Thelma & Louise as a cowboy movie, in the tradition of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Screenwriter Callie Khouri, who would win an Oscar for it, said it's an outlaw movie. Geena Davis called it the film that changed her life because its reaction prompted her to start the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and fight for better representation for women across the media landscape. But for many critics Thelma & Louise was a man-hating revenge story of feminism gone way too far. In 1991, there was a conversation happening around feminism in America. Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women was published. As a research project started in reaction to an infamous 1986