A brief introduction to gender and sexuality within Annie Proulx's 'Brokeback Mountain'.

1. BROKEBACK
MOUNTAIN
By Annie Proulx
Week 2

2. First Impressions
■ What did you think of the book?
■ Any thoughts on the link between the short story and
Foucault’s article? (5 mins in pairs)

3. Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’
■ ‘heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is
deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.’ (p5)
■ ‘Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they
open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies.
The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of
absolute break with their traditional time.’ (p6)
■ ‘the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place.’ (p7)
■ ‘This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create
a space of illusion that exposes every real space […or] to create a space that
is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours
is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.’ (p8)
Brokeback Mountain as a heterotopia of deviation?

4. Werner Bigell (2007) ‘Cultural Significations
of Heterotopian Spaces of Nature’
‘The film Brokeback Mountain (2005) depicts a related experience of
deviance. Whereas homosexuality is dangerous in the cowboy culture of
the AmericanWest, the characters escape that culture and live
temporarily "out there in the middle of nowhere" according to their sexual
inclination.’ (p8)
‘The social function of ritual deviance is to provide a safety valve through
release.’ (p8)

5. Heterotopia of Deviation: Close Reading
‘Ennis woke in the red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade
headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about it
both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.
As it did go.They never talked about sex, let it happen, at first only
in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down,
and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack
of noises, but saying not a goddamned word except once Ennis said, “I’m
not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing.
Nobody’s business but ours.”There was only the two of them on the
mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back
and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above
ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark
hours.’ (Proulx, 1999, p291)

6. “Stoicism” is a word with which we are all familiar; the Oxford English Dictionary cites
austerity, repression of feeling and fortitude as characteristics of a Stoical attitude
towards life. […] the Stoics proposed a materialist ontology in which God permeates the
entire cosmos as a material force.They claimed that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness
and that external goods and circumstances are irrelevant (or at least nowhere near as
important as most people tend to assume).They argued that our emotions are merely the
product of mistaken judgments and can be eradicated by a form of cognitive
psychotherapy.They brought these various doctrines together in the image of the ideal
Stoic sage who would be perfectly rational, emotionless, indifferent to his or her
circumstances and, infamously, happy even when being tortured on the rack. (pp. 1-3)
John Sellars, Stoicism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006)
’If you can’t fix it…
you’ve got to stand it.’

7. “Don’t say nothin and get it over with
quick”
Using your books, locate evidence of ’stoicism’ in the short story, and think about this
in relation to masculine identity.Think about the differences between Ennis and Jack’s
performance of masculinity and their approaches to sexuality. (In groups)

8. Further Study
■ Examine the ending of the short story with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
■ Think about the way women are presented in the novel – do they
conform to/subvert expectations of 20th century femininity?

9. NextWeek…
Alice Munro’s Open Secrets (1994) with particular focus on ’Spaceships
have Landed’. It is available to read on Surreylearn.
For next week, consider the following:
■ How do the women in the story identify themselves and what
different female relationships are presented?
■ How is the small town portrayed, particularly domestic space?