Madani’s cloistered gatherings of men are humorously imagined through an ironic portrayal of girl-culture, their clubby skullduggery emasculated against the background of female rituals such as sleepovers, spa treatments, and bake-offs. In Braided Beard Madani envisions a barber shop as a setting for camped up erotica, with a hirsute bear-type getting a pampering session he didn’t bargain for. Madani replicates this melodramatic fussiness using her loose painting style as a key component of her epicene narrative: the elaborately patterned carpet and the man’s hairy legs point to a feminine eye for detail and decoration and the hamfisted clumsiness of its male approximation.