Settler Alienation in the American West: Alienation, Loneliness, and Colonial Masculinity in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The settler colonial history of America is an intrinsically lonely one, and thiscan be seen by looking at the colonization of the American West, and the newfound masculineidentity which arose from it: the cowboy. American colonialism is a wretched history, but notonly has it devastated the Indigenous peoples who were eradicated and exterminated, so too,albeit in different ways, has the history of colonialism negatively affected the live of thecolonists who inhabited what is now the United States. This is evident in many popularrepresentations of the American cowboy, an iconic figure that arose from the settlement of theAmerican West, but one whose very status is both intrinsically masculine and lonely, a dualitythat is necessarily imposed on the cowboy due to the figure’s direct relationship to colonialism.Through looking at two fictional settlers of the American West, the kid in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian( 1985) and Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), this article argues that ineach respective text the protagonist’s cowboy-like identity, due to its roots in colonialism,complicates American masculinity and makes the life of the “masculine” cowboy an inherentlylonely one.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".