lesbianism today isn't what it was in the 80s, sure, but it's also not what it was in the 00s. i don't buy into the idea that words and movements can only travel the path of normalization in one direction. in fact i think it is precisely the fact that everybody thinks they know what lesbianism is which gives it radical potential for imagining something which isn't.

« Agamben explains, "For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this I can, which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this 'I can' does not mean anything—yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality." For countless feminists in the 1970s, lesbian existence was that formidable force shining a light on the way to a better future.

In bringing together many women of disparate backgrounds, both physically and virtually (in instances of written, audio cassette, or video cassette correspondence), feminist media not only offered representations of lesbian potentiality but facilitated experiences of it. There is a scene near the end of Joanna Russ's science fiction novel ‘The Female Man’ (1975) in which the protagonist Joanna describes acting on her fantasies about her friend Laur as tantamount to creating her own reality—"an impossible project." After kneeling behind Laur's chair as she reads, Joanna kisses Laur's neck and then over her ear and cheek to her mouth, knowing that at any second Laur will rebuke her and "the world will be itself again." Except Laur kisses her back. In this moment, reality for Joanna is torn wide open, and she tells the reader, "If this is possible, anything is possible." Such experiences of potentiality were incredibly common in the 1970s due to lesbian feminism's growing luster. In Russ's novel, Joanna and Laur eventually get stoned and make "awkward, self-conscious love," but "nothing that happened afterward," Joanna tells us, "was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind." » this could be us but you playin