Gender Roomours II

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Proulx, Annie. Close Range. Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Proulx, Annie, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Brokeback Mountain. Story to Screenplay. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet. Homosexuality in the Movies. Revised Edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative". Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2003.

_____. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

_____."Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp". In Camp. Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Notes

• 1) Quotations from "Brokeback Mountain", the short story, are taken from Proulx's collection Close Range. Wyoming Stories. Quotations from the film, respectively the screenplay, will be indicated by a note referring to all the screenwriters, Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana.
• 2) Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet, for example, discusses the American Western masculinity of late-1960s buddy films, in particular Midnight Cowboy (1969), arguing that their depiction of the cowboy permanently "calls into question the innocence of this ultimate masculine ideal" (81), even to the degree of an implanted fear, a homosexual panic, whose angst-ridden anticipations predict the erasure of the "difference between the cowboy hero and the faggot on Forty-second Street" (ibid.). More recently, the masculinity of the cowboy has developed into a camp cliché, especially in queer movies such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).
• 3) The link between camp and the pastoral genre has already been put forward by Susan Sontag in her famous "Notes on Camp," first published in 1964. Although Sontag initially argues that "nothing in nature can be campy […]. Rural camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban" (55), she nevertheless admits to the fact that "they [campy objects] have a serenity - or a naïveté - which is equivalent of pastoral." (ibid.). Thus, Sontag herself proposes a commonality between camp objects and the pastoral genre that eventually puts her first claim about the absence of camp in nature into perspective. In other words, even though nature, according to Sontag, is essentially un-camp, its representations, including the literary representations of the pastoral genre, may well be marked by the extravagances of this particular mode of perception. More recently, depictions of pastoral camp can be observed in the works of authors such as Alan Hollinghurst, whose AIDS-elegies make vast use of camp in order to simultaneously claim and question traditional routes to grief.
• 4) Sedgwick distinguishes between two camp practices, a reparative imagination that aims at amelioration and the healing of traumatic damage as well as a paranoid imagination that aims at the anticipation and disclosure of the workings of heteronormativity, including its classified gender performances. By using the term "dark camp," I suggest a continuity of these two forces, reparation and paranoia, albeit with regards to a different, a previous, Sedgwickean distinction, namely that between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental. "Dark camp," as applied in "Brokeback Mountain," thus marks a sinister variation of the original distinction, for it eventually depicts both a reparative sentimentality whose struggle for amelioration gives way to constant dissatisfaction and frustration and a paranoid anti-sentimentality whose gender performances, in this case that of the American Western masculinity, no longer anticipate the heteronormative workings in society in order to subvert and disclose them, but indeed in order not to be disclosed by them.
• 5) In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman creates the latest specimen of nay-saying, the sinthomosexual, whose independent death-driven existence eventually "forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms" (101), performing against them an "act of repudiating the social, of stepping, of trying to step beyond the future and the snare of images keeping us always in its thrall." (ibid.; emphasis added). Rhetorically impressive and insightful in its condemnation of futurism, Edelman nevertheless fails to designate a space where "no future" can be realised, even lived, with the exception, of course, of its paradoxical fulfilment in literal death. Sinthomosexuality, then, is itself a performative gesture, an enduring attempt to step out of heteronormativity, never realised, and thus certainly no less illusory, or naïve, than any other form of escapism. The sinthomosexual's claim to the death drive, not unlike the shepherd's claim to the pastoral idyll, imagines a social outside, both literarily detached, and nevertheless literally uninhabitable. Indeed both, the sinthomosexual and the shepherd, may have been looking for answers in all the wrong places, for if there is no social space outside the heteronormative matrix, no homosexual space prior to homosociality, then the impact of this disastrous social formation may perhaps best be alleviated by a psychic investment, deliberately and intentionally artificial, of beauty, theatricality, and even sentimentality, that knowingly disrupts this social formation from within, temporarily and locally. Camp, however, is a precondition of this investment. And thus, the sinthomosexual and the shepherd both seriously claim what they might as well playfully subvert, namely the death drive and the pastoral elegy.
• 6) In "Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative," Sedgwick uses the periperformative to counter the Althusserian concept of interpellation, arguing that "to disinterpellate from a performative scene will usually require, not another explicit performative nor simply the negative of one, but the nonce, referential act of the periperformative" (70).