GWSS 3307

Final Paper

On the Limits of Transgression

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. – Michel Foucault1

The space of cinema serves a variety of purposes. It can try to “innocently” reflect reality; it can

consciously or unconsciously reinforce existing ideologies by being an “ideological [state,

gender, sexual, racist] apparatus.” Cinema can also be a space where ideologies are challenged,

new forms of social life and diverse identities enacted, and future possibilities imagined. Or,

possibly it can do all of the above in the self-contradictory manner that cinema is often capable

of. The contradictions emerge not merely by the intent of its creators but also by the diverse

interpretations of its spectators, or in the contradictory social field more broadly where various

competing ideas, identities, and representations play out. Looking at films through queer lenses

might be particularly useful, since queer theory claims no boundaries or dogmas, but rather “the

open match of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, distances and resonances, lapses and excesses of

meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or

can't be made) to signify monolithically” (Kosofsky Sedgwick2). However, though queer theory

attempts to critique social relations beyond sexuality, it often remains confined by its narrow

focus on sexuality. In this paper I will argue that transgressive representations in the films

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Secretary allow for a queer readings, but that the films are

limited in their subversive potential, since they challenge power only in certain areas (such as

1
Quoted in Shannon Winnubst. Queering Freedom, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
2006, 125.
2
Quoted in Jamie Heckert, Resisting Orientation: On the Complexities of Desire and the
Limits of Identity Politics, University of Edinburgh, Doctoral Dissertation, 2005, 53.
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gender and sexuality) while obscuring or reinforcing in others (such as colonialism, male

dominance, whiteness, and capitalist appropriation).

The first impression watching Priscilla is that it is a complex and celebratory

representation of queer life in Australia. The film’s plot revolves around three protagonists – gay

drag queens, Tick/Mitzy and Adam/Felicia, and transsexual Bernadette. The film is a colorful,

humorous and campy road story. According to Padva, “by celebrating its extravagance, carnival,

stylized eroticism, masquerade, and colorful kitsch and mimicry, camp provides a different

perspective that provokes heteronormative gender roles and codes of visibility and behavior. It

practically challenges the dominant ideology”(216). Priscilla fits the above description of camp

practice and potential. It could be argued that characters’ queerness challenge dominant ideology

and offer the viewer gender and sexual models which can be read as transgressive when

juxtaposed to the model of hegemonic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality which

dominates Western political and cultural spaces.

However, under closer examination, the films liberatory and transgressive potential

appears to be limited and contradictory. For example, the representation of butch lesbian Ol’

Shirley can be seen not only as mysoginistic but also as homophobic (Barber 45). Ol’ Shirley is

intentionally represented as asexual and unattractive and is being mocked and humiliated in front

of an all male audience by Bernadette (44). This establishes a certain masculine solidarity and

reinforces gender hierarchy that comes at the price of subordinating woman and her female

masculinity. Bernadette, while being a trans-woman, still exercises male privilege. The women

throughout the film are put in rather subordinate positions – two lesbians, Ol’ Shirley and

Marion, as well as Cynthia (Bob’s wife) are subjected to mockery, laughs, and/or moral

judgment. Riggs states that “white queers are at times seemingly placed outside of oppression”

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(9). It is relatively easy to assume such a claim since the three characters throughout the film do

experience queerphobia through verbal and physical violence. Unproblematic identification of

the film’s queer characters as oppressed, as well as transgressive, in an often hostile and

conservative Australian countryside obscures how they might still be occupying (and

reinforcing) social hierarchies. Robbins and Myrick, for example, state that the film, ultimately,

is “unable to enact a sustained, strategic, and comprehensive resistance to traditional, fixed

cinematic renderings of gender for women” (278).

It needs to be examined how male privilege and national belonging, while destabilized,

still largely operate as a structural advantage of Whiteness. Whiteness, according to Reddy, is

“not only a cultural collective identity, but a collective experience of structural advantage and

state ‘assistance’ in a racially defined national terrain” (364).” The film itself goes beyond the

lives of its three queer protagonists and also communicates larger national and social issues that

are not subverted but rather reinforced. Barber states: “Priscilla dresses up the once

embarrassing and gauche ocker3 genre for international consumption, using the alluring and

exotic flamboyance and spectacle of drag and transsexuality to vent hostilities toward women

who challenge traditional male ideals of womanhood and singling out Asian women in particular

as scapegoats for all those Pacific Rim immigrants who "taint" white Australian society” (45).

