Rox Samer is a feminist, queer, and trans media and cultural studies scholar; remix artist; and documentary filmmaker. They joined the Department of Visual & Performing Arts in Fall 2018. They teach courses in both the Screen Studies and MCA majors, including “Gender and Film” and “Sex in the 90s.” Outside of the classroom, they regularly organize events like the Spring 2021 Higgins School of the Humanities roundtable on “Trans Media and Its Futures” with TV producer/filmmaker Zackary Drucker, game designer micha cárdenas, and interdisciplinary artist Chris E. Vargas.
In March 2022, Duke University Press published Rox’s monograph, Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. The book explores how the sign of the lesbian was taken up by 1970s feminists media workers in their attempts at reimagining gender and sexual existence. Offering an archival study of feminist media cultures, Lesbian Potentiality reveals that what lesbian signified in the 1970s extended beyond immediate possibilities, such as partnership and collective living. It signaled something more: the potential that gendered and sexual life could and would someday be substantially different, that heteropatriarchy might topple, and that women would be the ones to topple it. In the lesbian futures imagined in discussions following feminist film programs, on half-inch video in tapes made at production workshops at women’s prisons, and across the pages of feminist science fiction fanzines, the creation of the meaning of lesbian existence would necessarily evolve beyond past its 1970s present. Under the purview of potentiality, the lesbian becomes a heuristic for exposing the contingency of history. Lesbian potentiality provides feminist, queer, and transgender media and cultural studies with a way of connecting potentialities past and present that neither obfuscates nor reifies their differences. It is a method that illuminates social movement history while also attending to privations—the what was and the what could have been.
Rox has published essays and articles in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Jump Cut, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and Feminist Media Histories. Their Los Angeles Review of Books essay, “On the Gender Trouble of ‘Loving Highsmith,’” is available to read online. They are the editor of the “Transgender Media” special issue of Spectator (Fall 2017), the first journal issue devoted to the study of transgender media, and the co-editor of Su Friedrich: Interviews (UP Mississippi, 2022) and Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media (UT Press, 2017).
Rox is busy at work on Tip/Alli, a documentary on the life, work, and influence of science fiction author James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon), and a new book project on trans comedy and humor, tentatively titled The Transgender Joke Book.