Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo

by Elyssa Ford

From the Wild West shows of the nineteenth century to the popular movie Westerns of the twentieth century, one view of an idealized and mythical West has been promulgated. Elyssa Ford suggests that we look beyond these cowboy clichés to complicate and enrich our picture of the American West. Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion takes us from the beachfront rodeo arenas in Hawai'i to the reservation rodeos held by Native Americans to reveal how people largely missing from that stereotypical picture make rodeo--and America--their own.

Because rodeo has such a hold on our historical and cultural imagination, it becomes an ideal arena for establishing historical and cultural relevance. By claiming a place in that arena, groups rarely included in our understanding of the West--African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the LGBT+ community--emphasize their involvement in the American past and proclaim their right to an American identity today. In doing so, these groups change what Americans know about their history and themselves. In her journey through these race- and group-specific rodeos, Ford finds that some see rodeo as a form of escape, a refuge from a hostile outside world. For others, rodeo has become a site of rebellion, a place to proclaim their difference and to connect to a different story of America. Still others, like Mexican Americans and the LGBT+ community, look inward, using rodeo to coalesce and celebrate their own identities.

In Ford's study of these historically marginalized groups, she also examines where women fit in race- and group-specific rodeos--and concludes that even within these groups, the traditional masculinity of the rodeo continues to be promoted. Female competitors may find refuge within alternate rodeos based on their race or sexuality, but they still face limitations due to their gender identity.

Whether as refuge or rebellion, rodeos of difference emerge in this book as quintessentially American, remaking how we think about American history, culture, and identity.

288 pages, Paperback

Published November 23, 2020

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s increasingly easy for us to look at sport, in its corporate forms and otherwise, as an agent sustaining hegemonic relations of power. Go no further than American football’s relationship with the military, English (and most other places) rugby and soccer’s sustenance of particular forms of masculinity and marginalisation of women and of gays who don’t comply with the game’s heteronormativity and more. In almost any setting we go to we can see sport as an agent and sustainer of unjust systems of power and exclusion; often these are locally inflected, or have specific national or regional aspects. Amid all of these there are few national myths that have more power and resonance than the ones settler colonies tell themselves about their frontiers, and few frontiers where the myths have such a global resonance as the American west. Here we see a powerful tale of occupation and exclusion masked by the heroic image on the cowboy, a potent masculine figure embodying the nation and the final stages of is continental colonisation; an image and myth sustained in the contemporary corporate rodeo.

That the myth, its image and sustenance, is not challenged by rodeo practitioners is systematically pulled apart in this important, engaging and impressive exploration of rodeo as dissent. Elyssa Ford explores four cases of rodeo defined by ‘race’ – Mexican/American charreada and rodeo in Hawaiian, First Nations/Indigenous and Black communities – and LGBTQ+ rodeo. It is a compelling analysis that gets beyond revisionist history to point to a rich untold history, both of rodeo and of the White, masculine West it represents, and of a hegemonic discourse that has sustained that image by excluding women, Indigenous peoples and peoples of colour within a powerful heteronormative framework.

Each of the five chapters follows a similar format, uncovering the presence of the group in focus in the historical West (or in the case of Hawai’i in the Islands’ ranching past and present), exploring the group’s engagements with rodeo as a sport and cultural practice, and looking then at forms of autonomous organisation of rodeo in each community context. Woven through each chapter is a strong focus on the presence of women as both practitioners and organisers, and attention to the social and cultural significance of rodeo. In each case Ford highlights the important community building and identity making aspects of participation in rodeo, but she goes further also to accentuate the ways in some settings, especially Black and Indigenous, that rodeo has an important educative function revising the image of the West and Black and Indigenous participation in ranching and farming. In other settings, and this is more obvious in charreada and in the Hawaiian rodeo, there is a powerful community sustenance component as well as a preservation and promotion of local horse cultures and riding styles.

In each of the four ‘race’-based cases Ford also highlights the powerful evidence driven historical basis of rodeo, in part driven by in-group generational transmission of knowledge and skills. She is also clear that this a model does not have the same power in respect of LGBTQ+ rodeo. Even though there is a growing body of scholarship that queers the West, and some of the gay rodeo participants come from a Western cultural world, that same aspect of cross-generational in-group transmission is not present. This leads to a compelling conclusion that perhaps gay rodeo may be in an increasingly precarious position in a setting where social attitudes to non-heteronormative sexualities are changing, not that she is suggesting that this change is fast or in any way universal. The argument that gay rodeo should be seen as based in different circumstances than the ‘race’-based forms is convincing and shapes the analysis in compelling ways.

Ford has made good use of oral sources in particular in recovering (or uncovering) the diverse histories of rodeo and of specially gendered aspects of the relevant horse cultures, as well as critiques of some of the continuing gendered discriminations and gender-marking of rodeo practice, especially women’s continuing marginalisation. She allows this aspect of the narrative to grow incrementally, noting the more obvious forms of commonality and distinctiveness such as escaramuza in charreada and pa’u riding in Hawai’i as well as the more nuanced and subtle forms of marginalisation as seen, for instance, in the dominance of forms of masculinity and of men in LGBTQ+ rodeo. In doing so she points to the complexities of refuge, resistance and rebellion along several axes in the same practice, and provides an excellent example of the important of intersectional consciousness in analyses. It is also a marker of the importance of weaving those analytical threads through a text in a sustained manner.

As such, this is a great example of scholarly analyses of sport that get well beyond the everyday practice of sport the provide a critical assessment of its engagement with wider social and cultural forces, and to explore that critical and revisionist history through the banality of a sport and leisure practice. It is highly recommended, even, or especially, for those (like me) with only a very limited knowledge of rodeo.