Eight

Excerpted From Karen Gage’s Unpublished Manuscript, Bullet Makeover: William Cullers and the Dialectic of Control--

Despite his pretensions toward exaggerated machismo, Daniel Cullers’ construction of “Billy Shooter” from the raw material of his son has much more to do with long standing concepts of feminism and motherhood than new age notions of masculinity. This traveling circus is, in fact, in some ways at least—in intent if not in manner that is—perfectly aligned with a subversive strategy disempowered women have employed since the early nineteenth century, whereby their children became the tools through which they exercised a satisfying if illusory control on a world that had placed them firmly under its patriarchical thumb. Imagine, for the sake of analogy, a prisoner who uses the very tools of her imprisonment not necessarily to escape, but merely to carve into her prison wall, “I was here.”

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