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This book works to complicate and push against common arguments that the Western from its inception is an anti-feminist genre. By focusing on representations of women professionals in Westerns, it shows that women in cinematic and televisual Westerns sometimes do acquire agency and empowerment in the private and public realms, despite our culture's tendency to gender the former as feminine and the latter as solely masculine. The study reviews the relationship of these progressive Westerns to both explicit and latent feminist ideologies relevant to their times, as the films evolved from the 1930s to the twenty-first century.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Is the Western an Inherently Anti-feminist Genre?.- 2. Women Professionals in 1930's Film Westerns in the Context of the Progressive Age and the New Deal Gender Politics.- 3. Women and Westerns in the Films of the 1940s.- 4. Women and Western Films in the Cold War.- 5. After the Cold War: From the 1990's Interregnum to 9/11.- 6. Women and Television Westerns, 1954-2001.- 7. Conclusion: Some Reflections on Women, Violence and Westerns.
About the author
Mark E. Wildermuth is Dunagan Professor of English at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, USA. His previous publications include
Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema;
Print, Chaos and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture; and
Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State: 1958-Present.
Summary
This book works to complicate and push against common arguments that the Western from its inception is an anti-feminist genre. By focusing on representations of women professionals in Westerns, it shows that women in cinematic and televisual Westerns sometimes do acquire agency and empowerment in the private and public realms, despite our culture’s tendency to gender the former as feminine and the latter as solely masculine. The study reviews the relationship of these progressive Westerns to both explicit and latent feminist ideologies relevant to their times, as the films evolved from the 1930s to the twenty-first century.
