ABSTRACT
Twenty-first-century western US fiction has reimagined the gendered politics of the once putatively national meaning of nineteenth-century “frontier” violence by addressing its brutal legacy and its emotional inheritance head-on through racial and gendered intersectional lenses. In their recent novels set in the nineteenth century, Emma Pérez and Sebastian Barry queer the violent West of Cormac McCarthy. Celebrating liberatory, intersectional “betweenness” while acknowledging the entrenchment of identities amidst which such betweenness lives and takes shape, Pérez’s and Barry’s fictional reimaginings of McCarthy’s revisionist West bring queerness to the center of borderland experience. Even as they cannot escape historical violence and are at times complicit in it, these novels’ protagonists struggle to create alternate futures in borderlands, freed from cycles of revenge and victimization. Situated against the endings of past westerns that sought to figure a national future, these revisionist happier endings model temporality differently from the temporal logic of settler colonialism. Pérez and Barry demonstrate that to live in between already unstable categories of identity is to recognize that gender expression, racial formation, and historical meaning cannot be thought separately—or to be thought separately from feeling. The unsettling of identity in their work offers a prism by which to understand the present and its relation to the past, revealing an ongoing legacy of both the failures and possibilities of an intersectional future.
