Women in the Western

Description

In Westerns, women transmit complicated cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. As the genre changes and matures, depictions of women have transitioned from traditional to more modern roles. Frontier Feminine charts these significant shifts in the Western’s transmission of gender values and expectations and aims to expand the critical arena in which Western film is situated by acknowledging the importance of women in this genre. Half Title Dedication Title page Copyright Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part One Roles on the Range 1.  Silent but Rowdy: Stuntwomen of the Early Frontier 2.  Suffering Heroines on the Frontier—Melodrama and Pathos, 1914–39 3.  When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western Women from the 1910s to the 1930s 4.  The Virginian and the Rose: Two Key Female Roles in Western Films and Comics 5.  Freud, “The Family on the Land,” and the Feminine Turn in Post-war Westerns 6.  Clytemnestra and Electra under Western Skies 7.  “Never seen a woman who was more of a man”: Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the Western 8.  Gender Politics in the Revisionist Western: Interrogating the Perpetrator–Victim Binary in The Missing (Howard 2003) Part Two Women’s Issues in Post-War, Revisionist, and Feminist Westerns 9.  Trading Places—Trading Races: The Cross-Cultural Assimilation of Women in The Searchers (1956) and The Unforgiven (1960) 10.  Western Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Native American Women in Wind River (2017) 11.  Mostly Whores with a (Very) Few Angels: Asian Women in the Western 12.  “We been haunted a long time”—Raped Women in Westerns 13.  “My body for a hand of poker”: The Belle Starr Story in Its Contexts 14.  The Female Avenger in Post-9/11 Westerns 15.  You’ve Got Something: Female Agency in Justified 16.  Eastward the Women: Remapping Women’s Journeys in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman (2014) 17.  Women Gotta Gun? Iconography and Female Representation in Godless 18.  Wagon Mistress Part Three Filmography and Bibliographies 19.  Women in the Western Filmography and Bibliography Contributors Index