There are many “what ifs” that could be levelled at Gerwig’s Barbie based on an intersectional critique (spoiler: Barbie is not all women). In this short essay I’m going to experiment with just one. What if there were a Barbie who required a different kind of solidarity? What if there were a Barbie who upset the heteronormative logic of female femininity? What if there were a Barbie for whom a girls’ sleepover “every night” read not as party but as alienating promise of gendered failure? What if there were a Barbie who thought the best thing about being free from genitals was not having to share a women’s bathroom? In short, what if there were a Butch Barbie? Imagine Butch Barbie however you wish: with she or they pronouns, with or without a binder, wearing plaid or a neon beach outfit borrowed from Ken. There are of course “many ways to be butch” (Gayle Rubin 2020 [1992], 245). Regardless, imagine Butch Barbie as a hypothetical figure who pushes at and finds the limits of Barbie’s—and Barbie’s—politics of gender.

How has masculinity has shaped the terms of contemporary "lesbian" film and film studies? While mainstream film since the turn of the century has intensified its pursuit of femininity as the visible symbol of lesbian progress, gender nonconformity continues to function as a marker of inevitability and intrigue, contestation and disavowal. The reading and misreading of gendered codes of butch and trans masculinity has become a particularly fraught site of anxious correction. Situated against personal and intellectual trajectories of watching and writing about film, this talk explores masculinity through a double bind that underpins the seemingly endless anxieties over lesbian 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.

In the time-honoured tradition of the teen sex romp, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are willing to do anything to lose their respective virginities before they leave high school. But there’s a problem: they’re neither cool nor male enough to date the popular girls they have harboured crushes on for years. Then, after a rumour about their “summer in juvie” gives them a sudden, unwitting reputation as badasses, they set up a “fight club” in the name of female solidarity and self-defence but really for the sake of attracting cheerleaders.

In 2020, I was asked to design a module called “Diversity and Inclusion in Practice” for a new online MA. To design a module around this theme was to reckon with a paradox. Scholars such as Sara Ahmed, working across feminist, queer, and critical race studies, have given us theoretical and methodological frameworks not simply for celebrating “diversity” but for exploring this term itself as a function of power. While the use of terms such as diversity and inclusion may be a strategic necessity for social justice work around higher education’s current agenda, this “language of diversity” (Ahmed 2012: 51) is also part of an ambivalent institutional performance. In this essay, I chart my thought process in determining how to put ambivalence “in[to] practice” in my design and delivery of a module about D&I itself. I question how to avoid simply replicating models of D&I training like unconscious bias, mobilising instead the relationship between the theory of D&I and the practice of it. And I explore how the professional and personal experiences and contributions of students on this part-time, online MA shape the role of the classroom at the intersection of pedagogy and politics.

This article discusses the ‘Netflix imaginary’ and how it shapes our understanding of queer taste and legibility in contemporary visual culture. While Netflix has promoted itself as a bastion of LGBTQ inclusivity and other forms of ‘diversity’, this article considers the platform not on the basis of celebrated LGBTQ ‘Netflix Originals’ such as Sex Education or Queer Eye but rather on how our navigations of the platform’s content throw our queer attachments and recommendations into pleasurable chaos. If the ‘Netflix imaginary’ is built around personalisation – that is, the promise of knowledge and insight – it more often generates bewilderment and surprise. But the article argues that this uncanny algorithmic meddling also has the potential to generate its own source of fun, entertainment and queer pleasure. By analysing what consumers are led to understand of the site’s dependence on and commitment to collaborative filtering, algorithmic signposting and customer agency and choice, I consider how we might employ a queer method for engaging subversively with Netflix’s representational inconsistencies and inadequacies – how we might see Netflix itself as a queer method for reconfiguring queer taste.

Across her body of work in film, television, and digital media, Desiree Akhavan has captured the awkward politics of cultural production for female filmmakers and media-makers. Yet she has also refused to straightforwardly align her work with feminist critiques of dominant cultural production practices, however much she is interpellated by them. Akhavan, a queer woman of color in a racist, sexist, and homophobic industry, negotiates both contemporary feminism's potentials for solidarity and its intersectional shortcomings. Akhavan's autobiographical characters wrestle with the need for social justice while questioning the “appropriate behaviors” demanded by serious commitments to the cause. Her work reveals the ambivalence of feminist attachments. This article reads the queer feminist politics of Akhavan's work, with a particular focus on her debut feature Appropriate Behavior (UK/US, 2014), through the lens of citational practice. The author argues that Akhavan employs citational codes that function in Clare Hemmings's words as a “storytelling tactic,” sustaining normative narratives about feminism's recent past. By employing an ambivalent trope that the author calls citation→disavowal, Akhavan troubles both the dominant cultures she is excluded from and the viability and legibility of her place within the movements that resist them.

As a story of painting – an artist falling in love with the subject of her portrait – Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about representation itself, about the intensified spectatorship that comes with a sustained diegetic attention to the gaze. This article argues that rather than fulfilling the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Sciamma’s film draws on her radical visual vocabulary to capture desire’s precariousness. This is the site of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’s queerness: not (just) the explicit representation of a lesbian love story but rather a reckoning with cinema’s own role in making prohibited desires legible on-screen. Just as Gayatri Gopinath locates ‘queerness’ in ‘a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive’, we can find queerness in Sciamma’s relationship to the visual archive of lesbian film history. This article argues that by reminding us of desire’s precariousness, Sciamma’s film demonstrates its own negotiations with ‘lesbian’ cinema whilst opening up ways to read a visual map of queer possibility.

With this issue of MAI, which centres on feminist pedagogies, we hope you will find much to lighten your spirits and inspire, as we enter into this new decade. Now, perhaps more so than ever, we need to view the classroom as a space for contestation, for challenge, and for activism against both pernicious political systems of thought and the increasingly egregious neoliberalisation of higher education. Feminism as a form of ethics that demands we engage beyond hermetic boundaries of self and open ourselves up to community is a tool that we dismiss at our peril in this parlous political environment. The future is not determined: it is ours to grasp and to make. And not merely for ourselves, but for generations to come. This rallying collection of essays, toolkits, manifestos and creative work begs each and every one of us to take up the mantle and commit actively to changing the dire situation in which we find ourselves currently.