scholarly journals Annie Proulx’s Imaginative Leap: Constructing Gay Masculinity in “Brokeback Mountain”

Text Matters ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 209-220
Author(s):  
Kylo-Patrick R. Hart

Non-heterosexual men have long existed on the social and cultural margins. Gay and bisexual male characters in literature, too, have done so for many generations. This essay explores the construction of gay masculinity in the short story “Brokeback Mountain” in relation to the “imaginative leap” that its author, Annie Proulx, undertook in order to conceptualize and represent this noteworthy form of marginalized otherness. It demonstrates that, despite the story’s various refreshing elements, “Brokeback Mountain” ultimately relies far too extensively on the logic of melodrama when telling the tale of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love in 1963 and continue their sexual relationship over the course of two decades. As a result, this story ends up positioning its two queer protagonists as enemies of the patriarchal social order and the larger society within which it so comfortably exists, implicitly perpetuating both heterosexism and homophobia as it does its cultural work.

Author(s):  
Berceste Gülçin Özdemir

The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. However, the fact that men are still positioned as dominating women in the contrast of the public sphere/private sphere prevents the making sense of the concept of gender. This study questions the concept of social gender through the female characters and male characters presented in the film Tersine Dünya (1993) within the framework of Judith Butler's thoughts regarding the notion of the subject. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion. Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject. The possibility of deconstruction of patriarchal codes by using classical narrative cinema conventions is also brought up for discussion in the examined film.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Cynantia Rachmijati ◽  
Sri Supiah Cahyati

Gender roles are an important part of culture. How the genders are portrayed in the literature contributes to the image young adults develops of their gender roles and the role of gender in the social order. This research entitled  “Cinderella VS Timun Mas : Exploring gender stereotypes and culture as learning materials purposes” aimed to analyze the content of both “Cinderella” and “Timun Mas” which cover: 1. Occupations and Gender Stereotypes; 2 Centrality of Female and Male Characters; 3. Culture Content ; and 4 Suitability as learning material purposes. This research is a qualitative study using content analysis. It was carried out with procedures: collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. Based on research questions it is revealed that for occupation and gender types showed that “Timun mas” has varieties of gender with 66,67% reference whereas “Cinderella” only has 50% references. For the centrality of male and female character, “Cinderella’ has more varieties in 37,5% male and 62,5% female whereas in “Timun Mas” showed 50% for both genders”. For the cultural content, in “Timun Mas” the cultural content found was 60% and in “Cinderella” was 80%. And the suitability to be used as learning materials showed that “Timun Mas” checked with 16 points whereas “Cinderella” checked with 20 points. It can be concluded that both can be used as authentic learning materials for gender references, but “Cinderella” has more varieties and cultural content compared to “Timun Mas”.


Author(s):  
Priyanka M. C..

This paper addresses the ongoing tug - of - war between the first and second generation immigrants with respect to dress, and highlights the role played by costume in everyday lives. The predicament of the younger generation squashed between two extremely different cultures - one vouching for a conservative lifestyle and the other edging towards extremity mirrors the ever - changing cultural landscapes all over the world. No matter how much time has flown by, there are certain mindsets that are deeply rooted. Migrants are often compelled to make rapid changes in their overall personalities in order to be fully accepted by the host community. Here dress becomes the most resonant sign language, the spectrum through which cultures assess its members. This short story dramatizes precisely the desperate position of women who are forced to put on a mask to please the rest of the lot so as to secure their space in the social order.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110265
Author(s):  
Leandro Rodriguez-Medina ◽  
María Emilia Ismael Simental ◽  
Alberto Javier López Cuenca ◽  
Anne Kristiina Kurjenoja

It is frequently claimed that cultural agents are necessary to sustain and strengthen the social fabric, to guarantee economic growth and social development and to consolidate knowledge economies based on innovation. These arguments tend to avoid inquiring what kind of sociality these cultural actors are enacting. To address this point, we researched three Mexican midsize cities: Puebla, Tijuana, and Monterrey, between 1984 and 2017. Sociality produced by cultural dynamics, sponsored either by the public (cultural policy) or the private sector (cultural market), is generally characterised by a focus on social order, the construction of local identity, a hygienic view of public space and disempowerment of local actors. Differing from these views, our research has found a new form of sociality that we call ‘rough sociality’, produced by cultural agents from civil society. This sociality is conflictive, ephemeral, spatially bounded and affective, which has implications not only for the cultural work but, most importantly, for the social relations and the being/doing-togetherness that such work may enact and reproduce.


1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
ROY PORTER

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khatija Bibi Khan ◽  
Owen Seda

Feminist critics have identified the social constructedness of masculinity and have explored how male characters often find themselves caught up in a ceaseless quest to propagate and live up to an acceptable image of manliness. These critics have also explored how the effort to live up to the dictates of this social construct has often come at great cost to male protagonists. In this paper, we argue that August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone present the reader with a coterie of male characters who face the dual crisis of living up to a performed masculinity and the pitfalls that come with it, and what Mazrui has referred to as the phenomenon of “transclass man.” Mazrui uses the term transclass man to refer to characters whose socio-economic and socio-cultural experience displays a fluid degree of transitionality. We argue that the phenomenon of transclass man works together with the challenges of performed masculinity to create characters who, in an effort to adjust to and fit in with a new and patriarchal urban social milieu in America’s newly industrialised north, end up destroying themselves or failing to realise other possibilities that may be available to them. Using these two plays as illustrative examples, we further argue that staged masculinity and the crisis of transclass man in August Wilson’s plays create male protagonists who break ranks with the social values of a collectively shared destiny to pursue an individualistic personal trajectory, which only exacerbates their loss of social identity and a true sense of who they are.


Author(s):  
Oksana Galchuk

The theme of illegitimacy Guy de Maupassant evolved in his works this article perceives as one of the factors of the author’s concept of a person and the plane of intersection of the most typical motifs of his short stories. The study of the author’s concept of a person through the prism of polivariability of the motif of a bastard is relevant in today’s revision of traditional values, transformation of the usual social institutions and search for identities, etc. The purpose of the study is to give a definition to the existence specifics of the bastard motif in the Maupassant’s short stories by using historical and literary, comparative, structural methods of analysis as dominant. To do this, I analyze the content, variability and the role of this motive in the formation of the Maupassant’s concept of a person, the author’s innovations in its interpretation from the point of view of literary diachrony. Maupassant interprets the bastard motif in the social, psychological and metaphorical-symbolic sense. For the short stories with the presentation of this motif, I suggest the typology based on the role of it in the structure of the work and the ideological and thematic content: the short stories with a motif-fragment, the ones with the bastard’s leitmotif and the group where the bastard motif becomes a central theme. The Maupassant’s interpretation of the bastard motif combines the general tendencies of its existence in the world’s literary tradition and individual reading. The latter is the result of the author’s understanding of the relevant for the era issues: the transformation of the family model, the interest in the theory of heredity, the strengthening of atheistic sentiments, the growth of frustration in the system of traditional social and moral values etc. This study sets the ground for a prospective analysis of the evolution the bastard motif in the short-story collections of different years or a comparative study of the motif in short stories and novels by Maupassant.


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