GLIMMERINGS

Lesbian Potentiality

There is a description and accompanying screenshot in Rox Samer’s book Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s (103–4) that I can’t get out of my mind: two Black women in a U.S. prison are interviewing each other about their experience. Initially compliant with the requirements of the formal documentary interview, its sober conventions of bodily comportment, linguistic exchange and epistemological inquiry, they begin to smile at each other and then break out into laughter. Their self-reflexive critical analysis of prison experience is tempered by—and also transmitted through—their embodied joy in each other’s company, and their tender care for each other. More than an outtake that leverages a discourse of authenticity of performance and documentary realism, this scene documents their procedure. They are putting the documentary interview to the test. While we might read this scene in terms of the compelling literature on personhood and the screen test (Gustafson 2011), it also encapsulates Rox Samer’s critical project, their interest in the capacity of various forms of experimental and culturally marginal feminist media of the 1970s to document, perform, embody and project alternative ways of being in the world in terms of what, in retrospect, we should understand as the then-capacious sexual and political sign of lesbianism. It is a scene—at least in its multi-mediated retelling—in which the erotic becomes palpable, not only between the two women on screen but also projected outwards to towards me as a reader. Like Audre Lorde’s eros, it forms an ephemeral, affective connection or “bridge . . . which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between [us], and lessens their threat of difference” ([1978] 1993, 314). In Samer’s account, and my imagined spectatorship, it becomes an “anti-antirelational scene” (Muñoz [2009] 2019, 14) of lesbian potentiality. This affecting sequence is from a 1974 prison documentary, Songs, Skits, Poetry and Prison Life made, according to the film’s title card, by the women of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (102). It is one of a subset of feminist prison documentaries that Samer discusses in the context of what appears at first glance to be an eclectic critical archive of US feminist media culture of the 1970s: the production, distribution and screening of experimental and participatory films and videos, and the creation and publication of feminist science fiction or SF literature, its counterpublics and fan cultures. While acknowledging that these two moving image and print media cultures rarely intersected, Samer proposes that their consideration alongside each other makes lesbian potentiality legible as a potent, culturally specific, historical phenomenon.

Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s opens with “Feminist Media in Movement: The National Women’s Film Circuit and International Videoletters,” a twin case study of two significant distribution/exhibition and participatory film and video projects. The National Women’s Film Circuit (NWFC) and International Videoletters were catalysed by feminist organizing in 1975 located on different coasts of the US, the Conference of Feminist Film and Video Organizations in New York, and the Feminist Eye Conference in Los Angeles. The NWFC—which eventually split into Iris Films and Moonforce Media—packaged intersectional feminist and lesbian film programs for exhibition. International Videoletters comprised various feminist groups who compiled videos of local news and issues for exchange with others in order to build a network and sense of community. In the following chapter, “Producing Freedom: 1970s Feminist Documentary and Women’s Prison Activism,” Samer turns to focus on an understudied archive of Black feminist media: the already mentioned Songs, Skits, Poetry and Prison Life, as well as We’re Alive (CIW Video Workshop with UCLA Women’s Film Workshop [1974]) and Inside Women Inside (Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio and Third World Newsreel [1978]). While these two chapters form a pair of sorts, chapter three “Raising Fannish Consciousness: The Formation of Feminist Science Fiction Fandom,” marks a shift in focus to a different synchronic archive, that of the feminist science fiction fan communities and readerships in the US in the 1970s. In the fourth chapter, Samer considers the career and life of SF author James Tiptree, Jr. Highly engaged in the SF community documented in chapter three, Tiptree was part of the SF new wave of the late 60s and 70s alongside authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany. In 1977 Tiptree was “outed” as Alice B. Sheldon, and the title of this final chapter evokes Samer’s interest in this event and the trajectory of their argument: “Tip/Alli: Cutting a Transfeminist Genealogy of Siblinghood.” This sketch of the book’s contents indicates its scope but fails of course to convey the rich detail of its case studies. Drawing on interviews as well as extensive archive research, Samer engages in close and sometimes speculative readings of diverse materials, traversing questions of activist media infrastructures, spectatorship and counter-publics. Across the book’s chapters, they track how the capaciousness of the sign Lesbian, its “nebulous and dynamic” nature (33), is mobilized by feminist media culture activists, spectators, authors and readers/fans. Lesbian potentiality emerges within—or as an effect of the critical-historical analyses of—these minor media cultures and their archives, and via the resonances established through their conjunction and differences.

