Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western(Postwestern Horizons)

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways. Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo–Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.  

Table of Contents:
Introduction Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon Part 1 1. The Daddy with No Name: The Kinky Cowboy Aesthetics of The Mandalorian Jennessa Hester 2. Beyond the Virtual Frontier: New Possibilities of Sex and Desire in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” Katie Googe Part 2 3. Re-creations and Inescapable Repetitions: Sontag’s “Pornographic Imagination,” Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, and the Weird Western Micah Donohue 4. Lost Max: Mad Max and the Challenge to Masculine Dominance in 1970s Australia Scott Pearce Part 3 5. “Touch Your Wound, Dear”: Eye Killers and the Vampire of Manifest Destiny Miriam Brown Spiers 6. Qweirding the West: Re-forming the Nation in the Novels of C Pam Zhang and Emma Pérez Anne Mai Yee Jansen 7. Ishmael Reed Takes on the Weird Western in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Jana Koehler Part 4 8. Coming Back to Shane to Redeem the Cyborg in Soldier and Logan Elizabeth Abele 9. Leatherface Families and Final Grandmas: The Reproductive Rites and Slaughterhouse Sexualities in the New “Old West” Joshua T. Anderson and Rebecca M. Lush 10. “What Makes You Worth $100,000?”: Heists, the Commodification of Women, and Capitalism Condemned in The Professionals and Army of the Dead Meredith Harvey Part 5 11. The Woman in Room 237: Western Domesticity and Oedipal Conflict in The Shining Jeffrey Chisum 12. Transgression on the Frontier: The Ludicity of Incest in Bioshock Infinite Christina Fawcett and Marc A. Ouellette 13. Dead Fathers and Monstrous Daughters in The Last of Us II Sara Humphreys 14. “Do I Bring My Own Leash, or Do I Pick One Up at the Door?”: Kink, Camp, and Queer Masculinity in CBS’s The Wild Wild West Sara L. Spurgeon Contributors Index

About the Author :
Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine–Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is a professor in the Literature and Writing Studies Department and is the Faculty Center director at California State University San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of English and directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Fine, Johnson, Lush, and Spurgeon are the coeditors of Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (Nebraska, 2020).  

Review :
“The project is timely, professionally crafted, and genuinely fun. This book is nicely packed with analysis of weird westerns from the 1960s to the very present, paying attention to diverse representation and experience in sex and sexualities. These are terrific essays that form a rich and nuanced volume that will be welcomed in the scholarly community.”-Lydia R. Cooper, author of Masculinities in Literature of the American West