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Our laboratory has a vested interest in measuring the location and expression of the 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT, serotonin) 7 (5-HT7) receptor in the rat. Determining tissue-specific receptor expression would aid in validating understood and potentially new tissues that support the 5-HT7 receptor-mediated fall in blood pressure, an event we are committed to understand. We contracted with 7TM Antibodies to develop deliberately and rigorously a rat 5-HT7 (r5-HT7) receptor specific antibody. Three antigens, two targeting the third internal loop and one the C terminus, were used in three rabbits to generate antibodies. As a positive control, HEK293(T or AD) cells were transfected with a plasmid for the r5-HT7 receptor also expressing a C terminus 3xFLAG tag. Naïve rat tissues were also used in Western and immunohistochemical analyses. Nine antibodies (3 from three different rabbits) detected a ~ 75 kDa protein absent in homogenates of vector control HEK293T cells. Only antibodies that recognized the C terminus of the 5-HT7 receptor [ERPERSEFVLQNSDH(Abu)GKKGHDT; antibodies 3, 6, and 9] positively and concentration-dependently identified the r5-HT7 receptor expressed in Westerns of transfected HEK293T cells. These same C terminus antibodies also successfully detected the r5-HT7 receptor in immunocytochemical test of the transfected HEK293AD cells, colocalizing with the detected FLAG sequence. In naive tissue, antibody 6 performed the best, identifying specific bands in the brain cortex in Western analysis. These same antibodies produced a more diverse band profile in the vena cava, identifying 6 major proteins. In immunohistochemical experiments, the same C-terminus antibodies, with antibody 3 performing the best, detected the 5-HT7 receptor in rat veins. This deliberate work has given rise to at least three antibodies that can be used with good confidence in r5-HT7 transfected cells, two antibodies that can be used in immunohistochemical analyses of rat tissues and in Westerns of rat brain; we are less confident of the use of these same antibodies in rat veins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the video game Western and its relationship with ideas of temporality surrounding the American West. The fledgling video game industry first put 'Cowboys and Indians' on arcade screens in the 1970s, creating a playable digital West for gamers. Content and aesthetics proved decidedly simple, with game worlds reliant on prior filmic presentations. By the 2000s, thanks largely to technological advances, video game Westerns began to offer quantifiable depth and complexity, with Rockstar Games's Red Dead Redemption series (2004–18) being a leading example. Video game Westerns represent the next technological as well as cultural representation of the 'Wild West' in all its complexities. In this article, I explore how both old and new video game Westerns have toyed with notions of 'time' and how we experience 'the frontier' a century on from the lived historic period. I argue that games not only invite players to (re)visit a distinctive 'frontier time', but also, by their coding and mechanics, actively encourage players to subvert the temporal flow of Western history on-screen and even disrupt the West's larger cultural meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western has been seen as a key genre for understanding both the American national character and the particulars of Hollywood, but there are now very few contemporary studies of this once foundational genre. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the Lonely Are the Brave conference of 2021, aim to revisit the Western, and the post-war Western specifically, in order to revive scholarship surrounding these texts, to interrogate existing models of understanding the history of the genre, and to examine how the genre treats ideas connected to time and its passing as attached to the American west and its depictions on-screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the lead of Richard Dyer and Devon Carbado in naming whiteness as a racial identity and uses intersectional analysis to explore Jacques Audiard’s depiction of race and gender in Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers. Both movies depart from the gender norms of earlier Audiard films by doing away with female saviors, so making male protagonists responsible for controlling their own violence. Both films also reflect Audiard’s determination to foreground Black and Brown characters in ways that better reflect the racial and cultural heterogeneity of France and the world. And yet, unorthodox casting choices and visual framing distance these same characters of color from responsibility for violence. Such an approach might be interpreted as a challenge to film makers’ historical tendency to cast Black and Brown men as especially violent. However, Audiard’s films commonly elicit sympathy for white men who exercise violence. Accordingly, Audiard’s denial of authority for violence to Black and Brown characters intimates than they can only be sympathetic if seen to be more upright than his white protagonists.

The term Post-Western has been used since the 1970s to refer to books and films that are not Westerns but use conventions of the Western genre to analyse contemporary conflicts and issues. The most important contribution to the establishment of this subgenre has been Neil Campbell's monograph Post-Westerns (2013), in which they are described as films coming after and going beyond the traditional Western genre while at the same time engaging with its deeply haunting assumptions and values. This article seeks to adapt the concept of post-Westerns to Comics Studies and focuses on a recent graphic work that can be considered post-Western, Scalped, a 60-issue comic-book series written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by R. M. Guéra, published by Vertigo between 2007 and 2012. It tells a contemporary story of crime, violence and corruption in an Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where the Lakotas live in an environment of utter poverty, drug abuse and hopelessness. Making use of constant flashbacks and different points of view, Scalped makes references to the Western myth and establishes a dialogue with American history and the Western genre to show the contrast with post-Western contemporary nightmares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines three films that Hollywood director Delmer Daves made in the mid-1950s—Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy—all of which starred Glenn Ford. The pairing of Ford and Daves, the essay argues, allowed Daves to re-think the Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, especially regarding questions around gender identity and representation of genders, that of the Western man. In doing so, these three films present an anti-nostalgic view of the traditional mode of American Western masculinity as violent, non-verbal and threatening and instead embrace a version of American masculinity that is verbal, compassionate and considerate. Through a close analysis of the films, reviews of them and marketing, the essay demonstrates how Daves used his own family background to construct Westerns that featured more adult themes and addressing the larger societal concerns about the notion of American masculinity and manhood in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interview with Richard Slotkin held through email exchanges from January 15th and March 25th, 2022.