Anxious Masculinities: Lesbian Film & Lesbian Film Studies In 2024

Clara Bradbury-Rance presents a public talk that probes the ways in which 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. Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). Clara has published in the journals Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Theory, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Film Quarterly. She regularly writes film reviews for Sight and Sound magazine. More Info below.