Thirdspace on the Frontier

The “American West” evokes narratives that couple the nation’s exceptionalism and dominance with the spaces of its frontier. Seemingly codified in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier myth, these narratives work to obscure the nation’s history of violence and settler colonialism, marginalizing the experiences of racialized communities and indigenous peoples. Still, within western writing are works that problematize those narratives and challenge the mythic pasts and presents. The other literary texts work play with national myths associated with the frontier. Specifically, this essay will look at texts by women whose work critique ideologies, histories, and borders. These authors question who gets to be a Westerner and who is may call western space a home. The other gaze questions issues of colonialization and mastery, and suggests different ways of looking at the land and environmental use. This alternate lens creates alternative western subjectivities, questioning what counts as authentically western. Women writers, particularly writers of color, remake the West into a Thirdspace, where borders are de-naturalized and the West re-opens into a true frontier zone of convergence and possibility. The female gaze questions the supremacy of the frontier myth by reimagining space without hierarchy and master narratives; a place that is no longer a terra nullius but full of possibility. We therefore see how Western women writers attempt to remake the world into a “borderlands” space that is also a home