ENGLISH 124 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Heteronormativity, Compulsory Heterosexuality, Gender Trouble

• School: U of M
• Department: English Language And Literature
• Course: ENGLISH 124
• Professor: Lie

Document Summary

Murderball, brokeback mountain and the contested masculine body. The popularity of these two particular filmsdemonstrates a powerful cultural backlash against those representational histories that have conflated feminization, male homosexuality, and disability. Ironically, the rhetoric of masculinity that these narratives share is also the source of their antagonism. A close reading of both films exposes the masculinity as the visual mechanism through which disability and homosexuality are beginning to discipline one another on the contemporary cultural stage. Compulsory heterosexuality" and compulsory able-bodiedness" are often combined in a mutual effort to both conflate and regulate disability and homosexuality. These two films set up a world where the mainstreaming of homosexuality stigmatizes disability and where claiming an in-your-face crip subjectively forms in fundamental opposition to disability. The film"s emphasis [murderball] on the heterosexual potency of quadriplegic men is one of its most provocative features, and one that has received widespread praise from its reviewers.