A Lesbian Social Vision

There are some enticing discoveries in the archive, such as the screening questionnaires collected by Moonforce Media which Samer frames as ephemeral archives of “lesbian feminist affectivity” (57–70), reproducing two examples as figures 1.7 and 1.8. Mediated by the exhibition producer who completed them, the questionnaires make palpable the different voices of those who attended screenings, as well as the thinking of the producers who noticed and mediated this discourse. Samer considers what the questionnaires evidence in terms of, among other things, the strangeness for some viewers of seeing lesbian lives on screen, the lack of coherent community that screenings sometimes instantiated, and nuanced demands of working-class lesbians and lesbians of color to see themselves on screen while scrutinizing the racial effects of the representation of white women’s sexualities. This is just one example of many in which Samer demonstrates a distinctive attention to producer, audience and fan discourse—the voices of those in each network and community—with the materiality of the archive as ephemeral evidence—books, zines and other paper-based artefacts. Noting Samer’s caveat that we should not necessarily think of these case studies as “resources” for the present, I could not help thinking that we still have much to learn from 1970s feminist attempts to cultivate active, politically engaged audiences, including screenings organised to encourage discussion and debate beyond carefully calibrated Q&A sessions or impact campaigns.

It was only in retrospect that I fully appreciated Samer’s conjunction of these divergent feminist media archives. In the epilogue Samer draws on two key texts—Teresa De Lauretis’s still perceptive analysis of feminist politics and theory “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory” (1989, 127–48) and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983)—to crystallize the connections between the book’s media and genres, and their argument about the presence, cultivation, circulation and amplification of lesbian potentiality. More than retrospectively justifying in critical-historical terms the conjunction of these archives, the epilogue implicitly positions the book’s project in relation to a more specific feminist theoretical genealogy. De Lauretis was one of several influential voices in the 70s and after (see also, for example, Gledhill 1987, Hansen 1991, Russell 2002, Stewart 2005) who advocated for and led field-defining shifts in critical attention from technology, the gaze, and the text to “the wider public sphere of cinema as a social technology . . . its possibilities of both production and counterproduction of social vision” (134, my emphases). Samer expands this attention to cinema to include other kinds of electronic and print media, framing them as social technologies—deployed by historical individuals, groups and networks—that also have the potential to produce or counterproduce a lesbian “social vision.”

Taking the book’s epilogue as an invitation to loop back to the book’s keyword, we can see how lesbian potentiality emerges across the book as an expansive, critically and historically enabling concept. In a field in which many are still drawn to visibility as object of inquiry and sign of social progress, despite sophisticated theoretical and historical arguments otherwise (see for example Jagose 2002, Traub 2002, Villarejo 2003), Samer takes up and revises potentiality as a productive concept that traverses both the individual and social dimension of lesbian being and politics. One of Samer’s necessary starting points (4–5) is Giorgio Agamben’s essay “On Potentiality” (1999, 177–84). For Agamben, potentiality is a “faculty” or a “power” that a person can exercise, or not; it exists in virtual and actualised forms; as a virtual quality, potentiality is a present absence or, using the philosophical term, a “privation” (179). If a potentiality is actualized, say as a new lesbian identity or way of living, potentiality does not exhaust itself. Alternatively, and this is important for Samer’s project, even if what is desired politically and culturally—a new way of being in the world, or more ambitiously a new world—is not realized, its potential remains. As Agamben writes: “Contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality and, in this way, gives itself to itself” (184). The odd thing about potentiality—which is also its gift—is that it can never be destroyed. It is in a sense self-replicating, though it cannot necessarily be perceived in terms of continuity or discontinuity. Samer strategically leverages this latter quality, not exactly ahistorical but more a kind of sideways attenuation of historical causality, in order to open up a space for an alternative history of lesbian pasts and futures.

