Outlaw Territories: Negotiations of Gender and Race on the American Inner-City Frontier in (Speculative) Urban Crime Films of the 1970s and 80s

Abstract

This article seeks to elucidate how the American frontier myth with its specific narrative conventions, personnel and archetypes crucially informed a wave of urban crime film dramas from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. Its special focus will be on the film's gender politics centering around regenerative vigilante masculinity that these movies inherit from their Western ancestors. The basic gender script analyzed here is that of a white masculinity that re-establishes its seemingly lost or endangered position of superiority via the use of vigilante violence against an abjected non-white, underclass or female other situated in ethnic inner-city neighborhoods. While apparently undermining the state's legitimate power, the regenerative vigilante ultimately assists or calls for a greater presence of the state in such urban 'outlaw' territories. The article discusses how movies such as Death Wish, and Fort Apache, The Bronx reiterate or even reinforce the male vigilante script inherited from the American Western tradition and how 1970s Blaxploitation cinema and particularly speculative gang films of the early 1980s, from The Warriors to Carpenter's Escape films (partly) subvert or decenter this script. The personalized bracket of actress Pam Grier, who played characters in several of the above mentioned movies, will help to illustrate the various discursive framings of race, gender, violence and the state within these three strands of the urban frontier narrative.