Pinning Down the Past: Lesbian Politics and Queer Ecologies in The Duke of Burgundy

abstract :

Peter Strickland's film The Duke of Burgundy (2014) presents an all-female world of lepidopterists whose non-monetary economic exchanges consist of mounted butterfly specimens and whose interpersonal exchanges consist of BDSM roleplay. This essay explores how the film represents a thought experiment in reimagining lesbian-feminist history by reconciling divergent strands of feminist and lesbian politics that occupied opposing camps during the period of the film's early-1970s setting. The film's "soft" eroticism and depiction of a non-capitalist economy posits a seductive fantasy of what an all-female separatist world might have looked like, had the various clashes within second-wave feminism found a utopian middle ground over major issues like the shifting place of lesbians within the women's movement, the acceptability of sadomasochism and pornography as expressions of women's sexuality, and the ecological implications of queerness.