ABSTRACT
My descriptions of the representations of male sexuality in Eastwood’s films, and my considerations of the meaning of such representations, have been predicated upon the notion that these representations and meanings derive from the power of what I have been calling the “amongst men.” The “amongst men” operates as a foundational logic that has as its telos the almost contradictory goal of establishing the centrality of heterosexual relations in the culture-an endpoint that is, of course, emblematized perfectly in Tightrope. Much of what gets represented in Eastwood’s films in regard to masculinity registers the way in which this telos leaves the residues and marks of another kind of sexuality. But what that other kind of sexuality is not, is homosexuality. These films demonstrate, that is, an almost permanent disavowal of the homosexuality that the notion of the “amongst men” would almost automatically invoke. Homosexuality in these films is merely, as I have suggested, a matter of fake or dishonest sexuality, and constitutes-as in the ending of Enforcer-precisely that which needs to be blown away in order to keep the logic of the “amongst men” free of any perverse taint.
