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Annie Get Your Gun: Women, Performance and the Western Heroine

Jones, Karen R. (2017) Annie Get Your Gun: Women, Performance and the Western Heroine. In: The Second Amendment and Gun Control: Freedom, Fear and the American Constitution. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 36-47. ISBN 978-1-138-70628-6. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:70811)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)

Abstract

This chapter destabilizes the conventional narrative of smoking guns and masculine heroism in the construction of America’s frontier mythology to explore how western women seized the agency of firearms for themselves. More specifically, I look here at two prominent characters in the ‘winning of the West’ – Martha Canary (Calamity Jane) and Annie Oakley - to examine how two women came to take on the mantle of gun-toting heroines and how their stage presence added colour and contest to the frontier story. Both pointed, firstly, to a tradition of firearms use among pioneer women for whom skill with a rifle promised security and sustenance in remote climes. Moreover (and this is the principal focus here) the gun became a critical prop in the theatrical routines of Oakley and Canary as they developed their own cultures of celebrity in the latter years of the 1800s

Item Type: Book section
Uncontrolled keywords: gun culture, women, gender, American West, United States
Subjects: E History America
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User: Karen Jones
Date Deposited: 11 Dec 2018 12:55 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Feb 2021 14:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/70811 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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