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Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacism and Settler Colonialism
Kimberly A. Williams wants the annual Calgary Stampede to change its ways. An intrepid feminist scholar with a wry sense of humour, Williams deftly weaves theory, history, pop culture and politics to challenge readers to make sense of how gender and race matter at Canada’s oldest and largest western heritage festival. Stampede examines the settler colonial roots of the Calgary Stampede and uses its centennial celebration in 2012 to explore how the event continues to influence life on the streets and in the bars and boardrooms of Canada’s fourth-largest city. Using a variety of cultural materials—photography, print advertisements, news coverage, poetry and social media—Williams asks who gets to be part of the “we” in the Stampede’s slogan “We’re Greatest Together,” and who doesn’t.
- GenresCanadaNonfiction
232 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2021
7 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 9, 2025
Really enjoyed this read as someone who is not originally from Calgary but lives here because the author is the exact same. I remember first going to the Stampede as a kid and I didn't really find it fun then and when I returned as an 18 year old, I still didn't find it fun. Now working in the oil and gas industry I see the Stampede through another lens that does get covered in this book. I really recommend this for any Canadian, or anyone, who has questions about the Stampede. This book really took everything I had thought about and articulated it properly to words. I also learned quite a bit in this book as well that I didn't know existed at the Stampede. The Elbow River Camp being one of them, which is a huge red flag for me. I also thought the chapter on the First Nation Princess was very informative as someone who doesn't know a lot about what's going on at the Stampede. Comparing that chapter to the one on the Stampede Queen provided two sides of the, essentially, beauty pageants that get held. As this book discusses, women's role in the colonial stampede mindset is that of servicing and side kicking the cowboys.
I also love that the author highlighted the amount of work done after the 2013 floods to fix Stampede Grounds to what could be operational for the summer ASAP, yet so many communities struggled to get supports and many Indigenous communities never got any support. It's something that is reflective that still occurs today. Calgary will repaint the roads and fix things downtown where people will frequent yet so many communities outside of the core of the city are struggling to have roads without potholes and more.
I'm a Stampede hater so I thoroughly enjoyed this book that highlights the problems of it and also provides some ways the Stampede can do better without outright requesting it be shut down. Stampede is vital to many workers well-beings, especially sex workers as sex tourism goes up during July in Calgary. Also, women are 100% the backbone of the ground work that goes on within the city to make sure the Stampede is enjoyable.
I also love that the author highlighted the amount of work done after the 2013 floods to fix Stampede Grounds to what could be operational for the summer ASAP, yet so many communities struggled to get supports and many Indigenous communities never got any support. It's something that is reflective that still occurs today. Calgary will repaint the roads and fix things downtown where people will frequent yet so many communities outside of the core of the city are struggling to have roads without potholes and more.
I'm a Stampede hater so I thoroughly enjoyed this book that highlights the problems of it and also provides some ways the Stampede can do better without outright requesting it be shut down. Stampede is vital to many workers well-beings, especially sex workers as sex tourism goes up during July in Calgary. Also, women are 100% the backbone of the ground work that goes on within the city to make sure the Stampede is enjoyable.
July 21, 2021
This was a fantastic look at Stampede. I moved to Calgary during highschool and experienced the Stampede as a newcomer as well, and every time I went I would look around and think, "Am I the only one noticing the weirdness here?" Gender, colonialism, race, class, history... Especially as a trans person, Stampede was coloured with the constant threat of violence that no one else seemed to feel or be willing to take seriously.
Super accessibly written and engaging, I genuinely enjoyed this book. I do wish there was more queer and specifically trans analysis, but hopefully, a trans author can expand upon that in future. Ultimately this book reassured me that I wasn't crazy when I looked around Stampede and went "what the fuck?"
5/5!
Super accessibly written and engaging, I genuinely enjoyed this book. I do wish there was more queer and specifically trans analysis, but hopefully, a trans author can expand upon that in future. Ultimately this book reassured me that I wasn't crazy when I looked around Stampede and went "what the fuck?"
5/5!
November 5, 2022
Naming anywhere Calgary should be a sign that it’s going to be complex: the most widely known one being the hill just outside Jerusalem where Christ’s crucifixion marked the martyrdom that cast Christianity in its distinct form. This Calgary was also known as Golgotha – the place of skulls – although that terms is now possibly more associated with burial sites, plague pits and so forth, and suggests a sense of horror and repulsion. It seems a fitting name for the city in mid Alberta that is the focus of this sharp, insightful, powerful critique the image of a city, its manufacture of a narrowly specific form of masculinity, and the oil industry that sustains it.
Kimberly Williams, a Calgary based academic, has responded to one of the fundamental questions stimulating social research – What the f*ck? So much of our scholarly practice is prompted by precisely this question – responding to the incongruous, the odd, the unexpected, or the never before seen. In this case, it is the never before seen – truck nuts, the ubiquitous cock and balls hanging from many vehicles around Alberta although in this case, Calgary specific. Williams starts from this presence to spiral out to look at Calgary’s globally famous annual fair – the Stampede – as a celebration and assertion of a particular image of The West, of masculinity and of claims to being rightfully in and of that place.
