Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)


The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

Re-Reading a scene from Red River

Retrospectatorship after Brokeback Mountain

Patricia White in her book unInvited proposes the concept of retro-spectatorship. Retro-spectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through retro-spectatorship, Brokeback Mountain solicits us to re-view the classical Hollywood western ‘that belongs to the past but is experienced in a present that affords us new ways of seeing’ (97). Therefore, as a contemporary western Brokeback Mountain’s helps us to shape a retrospective reading of older westerns, particularly those westerns such as Red River and Calamity Jane that have either struggled to disavow their homoerotic underpinnings or made obvious a range of queer possibilities. Its not that re-reading the classic western is an appropriating practice or subversive re-imagining rather, no reading of the text is the correct one its just that straightness is the default position of culture that we have all some point internalised as a practice. The point here is that Brokeback Mountain answers the call to all those elided and hinted at stories of same sex desire in the Hollywood western by retrospectively prompting a return back to films like Red River from a vaulted position of contemporary spectatorship. Brokeback Mountain engenders a privileging of being able to un-think assumptions about westerns in relation to sexuality. As Patricia White brilliantly demonstrates in her re-reading of lesbianism in classical Hollywood cinema, our spectatorial vantage point as queer subjects is steeped in knowingness about how Hollywood edited out homosexuality and cast it to the realm of the merely connotative. D. A. Miller in his analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope, suggests that the eliding of homosexuality’s denotation ‘exploits the particular aptitude of connotation for allowing homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is also being elaborated’ which, explains how homosexuality by its absence is made meaningful throughout classical Hollywood cinema.

A contemporary viewing of Red River, armed with the knowledge that one of its central stars Montgomery Clift was gay, provides the insight that retrospectatorship reveals in the films homoerotics that are barely contained in ‘the shadow kingdom of connotation’. (Miller: 125) The spectator’s first introduction to Montgomery Clift’s as the Matthew Garth character is startling in its invitation to look at his handsome boyish looks, standing aloof he seems to be gazing down towards John Wayne’s crotch while sucking on a piece of straw (shot 1).

Shot 1

The camera cuts from the medium shot to a close-up of Clift’s face as he looks towards Wayne that instantly constructs him in relation to a relay of desiring looks. In the facial close-up Clift looks on, tonguing the single piece of straw that dangles from his mouth.(Shot 2 and 3) The shot of Clift’s face seems to linger for an extra beat but it’s the minor detail in the piece of straw where a queer reading of Clift’s body and performance values such minutiae as it suddenly jumps out retrospectively as a signifier of Clift’s queerness, his character’s desire for Wayne and our desire for him. He plays with the piece of straw in a way that hints and suggests sex, an oral tease, delicately phallic but undeniable in its capacity to be read as homoerotic.

Shot 2

Shot 3

Steve Cohan also discusses Clift’s performance in Red River describing how he ‘uses physical gestures to draw attention to his presence in a shot, rubbing his face, caressing his nose, holding his chin, sitting side-saddle on his horse’ to the extent that it ‘implies Matthew’s passivity as erotic spectacle’. (216) Cohan’s reading of film emphasis ‘the trope of boyishness’ in Montgomery Clift in contradistinction to the manliness of John Wayne as the film sets out working through its opposition between the soft boy and the hard man. Clift’s softness in Red River helps to define his erotic appeal and Cohan points out that its precisely this aspect of his performance which challenges the hegemonic forms of masculinity typified in the film by John Wayne.

References
Steve Cohan (1997) Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. New York and London: Routledge
D. A. Miller (1991) ‘Anal Rope’ in Diana Fuss (ed) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York: Routledge.
Patricia White (1999) unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

(Images: screen grabs; permissions)

Guest Paper: Queer Language, Homo-Masculinity and Gay Sexual Cinema

Professor William Leap from American University will be giving this paper on 3rd March 2009 as part of our on-going ICAn seminar series.

This paper brings recent concerns in queer linguistic inquiry into the communicative terrain of gay sexual cinema (GSC) – that is, films/videos depicting “men having sex with men”. These products have been dismissed as moments of erotic jouissance, yet a substantial body of literature shows that their imaging of “gay life” has substantial material and social consequences.

I examine here (and in current research) a specific genre of GSC and the type of gay identity that is repeatedly represented by films in that genre. At issue here is an image of gay masculinity that is framed within non-metropolitan and non-minoritarian settings, and within a world populated almost entirely by men, Whatever their sexual orientation, these men are always ready for man-sex and they do so on any occasion. These men refer to each other by given names, complemented by nicknames and affinity labels. Even when participating in “anonymous sex, this is a world where all men act like “best buddies.” Moreover, men are not exclusively “tops” or “bottoms”: every man “flips” to accommodate his partner(s)’ needs. This image of gay masculinity differs from that presented in other genres of GSC Primarily, (1) this image proclaims a sense of gay identity defined in terms of masculine practices and other key values of the American heartland, not the urban terrain; and (2) this image confirms that the exaggerated masculinity that is being defined through a gay idiom in these instances is at the same time a white construction. Indeed, infrequent occasions when men of colour are included in the story line, gayness requires of them an especially explicit performance of whiteness.

In part, these arguments reflect my close reading of the storyline, inventory of characters, directorial style, and the marketing given to this genre. But I am also guided by my close reading of the comments that viewers have posted to gay video club’s websites. These comments repeatedly acknowledge close connections between references to gayness, whiteness and uber-masculinity; and their references extend outside of the erotic context, to engage broader assumptions of the neoliberal social agenda that is broadly redefining gender and sexuality in the contemporary social moment

Time: 4.00-6.00pm. Place: GEE219, Clifton Campus, NTU. Everyone welcome.