Susan Bernardin – författare

The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and MÉtis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters.Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era. By tracing the complex, often unexpected relationships forged between these women, their cameras, and the Native subjects of their photographs, Trading Gazes offers a new focus for recovering women's histories in the West while bringing attention to the complicated legacies of these images for Native and non-Native viewers.

This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts:GenealogiesBodies MovementsLandsThe volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.