Gender Beyond the Western Frontier

On Saturday mornings during my childhood, my mother would call to me from her bedroom, her voice rising with urgent delight. “Come quick! You have to see this!” Her excitement would pierce the quiet of our small apartment like a train thundering down iron tracks. Though I’d resist leaving the sanctuary of my own room, I would inevitably find myself drawn to her bedside, where she lay enshrined in newspapers, her attention fixed on the television set. With the gravity of a scholar sharing ancient texts, she would summon me precisely during the crescendos of her favorite Westerns, each scene unfolding before us like a lesson she couldn’t bear for me to miss.

“Look, look! This part!” she’d exclaim, pointing at the screen with the kind of fervor reserved for miracles. Having spent her formative years beneath the vast North Texas sky, she passed down her inheritance: endless reruns of The Big Valley and Bonanza, and the distinctive sight of Clint Eastwood weaving through Sergio Leone’s landscapes like a snake through sand, each movement punctuated by Ennio Morricone’s haunting whistles. In those moments, half-asleep in the Saturday morning light, I didn’t understand that these weren’t mere entertainments for her. They were portals into America’s complicated soul, encrypted lessons in how to read between the frames of history.

The Western as a film genre emerged at a peculiar moment of technological and cultural convergence. In 1899, mere decades after the American Civil War had redrawn the nation’s moral and physical boundaries, British filmmaker Robert W. Paul created Kidnapping by Indians. This first Western, made by an outsider who had witnessed America’s violent rebirth, established many of the genre’s foundational tensions: the spectacle of conflict, the fetishization of Indigenous peoples, and the camera’s power to mythologize landscapes.

The Western genre’s emergence in the wake of the Civil War is no coincidence. Civil War photography had already transformed how American violence was documented and consumed, with Mathew Brady’s battlefield photographs marking the first time war’s corporeal brutality entered the American home. This visual heritage, the documented body in states of violence, would find its way into the Western’s DNA. But where Civil War photography forced Americans to confront the reality of white bodies in conflict, the Western genre would appropriate this visual language to spectacularize and distance the violence against Indigenous bodies. The same camera that brought the Civil War’s horror home would now frame Indigenous death as entertainment, transforming historical genocide into readable codes of “cowboys and Indians.” This brutal alchemy, whereby real violence becomes styled entertainment, remains one of the genre’s most insidious legacies.

These early seeds would bloom into a genre that has haunted American consciousness for over a century. The genre-defining opening scene of countless Westerns, an ultrawide shot that reveals an expanse of land so vast that the actors, riding on horseback, seem to inch along the horizon like tiny ants in a tunnel, establishes that the true protagonist is not the cowboy, bounty hunter, or outlaw, but the land itself. This distinctive narrative approach created a cinematic language that speaks far beyond the American frontier.

James Baldwin’s searing essay Here Be Dragons cuts to the heart of American masculinity’s violent foundations. He writes: “The American ideal . . . of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white.” The cowboy figure emerges in Baldwin’s critique as the perfect embodiment of this “paralytically infantile” ideal, a mythology that violently resists the complexity of genuine manhood.

As a trans masculine person navigating my own relationship to gender identity, during childhood I found myself drawn to different figures within masculinity, seeking models that might help me understand masculinity within its larger cultural context. These were figures that were often fraught with violence and repression, but so much of the conversation around masculinity is fraught with some unresolved desire. What fascinated me about the cowboy archetype was its fundamental contradiction: here was a figure supposedly embodying ultimate masculine independence, yet the Western genre repeatedly shows us men who are deeply dependent on each other, on the landscape, and on the very communities they claim to protect through violence. The cowboy’s relationship to domesticity remains perpetually unresolved, caught between the desire for connection and the mythology of solitary heroism that cinema demands.

The Western’s cinematic language itself centers masculine interiority in ways that reveal the genre’s anxieties about emotional expression. The extreme close-up on weathered faces, the lingering shots of men in contemplation against vast landscapes, the careful choreography of masculine bodies in space: all of these techniques work to make visible an inner life that the cowboy’s stoic exterior supposedly conceals. For someone questioning traditional masculinity, these films offered a strange comfort: they acknowledged that masculine identity was a performance, a series of gestures and poses that could be studied, analyzed, and perhaps even adopted or adapted. The irony runs deep: John Wayne, America’s most iconic cowboy, had his sexuality questioned throughout his life, his hypermasculine persona perhaps compensating for some perceived inadequacy or deviation from heteronormative expectations. There’s something almost comedic about this contradiction, which Willie Nelson captures perfectly in his tongue-in-cheek song Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other, a playful acknowledgment of the homoerotic undertones that have always lurked beneath the Western’s surface.

