Beyond Freudian Narcissism and the Cowboy Myth: Queering the Narcissistic Desires in Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

This exploratory chapter is extracted from the author’s completed research work entitled ‘Narcissism in Male Sexuality: Lan Yu, Crystal Boys and Brokeback Mountain’. By complicating the analysis of and imagined correspondence between narcissism and male sexuality, it aims to open up discussion on masculinity and male sexuality from an array of perspectives. Starting from but extending beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, the author attempts to destabilise the homo-hetero dichotomy and reveal a polymorphous, queer and everchanging sexuality. In order to deconstruct the presumed definitions of narcissism and male sexuality, Annie Proulx's popular American short story Brokeback Mountain (2006 edition) is analysed within the framework of narcissistic desires. The analytic focus is upon the literary version, while occasionally the screen version by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, 2005) is also addressed and discussed intertextually. By examining characterisation and various symbolic representations within the texts, a more vivid and diverse picture of narcissism and male sexuality is revealed. The author thus suggests that the representations of the sexual and emotional attachment between the male protagonists are in fact not genuinely homosexual, but a complicated and manifold narcissistic desire. In revealing the fluid and uncontrollable sexuality in Brokeback Mountain, this paper further postulates the vicissitudes of sexual drive originating from the ambiguous narcissistic desire represented, which subvert traditional ideas of straight, gay, lesbian and even queer sexualities.