Opengender

Queer theory attempted to supersede conflicting models of identity by deploying a Foucauldian discursive account of the production of subjectivity. In Foucault's (1976) account of The History of Sexuality, the discursive formation of 'alliance' (gender) has, in the 20th Century, been superseded by the discursive formation of 'sexuality' as the universal referent of questions of identity. "Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic [of sexuality] that henceforth serves as our master key" (Foucault, 1976: 78).

In 1991, when Thelma & Louise was released, lesbian communities were, of course, well established:

The fragmentation of identity politics has generally been blamed on the alleged recalcitrance of one or other identificatory group or tendency. It is, perhaps, more profitably seen as a struggle between diverse counter-cultural groups whose material interests, privileges, or access to power, are not always equal or in alignment. Queer mobilised its Foucauldian critique in opposition to the terrain of identity politics upon which the 'sex wars' had erupted.

There was already a long tradition of setting novels and films in all-female contexts such as schools, prisons or other institutions, for a range of allegorical or titillating purposes; but a pro-feminist discourse of 'female-bonding' was carried over to the New Women's Cinema during a peak in feminist critical activity in the 1970s). The feminist buddy movies of the 1970s which are analysed in the next chapter can thus be seen not only as a product of a feminist discourse of female-identification, but also as a reversal of the male-buddy genre which was popular at that time.

There have been various accounts of the allegorical significances of nostalgic narratives in revisionist westerns for North American society during the 1970s which are not relevant to my present argument. What is most relevant to an analysis of representations of sex-gender in this cycle of films is the idea that the increasing popularity of buddy films in the 1970s and 1980s may have reflected more general male anxieties.

It was noted by structuralist and post-structuralist film-theorists at the time that the popular western buddy movie of the 1970s foregrounded a homosocial order. Masculinity was argued to have become destabilised as 'muscular individualism' gave way to corporatisation and the institutionalisation of social relations following WWII and this focus on male homosociality articulated nostalgia for the 'phallic' phase of American 'childhood'.