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" The Cowboy and His Shadow: "
Carpenter, Peter Joseph
Gere, David
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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903215
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| Doc. No
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TL4dx1m574
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| Main Entry
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Carpenter, Peter Joseph
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| Title & Author
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The Cowboy and His Shadow:\ Carpenter, Peter JosephGere, David
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| College
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UCLA
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| Date
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2013
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| student score
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2013
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| Abstract
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Ronald Reagan's appropriation of cowboyness as a defining factor in his successful bid for the presidency in 1980 intersected with complementary trends in popular media. In the wake of mainstream enthusiasm for the frontier, gays and lesbians formed their own country-western dance spaces. This cowboy renaissance has been discussed as a reclaiming of American conservatism that helped heal wounds inflicted upon the U.S. imaginary in the wake of failures in Vietnam; through this lens, gay dancing cowboys can be seen as acquiescing to assimilationist impulses. However, this study argues that queers find numerous recuperative possibilities in Western-themed choreographies, frequently subverting heteronormative nationalism by taking on a cowboy swagger. Through ethnographic fieldwork at a gay country-western bar in Los Angeles and analyzing dances on the concert stage, the author theorizes cowboyness as an articulation of masculinity, Americanness, and queerness. The introduction posits President Ronald Reagan's performance of cowboyness as foundational to connections between normative masculinities, the legacy of Manifest Destiny, and the homophobic rhetoric and polices that marked Reagan's presidency. The first chapter looks at the political potency of female cowboyness in the two-step at Oil Can Harry's--a country-western bar in Los Angeles--and in a dance by Marianne Kim and Lee Anne Schmitt called <i>Making a Disaster: The Many Deaths of John Wayne, Part II<i> (2005). Chapter two analyzes <i>Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders<i> (1984) arguing that choreographers Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones usurp the assumed whiteness and heterosexuality of the Hollywood cowboy, creating a utopia of queer possibility. The third chapter looks at The Shadow as a choreographic incursion upon the two-step that speaks to sex practices of gay men in an atmosphere of neoliberal permissiveness sans equity for queers. Chapter four looks at the line dance "Walk the Line" alongside Joe Goode's <i>The Maverick Strain<i> (1996) to show the potency with which camp can disrupt heteronormative claims to nation. The concluding chapter compares the film Brokeback Mountain (2005) with Adam and Steve (2005), showing how the latter used the cowboy as a symbol of queer possibility in ways that the critically lauded Brokeback Mountain failed to imagine.</i></i></i></i></i></i>
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Gere, David
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UCLA
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