Negotiating masculinity and dismantling frontier myths in Brokeback Mountains transnational discourse

Amid increasingly intertwined global media contexts, the cross-cultural circulation of gender discourse has become a critical focus in cultural studies. As a globally disseminated film, Brokeback Mountain not only challenges the heteronormative masculinity narratives embedded in traditional Western cinema but also elicits highly heterogeneous emotional responses and gender interpretations across cultural communities. Centered on the themes of masculinity negotiation and frontier myth deconstruction, this study constructs a transnational review corpus based on user-generated content from IMDb, Reddit, and Douban. By integrating natural language processing, visual Transformers, and multimodal sentiment recognition techniques, the study examines how users from different cultural backgrounds articulate masculinity, emotional repression, and sociocultural expectations through both text and imagery. The findings indicate that English-language discourse tends to emphasize identity dilemmas and emotional suppression, while Chinese-language discourse frequently frames masculinity in relation to family responsibility and moral order, highlighting the cultural adaptability and reconstructive nature of gender discourse in global media transmission. Moreover, the proposed multimodal fusion model demonstrates significant advantages in detecting implicit gendered emotions and resolving cross-modal semantic ambiguities. This research not only affirms the applicability of artificial intelligence in analyzing gender discourse within complex cultural environments but also provides methodological and theoretical insights for advancing gender equity communication in multilingual contexts.