The Queer West: Homophobia in The Power of the Dog and Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

[EN] The cinematographic success of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain and the 2021 film The Power of the Dog symbolises the public’s interest in LGBTQ+ stories about the American West and the need for appreciation and exploration of homosexual narratives. The paper aims to explore the interconnection between queerness, cowboy hypermasculinity and homophobia within the Western genre in Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog and Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, on which both prizewinning films are based on. The literary works are analysed focusing on the representation of male gender roles and the ideal of manhood in the context of the American West, paying special attention to affective-sexual relationships between men, the self-perception of these homosexual characters, and the homophobic social repression they endure. The main critical frameworks used to analyse this correlation will be cultural and gender studies. The first part of the paper consists of a brief analysis of the authors’ personal life and writing intentions concerning the topic of cowboy literature and homosexuality. This introduction is followed by an overview of terms regarding masculinity, the historical review of the origins and sustainment of the social idealisation associated with the figure of the cowboy as a symbol of manhood and the examination of the queer reality of the twentieth-century American West’s rural world, focusing on the homosexual relationships between men. After this contextualisation, the representation of homophobia in both literary works is analysed. Firstly, the issues homosexual characters have with socially imposed cowboy masculinity and their resulting attitudes towards femininity are analysed. Secondly, the ways in which repressed homosexuality displays itself in the form of homophobia are examined, focusing on the complex relationship homosexual characters have with nudity and sex. This exploration is followed by an observation of the social repression homosexual characters endure both from the community and from their own families. The paper is concluded with an evaluation of the analysis conducted.