ABSTRACT

This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts:

  • Genealogies
  • Bodies
  • Movements
  • Lands

The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. 

This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

chapter |22 pages

Monumental Reckonings and Impossible Placeholders

Introduction to Gender and the American West

part I|102 pages

Genealogies

chapter 1|8 pages

Mountains and Valleys of Difference

Traces of Language on the Land

chapter 2|11 pages

Re-inscribing a Woman Writer into the West

Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda and the Laterality of Legend

chapter 3|15 pages

Drifting across Lines in the Sand

Unsettled Records and the Restoration of Cultural Memories in Indigenous California

chapter 4|11 pages

More Than One Story

Gender, Region, and the American West in Japanese American Literature

chapter 7|12 pages

The Popular Western in Print

A Feminist Genealogy

part II|130 pages

Bodies

chapter 10|15 pages

“That's History. That's Truth. I Seen It Myself”

A Native American Slave Narrative

chapter 11|16 pages

Disturbing the Peace

Genre, Gender, Jurisdiction, and Justice in the Short Fiction of Ruth Muskrat Bronson

chapter 12|12 pages

Native Mother, Daughter, and Granddaughter

The Murder of Savanna Greywind and the Abduction of Haisley Jo Greywind

chapter 15|13 pages

Extractive Masculinity

The Western's Precarious Male Bodies in the Anthropocene

chapter 16|13 pages

Blood Tests in the Toxic Wests

Unsettling Settler Masculinities in John Carpenter's The Thing

chapter 17|18 pages

“The Very Borderland of Our Act”

The Queer West, Historical Violence, and the Intersectional Future

part III|106 pages

Movements

chapter 19|14 pages

“Incalculable Evils”

Policing Gender, Race, and the Family in the US West

chapter 21|10 pages

Black Women Writers Reclaiming Western Literature

Regionalism and Historical Fiction in the 1990s

chapter 22|11 pages

What About the Ingalls? What about La casa de la Pradera?

The Reception of Little House on the Prairie in Spain

chapter 23|11 pages

Gender and the Global West

Movements, Belonging, Exclusions

chapter 24|21 pages

“In-Between Kumeyaay and Brooklyn”

Mapping Queer Indigenous Memory, Affect, and Futurity in Tommy Pico's IRL

chapter 25|12 pages

Fierce Mariposa Warriors

chapter 26|12 pages

Queer Indigenous Feminism

Unsettling “Gender” as a Decolonizing Methodology

part IV|104 pages

Lands

chapter 28|9 pages

Reshaping Texas

Kimberly Garza's Short Fiction and the Gulf of Mexico

chapter 30|13 pages

“Ghastly Whiteness”

Ecofascism and Indigenous Ecofeminism on Cogewea's Frontier

chapter 31|12 pages

A Crowded Wilderness

Women, Homemaking, and Federal Bureaucracies in the American Southwest, 1920–1968

chapter 32|15 pages

What Is a Feminist Landscape?

A Vocabulary for Re-visioning Place in the US West

chapter 33|15 pages

Gesturing Toward the Sacred

Los Angeles, Queer Lands, and Bodies in Hector Silva's “Los Hijos de Doña Rita”

chapter 34|13 pages

“Land Back” beyond Repatriation

Restoring Indigenous Land Relationships