The post-queer dystopia of The Mudge Boy (Michael Burke, 2003)

Michael Burke’s The Mudge Boy (2003) is a film about an American farm boy, Duncan Mudge, who befriends a chicken following the death of his mother. The chicken, which is a source of comfort to him and ridicule to others, is a constant reminder of his late mother who, it transpires, taught him how to orally ‘becalm’ chickens. This unsettling relationship is offset by an equally disturbing sadomasochistic relationship that Duncan develops with a similarly aged male neighbour, Perry Foley. Distinguishing between gay, queer and post-queer, this article suggests that The Mudge Boy provides a new template for queer cinema and, in fact, queer theory in the twenty-first century.