Last, this paper further postulates the vicissitudes of sexual drives originating from the ambiguous 'narcissistic' desire represented in the texts, to subvert the traditional ideas of dichotomous sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, and even queer theory.ĭespite the many announcements of its death, the western has recently reappeared in American cinema and literature, reinvigorating a tradition that spans from James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye to the Lone Ranger and John Wayne. The author suggests the representations of homosexuality between the male protagonists are in fact not genuinely ‘homosexual’, but a complicated and manifold narcissistic desire, which allows the story to attract and arouse a varied reader and audience identification. By examining the sexual and emotional attachment between the male characters in these texts, a more vivid and diverse picture of narcissism and male sexuality will be revealed. The analytic focus is upon the literary version, while occasionally the screen version Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain (2005) has also been addressed and discussed intertextually. Next, Annie Proulx's popular American short story Brokeback Mountain (2006), as one of the three chosen texts, will be analyzed. First, the definitions of narcissism as illustrated in Sigmund Freud's ‘On Narcissism’ (1915) will be briefly introduced and compared with other works of literature and art expressing a similar motif, such as Ovid's Metamorphosis, William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Salvador Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Eric Stenbock Stanislaus's Narcissus as well as other sources from western psychoanalytic discourses, at the outset problematizing the Freudian narcissism yet without providing a concrete redefinition. Starting from and trajecting beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, the author attempts to deconstruct the presumed definitions of narcissism and male sexuality in order to provide another perspective on the psycho-sexual politics in the representations of such in both Chinese and Western queer literature and cinema. This paper, extracted from a chapter of the author’s completed research paper entitled ‘Narcissism in Male Sexuality: Lan Yu, Crystal Boys and Brokeback Mountain’, aims to complicate the analysis of and imagined correspondence between narcissism and male sexuality. Finally, I consider how the film might help us to understand our current situation in the midst of an often unacknowledged tension between not only love and marriage, but also romantic love and intimacy. Through the forum, the film points to a communal participation in the effects of traditional romantic love stories, enabled by new forms of sociability on the internet. I look in particular at one forum and its communal articulation of an emotional condition called “Brokeback Mountain Fever,” a curious amalgam of longing and grief. In so doing, the film invigorates romantic love as a political force both in its presentation of non-heterosexual men, but also in its spur to cultural activism through online forums. The film’s reception recalls for us the rebellious social and political power of romantic love, its traditional transgressions against patriarchal control of familial alliances and reproduction, and its fervent individualism. Instead I argue it is romantic love, intensified and rewritten, that is still capable of bestowing unique cultural authority. According to the cultural historian David Shumway, a new intimacy paradigm for couples, and not the older romantic love paradigm, accounts for the growth in support for gay marriage. In this article I explore the broad appeal of one recent and unusual cinematic revival of an orthodox romantic love narrative.
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