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Melancholics
in love: re-reading the s/m romance in Steven Shainberg’s
film Secretary
Angela
Failler
Department
of Sociology
University
of Winnipeg
Canada
Based on a short story by
American author Mary Gaitskill (1989), Steven Shainberg’s
film Secretary (2002)tells the tale of a burgeoning
relationship between Lee, a young woman coming out as a
sexual submissive after a history of self-mutilation, and
E. Edward Grey, her ambivalent lawyer-boss who is coming
to terms with his own sadistic tendencies.
Upon the film’s
mainstream release in North America, audience reception
was divided: some critics heralded it as “sexually
liberatory” while others felt that despite its risqué
plot the film ultimately reproduced a conventional romance
narrative. That is, some read the film as a story of “coming
to power” particularly for Lee, the secretary, who moves
from emotional conflict to sexual agency by way of
inter-office spankings from the barrister, while others
saw the s/m romance (which incidentally leads to the
marrying of the two characters) as simply reinforcing the
gendered scripts of male dominance and female sexual
submission.
From a feminist perspective,
these contradictory readings might be easily mapped onto
the “pro-sex” versus “anti-sex” positions of the
1980s feminist sex wars: sex-radical feminists saw sex as
a potential site for the recuperation of female agency and
pleasure, while radical feminists saw sex (especially
hetero-sex) as a site for the continued subordination of
women by men.
Canadian legal scholar
Brenda Cossman (2004) has since argued that the pro-sex/anti-sex
polarization of the feminist sex wars was reconstituted
during the 1990s with the development of lesbian and gay
studies and queer theory; queer theory’s celebration of
sexual pluralism came to represent the pro-sex side of the
debate, while “governance feminism’s” focus on the
oppressive power dynamics between men and women became
associated with an anti-sex position. For Cossman (and
others), however, this polarization fails to capture the
subtleties of both feminist and queer analyses of sexual
politics. As such, she advocates for a rapprochement
between the two “sides.”
She calls this
rapprochement “feminism after” – that is, feminism
after the critique of queer theory – an integrative
approach that maintains feminism’s analysis of gender
inequality but is informed by queer theory’s investment
in the transformative potential of non-normative sexual
practice. My paper argues that Cossman’s “feminism
after” framework is usefully extended by a
psychoanalytic critique that explores the role of the
unconscious in expressions of desire and sexuality.
Specifically, re-reading
Secretary as a story of “melancholics in love” adds an
interpretive dimension that recognizes desire not only
through the terms of gender and/or sexual practice, but
also through the psychical dynamics of loss and mourning.
In other words, reading both Lee and E. Edward Grey as
melancholic subjects sheds light on the way in which their
relationship is also structured by internal struggles
toward love. This re-reading moves past a limited debate
of whether the lawyer-secretary s/m romance is either
liberatory or oppressive and instead centres the question
of interiority for a more complex analysis of sexual
agency in the film.
About Angela Failler
Dr. Angela Failler is
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender
Studies at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada.
Her research areas include cultural studies, feminist
psychoanalytic theory, and queer sexuality studies. |
