Atalie Gerhard
(Anti-)Liberational Feminism in the Neo-Westerns Harriet (2019) versus Terror on the Prairie (2022)
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 18 (2024), pp. 241-254

Abstract: This essay aims to put the neo-Westerns Harriet and Terror on the Prairie into dialogue as pop-cultural texts that convey intersectional and conservative Feminism, respectively. As John G. Cawelti remarked, the turn to armed self-defense of Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon (1952) legitimated violence on the frontier when practiced by virtuous female settlers. In fact, the Westward expansion of the U.S. necessitated both, the participation of Euro-American women and the resistance of Indigenous and enslaved Black women. The biopic Harriet literally commemorates the agency and legacy of the formerly enslaved Harriet Tubman who led masses of fugitive African Americans to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Like the Black Westerns of the Harlem Renaissance, the film deploys recognizable frontier aesthetics to conjure a Biblical struggle between heroism and savagery with the twist that a Black woman embodies superior moral authority with intersectional implications. In contrast, the independent film Terror on the Prairie with its controversial lead Gina Carano explicitly aligns itself with “anti-woke” conservativism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. While its title reminds of the nationalistic rhetoric of the War on Terror, the former MMA fighter Carano’s central performance as a settler mother violently slaying her husband’s avengers to protect her family constitutes a reactionary celebration of the foundational “myth of regeneration through violence” that Richard Slotkin described. Since both films evoke the cultural climate of their production, the flexibility of the Western as a genre can be underlined.

Keywords: Western cinema, Feminisms, American frontier, culture wars

DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.18/2024.17

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