{"id":2428,"date":"2023-10-12T20:41:45","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T00:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2428"},"modified":"2023-10-12T20:41:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T00:41:45","slug":"let-people-be-people-in-the-mountains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2023\/10\/12\/let-people-be-people-in-the-mountains\/","title":{"rendered":"Let People be People in the Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way time was structured in Brokeback Mountain was both rushed and savored, where long periods of time could pass by in a paragraph, but moments could last pages. Time seemed to structure itself around the things that were important to Jack and Ennis, skipping over their married lives but reveling in their moments of intimacy. Halberstam in <\/span>In a Queer Time and Place <\/span><\/i>writes, \u201cQueer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,\u201d (1).\u00a0<\/span>In the beginning, when Proulx sets the scene of the mountain and the sheep and their daily tasks, it reminded me of queer time, of a place that existed outside regular societal time constraints. Perhaps they didn\u2019t intend to carve out queer time for themselves, were ready to subscribe to marriage, normativity, and had no such fascinations with men. Either way, they ended up separated from everything but nature and each other, acting on base instincts\u2014eating, sleeping, and roaming– which is how they came to discover their desire or one another. They found their own queer time on the mountain. Proulx writes, \u201cThere were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk\u2019s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours,\u201d (15). The emphasis is on their isolation, on their actions that are nobody else\u2019s business, on an existence outside of expectations and prejudice, where all that mattered was their desire and care for each other.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Queer time seems to manifest a lot in nature, in isolation. I found Jack and Ennis\u2019 relationship interesting in this respect, where they had such little hesitation about their couplings, as if operating on base instincts. The first time they had sex, Proulx writes, \u201cnothing he\u2019d [Ennis] done before but no instruction manual needed,\u201d (14). This implies a certain naturalness to queerness, like what we discussed regarding queer ecology. Very relevant to Brokeback Mountain, Sandilands writes, \u201c Gide\u2019s <\/span>Corydon…<\/span><\/i>pursued the idea that the homosexual activities of boy-shepherds represented a more authentic and innocent sexuality than the heterosexual conventions they needed to learn in order to enter into adult relations of heterosexuality,\u201d (169).<\/span> Whether we need scientific precedence to validate queerness or not, letting people be people in the mountains certainly seems to imply that being gay is not in fact something unnatural at all. I had never thought before about the relationship between queerness and nature, but now I see there seems to be an almost inseparable connection, where queerness is a return to base instincts, to nature, to something that can exist peacefully outside the restraints of a chronobiologically organized life. I feel certain that they would never have experienced this kind of love without the space and time Brokeback Mountain offered them, and I wonder what kind of lives people could lead on their own mountains, away from tire irons and loveless marriages.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The way time was structured in Brokeback Mountain was both rushed and savored, where long periods of time could pass by in a paragraph, but moments could last pages. Time seemed to structure itself around the things that were important to Jack and Ennis, skipping over their married lives but reveling in their moments of … Continue reading Let People be People in the Mountains<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5316,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346798],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5316"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}