I've been pondering this, partly because we've been having discussions (elsewhere) about why it's so important for women of color to speak their experiences and criticisms within feminist thought.
Kortney, at Blac(k)ademic, wrote a poem expressing frustration at being silenced even in a department that ostensibly brought the writing of women of color to the forefront.
So, we've been talking something I'd written about how we might view oppression as a process, not a product. The reason we might want to look at it that way is because an alternative notion of identity -- an additive analysis -- conceptualizes blackness, gayness, femaleness, disability, etc. as a "thing" (the product) that is the "problem" to be explained.
What doesn't get explained -- what isn't problematized, what isn't a problem to be explained -- is whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness, heterosexuality themselves.
So, thinking along those lines, what's interesting is the way that the standard, the norm, what's been normalized is Love (capital L, Love). Lee's Love is ahistorical, has always been this way, can only be this way, is this way regardless as to historical time and place.
Love is something that cannot be consummated, there must be barriers, constant postponements, to the attainment of love. But, instead of asking why what is actually a particular love becomes Love as the standard, the norm. Conceived this way, as Love, there are arguments about whether he was right to place the barriers to queer love given historical events, whether film accurately represents queer love, if Lee refused to because he's not really on board the Queer Klew Train, if those barriers to attainment of Love were really real in that era, if Love couldn't have overcome those barriers, even back then, and if those barriers are merely the product of Lee's prejudice, etc. etc.)
It is in this process that Love is normalized, made the unquestioned center agasint which everything else is defined as deviant, as the problem. Even as its normalized it is also erased -- just as maleness, whiteness, etc. are erased. Love with a capital L is simultaneously normalized, made the standard against which everything else is found wanting, but it is also erased, a slippery object we can never confront, let alone attain. It doesn't exist, except in time and space, but Lee constructs it as something that is universal, ahistorical. And that fits right in with our modern notions of romantic love, something that's only been a round a few centuries. And, as others have argued, romantic love, like Protestantism, were expressions of an ideology of individualism that would become central components of capitalism.
Queer love seems to be on a pedestal in Brokeback, it seems to be center stage, but it isn't really queer love that we're watching: it's Lee's project on a universal Love with a capital L, a Love that is simultaneously erased, tacitly accepted as the norm, the standard, that no one needs to question. It just is -- precisely because it cannot be.
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