Introduction: Westerns as Moral(ity) Tales (or Lessons Learned)

Abstract

The Western genre offers a wide range of moral(ity) tales in both the narratives they tell and how those stories are performed—establishing cultural ethics of value, patterns of human social interaction, and ethics of engagement between human contact with the animal world and a critical self-reflexivity on one’s performative agency. Using the lyrics of a classic 1958 Johnny Cash song ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,’’ which tells a tragic coming-of-age story in the West as a trope of engagement, these critical/performative/autoethnographic essays explore the lessons learned (and not learned) from Western narratives. The essays range from the performance/ performativity of masculinity and femininity to understanding the relational dynamics of family life; from the relationality of the real to the reel of cinematic depiction of everyday life in the West; from the politics of identity across ethnic and geographic borders to the politics of who should even get to talk about representations of Native American peoples. These performative autoethnographic essays engage in a critical play and interplay with memories of/in Westerns—in that way in which critical play is enjoyment/entertainment/enlightenment, a process of delving into deeper ways of knowing and a rehearsal for performing culture. This special issue is a companion piece to two previous special issues in Cultural Studies$Critical Methodologies: ‘‘‘West of Everything’: Critical Reflections, Remembrances and Representations on/in Westerns’’ (Alexander, 2012) and ‘‘The Iconography of the West: Auto/Ethnographic Representations of the West(erns)’’ (Alexander, 2014). Essays in this special issue take serious aim at the charge covering a range of responses. The first seven essays were formally scheduled at the 2014 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) (in order of presentation). In his essay ‘‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’: Academic/Administrative Life as the Old West,’’ I explore how my childhood obsession with Westerns and cowboy/Indian