Overview
- Traces the evolution of feminist Westerns in film and television and shows how they resisted the sexism of the times as they kept pace with the evolution of feminism in the American political, social, and cultural scene
- Uses rhetorical analysis of Westerns to show that how they make strong appeals to liberate women from the confines placed on them by the reigning cultural construct
- Complicates the landmark works of John Cawleti and Jane Tompkins by arguing how Westerns have illustrated feminist positions and portrayals despite an accepted idea that anti-feminist ideologies of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century are embedded in the genre
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Feminism and the Western in Film and Television
Authors: Mark E. Wildermuth
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77001-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-77000-0Published: 26 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08344-1Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-77001-7Published: 17 April 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 167
Topics: Genre, Culture and Gender, American Cinema and TV, Popular Culture , Close Reading