This book works to complicate and push against common arguments that the Western from its inception is an anti-feminist genre. By focusing on representations of women professionals in Westerns, it shows that women in cinematic and televisual Westerns sometimes do acquire agency and empowerment in the private and public realms, despite our culture’s tendency to gender the former as feminine and the latter as solely masculine. The study reviews the relationship of these progressive Westerns to both explicit and latent feminist ideologies relevant to their times, as the films evolved from the 1930s to the twenty-first century.

In Westerns, women transmit complicated cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. As the genre changes and matures, depictions of women have transitioned from traditional to more modern roles. Frontier Feminine charts these significant shifts in the Western's transmission of gender values and expectations and aims to expand the critical arena in which Western film is situated by acknowledging the importance of women in this genre.

Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to 'undo' or 'subvert' popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.

Women have fulfilled film roles that exhibit their historically subservient or sexualised positions in society, among others. Over the decades, the gender identity of women has fluctuated to include powerful women, emotionally strong women, lesbian women, and even neurologically atypical women. These identities reflect the change in societal norms and what is now acknowledged as more likely and more mainstream. The evolution of society’s views of women can be mapped through these roles; from 1950’s America where women were depicted as the counterpart to male characters and their masculinity either as a threat or support to the patriarchal norms; to more recent times, where these norms have been questioned, challenged, deconstructed and reconstructed to include women in a more equitable balance. The fight for equal access, equal pay and equal standing still exists in all walks of life and different cultures requiring continued scrutiny of the norms that made that fight necessary. The essays offer a unique vantage of the changing culture and conversations that allowed, encouraged, and praised an evolution of women’s roles. They strive to represent the issues faced by women, from the early heyday of Hollywood through to films as recent as 2007; examining depictions of the masculine gaze, mental and physical oppression, the mother figure, as well as how these roles may develop in the future. The book contains valuable material for film students at an undergraduate or post-graduate level, as well as scholars from a range of disciplines including cultural studies, media studies, film studies and women’s and gender studies.

Feminist thinking on cinema has been dominated by approaches which emphasize how meanings are produced in films, and how this process hinges on sexual differences and prileges the masculine. The essays in this collection have been written by feminist film-makers and theorists on both sides of the Atlantic. Together, they provide a picture of feminist film criticism in teh 1980s, perspective readings of individual films and TV programs, and insights from women in the business of making films today.--Adapted from book jacket.

Seminar paper from the year 1995 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1, University of Tubingen (Department of American Studies, Faculty of English Philology), course: Hauptseminar "American West ", 24 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: University of Tübingen, Department for American Studies, HS: The American West Western Myth with gender change: Thelma & Louise (1990) von: Sebastian Hoos Abstract The scientific community widely agrees that no region on earth shaped as many contemporary myths as the American West. The number of definitions of what is meant by "the West" is close to the number of references made to it - in numerous fields. Only by looking at individual examples of western myth at work can we find ways to appoach the myth itself and its consequences. In this paper I want to illuminate the intellectual and cultural web that is worked into and created around the Hollywood-made motion picture "Thelma & Louise". Following a rather broad attempt I want to give a comprehensive overview over all the printed reactions and reviews of this piece of discourse beginning with a few "traditional Westerns" and a piece of generic criticism by a young female American film critic. Following that, the story of the movie will be recaptured, analyzed, and thereby, finally, interpreted. This paper is a revised and extended version of an earlier one presented to Prof. Jeff Bass at Baylor University, Texas, USA. Thanks to the excellent facilities and up to date media access of Moody Memorial Library on Baylor University campus I am apt to say that all relevant publications about this movie have been elaborated in my work. New insight about the recipience and interpretation of the western myth made me rewrite this paper specifically for a course on the American West. Directory of content p. 3 Introduction p. 4 Chapter I: Recent Western Film Reviews p. 5 Chapter II: Generic Criticism p. 8 Chapter I

Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to ‘undo’ or ‘subvert’ popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.