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Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx)
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Annie Proulx
o Born 1935
o American journalist and novelist
o 2nd novel, The Shipping News (1993), won Pulitzer Prize
o Brokeback Mountain originally in collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999)
▪ Made into film in 2005

•

Queer theory
o Sexuality is about desire and not necessarily linked to biological sex
▪ Disrupting compulsory heterosexuality/the heterosexist matrix
o Both sexuality and gender are socially constructed in time and place
▪ Changing constructions of the perverse or marginal
▪ We can uncover the ways in which our society controls sexuality and gender
identities by considering them historically and in their representation
o “Foucault criticizes the traditional understanding of sexuality as a natural libido
yearning to break free of social constraint
...
He emphasizes the generative aspects of the
social organization of sex rather than its repressive elements by pointing out that
new sexualities are constantly produced” – Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex, pg 275-277
o Sexuality and gender
▪ Sexualities are numerous and not rigidly fixed: heterosexualitIES;
homosexualitIES; bisexualitIES
▪ “As sexual behaviours or occupations fall lower on the scale, the individuals
who practice them are subjected to a presumption of mental illness,
disreputability, criminality, restricted social and physical mobility, loss of
institutional support, and economic sanctions” – Rubin, pg 279

•

Brokeback Mountain
o Setting: small town, rural USA
▪ Lightening Flat
▪ Wyoming Homestead “that was the only road Jack knew” (315)
▪ Limitations and problems of being homosexual in this setting
▪ Rigid definitions of masculinity
▪ “All the travelin I ever done is goin around the coffeepot lookin for the
handle” (308)
• EXCEPT Brokeback Mountain – “suspended above ordinary affairs”
(291)
o American gothic
▪ Grant Wood
▪ Threatening nature – destabilisation: reality questioned; domesticity
disturbed
o Masculinity

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Connected to landscape, elements, animals, farming
Provider: husband and father – “reassuring of fecundity and life’s
continuance” (293)
▪ Physical violence – “Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good”
(300)
Theme and genre
▪ Short story: collapse of time frame into vignettes, cycles – “One thing never
changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by
the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough” (307)
▪ Emphasis on what is not said, not on explanation – “They never talked about
the sex, let it happen” (291)
• “What could he say?” (295)
• “He didn’t know which way it was, the tire iron or a real accident”
(312)
• “There was some open space between what he knew and what he
tried to believe” (318)



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