European journal of American studies

Book reviews | 2015

Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns:

Regenerations at the Turn of the New Millennium
Anna De Biasio

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11155
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.11155
ISSN: 1991-9336

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European Association for American Studies

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Anna De Biasio, “Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New
Millennium”, European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, document 6, Online since 06
October 2015, connection on 31 August 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11155 ; DOI:
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 Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New ... 1

Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and

Westerns: Regenerations at the
Turn of the New Millennium
Anna De Biasio

REFERENCES
Verona: ombre corte, 2014. Pp. 240. ISBN: 978-88-97522-83-6

1 The western is by definition a masculine genre; or, we should say, by

redefinition. Whereas its paraphernalia can to some extent vary, its top
icon remains the strong, solitary cowboy, who —since his first modern
appearance in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)— is also laconic and
charismatic, occasionally violent and at the same time chivalrous: in a
word, an emblem of secure manhood. At closer inspection, the icon and
the genre that hosts it are less safe than they seem. If its ancestors were
pioneers like Daniel Boone and J. F. Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, the western
itself was born at a moment of crisis as far as American masculinity is
concerned. The turn-of-the-century exceptionalist or downright
imperialist discourse of such diverse figures as Theodore Roosevelt,
Frederick Jackson Turner, or Frederic Remington went hand in hand
with the attempt at strengthening men’s identity, which was perceived
as threatened by the new forces of modernity (industrialization,
urbanization, women’s advancement in society). From its inception
through its “golden age” in the 1940s and 1960s, therefore, the western
effectively served the function of first reaffirming and then patrolling
the borders of hegemonic masculinity, that is to say white, U.S. born,
heteronormative. Yet what do the origins of the genre have in common
with its resurgence between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the

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 Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New ... 2

21st century, as testified—among others—by the literary works of Annie

Proulx and Cormac McCarthy, by television series like Lonesome Dove
(1994-1996) and Deadwood (2004-2006), as well as by a long list of movies?
Elisa
2 Bordin’s main argument is that in the contemporary revival
of the western, long declared dead, it is possible to recognize a historical
continuity, the present turn-of-the-century transition resembling the
preceding one in its need for a redefinition of masculinity. As a result of
the radical, generally pacifist movements for the emancipation of
women, homosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and due to the
increasingly strong pressure of consumerism in today’s globalized
capitalism, male identity has changed in ways unimaginable one century
ago. And yet the adjustments required from men (in the workplace, in
the experience of fatherhood, in the relationship with women or with
their bodies) generate a friction, which is often described in terms of a
“crisis,” with long-standing traditional expectations about masculinity.
In turn, the western itself has become more complex and fragmented,
frequently taking a self-critical stance toward its own ideological
premises, as suggested by the different sub-genre labels used in this
study to map the contemporary production (revisionary westerns,
postwesterns, neo and nouveaux westerns). The challenging question,
therefore, is whether in the face of such transformations western
narratives are still able to accommodate fantasies about regenerated
manhood. Bordin’s general assumption is that they do rely on the same
reassuring role they used to play when American men first discovered
their vulnerability. At the same time, she is especially interested in
exploring the margin for “gender trouble” in a genre that more than
others is associated with a conservative vision of male identity.
The
3 analysis opens with two movies that deeply unsettle western
stereotypes. Based on a true case of crossdressing, The Ballad of Little Jo
(1993) by Maggie Greenwald tells the story of a young woman who
reinvents her life by becoming “Jo” once she has crossed the frontier.
Bordin discusses the break in the continuity between gender and the
body by means of inescapable references to Judith Butler (Gender Trouble,
Undoing Gender) and Judith Halberstam, whose notion of “female
masculinity” is read here as a reductio ad absurdum of the logic of the
western. By focusing on the various stages through which male identity
is learnt and performed, the protagonist’s metamorphosis exposes the
mainstays of the genre (attire, gun handling, acts of violence) as an
apparatus that enables the construction of masculinity in the very
absence of the male body. Likewise, the more successful Brokeback
Mountain (2005) by Ang Lee is accounted for as a laboratory for the
deconstruction of the white, straight manhood that is the trademark of
the genre. As Bordin points out, since it explodes the prohibition to
same-sex desire structuring men’s identity while it casts especially Ennis
as a very virile cowboy, the movie has proven particularly unendurable
to tradition-oriented audiences. Both the poor reception of The Ballad of

