Jan 30
Frontier Fantasies: Unaccountable Gender and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century Dime Novel Westerns - A talk with Emily Coccia
Although contemporary audiences often think of the Western as a socially conservative genre, nineteenth-century sensation novels built a nostalgic vision of the frontier as a space of unfettered freedom that could, at times, provide opportunities for characters to envision and inhabit queer worlds of their own making. Gender-transgressive, sharp-shooting characters like Calamity Jane and Baltimore Bess gallop across the pages of mass-popular dime novels, seducing other characters and the readers alike. This talk will consider both the vital queer and trans potential of these texts, which emerged at the same time as legislative efforts to police gendered and sexual difference, as well as the novels' complicity in reinforcing nostalgic, settler-colonial fantasies.
Presented by Emily Coccia, Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts in the Department of English