What do you think about when you hear the phrase “second wave feminism”? Is it the stereotype of the bra-burning, angry lesbian feminist? Or consciousness raising groups where women looked at their vulvas with hand-held mirrors? Lesbian separatists creating their own “women-only” communes? Or groups of white, straight, middle class women fighting for their rights, while leaving behind women of color, poor women, lesbians, and trans people?

Jed Samer’s book Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s looks at 1970s feminist experimental film, video, and science fiction literature to complicate and expand our understanding of this divisive period of feminist history. Samer’s book points to the limitations of the stories, like the ones I listed above, that have come to symbolize 1970s lesbian feminism. Lesbian Potentiality helps us see how particular texts imagined lesbian feminism and “lesbian” itself as a multiplicitous, liberating concept.

“What ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’ signified was not a coherent and consistent thing across the thousands of people who made their way to lesbian feminist spaces. That’s a huge impetus of my project,” Samer, an incoming Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University, told me when we chatted in early July.

Like Mairead Sullivan’s book Lesbian Death, Samer wants to expand our understanding of this history beyond sexist stereotypes or generational divides: “My book is in large part a story of how there was so much more. Because feminism was so much more.”

Samer brings feminist film studies into conversation with lesbian feminist theory to explore how experimental film and science fiction expand our understanding of the term “lesbian.” As they write, “lesbian” in these texts signified “the potential that gendered and sexual life could and would someday be substantially different, that heteropatriarchy may topple, and that women would be the ones to topple it.”

In other words, in these texts “lesbian” was not just an identity category that described women who loved other women — it was a force with the potential to help us move towards a more liberatory future.

“Potentiality” is a key concept for Samer. They draw on Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben to theorize the politics of lesbian potentiality. For Samer, lesbian potentiality is not necessarily about what historically has happened to our configurations of gender and sexuality since the 1970s, what should have happened, or what life should be like now, but instead about what could have happened. They write, “These cultural texts engender new space-times from which women might love and live differently than they do in the present but also suggest that the lesbian existence they envision need not come to be, or stay as it is should it come to be.”

In our conversation, Samer explains lesbian potentiality like this:

“Very often when we think about the past, whatever past we’re thinking about, separate of lesbian feminism or feminist past or queer pasts, is that it feels set in stone. Right? It feels like this is what happened, and it happened because this guy did this, and that gal did that, and they wrote this, and these people said that, and therefore X, Y, and Z happened. 

And we experience that sort of certainty and concrete-ness in direct contrast to how we experience our own present, right? We look around the world and we’re like, what’s going to happen tomorrow? What’s gonna happen in the upcoming election? What’s gonna happen in Gaza? It all feels so uncertain. And both in really terrifying ways and, at times, really exciting ways. 

And when we are part of social movements, when we’re at protests, when we’re organizing, when we’re creating queer spaces, there is this sense of possibility of what could come out of such commitments, from listening to one another, to organizing together, to creating art together. We can forget that that was there in the past too. 

And so even as only certain films were made, only certain books were written, if the conversations around such films and such books went certain directions and not others, doesn’t mean that other things couldn’t have happened. 

However thorough our archival research, we don’t know all that was said or done [in the past]. And while certain texts and figures rise to the top of our historical memory, that is often in fact the result of capitalism and white supremacy that allows certain voices to speak for millions. They weren’t the only people speaking and organizing at that time.…

If meaning around this word [“lesbian”] calcified into a more singular unified vision such that it came to appear to many as a very limited framework for thinking gender and sexual possibilities, in the 70s it was so not monolithic. It was so bountiful of meaning and so open to contestation.”

“Lesbian potentiality” is about acknowledging the possibilities of what could have been and what could still come to be. Using “lesbian potentiality” as a framework, Samer wants to move beyond particular narratives (that 1970s lesbian feminism was a white cis women’s movement, for example), to explore the multiplicity the word “lesbian” has held. In doing so, Samer complicates our relationship to the past, present, and future.

Importantly, Samer does not want to romanticize the past as a time of more liberatory potentiality, or to throw it away for its supposed lack of intersectional feminist politics:

“It’s not to say not to criticize limited visions of the past. But maybe it’s more productive, more fruitful to understand ourselves as historical subjects too, where just like those in the 60s and 70s whose visions for the future did not come to be, ours may not too. We’re part of an ongoing movement. There’s ways to both distinguish different political movements across time while also linking them as part of a broader movement for freedom.” They add, “What is the past was once a present, was once a future. Our present is a former future and will someday be the past. Individuals, communities, those organizing, as well as companies and states, everyone is invested in a future. And the future is up for grabs, [and] always will continuously be so.”

Samer often writes in the conditional tense. The conditional tense in English allows us to speculate about the past and future: what could have happened, what should happen, what might happen. Using the conditional tense allows Samer to gesture towards the fact that the past, present, and future are both indeterminate and intertwined with one another. Holding the past, present, and future in conditional tension with one another allows Samer to gesture to the fact that each of these temporalities is open to as yet-to-be-determined meanings; each moment in time is, as they say, “up for grabs.”

