The Business of Representing

Abstract

Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. By Katherine Sender. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 311 pages. $35.00 (cloth). The Ellis Island Snow Globe. By Erica Rand. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 360 pages. $22.95 (paper). In late 2005, film director Ang Lee's heavily hyped film Brokeback Mountain first screened in U.S. theaters. The film was an immediate success, garnering $32 million during the first month, winning the Golden Globe award for best picture and best screenplay, and winning the Academy Award for best director, best screenplay, and best original score. The film, based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx about two young cowboys who meet and fall in love in Wyoming in the summer of 1963, has received a great deal of attention in the popular press. Frank Rich, in the New York Times, called it "a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality."1 In Newsweek, reporter Sean Smith waxed passionately about the film, stating, "No American film before has portrayed love between two men as something this pure and sacred. As such, it has the potential to change the national conversation and to challenge people's ideas about the value and validity of same-sex relationships."2 Whether the film is as important as these reviews suggest remains to be seen, but the hyperbole of the reviewers does imply that the commercial success of Brokeback Mountain is in some way indicative of the film's ability to tap in to "authentic" gay culture. Indeed, much of the critical acclaim of this film assumes somehow that the film offers transparent meaning in terms of the relationship between the two men—the reviewers' positioning of Brokeback Mountain as an important intervention within "the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality" or as the first film to portray "love between two men as something this pure and sacred" suggests that the film was able to access, in some way, an "authentic" gay identity (which, apparently, could be depicted only by two heterosexual actors). The film's rendering of the complexities of gay male life in the 1960s United States—and cowboys, no less— [End Page 495] has inspired film critics to assume that after years of attempts to represent gay identity within commercial culture, finally someone got it "right." This idea, that commercial products allow us a way in to deep, "authentic" sentiment or action, is certainly not new. Commercial products, such as Hollywood films, are often imbued with a sense of political urgency—indeed, the consumption of such products often stands in for political action itself. With respect to gay, lesbian, or queer identity, commercial products that carry within them or signify political statements and commitments are often seen as transparently progressive, interpellating consumers who buy and use such products as active participants in struggles over GLBTQ rights and practices. Indeed, examining the trajectory of commercial images of gays and lesbians, one can see how consumer culture has gradually shifted gay acts to gay identity; products contain the "essence" of a personal identity. It is not so much, however, that commercial products reveal identity in some authentic way, but rather that commercial products produce particular identities as real and "authentic." In two recent books, Katherine Sender's Business Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market and Erica Rand's The Ellis Island Snow Globe, both authors explore this claim of politicized commercial objects; both books detail practices in visual and commercial culture that work to discipline and classify particular individuals as gay or heterosexual "identities." As much as Brokeback Mountain (partly) subverts the myth of the American cowboy through the inclusion of gay identity, other commercial forms such as advertising and souvenirs offer an opportunity to reflect on how the boundaries of consumer culture are policed and monitored in terms of sexuality. Each author adopts a very different strategy for presenting her arguments, and while both are concerned with consumer culture, they look...