Queer Grit: Feminist Encounters with the Hollywood Western

Roewan Crowe

University of Manitoba (Canada)

The collision of colonial history and Hollywood Western narratives creates a space where the popular imaginary and the real blur.  The classic Western film has colonized and falsified history, producing a powerful colonial story that has layered itself upon the land and our bodies.  In this paper I explore these narrative ghosts, left behind by the death of the western genre, paying particular attention to the counter narratives of the “Anti-western.”  I claim and investigate this genre as a site of resistance and as a useful form to mobilize the untold stories of the West – tales of exile, dispossession and trauma.  I also critically reflect upon my animated short video “Queer Grit.”  

In Queer Grit, Jane West confronts her deepest fears and untangles herself from the violence of the Western, and of the West, to disobey the law and take her rightful place on the prairies.  She offers an answer to the question, How to be Queer on the prairies when your dad is John Wayne?  I use the Western genre against itself to insert the missing Queer, to ask questions about belonging, and to expose the regulating violence of the Western, and of the West.

About Roewan Crowe

Roewan Crowe is an artist, writer and interdisciplinary scholar who blurs the boundaries between art, academic disciplines and writing. Energized by acts of disruption, she crafts together various media and irreverently tampers with traditional forms –– academic prose, qualitative research, theory, photography, fiction, and video. Through the use of visual arts and scholarship she investigates questions of form and representation, particularly in relation to the of violence of the West, war, globalization and colonization. She is also engaged in initiatives in cultural democracy and in explorations of the radical power of art and imagination to create and sustain community. Roewan Crowe is a research affiliate at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Manitoba.

» Special Session: Language, Authority and Silence: Storytelling and Oral History in Canada

Abstracts/Resumenes de las Ponencias