Queering the Western (2010 Brokeback Mountain Chapter) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Men's Studies, 2007
Ang Lee's big gay tragic historical love story, Brokeback Mountain, was released internationally in late 2005 and early 2006. Lee's film told the story of two cowboys who fell in love while shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. Although the film narrated a demonstrably American story, appeals to a socio-historical connection were widespread in Australia. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain's cinematic release in this country coincided with "Australia Day," a national day of celebration in which beginnings, nationhood, and "settlement" are reaffirmed. In this article, we track the explosion of publicly-audible conversations that took place in Brokeback Mountain's wake in Australia in 2006. On the one hand, we seek to historicize this film; on the other, we also consider the political ways in which it historicized. As the "noise" about Brokeback Mountain became almost impossible to ignore in Australia, we noticed the film tended to be viewed as a cause for celebration. Through an analysis of the politics of historical stories and the gendered politics of emotion, we seek to complicate the notion that this film signified a radical departure from homophobic cinematic and cultural traditions.
The Ethics of Alterity: Adapting Queerness in Brokeback Mountain
Adaptation, 2011
The Ethics of Alterity: Adapting Queerness in Brokeback Mountain' addresses issues of audience, asking what happens to an author's intentions for her audience when they are translated into a new medium. My texts here are Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and Ang Lee's 2005 adaptation, and I focus on the debate in queer studies regarding how queer texts should treat their predominantly straight audiences: ease them into sympathy by stressing similarities between the straight and queer or make them uncomfortable by insisting on the difference queerness makes. Rather than taking a position in the initial debate, I examine instead what Brokeback Mountain actually does. This seemingly simple move leads to new attention to the fact that Proulx published several different versions of her story before the film was made, raising the question of which version the film should be read against. My analysis shows that in each of these different versions, Proulx's purpose is to champion difference, whether that difference is one of sexual orientation or regional affiliation. By contrast, Lee's film initially emphasizes the similarities between straight and queer desire but ultimately invites his implied straight audience to recognize the ambiguity of the protagonists' experiences and to register the gap between the audience's heteronormativity and the protagonists' queerness. In this case, the shift in authorial conception of audience leads to a shift in narrative purpose, but both source and adaptation are highly effective.
" I Ain't Queer " : Love, Masculinity and History in Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee's big gay tragic historical love story, Brokeback Mountain, was released internationally in late 2005 and early 2006. Lee's film told the story of two cowboys who fell in love while shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. Although the film narrated a demonstrably American story, appeals to a socio-historical connection were widespread in Australia. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain's cinematic release in this country coincided with "Australia Day," a national day of celebration in which beginnings, nationhood, and "settlement" are reaffirmed. In this article, we track the explosion of publicly-audible conversations that took place in Brokeback Mountain's wake in Australia in 2006. On the one hand, we seek to historicize this film; on the other, we also consider the political ways in which it historicized. As the "noise" about Brokeback Mountain became almost impossible to ignore in Australia, we noticed the film tended to be viewed as a cause for celebration. Through an analysis of the politics of historical stories and the gendered politics of emotion, we seek to complicate the notion that this film signified a radical departure from homophobic cinematic and cultural traditions.
Male homosexuality has been historically separated from the notion of traditional hegemonic masculinity yet the film Brokeback Mountain (2005) casts its male love story in a fiercely masculine light. This paper intends to examine how two protagonists in the film (Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist) have been individually and mutually constructing their masculine identities through rediscovering their inner selves and enlivening the dormant parts of their masculinity from a constructionist perspective. Three crucial elements contributing to such identity construction are investigated: nature, gender, and parenthood. Each element is explored based on its relevant text, subtext, intertextuality, and context; interwoven with the analysis of film techniques, cultural theory and literacy/film criticism. First, nature endows men with the power to dominate and control their environment and is employed heavily throughout this film to illustrate the characters' desire to attain hegemonic masculinity. Secondly, the discussion of gender is developed on the binary of masculinity and femininity. The aspect of masculinity is explored in the framework of Judith Butler’s gender performativity (1990) while the aspect of femininity is analyzed within the heterosexual context as a destructive power to masculinity. The third aspect looks into how characters internalize the influence of parenthood—centering on fatherhood—in the early construction of their masculine identities. All of these elements in turn shape the nature of the relationship between these men into one that is shaped by, and in turn redefines, the paradigms of dominant masculinity.
