No retreat: American self-defense doctrine

This chapter outlines shifts in the American legal system related to justifiable gun violence. A crucial juridical shift, the transition wrought by American self-defense doctrine from the English requirement to "retreat to the wall" to the American freedom to “stand one's ground” and repel force with force is covered here.

Old dogs and new tricks: race and justifiable homicide in neoliberalism’s Western imagination

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.

‘Deserve’s got [everything] to do with it’: property, process, and justice in Unforgiven

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.

‘A kind of wild justice’: revenge and constitutional commentary in the Western

This chapter engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on legal systems and revenge in order to argue that the Western, like other genres which seek to provide justifications for violence, has informed and been influenced by paradigmatic shifts in the American legal system. A fuller investigation into the style of the gunslinger's vengeance, this chapter argues, suggests a rather different relationship between cultural products and legal apparatuses than that suggested by critics who portray the Western revenger as a reactionary figure. The Western gunslinger is presented here instead as a progressive figure by reading the cultural work of the Western genre as a rhetorical thinking through of a set of interconnected conflicts and inconsistencies in American legal paradigms related to justifiable homicide and gun possession.

American gun rights: from national defense to self-defense

Equally important to the development of American law, as well as the Western's imagination of gunslinging heroics, is the constitutional guarantee of gun possession, a guarantee explored in this chapter by examining key Supreme Court cases. This chapter argues that the modified conception of defense, from a collective duty to an individual right, enforces a rhetorical shift to normativity concomitant with the rise of modernity and the formation of dispersed, interrelated networks of power that create individuated subjects, what Michel Foucault has termed “biopower.”

Guns and governmentality: normative masculinity and disciplined gun violence

This chapter explores the language of normativity and its interaction with the Western and the discourse of law. Through close readings of cinematic texts like Shane (1952), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and The Shootist (1976) the Western genre is read here to represent what Barbara Cruickshank has called a "technology of citizenship." This chapter argues that the Western gunslinger's masculinity works to discipline, to tame, the potential for radically disruptive personal violence inherent in the liberties of American self-defense doctrine.

Introduction: the warp, woof, and weave of American gun violence

This introductory chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the forgoing analyses, taking many cues from legal studies, U.S. Supreme Court cases and Foucauldian theory. In the world of the Western, the procedural focus of American law gets in the way of justice. The genre embraces justice by gun violence rather than by trial, and has therefore often been read as ‘anti-law’. From the early dime novel fascination with such outlaws and renegades as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, through depictions of lynching in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, and the film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), to the guns-blazing heroics of films such as Rio Bravo (1959), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), through the darker critiques of The Gunfighter (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Unforgiven (1992), to the postmodern pastiche of Django Unchained (2012), the Western has nourished a vision of social organisation and a means for delivering justice that operates outside the official parameters of American law, relying on a gunslinging hero to uphold order. This chapter argues, in fact, that this opposition is progressively undone in the genre’s formulaic shootouts. The cherished antipathy between ‘the law’ and the Western’s ‘law of the gun’ is, in short, unfounded.

The guns that ‘won the Western’: firearm iconography in Western literature and film

This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.