While “lesbian potentiality” is theoretically complex, the chapters of the book are grounded in historical archival research. The first two chapters examine feminist independent film and video collectives and feminist prison documentaries of the era. The third and fourth chapters explore science fiction literature: the history of feminist science fiction fandom and an in depth look at the writing of James Tiptree, Jr., the pseudonym of prolific sci fi author Alice Sheldon. Samer interweaves their historical research with their theoretical framework, allowing us to see how each case study illuminates something different about lesbian potentiality.

I was most curious to hear about Samer’s interest in Tiptree, as Samer is hard at work finishing a documentary that complements the book called Tip/Alli about the author. What drew Samer to Tiptree’s writing and Sheldon’s life story?

They shared, “I would love to point Autostraddle readers to James Tiptree, Jr.’s life and work. Read ‘Houston, Houston, Do you read?”, read “With Delicate Mad Hands,” and see in these lesbian feminist futures the varied ways of doing gender. There are trans men and trans women in these lesbian feminist science fiction futures. It might not be apparent because we’re so distracted by the science fiction-ness of it all, the alien-ness of it all, but in fact what’s being imagined in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by Tiptree is very very differently gendered worlds that are intentionally incomprehensible to our present because they’re so alien and Other, but nonetheless are the results of the imagination of a 70s lesbian feminist.”

The documentary explores the feminist, queer, and trans resonances of Tiptree’s writing, and features interviews with some of the feminist, queer, and trans readers influenced by Tiptree’s stories over the past five decades.

Samer takes much inspiration from the history they study. In Lesbian Potentiality, Samer writes, “I look to the past not for myself or my trans siblings but for a history of the reimagination of gender and sexual existence, which we might in turn pass along.” Samer re-reads the feminist, queer, and trans past not to find a roadmap for the future, but instead for “a capacious commitment to the unknowability of the feminist future” with its “many gendered lesbian potentiality.”

This past is personal for Samer as well. In our conversation, Samer talks about the influence Tip/Alli has had on their own life:

“This dissertation and book was started by someone who understood themselves to be a queer woman and was published by someone who understood themselves to be a queer non-binary trans masc…I think it’s fair to say that Tip/Alli had a huge hand in that evolution. 

Cameron Awkward-Rich writes beautifully about how reading ‘transes’ folks, and that of course is not how the world typically thinks about transness. Right? You are supposed to have known this truth about yourself since you were two and have articulated it consistently across decades and therefore as an adult are granted access to hormones and a life that one has wanted to live all along. 

When in fact, for many of us, we were plopped down in this world and told this is the way it is, and it can sort of feel ‘not right’ forever, but also that not-rightness is not just about you, it’s that this [world] is fucked up, right? It’s not solely about individuals and making individuals accommodated or comfortable or tolerated, but discomfort with the way the world is organized.

Our encounters with others who’ve felt a similar discomfort across time, and have expressed it through different genres and different modes, can enable us to feel our own way towards a future, both in community with those around us and personally. So yeah, would I have transitioned if I hadn’t read Tiptree? Who knows? It might have taken something else later. 

I deeply love this person. I think when I was 25, I thought I was in love with this person, and at 38, I think I now see a lot of myself in them. And that may have in fact been true at 25 and I just didn’t know it, is what I would say. Tiptree, Alli Sheldon, feels like kin to me.

It takes me back to being 17 and coming out as bisexual to parents too, and they’re like, ‘is that just because all your friends are?’ And at the time you want to say ‘no!’, but also, maybe, yes? You have to be introduced to the possibility to consider it. I mean props to those who are three years old and are like, ‘I’m gay.’ But some of us have to meet some gay people, and sometimes those people are people you encounter in books and archives, they’re not your friends, and they’re not even here on this planet anymore physically, but their ideas are, and that’s really powerful.”

While Samer works on finishing the Tip/Alli documentary, they’re simultaneously working on a second book about trans comedy, tentatively titled The Transgender Joke Book. They shared, “I’m curious about this eruption of trans representation in the comedy space, when so often comedy historically has been at odds with transness, and even in the last five years is a central site of transphobic discourse. It’s the irony, or tension, or paradox that some of those given the greatest microphone, literally, around transness and transphobia are comics, but also compared to other cultural corners, comedy is full of trans folks doing comedy.” The book will theorize this contemporary moment in trans comedy as well as how humor as a genre can shape our way of thinking about trans politics more broadly.

While studying contemporary trans comedy is a different project than archival research into lesbian feminist media history, there are some key throughlines here: Samer’s interest in the significance of trans and queer cultural production and what it can mean for queer, trans, and feminist audiences. Perhaps there is (trans?) potentiality in the second book too: what comedy might come to be, if we look to trans comics for its possible futures.

I leave our conversation thinking about the way I’ll teach classic lesbian feminist texts to my Introduction to Queer Studies students this fall. It’s easy to critique these texts for their short sightedness or for their lack of inclusivity. Beyond that critique, what can we take away from 1970s lesbian feminism that is generative, that allows us to see it and our own world anew? Lesbian potentiality, the freedom dream that our sexual and gendered world might have been different and might still come to be, is certainly one answer.

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