But this raises deeper questions: How does the landscape help shape one’s relationship to gender, identity, and presentation? The vast expanses of the American West seem to promise freedom from societal constraints, yet early Westerns are thoroughly fraught with rigid gender norms. In Ford’s The Searchers, the leading love interest must wait around for her man to return, awaiting letters over years while he gets to live out a fantasy of solitude and warrior life as he seeks to save his family. The landscape becomes both liberating and imprisoning, offering men the freedom to roam while confining women to domestic spaces of waiting and worry.

The landscape itself, particularly in films like The Searchers, becomes a feminine presence, vast and unconquerable, standing in defiance of this rigid masculinity. Monument Valley is not merely a backdrop but a character that refuses to be conquered, much like the bodies and stories that hover at the edges of these narratives. The tension between the masculine desire to dominate and the landscape’s ultimate indifference creates a space where traditional gender roles begin to fracture and reveal their artificiality.

Joan Didion’s essay John Wayne: A Love Song begins with a seemingly innocent memory of watching John Ford’s cavalry trilogy being filmed in the 1940s. As a young girl, she witnessed Wayne’s careful cultivation of what would become America’s definitive cowboy archetype. Yet what emerges through her nuanced critique is something far more complex, revealing how his carefully constructed persona, and by extension, the entire Western genre, sustained a collective American myth about masculinity and power.

In this moment of profound political reckoning, as we grapple with the aftermath of the 2024 election and the ongoing crisis of white male identity, the films in this series take on new urgency. The cowboy figure, that lonely sentinel of American mythology, reveals itself as a complex symbol of power, vulnerability, and contested belonging. The landscape surrounding Texas and California, territory my mother’s stories first helped me navigate, becomes a metaphorical space where fixed identities dissolve into possibility. Films like Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar reveal how the Western’s fascination with hypermasculinity often masks deeper currents of queer desire and repression.

As part of the series Landscapes of Myths, which is now moving to the Walker Art Center from Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), I am screening Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher, a film that serves as a powerful counterbalance to everything presented in The Searchers.

Though the screenplay was written by white screenwriter Ernest Kinoy, who also helped write parts of Roots and films for Gordon Parks, the story functions as a reclamation narrative for both African Americans as freed slaves and for women’s representation in cinema. Ruby Dee’s character, Ruth, exemplifies this resistance to traditional Western gender roles. Unlike the passive love interest in The Searchers, who waits endlessly for her man’s return, Ruth refuses the role of the waiting woman. She sets out on her own horseback journey, actively participating in the fight to help the wagon train move west. Her agency transforms the Western landscape from a space of masculine fantasy into one of shared struggle and liberation.

The intersections of gender, race, and landscape converge powerfully in contemporary reinterpretations by filmmakers who reimagine the genre’s boundaries. Charles Burnett’s The Horse presents a tender study of connection and loss, following a young Black boy’s relationship with a dying horse against the backdrop of the rural American South. The film’s quiet power lies in how it positions Black presence within pastoral spaces that have often been sites of exclusion and violence, transforming the landscape itself into a meditation on mortality and resilience.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s Ten Five in the Grass takes a different approach, documenting Virginia’s Black rodeo circuit with an eye for the ritualistic and the everyday. Everson’s patient camerawork reveals how generations of knowledge are transferred through gesture and practice, as riders prepare their equipment and steady their horses in movements that speak to deep cultural inheritance. Refusing a conventional documentary narrative, the film finds its rhythm in repetition and physical presence, showing how Black communities have claimed and redefined Western iconography through lived experience and collective tradition. These works, alongside Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit (Searchers), an Inuit reclamation of the revenge Western set in the Arctic, demonstrate how the Western continues to evolve as a vehicle for examining power, identity, and resistance across different cultural contexts.

When I called to tell my mom about this series, her voice carried the same urgency it did on those Saturday mornings of my childhood. Now, decades later, those urgent summons to witness crucial scenes have transformed into this journey through America’s complicated relationship with its own mythology. My mother still calls me about Westerns. But these days, our conversations stretch longer, deeper, parsing the shadows between frames, questioning what lies beneath the mythology, examining how these films shaped both our understanding of America and our relationship to each other. This series is, in many ways, a continuation of those Saturday morning conversations: an invitation to look closer, think deeper, and understand that every Western is, at its heart, a story about who we choose to become.▪︎

Experience the films of Landscapes of Myth this fall at the Walker. Learn more and get tickets here.