Power, Challenge, And Punishment

Brokeback Mountain (2005) is a work of Ann Lee. It was adopted by DianaOssana and Larry McMurtry from the short story with the same name written byAnnie Proulx in one of issues of New Yorker in1997. It won Academy Award forBest Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is a story about two men’s sex, loveand complicated relationship from1963to1981in western America. It is beyondquestion that this film has been analyzed greatly either in China or abroad;nevertheless, it is rarely from the perspective of power and psychoanalysis,researched. With the help of the theories of Michel Foucault and Sigmund Freud, thedissertation reveals the construction of homosexuality in the film and elucidates itsprocess.It develops in the following logic order: through the theory of the mechanism ofmicro power and theory gender and sex, the first chapter displays the fact thathomosexuality per se is representing a game with power; and such relation provokesa variety of challenges of the subjects in homosexual identity, either conscious orunconscious, to the social system in many aspects, and to better illustrate that, thesequent chapter mainly focuses upon the behaviors in heterosexual marriage,particularly sexual acts; naturally, in third chapter, upon the any defiance, powercomes with punishments of deterrence which triggers a mental mechanism of theassociation between punishment/representation and idea/fear and such system helpsto the last step of construction of homosexuality in the film.With social development, homosexuality is a hot issue both in China and aroundthe whole world. The preference of considering this film as a text, perhaps, results inthe constructiveness and guidance of this film for both general audiences andhomosexual individuals/group. Three major questions are aimed to be resolved:1)how does power bring impact upon the subjects;2) how do the subjects challengeand3) how does power punish the subjects; and eventually the construction of homosexuality in the film is clarified.