Opengender

It seems obvious that female-addressed genres such as melodrama would feature (feminised) female protagonists, but the presence of protagonistic, crossdressed, female, figures might seem quite unexpected in action genres which are most popular with men. Although Hollywood barely kept box-office records at the time, it can be deduced by the number of films made as well as by the limited audience research available (Buscombe, 1991 : 36) that the western genre was one of the most popular genres with young males in the US in the conservative-dominated 1940s and 1950s (Buscombe, 1991 : 43-44). If the male spectator requires the diegetic presence of an ego-ideal, it seems odd, then, that the western should so frequently feature female protagonism in films as diverse as Caught (1931), West of the Pecos (1934), Annie Oakley (1935), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Paleface (1948), Montana Belle (1952), The Rose of Cimarron (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), Forty Guns (1957), Calamity Jane (1963), and Soldier Blue (1970). It might also seem odd that heroines of emphatically male-addressed action genres should so often have become iconic in lesbian sub-cultures.

Russo argued that the tomboy was the analogue of the 'sissy' stereotype — that is, the dominant stereotype of lesbianism in popular cinema of the period (1981 : 6). The tomboy figure is more characteristically interpreted by feminist critics as a negotiation of the male unease engendered by the economic independence achieved by women during World War II (Haskell, 1974 : 174-176; Sheldon, 1984 : 17). Structuralist and feminist analyses of the genre in the 1970s interpreted the gender-significance of the western tomboy of the 1950s and 1960s more as a fixed function of the heterosexual psyche than of US history (Cawelti, 1971; Wright, 1975, Johnston, 1975; Merck, 1980; Mulvey, 1981; Levitin, 1982). In particular, Mulvey's revision (1981) of her seminal theorisation (1975) of the exclusion of the female spectator from the relay of the gaze in the IMR focused on a western, Duel in the Sun (1946).