Cynthia, an Asian sex-worker who becomes Bob’s wife is represented as irrational, unruly,

hypersexualized, and unmistakably Other. Instead of displaying signs of sympathy and solidarity,

drag queens of the film despise her and see her as a competitor. Barber states that “Adam's snide

solution for the "Cynthia problem" [is] to "sell her off' before he and Bernadette send her off”

(45). The only other representation of Asian-ness is Felicia’s Asian drag. According to Barber,
3
Ocker films, according to Barber, were extremely popular in the 1970s and typically would “feature vulgar and
uncouth males (ockers) with a resolutely hedonistic outlook, and an obsession with bodily pleasures - sex, drinking,
and women” (42).
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while Felicia’s drag operates as masquerade, Cynthia’s representation, even if clearly

exaggerated, operates as real in the film (44). The representations of otherness outside the main

trio are often reduced to a collection of stereotypes which, while attempting to be playful and

humorous, cater to dominant ideologies.

The representations of Indigenous people are not much more positive – they are, rather,

passive and voiceless. Even if one of them joins the performance an Indigenous presence does

not challenge privileged whiteness nor allow for any critical reflection on the nature and

consequences of the colonial state. Overall, although marginalized themselves for their gender

and sexual identities, the protagonists communicate dominant messages of national anxieties

about female power and sexuality, threatened whiteness and social hierarchies.

Priscilla is also rather conservative in its representations and ideals of the family and

romantic relationships. According to Robins and Myrick “the film works constantly to endorse

what is ultimately a celebration of coupling based on fairly fixed, traditional notions of gender [-]

the entire film is centered around either the mourning over the loss of—or a drive to assimilate—

male/female couples” (277). The films closure ends with the two couples of Mitzi and Tick, and

Bernadette and Bob. “While these unions are not typical in the suburban sense of the word, they

are ultimately conventional and represented as the ‘natural’ point toward which people should

grow, and offer, in the film’s own register, a utopian vision of gender relations and identities

(Robins and Myrick 277).

The film Secretary, although it focuses on heterosexual relationships, could be read as

queer since it portrays non-normative sexual desires through the practices of BDSM. Ethical

BDSM, which assures consent, could be seen as a practice which queers heterosexual dominant

sex practice “as involving of an active male, passive female and linear progression towards

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vaginal intercourse” (Heckert 25). McClintock states that S/M was pathologized and

medicalized by Krafft-Ebing, a late 19th century sexologist (237). “The task of medical sexology

was to police a double boundary: between the ‘normal’ culture of male aggression and the

‘abnormal’ culture of S/M, and between ‘normal’ female masochism and ‘abnormal’ male

masochism” (238). In this context it can be argued that S/M in general is a subversive practice,

which allows for the exposure and denaturalization of power hierarchies. While it could be

argued that S/M is a queer sexual practice, certain strands of feminism historically denounced

S/M as “the epitome of misogyny, sexism, and violence” (Califia 165). S/M along with

pornography and sex work became sites of contention, known as feminist sex wars, between

“radical” feminists and sex-positive feminists throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

McClintock states that S/M could be seen as “the sexual organization of social risk, for

one of S/M’s characteristics is the eroticizing of scenes, symbols, context and contradictions

which society does not typically recognize as sexual: domestic work, infancy, boots, water,

money, uniforms and so on” (248). It also “publicly performs failure of the Enlightenment idea

of individual autonomy, staging the dynamics of power and interdependency for personal

pleasure” (249). The Secretary does not squarely fit into the above descriptions. The plot takes

place within the office and between two main protagonists whose relationship, first of all, is

defined as employer-employee. The setting does not fit into theoretical distinction of S/M as

either reciprocal (for the purpose of mutual pleasure) or consensual (as an act of commercial

exchange), but rather shares certain characteristics of both (McClintock 250 ). The plot revolves

around Mr. Grey, who is a lawyer with sadistic sexual desires and Lee Holloway, a young

secretary, recently released from a mental institution. Sex-positive feminism would suggest that

rather than seeing Lee as a self-abusing victim, the film can be interpreted as Lee’s journey of

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coming out as an empowering masochist: “She may be a slave, but she is no pushover. She

knows what she wants. She knows how to get it. […] She is a post-feminist heroine” (Cossman

850). An alternative reading, however, could argue that Lee’s submissive position simply

reinforces dominant notions of gender and sexual roles. While it certainly could be argued that

sexuality does not always need to be attached to or analyzed through gender, the question

remains why the film makers chose male=dominant, female=submissive formula, if, in fact, the

majority of men in commercial S/M prefer to be in a submissive position?4 (McClintock 239).

