>Someone recommended this item from Chron Higher Ed. Don't have
>online access but I wish I did!
Chronicle of Higher Education - January 13, 2006
FILM Rural Space: Queer America's Final Frontier
By COLIN R. JOHNSON
Almost 10 years ago, during my second year in graduate school, someone passed along a copy of a curious short story, entitled "Brokeback Mountain," that had recently appeared in The New Yorker. Because this person knew that I planned to write a dissertation about the history of nonmetropolitan sexualities in the United States, she understandably assumed that I would be interested in Annie Proulx's elegantly worded narrative about an emotionally and erotically passionate relationship between two ranch hands. She was correct. At the time, however, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the story, which follows the men's affair over 20 years as they marry and have children yet struggle to maintain their intimate attachment to one another. "Brokeback Mountain" is, after all, a product of Proulx's exquisite literary imagination, not to mention the late 20th century; as such its value as a "historical document" seemed negligible to me on first blush. Nine years later, with the release of Ang Lee's movie of Brokeback Mountain, my opinion has changed somewhat.
Rural space may be queer America's final frontier, and Lee's film, which promises to do very well come Oscar time, will almost certainly be remembered as doing for queer country folk what Philadelphia did for the HIV positive. What that is, precisely, and whether it's an altogether good thing, remains somewhat unclear. What seems obvious, though, is that Brokeback Mountain and the phenomenal interest it has generated are magnificently suggestive pieces of evidence about the history of the present.
What they demonstrate, I think, is a pressing desire on the part of lesbians and gay men today to see themselves in places that have felt conceptually off limits to many for several decades. Especially in the wake of Matthew Shepard's brutal murder in 1998 in Laramie, Wyo., but also in light of the poignant sadness at the core of other queer landscape films like My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Boys Don't Cry (1999), the kind of big-sky rural vistas that Lee captures quite superbly on screen have tended to engender feelings of exposure and vulnerability in lesbians and gay men more than freedom and openness, two symptoms of affective privilege that heterosexual Americans have traditionally felt in connection to the great outdoors though rarely regarded as privilege per se.
Brokeback Mountain refigures that aesthetic association in some important ways. In the story certainly but in the film especially, it is the openness of the landscape that signals a temporary opening in the heteronormative constraints of American masculinity. By contrast, it is the cramped and claustrophobic domestic spaces of Ennis Del Mar's and Jack Twist's marital homes that signal the intrusion of homophobia's stark realities, not to mention a necessary illicitness about same-sex intimacy and desire that comes at the expense of women, namely their wives. Similarly, it's the deafening silence that Lee's film associates with open spaces that seems to point to the site where intimacy's potential might be realized. Talk, by contrast, maps its very limitations.
One of the many things that the philosopher Michel Foucault wanted us to understand about sexuality is that its history is in some ways best understood in terms of the intensity of discourse surrounding sex - be it positive or negative, celebratory or disapproving, pro or con. In other words, the "properly historical" question about sexuality is less what gets said about sex - though considering what gets said is certainly important - than how sex comes to be spoken about at all. Perhaps more to the point where Brokeback Mountain is concerned, Foucault also wanted us to understand that there is nothing self-evident about the status of talk when sex is the issue. This is not to say that all speech about sex is the same; nor is it to say that silence is a virtue. But it is to say that silence, like everything else, contains the seeds of possibility where power's exercise is concerned.
And silence is precisely what's at issue in Brokeback Mountain. Somewhat different from the silence that Act Up equated with death during the late 80s - a silence that is mournfully familiar in the context of lesbian and gay history - the silence at work in Brokeback Mountain is not the silence of repression and denial, at least not exactly. Rather, it's the stymied half speech of a certain kind of willful inarticulateness about sex's meaning that was common in many nonmetropolitan areas during the first half of the 20th century, and that continues, on one level or another, to this day. Ennis and Jack's inarticulateness is not a matter of a lack of sophistication; their refusal to talk about their relationship in terms of what it says about their sexual identities actually involves a kind of agency. This discursive stillness is simultaneously unsettling and exhilarating. It is what makes Brokeback Mountain feel like both a tragedy and a triumph of love, and it is what makes the provisional nature of actual rural queer life both endlessly frustrating and, in some strange way, our last best hope.
