Opengender

The 1990s was an era of conservatism as free-market ideology consolidated its hold on USA and UK cultures. For many feminists, the 1990s was a period of 'backlash' against feminism:

The word may be that women have been 'liberated,' but women themselves seem to feel otherwise. Repeatedly in national surveys, majorities of women say they are still far from equality. Nearly 70 percent of women polled by the New York Times in 1989 said the movement for women's rights had only just begun. [Introduction to Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, New York: Doubleday, 1991]

Roger Hewitt identified a similar ethos of 'backlash' against multiculturalism [White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism, Cambridge UP, 2005]. For conservatives, movements for equality had already gone too far whilst for those at the economic and cultural margins the struggle had only just begun.

After tailing off through the 1970s and almost disappearing during the 1980s, the western made a modest comeback at the turn of the decade into the 1990s. In terms of the traditional critical understanding of the cultural significance of the genre, this would seem to indicate that the US was engaged in processing some fundamental cultural conflict. The Western genre is also traditionally associated with gender-boundary anxiety. A recurrent theme of this resurgent form does, indeed, seem to be a sense of displacement and disempowerment on the part of the American white male in the face of the political and cultural successes of feminist and 'multicultural' perspectives in the 1980s. The white male's implicit position as 'controller' of cinematic space could no longer be taken for granted as the IMR succumbed to a 'postmodern' ethos in media culture.

The more conservative neo-Western films expressed a classical nostalgia for an imaginary simplicity in America's historical 'childhood' whilst the more liberal pursued revisionist agendas. There was a spate of liberal revisionist films such as a fourth remake of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) which attempted to address the representational imbalance of 'encirclement' perspective in the traditional western. Arguably, however, it merely manoeuvred the white point of view through an externally appropriative attitude instead. Van Peebles' Posse (1993) was the first black black-cast western since the 'blaxploitation' era and the first black-directed film in the genre. Thus it represented for the first time both a black historical presence and a black point of view at the generic frontier (of meaning). Posse received minimal critical notice, perhaps underlining the tendency for black male characterisation and perspective to be acceptable only in the contemporary setting of urban decay.

The western is, typically, also about gender — or rather about masculinity. Popular middle-class, white, heterosexual, male, masculinist movements in the US, such as Iron John, saw masculinity as a property remaining to Native Americans but which has been mislaid by modern whites. The reactionary nature of this discourse might be interpreted as expressive of discomfort with the degree of displacement of white, male, subjectivity as the single and controlling point of reference in western culture effected by feminism and 'multiculturalism'. Thus, the other popular tendency in the western at this time seems more straightforwardly nostalgic, as in Young Guns (1988); or City Slickers (1991) — a variation of the 'yuppie in peril' genre popular at the end of the 1980s. Both tendencies might be seen as reflecting a search for an 'authentic' (white) identity combined with a fantasy of escape from the 'emasculating' effects of contemporary US culture.

During this period, however, Hollywood also produced a spate of pro-feminist and pro-queer films, most of which were financially successful (although frequently critically unsuccessful). The revisionist Western spun off feminist and pro-feminist forms which overtly and formally explored the frontiers of gender politics. The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw a revival of the noir genre in which a wily femme fatale not only played successfully with the classic structure of the cinematic gaze but also survived and kept the money. The cultural backlash appeared to be somewhat offset by the exploitation of newly segmented media markets. Is this evidence for conservative claims that women and black people had already achieved equality in a morally neutral free market? Feminists tended to take a negative 'backlash' stance, along with many African-American commentators, whilst queer media organisations frequently celebrated what was seen as successful assimilation through the power of the pink pound in a truly free market.