“Stand It Like a Man”: The Performance of Masculinities in Deadwood

Abstract

Georgi-Findlay explores how the US television series Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006), within its interrogation of American founding myths linked to the West and the Western, summons versions of nineteenth-century manhood potentially meaningful for a post-9/11 audience, and draws attention to the performative nature of masculinity. She looks at how the show explores mythic Western masculinity, the dynamics and constraints of men’s interactions, and the motivations underlying male exercises of power. The men of Deadwood, she argues, are made to embody and enact diverse, often compromised forms of manhood within the emerging, improvised social and economic order of a gold rush camp that is defined not only by economic competition, unequal power, and the imminent arrival of the state, but also by white male privilege, misogyny, nativism, and racism.