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This essay offers a microhistory of the feminist film distributor Moonforce Media. Between 1975 and 1980, Moonforce Media built the National Women's Film Circuit, a lesbian feminist distribution system that circulated preconstituted packages of multigeneric feminist films through as wide a nontheatrical feminist U.S. market as possible. Drawing on the organization's records and ephemera, now located in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, and oral histories with its founders, this analysis of the development of Moonforce Media—its distribution policies, programming choices, and exhibition strategies—and audiences' reception of the National Women's Film Circuit provides insight into how feminist media workers strove to change society through the ongoing learning process of relating to one another and to their audiences. It also offers an opportunity to return to the emergence of cultural feminism and to rethink the economic and affective labor of lesbian feminist organizations and lesbian feminist cinema in particular. Often thought to have redirected second-wave efforts away from radical feminism's earlier revolutionary challenges of systemic sexism and toward the more retreatist and capitalist creation of a female counterculture, here cultural/lesbian feminism does not delimit political possibility, but instead supports a range of political practices in its variegated conception of lesbian media and deployment of said media across geographies and ideologies. In its exhibition, lesbian feminist cinema brought together diverse audiences with a wide range of expectations and demands for its feminist films, and, in turn, these cinematic encounters constituted an affective archive of 1970s U.S. feminisms.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Gender, Sexuality, and Media: Audience and Spectatorship -- PART I Revisiting Film Subjects and the Pleasures of Cinema -- ONE Feminine Discourse in Blackmail -- TWO Venus in Furs: Masoch, Deleuze, and the Films of von Sternberg -- THREE "You Don't Know What It Is to Look White and Be Black": The Black Press Mediates Race in the Classic Hollywood Studio System, 1930–1940 -- Joe Dallesandro—A "Him" to the Gaze: Flesh, Heat, and Trash -- PART II Speaking Up and Sounding Out 75 -- FIVE Unheard Sexualities?: Queer Theory and the Soundtrack -- SIX The Articulation of Body and Space in Speak Body -- SEVEN "I Kinda Prefer to Be a Human Being": Roseanne Barr and Defining Working-Class Feminism and Authorship -- EIGHT Riot Grrrl: It's Not Just Music, It's Not Just Punk -- PART III Queering Media -- NINE Soap Slash: Gay Men Rewrite the World of Daytime Television Drama -- TEN From Excess to Access: Televising the Subculture -- ELEVEN Pronoun Trouble: The "Queerness" of Animation -- PART IV Containment and Its Critiques -- TWELVE Of Fleiss and Men: The Transgressions and Containment of a Hollywood Madam -- THIRTEEN Out on Stage: LGBT Politics of Entertainment Award Shows -- FOURTEEN Lesbian Cop, Queer Killer: Leveraging Black Queer Women's Sexuality on HBO's The Wire -- PART V Fandom and Transmedia -- FIFTEEN Resurrection of the Vampire and the Creation of Alternative Life: An Introduction to Dark Shadows Fan Culture -- SIXTEEN The Rumors Are True!: Gossip Girl and the Cooptation of the Cult Fan -- SEVENTEEN The Trouble with Transmediation: Fandom's Negotiation of Transmedia Storytelling Systems -- Contributors -- Index