Ambivalent Masculinities in Contemporary Film and TV: On Lesbian and Trans Representability

In 1999, Jamie Babbit’s lesbian cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader parodied the absurd correlations between cisgender roles, styles, and heteronorms. In doing so, it gave audiences the opportunity to laugh at the assumptions of “gaydar”: the notion that you can make a connection between gender nonconformity and sexuality. This article explores how the landscape of queer and trans representation in film and TV has shifted in the intervening decades, arguing that the reading and misreading of gendered codes remains a structuring condition of the queer comedy. If mainstream media of the past decade have strategically pursued femininity as the visible symbol of lesbian progress, other media have instead ambivalently negotiated a double bind: a resistance to accepting masculinity as the straightforward condition of lesbian legibility and a simultaneous anxiety over the precarity of lesbianism itself.