Race and Gender in the Images of American West

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveled the U.S. and abroad around the turn of the twentieth-century, performing iconic images of the West. This show both exemplified and helped create the central role that the American West has played in the formation of American cultural identity—through images more mythic than real. Over a century later, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” broke Billboard chart records, and, at the same time, demonstrated that cultural storytelling about the American West remains “contested terrain.” This course explores the ways that popular culture, particularly film, has constructed the West as a place where cultural ideologies of race and gender are played out. In examining a range of texts that depict popular images of the American West, we will analyze what different visions of race and gender suggest about identity and power in American culture.