A Body without a Story: The Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo

As a genre intimately tied to the landscape of the American West, the romanticization of the frontier, and the American social imaginary, the Western holds a special place in Americans’ hearts. While Western films present a nostalgia for supposedly simpler times— when communities stood by each other and people lived by a moral code, at least in theory— they also develop to deal with the anxieties present in contemporary American culture. As American culture shapes the genre, pushing it to evolve over time, the genre Western likewise informs culture by teaching Americans about their own social identity. This reciprocal relationship makes Westerns troubling to critics; Western films are steeped in genre conventions that whisper disconcerting truths about American ideology and hint at Americans’ callous treatment of both themselves and the Other. One particularly troubling element of the genre Western is “the centrality of the male protagonist and the subservient nature of the female characters” (Piturro 113). Even as Western films progress to address changing American values and beliefs, they struggle to shake the patriarchal gender dynamics marginalizing women, as time and again Westerns demonstrate that “the root language of the genre is gender” (Dowell 10).

Leo Braudy asserts that “genre films essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering ‘Yes.’ Change in genres occur when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated’” (179). This argument suggests that if a progressive or revisionist genre film is unpopular, the audience still believes in the classic model a filmmaker sought to challenge, ultimately demonstrating that the audience is not ready to evolve as the genre progresses. Such is the case with Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), a thought-provoking film that has been labeled both a revisionist and a feminist Western for its portrayal of a female embodying the classic Western hero. Earning just under $550,000 at the box office, the film’s unpopularity suggests that even in the midst of the women’s empowerment movements dominating the 1990s, audiences still believed, and supported, genre conventions that reinscribe patriarchal social structures. Although this weak box office performance leads some to believe the film does not merit reintroduction to critical conversations, I instead posit that The Ballad of Little Jo dropped off critics’ radar because scholarship about gender performativity and transgender representation was not yet prominent in the field when the film was released.

Maggie Greenwald presents a female Western hero who identifies as a man, and in doing so challenges an earlier feminist criticism that was dominated by cis-gender normativity. In the early 1990s the film anticipated our present discussions of transgender experiences, asking viewers to reevaluate their understanding of gender and its relationship to identity within the context of the genre Western. Jo’s story takes place just outside a small frontier community called Ruby City during the nineteenth century, and as such, the film depicts early instances of intolerance and gender violence in the American West. Despite developing into less isolated, law-governed towns in the century following westward expansion, in some respects, western communities are still plagued by the legacy of the “Wild West,” both in modern culture and in popular imagination— a distressing reality addressed in other popular Western productions. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), for example, addresses gender violence, hate crimes, and homophobia by alluding to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Productions like The Ballad of Little Jo, Brokeback Mountain, and Moisés Kaufman’s documentary play The Laramie Project (2001) speak to the necessity for scholarship addressing the troubling legacy of hate violence in the “Wild West.” By reintroducing The Ballad of Little Jo to contemporary gender discourse, I hope to address the need for more criticism about hate and gender violence in Western literature and film studies. Additionally, I propose that publishing an individual’s image can be an example of necroviolence, especially when their final image is misrepresentative of their...