Lesbian Secretary Adaptation Gains Aesthetics, Loses Patriarchal Critique

Jane Schoenbrun and Hannah Einbinder performed Secretary as a live reading this summer—a lesbian adaptation of Steven Shainberg's 2002 film about a woman who finds erotic submission to her boss liberating.

The original movie rested on a specific argument. It claimed that a woman's surrender to power could be radical because the power structures she was surrendering to were so visibly alienating that the act of choosing submission became a critique of the whole system.

She was opting out of the white-collar machine by opting into a different kind of contract. It was dark, it was sexual, it was supposed to be complicated. The sapphic reframing assumes something the original film didn't have to defend—that desire between women automatically disrupts power itself.

Lesbian desire is not inherently liberatory. Two women can replicate every hierarchical pattern heterosexuality produces, and two women can want to dominate and be dominated. Two women can use submission as a strategy for avoiding the world rather than interrogating it. When you shift the film's dynamic from a woman and her male boss to two women, you lose what the original did—the specific weight of being a woman inside patriarchal capitalism, the way the film traced her alienation as structural, not just personal.

Lesbian desire is not inherently liberatory.

You might gain aesthetics and almost certainly gain audience sympathy, but you risk collapsing the argument into something much safer. The live reading format—bodies in real time, no cinematography, no distance—makes this visible in a way film never could. It forces you to watch the power dynamic happen right in front of you, not filtered through Shainberg's lens. You can't hide behind the text's original argument anymore. What remains depends entirely on whether the adaptation knows what it's interrogating, or if it's only sure that it wants to desire.