Introduction: Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s

By creating this context, the film re-materialises the community at its heart, lending a name and identity to what was, in its day, an informal social milieu.The Guardian describes "rebel dykes" as "a new term for an old mood". 2 That "old mood" looked something like women exploring their sexuality, navigating conflicts and solidarities, and manoeuvring through the DIY economies that often sustain artistic practice.An exhibition at Space Station Sixty-Five in south London that coincided with the film's release, The Rebel Dykes Art & Archive Show, underscored the way in which its titular term had travelled, not only capturing a history but also offering a framework through which to position contemporary practice that shares the rebel dyke sensibility (figs. 1 and 2).The exhibition located artists such as Lola Flash, Del LaGrace Volcano, Tessa Boffin, and Jill Posener alongside a younger generation, creating equivalences with work by the likes of Rene Mati, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Bernice Mulenga.Where the idea of the rebel dyke had initially been posed as an identity forged in the context of the long 1980s, here it was reoriented as an oppositional stance with as much relevance to younger generations as to those who came of age in the time of Thatcher's Britain.