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 Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New ... 3

Little Jo and the strongly ambivalent response to Brokeback Mountain are

thus taken as evidence of the relative imperviousness of the western to
gender and sexual deviance.
By4 dwelling on the gay characters’ relationships with their
children (to a greater extent, it should be added, than in the Annie
Proulx’s story on which it is based), Brokeback Mountain is in itself
revelatory of the important role that fatherhood has come to play in
contemporary fictions of the West. This is not to imply that in the past
western narratives did not portray fatherly relations: they generally did
so in symbolic terms, as the classic cowboy is notoriously a bachelor,
orphaned man dodging the tentacles of family and domesticity.
Nowadays, however, the increased interest in the theme appears to
resonate with the ample space the public debate has devoted to the
question of fatherhood and its responsibilities since the 1970s, with a
frequent emphasis on the necessity to strengthen a diminished role. Two
movies, 3:10 to Yuma (2007) by James Mangold and Don’t Come Knocking by
Wim Wenders, are discussed by Bordin as representative of this general
trend. Both envisage the paternal role as a necessary attribute of
masculinity and at the same time as a source of anxiety, something to
recover in order to assuage one’s sense of being a man.
Women,
5 homosexuals, angst-ridden fathers are not the only
subjects that gain center stage, with ambiguous results, in an
imaginative space that had long marginalized or thoroughly excluded
them. Revisionary westerns prove to be especially hospitable to non-
white characters with (co) protagonist roles. This is the case of the TV
series like Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993-1998), in which Native
American cultures feature prominently through the character of Sully, a
white hero who rejects white people’s ways to become fully Indianized.
Yet is the series entirely persuasive as an attempt to amend numberless
distorted representations of Native Americans? As Bordin correctly
maintains, there is an underside to the appropriation of another culture,
namely, the reaffirmation of white centrality and the exploitation of a
sanitized vision of Indianness to bolster masculinity (both gestures date
back to Cooper’s Leatherstocking but were recently revived by Men’s
Movements). On the other hand, the inclusion of black protagonists in
such narratives as Percival Everett’s God’s Country (1994) gives further
evidence to the genre as a space that validates masculine identity. Here
too the revision of the western myth appears to be partial, for the source
of empowerment for the novel’s black protagonist is the appropriation
of the white hero’s defining traits, among which reticence,
righteousness, and capacity for violence.
The
6 problem of violence is at the core of Bordin’s discussion of
another novel, Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy. This much-
praised, historically based narrative —whose telling subtitle is The
Evening Redness in the West— revolves around a series of systematic and

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 Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New ... 4

carefully differentiated acts of brutality committed by a gang of scalp

hunters. The head of the group is the satanic figure of Judge Holden,
whose symbolic antagonist would be the Kid, if only the novel allowed
the possibility of breaking down the orgiastic circle of violence in which
everybody participates. Due to the lack of all regenerative vision behind
its reenactment of the frontier mythology, Blood Meridian is usually
regarded as revisionary or even as an anti-western, a sort of postmodern
parody that has the effect of debunking the myth of the West. Bordin
aligns instead with those critics who see Blood Meridian as an ultimate
validation of the tradition of American violence, stressing the features of
the novel —such as characterization and the use of allegory— that
prevent the possibility for development and change. By universalizing
violence and by focusing once again on white male characters, McCarthy
would “obscure practices of domination…at the expense of other
possible characters, visions, and attitudes” (196). While it is always
objectionable to criticize a work on the basis of what it does not do, the
discussion of this major novel is especially successful in conveying the
general purpose of Bordin’s book, which is an investigation of the
western as a highly contested ground, at various levels. From the point
of view of scholarly definitions, the “battle of labels” that frames the
study —Bordin herself classifies Blood Meridian as a neo-western—
bespeaks the current eclecticism of the genre, its ability to refashion
itself by following unorthodox and plural paths. A special focus on
masculinity, on the other hand, shows that the resilience of western
narratives has limits. Their capacity to absorb a revision of gender (but
also of racial and sexual) identities very often hides a deep-seated
resistance, which is ultimately the undead power of attraction of the
cowboy myth.

AUTHOR
ANNA DE BIASIO
University of Bergamo, Italy

European journal of American studies , Book reviews