Article: "You know I ain't queer": Brokeback Mountain as the not-gay cowboy movie.(Critical essay)

"Yes, it's the gay cowboy movie. Get over it," wrote Ty Burr in his Boston Globe review of Brokeback Mountain (par. 1). Intending to rebuke any viewer who would resist the movie because of its "gay" content, Burr ends up constructing a response that has the effect of simultaneously defining and denying such content. At the same time that the statement declaratively assigns the film a very particular same-sex identity--"gay cowboy movie"--it denies the significance of that identity through an imperative erasure ("get over it"). Structurally, Burr's comment replicates the cultural effect of the film as a whole: at the very point that Brokeback Mountain was being praised by many ...

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