Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.

Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo-Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at University of Maine-Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is a professor in the Literature and Writing Studies Department and is the Faculty Center director at California State University San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of English and directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Fine, Johnson, Lush, and Spurgeon are the coeditors of Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (Nebraska, 2020).