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This edited collection explores the role of sex and sexuality in the genre known as the weird western—a popular hybrid form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, or conventions with elements drawn from horror, fantasy, supernatural, or science fiction genres.
List of contents
Introduction
Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon
Part 1
1. The Daddy with No Name: The Kinky Cowboy Aesthetics of
The Mandalorian Jennessa Hester
2. Beyond the Virtual Frontier: New Possibilities of Sex and Desire in
Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”
Katie Googe
Part 2
3. Re-creations and Inescapable Repetitions: Sontag’s “Pornographic Imagination,” Bacigalupi’s
The Water Knife, and the Weird Western
Micah Donohue
4. Lost Max:
Mad Max and the Challenge to Masculine Dominance in 1970s Australia
Scott Pearce
Part 3
5. “Touch Your Wound, Dear”:
Eye Killers and the Vampire of Manifest Destiny
Miriam Brown Spiers
6. Qweirding the West: Re-forming the Nation in the Novels of C Pam Zhang and Emma Pérez
Anne Mai Yee Jansen
7. Ishmael Reed Takes on the Weird Western in
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Jana Koehler
Part 4
8. Coming Back to
Shane to Redeem the Cyborg in
Soldier and
Logan Elizabeth Abele
9. Leatherface Families and Final Grandmas: The Reproductive Rites and Slaughterhouse Sexualities in the New “Old West”
Joshua T. Anderson and Rebecca M. Lush
10. “What Makes You Worth $100,000?”: Heists, the Commodification of Women, and Capitalism Condemned in
The Professionals and
Army of the Dead Meredith Harvey
Part 5
11. The Woman in Room 237: Western Domesticity and Oedipal Conflict in
The Shining Jeffrey Chisum
12. Transgression on the Frontier: The Ludicity of Incest in
Bioshock Infinite Christina Fawcett and Marc A. Ouellette
13. Dead Fathers and Monstrous Daughters in
The Last of Us II Sara Humphreys
14. “Do I Bring My Own Leash, or Do I Pick One Up at the Door?”: Kink, Camp, and Queer Masculinity in CBS’s
The Wild Wild West Sara L. Spurgeon
Contributors
Index
About the author
Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine–Farmington.
Rebecca M. Lush is a professor in the Literature and Writing Studies Department and is the Faculty Center director at California State University San Marcos.
Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of English and directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Fine, Johnson, Lush, and Spurgeon are the coeditors of
Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (Nebraska, 2020).
Summary
This edited collection explores the role of sex and sexuality in the genre known as the weird western—a popular hybrid form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, or conventions with elements drawn from horror, fantasy, supernatural, or science fiction genres.
