TACOMO · Transatlantic Cowgirl Mobilities and the Western Show
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2023-07-05
- EU contribution
- €186,167
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Transatlantic Cowgirl Mobilities and the Western Show
TACOMO addressed female cowboy performers at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Austria and Germany and sought to integrate this research into present-day Austrian popular cultures. It explored how showwomen performed cowboydom and American girlhood, how they interacted with European gender norms, and how they coined the figure of the US cowgirl. TACOMO communicates the gendered quality of the Wild West and the importance of gender roles at the heart of national myths to Europeans in the here and now. TACOMO has shown that the Wild West was created as gendered performance that persists into our present day, with the objective to help Europeans understand better the key role gender plays in today’s transatlantic relationship and in everyday popular culture through a topic that is easily accessible and that posits agency and self-determination as key narratives of how to be a cowgirl. TACOMO’s method to attain these objectives included a strong public outreach and academic networking strategy that benefitted the general public as well as academic audiences, specifically students at UVienna (specifically future teachers of English and early career scholars in American and Canadian Studies). The objective was to equip these students as discussants in cultural and gender studies and in the history of nationalism and popular culture in Europe. For the researcher, individual objectives included publishing research, building an international professional network, and applying and interviewing for professor positions to reach the professional goal of a tenured professorship.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Cowboys are known all over the world. They embody fantasies of mobility and adventure in the North American West to people around the globe. And naturally, we imagine cowboys as white and male figures who roam the prairies. The innovative action TACOMO takes a new look at cowboydom: It shows how cowGIRLS produce and revise cowboy gender norms in transnational cultural mobilities. Travelling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to Germany and Austria at the turn of the 20th century, female performers presented show acts such as trick riding, roping, and sharpshooting. Their acts addressed narratives of the frontier, American womanhood, and the gender norms of their European audiences, both through their performance (dialogue, costume, behavior) and its reception (newspaper commentary, advertising). TACOMO’s objective is to show that the gendered myth of the Wild West was created transatlantically in North America and in Europe. It explores three research questions: first, how did women performers experiment on the cowboy figure at Wild West Shows? Second, how did US cowgirldom interact with continental imperial gender roles? And third, how does their legacy resonate with present-day popular Western cultures in the US, Canada, Austria, and Germany? The action completes the researcher’s previous findings about female cowboys. It theorizes their performance through cutting edge fields of inquiry from Popular and Visual Culture, Mobility Studies and Transnational North American Studies, and it closes a gap in scholarly research on the myth of the American West. TACOMO’s special relevance to the H2020 program includes, first, a strong gender aspect in the diachronic research topic and in the researcher’s and the host’s gender-critical perspectives on academia; second, an appeal to general interest through its popular culture focus; and third, an understanding of culture as essentially mobile and produced in the travelling of ideas, persons, and objects between cultures.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT WIEN · WienCoordinatorAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union