Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Open Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English and Theatre
First Advisor
Gerald Nachtwey
Second Advisor
Dominic Ashby
Third Advisor
Rick Mott
Abstract
This work uses Western genre cinema as a springboard for evaluating how alt-right political ideologies are absorbed by common, everyday people. Using the exploratory work of political journalist Andrew Marantz and employing his research of the alt-right movement as supporting material, it explores the dissemination of alt-right rhetoric in contemporary settings. Evaluating instances of hegemonic masculinity in John Farrow’s 1953 film Hondo and John Huston’s 1960 film The Unforgiven, alongside John Ford’s The Searchers, this work explores how filmic versions of masculinity have shaped characters to mimic and enforce social and societal systems that coincidentally adhere to alt-right ideologies. Hegemonic masculinities seek to limit and oppress individuals, based on their race and sex, according to a hierarchical (and tetrachotomic) means of organization. Investigating how those hegemonic masculinities continue to exist throughout various spaces in modern times, this work analyzes their manifestations in both physical reality and on the internet. Using Laura Mulvey’s concept of “the gaze,” Alison Landsberg’s idea of “prosthetic memory,” and Nana Verhoeff’s historical view of our modern understandings of the American frontier, this work aims to build on the tradition of understanding how certain mechanisms and historical moments have allowed for the survival and growth of hotbeds of hegemony on the modern online frontier, and the corporeal ramifications of the existence of such hegemonic structures.
Recommended Citation
Bailey, Lauren Samantha, "This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Two of Us: Western Genre Cinema Rhetoric of the Twentieth Century and the Modern Alt-Right Movement" (2024). Online Theses and Dissertations. 823.
https://encompass.eku.edu/etd/823