Though Samer’s starting point is Agamben’s interpretation and extension of Aristotle’s concept of potentiality (occasionally re-anchored to Agamben’s argument in later chapters), Samer revises and particularizes potentiality so that it becomes a multivalent phenomenon. Lesbian potentiality offers an alternative—though not always unambivalent—perspective on lesbian existence and experience. It foregrounds the presence of a quality shared by all humans, akin to Lorde’s eros or the erotic. It can be recognized as already present (even in its absence) and it can also be cultivated individually and collectively via forms of cultural production. Here is where Samer modifies the two forms of potentiality that Agamben conceptualizes: generic potentiality (cultivated through various forms of education or training, such as the generic potentiality of the child), and existing potentiality (which is already present as a capacity of human being). Though Samer claims to focus on the latter kind of potentiality, their development of lesbian potentiality as it was present, recognized and fostered individually and collectively in activist filmmaking circles and feminist SF networks, reworks generic and existing potentiality into a new version for queer media historiography. The bigger critical insight that emerges from Samer’s work is that lesbian potentiality in the US in the 1970s is a fragile posthuman experience, always dependent on and entangled with material and technological forms and discourses, and vibrant practices of media production, distribution and reception.1

Samer’s concept of lesbian potentiality develops earlier iterations of potentiality and its cognate concepts in queer studies. Potentiality’s most well-known and influential uptake occurs in José Esteban Muñoz’s celebrated book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity ([2009] 2019). For Muñoz, potentiality, alongside Ernst Bloch’s “no-longer-conscious,” permits the subtle and more hopeful theorisation of a fugitive queerness: it is “not quite here; it is . . . a potentiality” (21). But a future-oriented potentiality that looks to re-encounter the queer past also goes under other names in queer studies, including poetry and poetics (Keeling 2019), the reparative (Sedgwick 2003), re-enchantment (Wallace 2020), and even retrospectatorship’s “irreducible play of past and present” (White 1999, xxiv). Potentiality and its cognates variously underpin a significant protocol for queer historiography: that “it is also possible . . . to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past . . . could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (Sedgwick 2003, 146). As my emphasis indicates, the work of alternative or counter-histories requires imagination. The book aligns with and extends queer scholarship that centres and values a theory and politics of the imagination, whether Muñoz’s project to “stave off the failures of imagination that [he understands] as antirelationality and antiutopianism in queer critique” ([2009] 2019, 18), Nicole Seymour’s queer ecological archive of “achievements of imagination” (2013, 10, original emphasis), or Kara Keeling’s insistence that “imagination is among the weapons on offer in societies of control” (2019, 13). In the context of a field in which “negativity is queer theory’s most important contemporary idiom, if not its defining sensorium” (Wiegman 2017, 221), Samer follows these reparative and utopian (or more precisely anti-antiutopian) queer critical genealogies, looking to the 70s feminist media archive to reprise its imagined futures as alternative lesbian idioms of potentiality.

While Samer tracks the occasions and situations in which lesbian potentiality can be recognised in terms of its (absent) presence or cultivation, it can at times be a fuzzy concept, frustratingly difficult to grasp. One implication of the concept of lesbian potentiality only became clearer to me when revisiting Samer’s discussion of Chick Strand’s film Fever Dream (1979) (25–6) and the question of lesbian existence. This concept as developed by Adrienne Rich comprises both the historical fact of lesbian existence and the ongoing cultural work of “[creating] the meaning of that existence” (Rich, cited by Samer, 1). Lesbian potentiality modifies and extends the meaning of “lesbian existence” so that the latter must now always include the existence of, the absent presence of, or the unactualized potential for some kind of unrecognizable historical present or future of genders, sexes and erotic relations. In other words, the historical fact of lesbian existence becomes contingent (in a way aligned with post-Foucauldian histories of sexual subjectivity), as do the effects of the cultural work that sustains that existence, both the sites of a now expanded sense of future-oriented lesbian potentiality.

One of the more striking outcomes of this conceptual and historiographical framework arises in the fourth and final chapter on Tip/Alli. Here, as in other chapters, Samer makes important critical space for thinking about the impacts of lesbian culture-making in the 70s including the articulation of imaginary spaces that opened up possibilities of lesbian being, existence and ways of living that were not predetermined. This not only expands the cultural meaning of “lesbian existence” but points towards its co-implication in other past/present/future possible gender identities and sexualities, including trans ones. We can see this in Samer’s account of Tip/Alli’s award-winning SF novella “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which envisages a future world without men, of technological reproduction (cloning) of beings that appear as women, or who can pass as cis men. As Samer comments, “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” (22). Samer’s is a double argument, not only about the historical participation of trans people in feminist cultures and politics, but the capacity of lesbian media cultures to nurture trans futures that they could not anticipate. This is not to say that there is a direct causal relation but rather that activists, media makers, writers, readers and fans worked to establish practices, environments and conditions that nurtured this open-ended potential.

