Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century
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Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Scofield, Rebecca Elena. 2015. Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845496 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century A dissertation presented by Rebecca Elena Scofield to The Committee on Higher Degrees in American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2015 © 2015 Rebecca Elena Scofield All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Robin Bernstein Rebecca Elena Scofield Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century Abstract “Riding Bareback” uses rodeo as a site of analysis to investigate the continual expansion and contraction of the supposedly authentic West in the twentieth century. For over a century, rodeo has been a vibrant and multifaceted stage on which diverse groups of people, both within and beyond the geographical West, have embodied the plethora of cultural meanings attached to westernness. Rodeo is an epistemology of the West, meaning it is a way of knowing and expressing what it means to people to be western. Rather than offering a history of gender in rodeo, this is a history of gender through rodeo, showing how the West was written onto individual bodies with national and international ramifications. “Riding Bareback” critically investigates marginalized rodeo communities across the twentieth century, specifically professional rodeo cowgirls from the 1900s until the 1930s, the Texas State Prison Rodeo from the 1930s until the 1980s, and the International Gay Rodeo Association in the 1980s and 1990s. These rodeoers have performed westernness in order to claim legitimacy as Americans, even as they often marginalized themselves and others even further. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Get On, Get Drunk, Get Laid Chapter 1 19 Beloved Freaks: Early Rodeo Cowgirls and the “Western Woman” as Spectacle Chapter 2 63 In the Shadow of the Walls: Masculinity and Social-Salvation at the Texas State Prison Rodeo Chapter 3 109 Too Legit to Quit: Gay Rodeo, Camp, and the Performance of Gender in Reagan’s America Conclusion 158 Thrust to the Margins: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of Multiple Wests Bibliography 164 iv Acknowledgements Many people have helped me propel this project forward. I would first like to thank my advisors for believing in the merit of this research. I could not have scrambled through the dissertation process without your gracious assistance. Robin Bernstein helmed this unsteady ship with an iron grip and always had a compass when I was lost. Andrew Jewett, who reads everything with great care and attention, has taught me the value of truly engaging with people, both as a scholar and as a person. Rachel St. John, whose offer to lend her aid came in the nick of time, provided crucial advice and a much appreciated brand of levelheaded calm. Finally, through her own work on bodies and the margins, Susan Greenhalgh gave me a different lens through which to view my project and the language to pursue it. While working on this project I was financially supported by many generous groups and people. I would like to thank the Jacob K. Javits Foundation for four years of assistance. Also, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History and Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences enabled me to visit archives and have time to write with research fellowships. Lastly, I deeply appreciated the grants I received from Harvard’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus (The Open Gate) and the Center for American Political Studies. Likewise, I could not have conducted my research without the untiring aid of the dedicated archivists at each of my archives. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to the Autry National Center for awarding me a visiting scholar fellowship to spend several weeks deep in the International Gay Rodeo Association archives. The entire staff at the Autry deserves my appreciation for their stimulating conversations and dedication to hospitality. My continued research at the Autry has been greatly facilitated by Marva Felchlin and Belinda Nakasato. In v addition, this research would not have been possible without the work of Gregory Hinton and the people involved with the International Gay Rodeo Association. To my cohort and their spouses, thank you for becoming my graduate school family. Chris Allison, John Bell, Carla Cevasco, and Dan Farbman, you deserve unending accolades for the amount of time and effort you put into my project. Thank you for being amazing colleagues and even better friends. To the rest of my Harvard family who labored intensively on this project, Andrew Pope, Maggie Gates, Aaron Hatley, Amy Fish, Mike King, Julie Miller, Charles Petersen, and so many more, I could not have expressed any of my ideas without your unselfish listening abilities and unflinching grammar correction. Thanks especially to Theresa McCulla for being the best big sister American Studies has ever seen and to Arthur Patton-Hock for being the rock of our program. Jennifer Ryan, our lunches saw me through the darkest of times. To all of my friends away from Harvard, thank you for reminding me there is a world beyond. Chris Hanson, you called me every week of graduate school and still want to be my friend. May we ever meet at academic conferences in warm climates. Lastly, I would like to thank my family. You have encouraged me to pursue every adventure possible. You have also reassured me the home fires will always be lit when I’m ready to return. Nothing I have achieved that was possible without you. John, no one has ever had a better partner in life than I do. Thank you for coming back into my life when I needed you the most and for sticking around every day since. vi Introduction Get On, Get Drunk, Get Laid Authentic Fictions From Theodore Roosevelt to Sarah Palin, gendered fictions of the West have had a significant impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American politics and culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, historians like Frederick Jackson Turner and entertainers like William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody produced the “West” as an imagined space with racialized, sexualized, and gendered meanings.1 Through the everyday consumption of clothes, music, fiction, and movies, ordinary Americans have woven these fictions into the fabric of their lives. People living in the West often dress in western wear, proclaiming their identity with embossed leather boots, large cowboy hats, and tight fitting jeans, despite the fact that these styles were created and popularized by twentieth century rodeo and movie cowboys.2 In this process of bodily imagining over the twentieth century, cultural producers have helped limit the roles available in the imagined West to many groups of people, such as women and people of color. Many people have doggedly challenged these masculine, homophobic, and racist constructions of the West, attempting to rework its meanings even as they often reasserted new hierarchies. Historians of gender and sexuality in the American West are therefore faced with persistent questions about how to trace the deep connections between American authenticity and 1 Richard White’s “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, edited by James Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) describes the simultaneous creation of the frontier myth in both popular culture and academia by Buffalo Bill, who imagined a violent west, and Frederick Jackson Turner, who imagined a peaceful, agrarian west. 2 For a chronicle of changing western fashion see Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman’s How the West was Worn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). For a discussion of how people in the West increasingly implemented cowboyness as equivalent to westnernness in a western town, see Bonnie Christensen’s Red Lodge and the Mythic West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 1 the imagined West in terms of gender, as it intersects with race and sexuality. In order to answer these questions, we must find a way to access both the imagined and lived West, grounding our assertions in a source base that can provide both information about the reality of conditions and the popular definition of westernness. We must further attend to the diversity of the peoples participating in these historical processes in order to trace the ways in which people pushed to the margins also helped create constructions of westernness, even as they challenged older versions. In “Riding Bareback,” rodeo serves as a site of analysis to investigate the continual expansion and contraction of the supposedly authentic West in the twentieth century. For over a century, rodeo has been a vibrant and multifaceted stage on which diverse groups of people, both within and beyond the geographical West, have embodied the plethora of cultural meanings attached to westernness. Rodeo is an epistemology of the West, meaning it is a way of knowing and expressing what it means to people to be western.