— Dicks are for chicks!
Pretty much a one-joke movie, and/but more enjoyable as a time-capsule of the particular sexual anxieties of the late-1990s.
But I’m a Cheerleader’s fascination with the gendered signifiers of sexuality reads at first as a quintessentially turn-of-the-century preoccupation with what at that time would have been called “gaydar,” a term now employed only as an ironic gesture to anachronistic essentialisms. By contrast, our current moment has only amplified the fraught reading of lesbian codes, given the strategic implementation of “queerbaiting” as a pop-culture norm; the proliferation of multiple gender possibilities untethered from stable categories of sexuality; and the transphobic branding of lesbianism itself as the victim of an imagined competition between butches and trans men. Consequently, the twentieth-anniversary director’s cut of But I’m a Cheerleader, released in 2020 against contemporary waves of violent homophobia and transphobia, felt disconcertingly timely.
— Clara Bradbury-Rance: Ambivalent Masculinities in Contemporary Film and TV: On Lesbian and Trans Representability (Film Quarterly)
Synopsis: Megan is an all-American girl. A cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. But Megan doesn't like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she's pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. Her conservative parents worry that she must be a lesbian and send her off to "sexual redirection" school, where she must, with other lesbians and gays learn how to be straight.