The Ideological Work of Identity

I admire the historiographical ambition of Samer’s work but found at times some aspects of its theoretical armature elusive. Lesbian potentiality on occasion becomes a very elastic hold-all, and at times I wished for more detailed elaboration of other concepts drawn into its orbit. To give one example, the engaging discussion of the NWFC screening questionnaires mentioned above—compelling evidence that raises its own (tangential?) questions of archival fever—is framed in terms of the concept of “affectivity,” following Kara Keeling (2007). In a short, dense passage Samer glosses “affectivity” as the cognitive processing of affects, and as “central to a subject’s survival of reality as well as reality’s (re)production” (57). This is an important moment in which Samer expands their account of media reception to include the time, money, affect and labor of spectators. Yet I found it difficult to appreciate its implications without some further context for the development of the concept of affectivity which in part names the unacknowledged labor of the consumer of industrial mass cinema. For Keeling (who in turn draws on the work of Henri Bergson, Antonio Gramsci and most crucially Marcia Landy), “My embrace of a notion of affectivity is meant to signal just how deeply capitalism’s drive toward globalization strikes” (25). In this instance, I would have found it helpful for Samer to bring to the surface of their text why this concept was nevertheless still important for their account of the lesbian potential of minor feminist cinemas, SF counterpublics and fandoms, including more detail about what dimensions of “affectivity” they were extending, foregrounding, amplifying or deliberately occluding for their own project.

The selection of Samer’s book for the Camera Obscura book series published by Duke University Press is testament to the promise of its contribution to the fields of lesbian, queer and feminist media studies, its innovative approach to the media historiography, its conceptualization of an archive of feelings for the future, and its contribution to and recovery of transfeminist perspectives. Samer has a strong sense of their generational perspective and revisionist contribution to the field (29–30), while attuned to complexities of queer and trans historiography, and the identifications and affective relations across time of the nonbinary or trans historian. It is here that Samer negotiates a crucial tension in queer history and historiography in relation to the identity, subjectivity and agency of the queer and/or trans historian. Though they make claim to, and center, their identity in the work, in the spirit of feminist and queer theory in which the autotheoretical is an important methodology, Samer asserts that their re-visionist history “need not demand the survival of one’s identity as its reward” (36). This anti-identitarian positionality—one that nevertheless still values the existence of lesbian and trans identities, cultures and ways of knowing—acknowledges the ideological work of identity and its function in systems of sexuality, while keeping alive the potentiality of queer historiography itself, its critical attunements to the expansion and pluralization of the queer past as a way to re-imagine the present and its near-at-hand queer futures.

As they develop the multivalent concept of lesbian potentiality across the book, Samer plants a trail of lux metaphors for lesbian potentiality: its “luster” (5), brightness (60), “faint glow” (89), “gleam” (92, 121). While no doubt for SF fans these are familiar tropes scattered like breadcrumbs through Samer’s text, they also act as an Agambian refrain, pointing to his association of potentiality with light, and impotentiality with darkness. Perhaps idiosyncratically, this trope of luminosity, bright or otherwise, reminds me of the foundling Oscar Wilde’s glowing green-jewelled brooch in the opening sequence of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), the magical memory-object that travels from the future via UFO to the past present-time of the film. This recollection, a filament of my imagination, is one example of how Samer’s work promises to open up other critical perspectives on how the mobilization if not mash-up of contradictory media genres might enable us to recover the past’s queer potentialities.

Susan Potter is Chair of Film Studies in the School of Art, Communication and English at the University of Sydney, Australia, situated on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. She is the author of Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association.

Note

1. 1. Engaging with Samer’s book has provoked for me further questions, beyond the scope of this review, about the critical advantages and limitations of queer appropriations of the Western philosophical concept of potentiality, its tensions with Foucauldian conceptualizations of power, as well as indigenous thinking on potentiality and power that draws on and addresses significant limitations in both. In relation to the latter, see for example the work of Goenpul-Quandamooka scholar Moreton-Robinson 2020b; [2000] 2020a.

Works Cited

1. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2. Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2019. “What is a Human Possibility?” The Puritan, August. http://puritan-magazine.com/human-possibility-belcourt-2019/ (accessed December 1, 2023).
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6. Hansen, Miriam. 1991. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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21. White, Patricia. 1999. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
22. Wiegman, Robyn. 2017. “Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You.” Cultural Critique 95: 219–43.