Still, it is quite evident that the pleasure through S/M in the film is mutual and mutually

constitutive.

The film as a text is always open for interpretation despite its author’s intentions.

Cossman discusses Erin Cressida Wilson’s (the playwright for the film) articulation of the film

as explicitly feminist although counter to the earlier feminist orthodoxy where positive sexual

submission was a taboo. She adopted the story “as an affirmation of sexual submission as

feminist” (873). The interpretations of the larger audience and the message communicated still

remain problematic since they enforce dominant expectations of gender and sexual roles rather

than fictionalizes them.

Another problematic within the film and its S/M articulations is the role of fantasy. S/M

in its theoretical articulations is the fantasy play and theatrical enactment of power. S/M’s

subversive potential lays in the fact that “S/M refuses to read power as fate or destiny”

(McClintock 239). However, in the Secretary, the social S/M role play and actual roles align.

This could be read as still possibly transgressive, for example, by claiming that the role play and

real job roles comment on and critique each other, creating new social forms that are liberating

from social sanctions. However, it is more convincing to say that the role alignment subverts the
4

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subversive potential of S/M by diminishing the role of fantasy. McClintock, for example, states

that S/M “brings to its conceptual limit the libertarian promise that individual agency alone can

suffice to resolve social dilemmas” (251).

Even more disappointing is the inherently conservative ending of the film which portrays

fantasy realized (a nightmare?) Grey and Lee’s deviance “has now been reframed within loving,

hetero-normative parameters: it is monogamous, romantic, heterosexual, marital, and

noncomercial” (Cossman 870). Lee becomes a housewife in the suburbs, reinforcing powerful

ideal of spatial, class, gender, sexual, and labor divisions. While Lee’s S/M coming out and

empowerment might be read as merely a means to achieve certain goals and sedentary, mental

peace, still, it remains individualistic and non-threatening to the status quo. Although queer

feminism would be sympathetic to see a woman empowered through her sexuality and desire, the

desire itself can be questioned. Desire in various social theory and movements has been often

invoked as a radical act and tool, but there it is debatable how far such an approach can take,

since capitalism demonstrates over and over again its enormous ability to appropriate or cater to

even the most ‘dissident’ of desires. Desires, especially those, that operate from the marginal or

unimaginable spaces have a potential to destabilize social order and inspire new politics. Pat

Califia, however, states that “I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform the

world. I do not believe that pleasure is always an anarchic force for good. I do not believe that

we can fuck our way to freedom” (in McClintock 250).

Both films, Priscilla and Secretary, feature subversive and conservative elements. It is

evident that there has been limited media democratization and artistic forums such as cinema do

not function as an ideological apparatus with hegemonic intents and contents. These two films

are examples of space that has been carved for new identities and sexual practices which have

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been excluded in the earlier age of film industry. Often, however, the celebratory reception of the

transgressive representations and pleasures cinema consumers receive appear to be uncritical of

various other, non-transgressed ideological forces at work. Contemporary society operates under

a variety of ideological axes. Films, as transmitters of particular ideas and ideologies, operate in

often self-contradictory ways, although seemingly attempting to present a unitary whole.

Contemporary capitalism, state power, and social hierarchies based on various identity categories

or what could be described as postmodern social reality (or condition), rely on contradictions and

difference for their reproduction. Cinema is an integral part of these processes, which

simultaneously transgresses and reinforces various ideologies.

Works Cited:

Barber, Susan “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” [Untitled Review], Film Quarterly, 50.2 (1996-1997): 41-45

Califia, Pat. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. San Francisco: Cleis Press Inc. 2000.

Cossman, Brenda. “Sexuality, Queer Theory, and “Feminism After”: Reading and Rereading the Sexual Subject.”
MacGill Law Journal, 49 (2004).

Heckert, Jamie. Resisting Orientation:. On the Complexities of Desire and the Limits of Identity Politics. University
of Edinburgh, Doctoral Dissertation, 2005.

McClintock, Anne “Maid to Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power.” Ed. Pamela Church Gibson More Dirty
Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: BFI Publishing, 2004.237-254.

Padva, Gilad “Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24
(2000): 216.

Reddy, Chandan C. “Homes, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris is Burning,” in Burning Down the House: Recycling
Domesticity. Ed. Rosemary Marangoly George, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. 364.

Riggs, Damien W. Priscilla, (White) Queen of the Desert: Queer Rights/Race Privilege, New York: Peter Lang,
2006.

Robbins, Betty and Roger Myrick “The Function of the Fetish in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert,” Journal of Gender Studies, 9. 3 (2000).