Film Analytical Essay: Calamity Jane Canary

In the 1953 western-musical parody Calamity Jane the butch heroin, Jane Canary (Doris Day) undergoes a makeover, by imitating Katie Brown (Allyn McLerie), to become a feminine female; thus engaging into a heterosexual romance with Bill Hickock (Howard Keel) (cf. Mizejewski 185). Katie Brown an aspiring, burlesque singer and dancer, whom Jane mistakes as the famous hyper feminine Adelaid Adams (Gale Robbins), helps Jane to transition from a masculine cowboy into a real and proper woman, by confronting Jane with her own inadequate gender performance. Bill Hickock as the embodiment of a hyper masculine male authenticity shames Jane “to consolidate [a] normative, ‘feminine’ identity” (Savoy 169) in order to shape her character specifically to a “gradual conformity to heterosexual expectations of the feminine”, according to “what her culture regards as the ‘real woman’ (Savoy 165). I claim that Jane Canary’s object of affection is an arbitrary choice, according to gender normativity and that in fact Jane’s secret love is Katie Brown. To further examine the …show more content…
Moreover, the song “Secret Love” ultimately exposes the “epistemology of the lesbian closet and its provisional rupture” (Savoy 166) than expressing her romantic feelings towards Bill. The hybridity of performance reveals that gender is something being put on (cf. Butler) The film insistence that “in finding true love … [Jane] finds her identity and femininity” (T.E. Perkins 30, 31) shows that the decision of whom to love is connected to gender; thus according to gender normativity love is an arbitrary affair. Therefore, it is important to grasp the complexity of gender since the “representation of Jane serves as a register of contemporary cultural contentions about gender and sexuality” (Mizejewski