Ranging Bodies and Borders

Two more abstracts

Here are two more recent conference submissions. You’ll notice that they’re all focused on/taken from the same chapter of my dissertation. I have two more submissions to go out by the 15th (different chapters for these). Then, I’m done with submissions for a while I think.

Cartographies and Choreographies: Traversing Gendered Frontiers

The American frontier has been persistently imagined as the central ground upon which the U.S. forged a unique national character. Even after the western continental frontier was declared “closed” by a census in 1890, the imaginative geography of this landscape continues to be a formative cultural geography into the 21st century. The traditional frontier narrative is predominantly populated by white male bodies surviving and taming a wilderness landscape. However, at the opening of the 20th century, both Zane Grey and Willa Cather chose to place heroines at the foreground of their popular frontier novels Riders of the Purple Sage and O Pioneers! In my paper I map the anxieties that erupt in the bodies and landscapes of Cather and Grey’s texts revealing the hierarchically gendered spacial logic embedded in the frontier narrative. In my comparative reading I suggest that Grey introduces a central female subject only to remap and stabilize the traditionally gendered terrain, whereas Cather uses a choreographic technique to transgress these boundaries.

This paper is taken from a larger project in which I argue that close attention to the markings, gestures, and movements of the multiple bodies and animate landscapes within our frontier literary tradition reveals the continued imperial hierarchies that perpetuate violence in our personal actions and political policies. In the 20th and 21st centuries we have seen our frontier discourses perpetually remapped beyond the “closed” territory of U.S. continental boundaries. Examination of these narratives provides a space for thinking about how the violent logic of the dominant frontier tradition is perpetuated and suggests a new relational alternative to our errand in the global wilderness.

Embodied Landscapes in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

One of the most pervasive American imaginative geographies has been the frontier. In the 19th century, frontier narratives were predominantly characterized as the white male pioneer’s survival and taming of the wilderness. However, at the opening of the 20th century, Willa Cather reimagines this territorial space in her 1913 novel O Pioneers! by remembering women in the narrative of frontier history as active participants in the historic borderlands of America’s expansion. My paper examines how Cather’s text inherits a dominant discourse of gender and nation that limits and conditions the emergent female body of her central heroine Alexandra Bergson. However, I also attend to the anxieties, disruptions, and heterogeneity produced by the centralized inclusion of feminine embodiment in Cather’s text which I argue provides a space for differential narratives of self and nation to emerge.

The imaginative tradition that Cather’s frontier novel participates in typically situates its male hero as a rugged, self-reliant individual whose taming of a feminized wilderness creates an exceptional American self. In my paper I map the anxieties that erupt in the bodies and landscapes of Cather’s text which are produced by the emergence of a fully embodied feminine subject. These anxieties reveal the gendered spatial logic embedded in the traditional frontier narrative that privileges the male body as a naturalized site of unified identity, and marks the limits of participation by an active female body.

Although Cather’s heroine is limited by a hierarchically gendered geography that predetermines feminine presence as a passive site of submission, Cather’s representation of the frontier wilderness tries to reimagine a new relationality to the feminized landscape. Unlike the traditional frontier narratives, Cather’s Alexandra recognizes the intersubjectivity of her body and the land it inhabits. Cather’s representation of the land as resistant and wild — untamable by violence or imposition of a masculinized will — is threaded throughout the novel. This new relational ethic creates a potential space for exploring an alternative national geography that is not predicated on a gendered hierarchy of violence. In the 20th and 21st century we have seen the violent logic of our frontier discourses perpetually remapped beyond the “closed” territory of U.S. continental boundaries. Cather’s narrative provides a space for thinking about how this logic is perpetuated and suggests a new relational alternative to our errand in the global wilderness.

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