Claiming Queer Space in/as Nature: An Ecofeminist Reading of Secretary

Abstract

In Steven Shainberg's film Secretary, the supreme moment of female agency, in which the masochist Lee Holloway takes her stand for love in a radical and public act of sexual defiance, is marked by a rejection of feminism as a vehicle for empowerment. Sitting for days with her hands palms-down on the desk of her sadist employer, the lawyer E. Edward Grey, as a test of her commitment to him, she receives a lineup of callers who offer their opinions on her choice of a sadomasochistic relationship as the central focus of her life; among them is a Naomi Wolfesque feminist armed with a stack of books, who says, “I'm just going to leave you with this literature … why don't you read about women's struggle first.” This suggestion is ironic, given Lee's history of intense suffering within a patriarchal family, and Shainberg's satirical representation of feminism is especially striking within the context of a film that promotes sexual self-sovereignty. This wry characterization of Lee's visitor as out of touch with regard to sexual diversity and the needs of individual women is based on a familiar stereotype of feminists as “maternal, anachronistic, … puritanical,” and excessively focused on victimization, as well as on a faulty assumption that feminism and sadomasochism (S/M) are incompatible (Martin 110). In fact, feminism has been a primary site for the development of radical sexual politics and has been in conversation with queer theories and politics, including S/M, for decades.1 In 1989, Carol S. Vance urged feminists to recognize that if feminism is truly to stand for women's sexual freedom, “our diverse sexualities … require acknowledgment and visibility” (436). In the decades since, many feminists have come to see S/M as potentially allied with feminist politics, since S/M is a “means to transgress the social order and the moral codes of the ‘good society’” that is at issue in feminist critiques of dominant ideologies and power structures (Nadeau 213). Central to this understanding is the argument that “'S/M performs social power as both contingent and constitutive, as sanctioned neither by fate nor by God, but by social convention and invention, and thus open to historical change”; if social power is open to historical change, then there is hope for a feminist future (McClintock qtd. in Nadeau 226).