Drawing on feminist geographer Gillian Rose’s work on the politics of spatiality (1993), we examine how the film’s central setting—a traditionally furnished, heteronormative home—is systematically transformed into a site of lesbian authority. The titular act of “dyking,” here used as a verb, signifies a structural and symbolic intervention: the literal and figurative reframing of a space designed for patriarchal or hetero-monogamous scripts into an arena for queer control. From the opening frames, Dyked establishes its protagonist’s (Mink) domain as a pastiche of bourgeois domesticity. The set design features floral wallpaper, a well-appointed kitchen, and a master bedroom with a four-poster bed—what art director Judith Halberstam (in a separate commentary) might call “the visual grammar of compulsory heterosexuality” (2018, p. 44). Mink’s character, initially presented as the aggressor, moves through this space with the ease of a homeowner, but the film’s framing quickly subverts this assumption.
This act is the film’s thesis: to be “dyked” is to have one’s spatial orientation forcibly but collaboratively realigned. The home is no longer a prison; it becomes a stage for a new choreography. The final shot, a wide static take of the two characters seated opposite each other in the now-reconfigured room, suggests a détente—a new, uneasy but chosen order. The paper argues this is not a resolution but a provocation: queerness, the film suggests, does not destroy the domestic; it re-architects it from within. Dyked (Under Her…) is a minor film that poses major questions about power, space, and performance. By rejecting the lexicon of violence for that of spatial negotiation, Arielle Faye and Mindi Mink have crafted a work that functions as both a genre piece and a critical essay on film form. The film’s legacy may well lie in its demonstration that even the most coded, adult-oriented material can operate as sophisticated cultural theory. The home is never just a home; under the right hands, it becomes a contract—and contracts can be rewritten, reframed, and dyked. -Dyked- Arielle Faye and Mindi Mink - Under Her...
Architecture of Control: Power, Materiality, and the Subversion of Domestic Space in Dyked (Dir. Arielle Faye and Mindi Mink) Drawing on feminist geographer Gillian Rose’s work on