1970s.
Samer
describes the various media cultures that were simultaneously forming:
"The folks who were up for a night of feminist experimental and
documentary cinema were often a distinct group from those who were reading
science fiction literature at home."
Author
James Tiptree Jr., a pen name for Alice B. Sheldon, writes a narrative that
combines science fiction, feminism in the 1970s, and gender norms. Sheldon used
"Tiptree" as a platform to break into the male-dominated field of
publishing and to adopt a masculine demeanour when interacting with readers and
the feminist science fiction scene. Samer, who is creating a documentary with
the working title "Tip/Alli"—the way Sheldon signed letters after
being outed—says that there are many issues surrounding gender and sexuality
with this particular person. Samer cites the Tip/Alli incident as an effective
illustration of how the terms "woman" and "lesbian" have
come to mean similar things in modern parlance but may not have been as
well-defined in the 1970s. They claim that "both trans women and trans
males were at work in these places in plenty." "And folks who, now,
we might be tempted to label as trans masculine or nonbinary didn't always
identify that way or use those labels, but were living very ambiguously
gendered lives," the author continued.
Samer
wants readers to feel more knowledgeable about the history of lesbian feminism
and the significant political and cultural work that was accomplished in the
1970s. The secret, according to them, is to think about the possibilities that
sprang from that period and have assisted so many people in reimagining the
future rather than dwelling on "what might have been."
Samer
asserts that although the futures we can conceive today may be vastly different
from those of the past, we nonetheless engage in comparable creative
intellectual and political practices.