"In the dark camp," Or: Straight with a (Pastoral) Twist: American Western Masculinity in Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

Tracing both the fascination and the discomfort that tend to engulf a mainstream audience confronted with "Brokeback Mountain," this article contends that the major source of controversy concerning both the short story and the movie resides in a yet unacknowledged generic crisis rather than in the scarcely innovative postulation of a gay American Western masculinity as such. In a line of reasoning that explores the potentials of generic camp, this crisis is shown to result from a subversion of the Western itself whose conventions have been infiltrated and thoroughly undermined by the sentimental homoeroticism of an altogether different genre, the pastoral elegy. In "Brokeback Mountain," then, this camp invasion of normative generic traditions eventually culminates in the polarisation of two dissimilar stereotypes of masculinity, namely that of the anti-sentimental American Western cowboy, Ennis del Mare, and that of the sentimental pastoral shepherd, Jack Twist.