Queering the representation of the masculine 'West' in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain
2007
The colonial construction of Western dominance over Eastern 'others' features predominantly in postcolonial theory (as do those of the North over the South). Assumptions about geographical placement and origin are also sources of gendered space, especially if one subscribes to the representation of female space as 'inner' or domestic and masculine spaces as 'outer' or embracing of the outdoors. Popular notions of the cowboy as an embodiment of 'outdoor' masculinity endorses and repeats the colonial West as a dominant and desirable masculine representation, which has popularly evolved over time as a stable gender category through the use of cowboy imagery to sell 'manly' habits such as smoking (Marlborough Man), and to selling the hypermasculinised American Masculine Dream (John Wayne). The characters from Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (BBM) are from the great American cowboy traditions; the frontiering West of Wyoming and Texas. The film uses the celebrity bodies of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger to queer the cowboy whilst simultaneously maintaining the dominant homosocial attributes of the colonial West. The actors' actual bodies are neither queer nor cowboy, and their celebrity status suggests a gender performative 'fraud', yet the 'star power' of the actors alone has catapulted BBM from independent film obscurity into mainstream discussion and popular culture.
2021
In this paper, I will first provide a brief overview of the movie that highlights queerness, visibility, and violence in the context of the movie. Secondly, I will focus on specific scenes from the movie in which discourses of "fishing," "ranch," and "tire iron" appear in the various contexts. Lastly, I will offer an analysis that focuses on the relationship of queerness, visibility and violence.Throughout the paper, I use queer subjectivity as the forms of queerness-appearances in life by queer individuals. In that sense, queer visibility refers to either manifestation of queerness by queers or the disclosure of queerness by others. I use the term violence in that not limited to physical meaning, also as a psychological and social phenomenon. Not only in the form of collective violence but together with the various dimensions, violence follows a pattern that shows constitutive and destructive impact either on the personal or social level, when queer subjectivity and visibility occurred.
A Pathetic State of Affairs: Brokeback Mountain and Melodrama (2010)
The preceding chapter positioned Brokeback Mountain in relation to the Western genre. Yet, despite the plethora of ways in which this relationship was explored, the ensuing analysis did little to explain how Brokeback Mountain was affecting and emotionally involving. The obvious affects of the fi lm are the production of a feeling of powerlessness and pathos and of a heightened emotional response to what is a perspicuous topic for gay and lesbian audiences, the destructive forces of the closet and rural homophobia. The consequence of all this is tears. The power of melodrama to produce intense feelings has often constructed it in direct opposition to the stoic affects of the Western as a more serious genre of masculine agency. There is an obvious attempt to see these genres as separate through their imagined and assumptive social function and the gendering of audiences. In this chapter I will explore the melodramatic form and affects of Brokeback Mountain as a queer melodrama that promotes negative feelings and explain why feeling bad is important for queers and how melodrama is the mode through which Brokeback Mountain achieves this.
Queering the Sphere in Brokeback Mountain: Homosexual Body in Nature
Brokeback Mountain, written by Annie Proulx, depicts the lives of two gay men; Ennis and Jack. This study intends to discuss and refer to homosexual concepts by taking the nature as a primary concept in order to shed light both on the characters’ love affair in nature and their alienated selves in civilization. It focuses upon two powers in the lives of people; nature versus civilization. Nature presents an egalitarian attitude destroying all restrictions, definitions, distinctions and classifications. Hence it stands for their free queer space as an opposition to the socially constructed traditional gender roles while civilization stands for their forced heterosexual space and idea of being stuck in the closet. The reason for being stuck in the closet is related to the fact that gay people are accepted as “ ‘foreigners’ in their own culture and are reminded of this fact at every opportunity” (Jay&Young, 1992, p.21). Homosexuality is seen as an attack on the ideal classifications of the patriarchal ideology and heteronormative qualities. Key Words: Trans-corperality, body, nature, heteronormativity, civilization.