Brenda Cooper

Framing Brokeback Mountain: How the Popular Press Corralled the “Gay Cowboy Movie”

This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movies core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story while simultaneously encouraging audiences to read it as a “gay cowboy movie.” The tension between these competing frames—perhaps an artifact of reviewers’ lack of language to articulate the queer issues privileged in the films narratives beyond a heterosexual–homosexual dichotomy—results in disagreement about the “proper” interpretation of the film. The result, whether we see the film as “universal” or “peculiar,” is a paradoxical invisibility for queer identity, and yields a third frame in which homophobia is represented as a relic of the past. The tension among these contradictory frames illustrates how efforts in the mainstream press to privilege queerness struggle to exist within heteronormative space. Comparing the films queer protagonists to culturally familiar heterosexual symbols such as Romeo and Juliet, or Western icons John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, ironically elevates queer visibility while simultaneously relegating queers and queer experiences to the margins. Rather than celebrating Brokeback Mountain for its challenges to heteroideology, press reviews ultimately worked to appropriate Annie Proulxs voice, diluting her storys intended condemnation of brutal and destructive homophobia.

The relevancy and gender identity in spectators’ interpretations of Thelma & Louise

Using relevancy as a conceptual framework, this study investigates women and men spectators’ experiences with the 1991 film, Thelma & Louise. An analysis of the spectators’ self‐report essays explicates contradictory cultural subjectivities and subsequent interpretations of the film between the spectators: women tended to like the film—men generally hated it. While issues of sexism and womens marginalization appear irrelevant to the cultural subjectivities of the men, sexism and its consequences are the major relevant issues in the viewing experiences of the women. Women spectators overwhelmingly interpreted the events in the film as evidence of womens marginalized status in a patriarchal society, an interpretation that resulted in their endorsement of and identification with the films protagonists. Men failed to make this connection, resulting in their interpretations of the film generally as an unfair exercise in male‐bashing. Women also identified strongly with Thelma and Louises friendship, while ...

“It had no voice to it”: Sydney Pollack's film translation of Isak Dinesen's out of Africa

Through a thematic analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical implications of Sydney Pollacks translation of Isak Dinesens autobiographical texts. Specifically, the essay argues that Pollacks film uses strategies of transference, redefinition, antithesis, and displacement to renarrate Dinesens writings, resulting in a depoliticized romantic adventure. These strategies marginalize, or mute altogether, pivotal elements of Dinesens texts and life, including her complex voice and unconventional beliefs regarding the role of women, of race, and of colonialism. The consequence of Pollacks translation is a film narrative that honors patriarchal norms and cinematic conventions while fundamentally misrepresenting Dinesen and her life stories.

Strategic silences and transgressive metaphors in Out of Africa: Isak Dinesen's double‐voiced rhetoric of complicity and subversion

The “double‐voiced quality” of women travel writers of Dinesens time is much in evidence in Out of Africa, for although Dinesen is seemingly silent on colonialism, her silence on that topic structurally creates an absence in the text into which she inserts metaphorical accounts of her affinity with and attraction to African people, which leads the reader to the subtextual level where those metaphors collectively constitute a sharp critique of colonialism. The cumulative effect of Dinesens metaphorically rich narratives of affinity and attraction is an engendering of her deep identification—personal and cultural—with the Kenyans. Persuasive, indeed, is her invitation to enter the Kenyans’ world and to identify with, as she plainly does, their knowledge, values, practices, and lives. And she further induces identification with the Kenyans by contrasting their enlightened, tolerant attitudes to the prejudicial narrowness of the European settlers, a view amplified upon in her letters.

“It's going to be a rough ride, buddy!”: An analysis of the collision between “hate speech” and free expression in the Khallid Abdul Muhammad controversy

A phenomenological analysis of Kean College students’ responses to excerpts from Khallid Abdul Muhammads 1993 campus speech, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,”; reveals contradictory signification processes for students in terms of race. African American students tend to interpret Muhammads words in terms of their races marginalized status in a White society, an interpretation that results in experiencing Muhammads message as “pro‐Black,”; rather than as racist. Non‐African American students do not make this connection and overwhelmingly interpret Muhammads words as evidence of his racist attitudes and his role as an unprincipled troublemaker, leading to their support for limits on free expression.