Pixar’s Toy Story films offer a playful reflection on the declining fortunes of the American Cowboy in the American toybox, a process that ultimately (and inevitably) re-enshrines the “old-fashioned” pull string toy Sheriff Woody as an iconic boyhood hero. Toy Story 2 expands the roster of Western characters, most notably through the introduction of toy cowgirl Jessie. Jessie’s inclusion seems to disrupt the strictly gendered vision of the mythic west as a hyper-masculine space. In truth, this vivacious cowgirl is something of a red herring, and Toy Story 2’s frontier narrative is far from progressive, tapping into longstanding ideations of the West as space of white male supremacy. In her work on Hollywood westerns, Jane Tompkins describes how twentieth century frontier narratives increasingly reflected anxiety about threats to white male hegemony. No longer about “the encounter between civilization and the frontier,” Tompkins concludes, the new Western is “about men’s fear of losing their mastery, and hence identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents.” In this paper, I examine how these familiar themes dominate Toy Story 2 and its representation of children’s culture. Much like the archetypal Hollywood Western, the film’s plot derives from Woody’s threated obsolescence, and its central conflict is resolved through re-establishing the good sheriff’s vitality. In the process, Toy Story 2 engages in precisely the kind of identity project Tompkins discerns in the Hollywood Western. Reworking this narrative through a new genre, the kid’s movie, at the end of the 19th century, Toy Story 2 demonstrates both the durability and versatility of American frontier mythos—and it’s embedded narratives of white male power.
About the presenterMartin Woodside
Martin Woodside is a scholar and writer who has written five books for children, two books of poetry, and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation, which grew out of his research as a Fulbright Fellow in Romania. In 2015 he earned his doctorate in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden, where his dissertation focused on the interaction between frontier mythology and discourses of boyhood in America during the second half of the 19th century.