My point is not that we should romanticize rural landscapes as sites of liberation where a paucity of talk about sex somehow translates into a license to be our own true selves. Nor do I mean to suggest that Foucault, or Annie Proulx or Ang Lee, is arguing that we would be better off somehow if we would just shut up about the subject of sex and get on with the business of having it. Like power, "discourse" is not something to which one can simply say "no." Melville's Bartleby may be the only figure in history, real or imagined, to have tried that, and we all know how he ended up - cold, starved, and dead. What I do mean to propose - or at least to note for posterity's sake - is that there is something strangely appealing about those places in time where pleasure and passion and desire and intimacy - and all the other things that we're meant to understand are at stake in Ennis and Jack's relationship - were not so terribly, terribly contingent on an identity-based discourse of sexuality that binds us together in the present, yes, but that often has the effect of separating and exhausting us as well.
Over the next decade or so I predict that our understanding of the lesbian and gay past is going to change quite significantly. I say that in part because I believe that the political exigencies of the present - including a rancorous culture war that artificially pits lesbians and gay men (read urban, Eastern, and intellectual) against Christians (read rural, Southern or Midwestern, and pious) - are going to require both social progressives and cultural traditionalists to shed some of the rhetorical armaments that have served both sides so well for so long and that have effectively brought productive "debate" about the place of homosexuality in American society to a virtual standstill.
I also say this because I know that we have only begun to see the shadow of what will ultimately be a voluminous and innovative scholarly literature on the subject of gender and sexuality in nonmetropolitan settings. Already books like Mab Segrest's My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture (Firebrand Books, 1985), Will Fellows's Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men From the Rural Midwest (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), John Howard's Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Chris Packard's Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) have started to reshape our understanding of the history of homosexuality in post-bellum America. For example, we already know that the language of benign "eccentricity" was used as an important code in small towns and rural communities about people and relationships that might not have been "gay" in any public, political sense, but that weren't quite "normal" either. In the near future, the as-yet-unpublished work of the ethnographer and communications scholar Mary L. Gray of Indiana University is likely to transform our understanding of how queer youth not only survive but thrive in nonmetropolitan settings. I hope that my own work, which is also still being revised for publication, will help to provide some insight into two important issues: first, the institutional means by which modern notions about what constitutes "normal" sexuality were disseminated to rural American communities during the opening decades of the 20th century; and second, the now largely forgotten nature of sex practices and "genderways" that this modern discourse displaced.
Inevitably this literature will differ in some significant ways from the city-centered scholarship that has, quite crucially, made space within a broad range of academic disciplines for the study of gender and sexuality in general, and queer sexualities more specifically. For example, much of this new work will probably lack the triumphal feeling that many readers have come to expect from scholarship that deals with the social and political struggles of lesbians and gay men during the 20th century. Like Ennis and Jack's relationship, homosexuality's nonmetropolitan history is far too complicated for that. Similarly, these studies will probably fail, on some level, to satisfy certain expectations of what counts as historically significant instances of same-sex intimacy or sexual behavior - expectations that have their origins in a social turn that historians made during the 1960s and 70s, when they rightly decided to redirect their attention away from elite individuals and toward particular classes or groups. Like previous work in queer studies, though, what this work will do is redraw the boundaries of the thinkable.
Almost 60 years ago, in a seldom-read chapter on rural life in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey asserted that "ranchmen, cattlemen, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general" were all widely known to engage in same-sex sexual activities. "These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild," Kinsey explained. "They live on realities and on a minimum of theory." For Kinsey, saying that men like Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist lived "on reality and a minimum of theory" meant that they tended to sidestep the thorny issue of sex's relation to identity in favor of a somewhat less troubled, and less troubling, pragmatics of pleasure. I don't know that pleasure is precisely what's at stake in Ang Lee's film - unless, of course, we're talking about the pleasure that viewing audiences seem to be taking in finally seeing same-sex desire where it must have been yet where it could not be, given our own present-day assumptions about homosexuality's proper place. What I am quite sure of, however, is that Brokeback Mountain is enormously important in a historical sense, if not for the history it documents then certainly for the history it's making.
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Colin R. Johnson is an assistant professor of gender studies, history, and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington.