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Contents:

Western Masculinities Past and Present

Masculinity and Place in American Literature since -

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Western Masculinities Past and Present

American literature -- West U. West U. Abstract: Summary: "The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character.

Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction: "My American heart": how contemporary Westerns reimagine masculinity -- 1. The death of a cross-dressing bear: sexual violence and male rape on the frontier of Blood meridian -- 2. Of fertility and sterility: feminine masculinity and the Western in Ceremony -- 3. Outlaw geography: place and masculinity in Desperadoes and The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford -- 4.

Savages and citizens: revisions of the captivity narrative in Gardens in the dunes and The heartsong of Charging Elk -- 5.

The unpunishing of Anton Chigurh: fraternity as the final frontier in No country for old men -- 6. Martial masculinity and the ethics of heroism in Fools crow. Includes bibliographical references pages and index. From an academic point of view, even if it deals with cinema in many of its parts, this study is not to be considered the outcome of a film studies approach. My education is within the field of American Literature, and that also informs how I deal with movies in this volume.

In particular, this book springs from my interest in gender studies, and from some compelling works to which I am greatly indebted. Her focus on the turn of the twentieth century captured my interest, and I put a bookmark on the chapter about Teddy Roosevelt.

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The following study is an attempt at providing an answer to this initial question, further exploring why and how discourses of masculinity are performed in some westerns of the last twenty years roughly, from to The distinction between masculinity, maleness, and manhood is particularly useful for historians of gender; though, given that I limit my discussion to the last twenty years of American culture, I use manhood and masculinity in an interchangeable way, as many scholars presently do.

There are many egregiously written books that achieve that task better than I might do, and repeating their work would be hum- drum and not so expendable an attempt. Fenin and William K. How- ever, only in the s did Tompkins and Mitchell systematically focus on the relation between the western and manhood.

Slotkin has proved the ability of westerns to investigate issues that are crucial in American society within a genre that, at first, is rather conven- tional. Along this line, my investigation on the recovering of the genre and how it changes over time tries to give the measure of the constant adjustment of gender definitions, inserting new shades within established patterns or re-enacting pre-existing ideals of manhood.

She brings to the fore two ideas that have become influential in gender studies, i. Taking into consideration the performative character of gender, representations and the circulation of popular cultural products are signifying and meaningful practices, which participate in the performance of what gender is.

In his analysis on the mediatic exhibi- tion of masculinity, Sean Nixon emphasizes the constitutive role of representation in the formation of the attribu- tes and characteristics of masculinity through which real historical men come to live out of their identities as gendered individuals. Cultural lan- guages or systems of representation, then, are not a reflection of a pre- given masculinity fixed outside of representation. Rather, they actively construct the cultural meanings we give to masculinities. As we shall see, culture is a practice in which texts movies, books, commercials, music videos negotiate, display, and repeat narrations of masculinity, expressing fears and fan- tasies.

Popular texts spectacularize versions of reality; yet their repetitions also provide examples, role models, and hierarchies that often have a normalizing effect, legitimizing protagonists or outcasts. This is true for the western, whose existence, after the moment it nar- rates and even after the moment of its creation, continues to be a productive cultural practice, still delivering western images, heroes, and stories that are easily cashed in when, in the negotiation of genders, masculinity is solicited.

It is with this in mind that I approach the genre in this work. To the extent that representa- tion and entertainment are of the greatest importance in engender- ing practices, the long life of westerns in the United States may be considered a path trough which to accomplish such a strategy, contributing to the creation of how we perceive manhood, linking earlier conventions of masculinity in an era when the western came into existence with contemporary expressions.

Studying popular culture, Cawelti had already addressed the matter of repetition through his idea of formula, un- derstood as a fixed narrative pattern that gives the popular genre a canvas upon which to draw new themes, nuances, and traits The Six-Gun Mystique 8; Adventure 8; Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture Comparably, Butler does not consider the reiterative aspect of gender-making as a simplistic quotation. In the following chapters I will go into this in more detail, proposing noteworthy western texts that shed light on how the genre provides a space open to contemporary discussion, adjusting hot themes for the present-day debate on masculinity.

Masculinity and Place in American Literature since -

They try to highlight the dialectic between signs of openings and protection of positions, new debates and confirmations of long established discourses of masculinity, discussion and regeneration of codes of masculinity. These two positions often coincide in one production: the changing nature of gender constantly modifies and redefines masculinity, but, as long as the western uses its symbolic language, deconstructing its definition of masculinity appears problematic from within that same genre that has epitomized it.

From a methodological standpoint, this study grapples with different forms of cultural production, including cinema, TV, literature, video games, and music. Scholars such as Tompkins, Cawelti, Mitchell, and others have evidenced that the western is a composite genre, made up of different mediatic products and representations and not confined to one medium. Consequently, as long as cultural productions can be addressed as western, different media are here considered equivalent. Fur- thermore, since this study deals with very recent cultural produc- tions, ranging from Blood Meridian to Brokeback Mountain or Red Dead Redemption , it avoids the pretense of being all-encompassing.

Working on contemporary cultural texts always carries the risk that the next production will refute or ar- ticulate our understanding according to further consideration.

Jordan Peterson - The West Has Lost Faith In Masculinity

Nevertheless, I believe that such an inquiry may foster the discus- sion about masculinities and white manhood on the one side, and renew the approach usually employed when it comes to westerns on the other. The first chapter aims at giving additional theoretical back- ground to the discussion of masculinity and the reasons why we can tackle the western as a preeminent cultural form when man- hood is investigated.

The link between westerns and masculinity is histori- cally established, as the genre came to maximum expansion and definition during one of the most influential periods of renegotia- tion of masculinity in American history, i. The second part of the chapter continues with a panorama of contemporary manhood in the United States, in order to have a wider social and cultural understanding in which to situate the discourses con- tained in the contemporary westerns I analyze. As Chapter One highlights, contemporary American masculin- ity feels besieged for a number of reasons.

Among them, the pro- tests of women, racialized subjects, and gay men provide the more mordant accusations. Chapter Two exam- ines how repetition unfastens space for questioning the stability of the assumed natural order of masculinity, namely the consistency between body, gender, and sexuality as it has always been pro- posed in westerns.

While Chapter Two copes with the dismantling of traditional male coherence, Chapter Three considers fatherhood as one of the topics usually reclaimed in many of the moments of debate about masculinity. In both cases, I consider these incor- porations as strategies for masculine power. In the technologically-advanced masculinity of the end of the millennium, going Indian appears as a safe process to recover a softer masculinity in connection with nature and personal feelings, while maintaining an implicit stereotyped savagism that safeguards accusations of feminization.

The last part of the chapter provides an analysis of an interactional space between the western and hip hop, which is generally interpreted as one of the more authentic cultural productions of African American culture.

While Chapters Two, Three, and Four present forms of inno- vations true or not, as I will indicate , Chapter Five tackles the new cycle of westerns as a less elaborate repetition used to confirm power positions traditionally embedded in the genre. Many productions, such as Deadwood, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Appaloosa, and Open Range confirm nostalgia for a time when manhood was imaginatively stronger and easier to achieve and define.

Critics have received the book as a paramount western to shed light on the deconstruction of the white western hero, who is doomed by the cycle of violence he has contributed to create. However, I shall show that the exposition of the violence implicit in the old West is not sufficient to dismantle a position of white and male central- ity in the genre. Rather, such a practice corroborates the notion that men picture themselves in the mythical western past with new tones, but they do use the western as the setting where discussing white forms of masculinity.

In this general atmosphere, a genuine attempt at questioning the established white dominance with which the genre is imbued is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Dominik , a film analyzed in Chapter Six. Masculinities and the Western From the beginning the Western has fretted over the construction of masculinity. The last two parts of the chapter more specifically focus on a broad view of contemporary westerns, arranging them in four categories.

Masculinity, like femininity, is not bio- logically inborn but a culturally and historically constructed gen- der that changes over time and space. Usually, but not always, as a consequence of a biological penis, children are educated to be- come men, and are expected, as an effect of this gender, to develop 1 Westerns 4.

During those years, some men were actively involved in feminist progressive positions Adams and Savran and started reflecting on the construct- ed character of manhood. In the wake of s poststructuralist and identity theories of third-wave feminism, masculinity studies further elaborated the definition of manhood, which came to be understood not as an essence but as a cultural, social, and ethical construction Adams and Savran 4.

The following decades have seen the publication of other volumes on masculinity, such as David H. The gender into which children are socialized and adult men have to continually affirm themselves is a mobile construct, which Butler has defined as performative because it comes into existence only at the very moment it is done while constantly needing repetition.

In this sense, the norms through which the body gains its social and gendered existence depend on their constant repetition. As a fact, the need of constant repetition has a double effect on gender. Gender is stabilized by the constant repetition of norms and practices that define the form through which we experience it, almost acquiring a natural character since we perceive it as normalized and general.

The historical process by which gender exists can thus be explained as a balance between the maintenance of an established set of norms, rules, and prac- tices through repetition, and suggestions for innovative liminal spaces, in which repetition of existing norms vacillates. Given that masculinity, as well as femininity, is not a pure essence, but a cultural construct, masculinity can contain contradictions, leaving some space for revision. The historical nature of gender highlights its instability, and prompts the need gender has to continually re- define itself according to changing social, cultural, and economic variables.