Abstract:
Within a short period of time after the release of Brokeback Mountain, dozens of parodies of the trailer for the film began to appear on YouTube, a popular video sharing community. Clearly the film, or at the least its trailer, had sparked a strong reaction amongst many viewers. Several scholars such as Henry Jenkins, have speculated on the political consequences of internet video communication like the Brokeback Mountain parodies. However, analysis of the content of such media is still in its infancy. What kinds of politics can be found in these videos? How are political topics like sexuality conveyed by video images on the internet? No one perspective can sum the politics of such a diverse medium, but there are discernible patterns in the vast ocean of videos. As with older media like film, internet video creators often repeat tropes.
In order to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on the politics of cultural production on the internet, I examine the sexual politics of a genre of videos found on YouTube. Borrowing heavily from film, television and literary genre studies, I analyze the politics of parodies of Brokeback Mountain, focusing on works which use other films and television shows (in addition to the music and form of a Brokeback Mountain trailer) for source materials. I argue that these parodies both call attention to homoerotic overtones in other media, while reinforcing representations of heterosexual masculinities in several popular genres.
The technological combination of increased access to video editing software and the ability to share those videos easily, allows whole genres to appear within months. When I began this paper in October 2006, there were 247 hits for the keywords “Brokeback Mountain Parody.” Of those, I found over 80 that took a different original source (such as Star Wars) and edited it to be akin to a trailer from Brokeback Mountain. Several of these video were linked to widely by bloggers. For example, “Brokeback to the Future” a parody using footage from the Back to the Future trilogy, was viewed nearly four million times.
The intense responses to the film Brokeback Mountain is intriguing although not surprising. The film’s critical acclaim would have ordinarily garnered it more media attention than a normal film. However, most of the attention was centered on the representation of the protagonists’ sexual orientation. Representations of queer characters are targeted by pundits both the right and the left, as emblematic of the “culture war” in American. The added element to the Brokeback Mountain controversy is that the film challenged genre representations of male sexuality. Specifically, the attention was not drawn simply because the main characters were queer, but because they were gay cowboys.
Ridge, Charlotte.
Cowboys Can’t Be Gay! The Politics of Brokeback Mountain Parodies.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, IL, Aug 30, 2007.
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