In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive, the first scholarly book on this internationally renowned feminist, draws upon Greer’s largely unexplored archive to demonstrate her impact on readers and viewers since the 1970s. Across many decades in the limelight and through multiple media forms, the provocative Greer has worked to shape audience understandings of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Through deep engagement with archival material, Anthea Taylor offers a compelling reassessment of Greer’s celebrity feminist labour and its effects over time. Examining archived letters from fans, anti-fans, and those in between, this innovative volume shows how and why readers and viewers have come to affectively invest – or disinvest – in this iconoclastic feminist. Advancing debates about the social and political function of celebrity, Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive is essential reading for scholars in Gender Studies, History, Archival Studies, and Media and Cultural Studies.

An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promised consensus and appeasing conformity. They could also be cruel, painful, and disciplinary jokes. It turns out that an obsession with managing gender and female sexuality after the war would hardly contain them. On the contrary, it spread their campy manifestations throughout mainstream culture. Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! traces a larger-than-life lesbian menace across midcentury media forms to propose five prototypical queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. On the pages of comics and sensational pulp fiction and the dramas of television and drive-in movies, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire. Supplemental images of interest related to this title: George and Lomas; Connie Minerva; Cat On Hot Tin; and Beulah and Oriole.

Su Friedrich (b. 1954) has been described as an autobiographical filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, an independent filmmaker, a feminist filmmaker, and a lesbian filmmaker—labels that she sprucely dodges, insisting time and again she is, quite simply, a filmmaker. Nevertheless, the influences of the experimental film culture and of the feminist and lesbian political ethos out of which she emerged resonate across her films to the present day. Su Friedrich: Interviews is the first volume dedicated exclusively to Friedrich and her work. The interviews collected here highlight the historical, theoretical, political, and economic dimensions through which Friedrich’s films gain their unique and defiantly ambiguous identity. The collection seeks to give a comprehensive view of Friedrich’s diverse body of work, the conditions in which her films were made, and how they have circulated and become understood within different contexts. The volume contains fifteen interviews—two previously unpublished—along with three autobiographical writings by Friedrich. Included are canonical early interviews, but a special focus is given to interviews that address her less-studied film production in the twenty-first century. Echoing across these various pieces is Friedrich’s charmingly sardonic and defiant personality, familiar from her films. Her occasional resistance to an interviewer’s line of questioning opens up other, unexpected lines of inquiry as it also provides insight into her distinct philosophy. The volume closes with a new interview conducted by the editors, which illuminates areas that remain latent or underdiscussed in other interviews, including Friedrich’s work as a film professor and projects that supplement Friedrich’s filmmaking, such as Edited By, an online historical resource dedicated to collecting information about and honoring the contributions of women film editors.

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

This collection explores the many ways in which the Netflix series Sense8 transcends television. As its characters transcend physical and psychological borders of gender and geography, so the series itself transcends those between television, new media platforms and new screen technologies, while dissolving those between its producers, stars, audiences and fans. Sense8 united, inspired and energized a global community of fans that realized its own power by means of online interaction and a successful campaign to secure a series finale. The series' playful but poignant exploration of globalization, empathy, transnationalism, queer and trans aesthetics, gender fluidity, imagined communities and communities of sentiment also inspired the interdisciplinary range of contributors to this volume. In this collection, leading academics illuminate Sense8 as a progressive and challenging series that points to vital, multifarious, contemporary social, political, aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Sense8: Transcending Television is much more than an academic examination of a series; it is an account and analysis of the way that we all receive, communicate and consider ourselves as participants in global communities that are social, political and cultural, and now both physical and virtual too.

Engaging with fears of lesbian death to explore the value of lesbian beyond identity The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death, Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian feminism and its usefulness today. Lesbian Death reads how lesbian is conceptualized in relation to death from the 1970s onward to argue that lesbian offers disruptive potential. Lesbian Death examines the rise of lesbian breast cancer activism in San Francisco in conversation with ACT UP, the lesbian separatist manifestos “The C.L.I.T. Papers,” the enduring specter of lesbian bed death, and the weaponization of lesbian identity against trans lives. By situating the lesbian as a border figure between feminist and queer, Lesbian Death offers a fresh perspective on the value of lesbian for both feminist and queer projects, even if her value is her death.

Auteurism expanded With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies. Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube. McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.