sorry. I didn't mean to say that you said this in your post. What I meant was I DO think gender performance is different in rural areas b/c the dynamics are diffeent. For instance, there wasn't an area where gay people lived. The bars might be anywhere. Lesbians didn't hang out at a bar that was mostly only for lesbians.
And, for me, the experience was that there wasn't the same sort of demands placed on people to perform gender/sex in quite the same way as I encountered in more tightly integrated 'communities' where identity has become overtly politicized. There were demands in the way that there are norms -- but they were different and they weren't as politicized in terms of being signifiers for a movement because that was still largely absent. You didn't call attention to it then. In NY and SF, sure. But not in rural upstate NY.
I actually agree with you when you question that reading of the film. However, I do think that Yoshie's point about Lee's oeuvre hit home: that it's his stylistic tick.
On the other hand, and I don't know squat about Lee as a director, but the notion that love doesn't hurt is a uniquely modern one. The goopy, syrupy love makes me feel all warm and wonderful is not the notion of love that the Greeks had, for instance.
Love was tortore and pain for the Greeks.
Anyway, Brian might volley back saying that they could have moved -- but that's asking a lot of people. You're asking them to go to a city where they simply may not want to live -- no matter how much they love someone.
Moira's character on The L Word is experiencing exactly why it would suck to go live with a bunch of people you don't know who live lives that are so very different than yours -- and that's today. Given the hostility with which people from the city view people from the sticks, why should anyone want to move there if they happen to love other things about the area?
I know people from the West and they desperately miss the big, wide openness of it just like I miss rolling green hills against bright blue skies and the smell of rain in the spring. People who love the city also love it for its geography. So, I can understand not want to simply run off to the Big City for love.
Still, I haven't seen the film so I cant really speak to Yoshie's or Brian's reading of it.
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