The Stampede consciously and explicitly plays on images of The West – the myth of the cowboy, the moral iconography of the settler developing the land and the resources it provides – constructing explicit and implicit links between that mythologised past and the new frontiersmen of the oil industry. This mythologisation makes the Stampede a period of partying, hard drinking, hedonism and the assertion of a specifically validated form of hard-man masculinity. Williams weaves these ideals and images together into the notion of the Petro-Cowboy as the dominant motif developed and sustained through the Stampede, and the image around which much of her discussion turns.
The substance of the analysis runs around three key themes. The first is a common one in cultural analysis – she explores the question of ‘who is the ‘we’?’ claimed in assertions of community. She reads this ‘we’ in classed, gendered and racialised terms as a very specific sense of settler whiteness, as a domesticated suburban imaginary, alongside that petro-cowboy, frontiersman image. Woven into this is a discourse also that marks a series of legitimated or permitted forms of difference linked to this image – prescribed notions and forms of being gendered, and the ‘allowably Indigenous’, a notion she adapts and elaborates from the Métis scholar Chelsea Vowel. These permitted forms of difference sustain the dominant image by depicting it as including diverse ways of being, when there is little in those prescribed genders and allowable Indigenousness that disrupts the dominance of that established way of being. The point is, the ‘we’ is presented as inclusive but is enacted in limited and limiting ways.
This highly problematic ‘we’ is then elaborated further through discussion of First Nations and other Indigenous presences in the Stampede, from the ‘First Nations Princess’ to the First Nations Camp, both of which are presented as marginal to the central commercial dynamic of the Stampede. In the case of the Camp her reading is complex, taking account of both the Indigenous presentation of tradition in the now and the dominant discourse that presents the Camp as the old ways long gone, in a conventional settler colonial style. Williams also draws out the evidence of public debates within and between First Nations members to further highlight complexity: this is a sharp but careful argument.
This question of Indigeneity takes further form in her exploration of prescribed notions of gender, when she draws on the pressing issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, high rates of sexual violence, the fossil fuel frontiersman as inhabitant of ‘man camps’ linked to the commercialisation of sexuality, Stampede Queens and the Stampede’s sex industry. Here she weaves together several strands to critique the prescribed gendered forms and ways of being sustained by the Stampede.
This is an impressive piece of cultural studies analysis where Williams unpacks a recurrent festive event in a carefully historicised way to show how these themes and politics are woven into the Stampede since its early 20th century formation and through the subsequent century and more. The result is a powerful critique of local, provincial and national Imagineering and constructions of identities, to highlight the excluded and silenced, and the powerful interests served by this image. The case is theoretically rich, but for the most part the theoretical frame is not intrusive, although it is vital to the case. Williams draws on both image and spatiality to build the case in ways that make it an important contribution to making sense of not only Canada’s prairie West, but also the potential nuanced analyses that weave together gender, class and colonialism.
Highly recommended.
Kimberly Williams, a Calgary based academic, has responded to one of the fundamental questions stimulating social research – What the f*ck? So much of our scholarly practice is prompted by precisely this question – responding to the incongruous, the odd, the unexpected, or the never before seen. In this case, it is the never before seen – truck nuts, the ubiquitous cock and balls hanging from many vehicles around Alberta although in this case, Calgary specific. Williams starts from this presence to spiral out to look at Calgary’s globally famous annual fair – the Stampede – as a celebration and assertion of a particular image of The West, of masculinity and of claims to being rightfully in and of that place.
The Stampede consciously and explicitly plays on images of The West – the myth of the cowboy, the moral iconography of the settler developing the land and the resources it provides – constructing explicit and implicit links between that mythologised past and the new frontiersmen of the oil industry. This mythologisation makes the Stampede a period of partying, hard drinking, hedonism and the assertion of a specifically validated form of hard-man masculinity. Williams weaves these ideals and images together into the notion of the Petro-Cowboy as the dominant motif developed and sustained through the Stampede, and the image around which much of her discussion turns.
The substance of the analysis runs around three key themes. The first is a common one in cultural analysis – she explores the question of ‘who is the ‘we’?’ claimed in assertions of community. She reads this ‘we’ in classed, gendered and racialised terms as a very specific sense of settler whiteness, as a domesticated suburban imaginary, alongside that petro-cowboy, frontiersman image. Woven into this is a discourse also that marks a series of legitimated or permitted forms of difference linked to this image – prescribed notions and forms of being gendered, and the ‘allowably Indigenous’, a notion she adapts and elaborates from the Métis scholar Chelsea Vowel. These permitted forms of difference sustain the dominant image by depicting it as including diverse ways of being, when there is little in those prescribed genders and allowable Indigenousness that disrupts the dominance of that established way of being. The point is, the ‘we’ is presented as inclusive but is enacted in limited and limiting ways.
This highly problematic ‘we’ is then elaborated further through discussion of First Nations and other Indigenous presences in the Stampede, from the ‘First Nations Princess’ to the First Nations Camp, both of which are presented as marginal to the central commercial dynamic of the Stampede. In the case of the Camp her reading is complex, taking account of both the Indigenous presentation of tradition in the now and the dominant discourse that presents the Camp as the old ways long gone, in a conventional settler colonial style. Williams also draws out the evidence of public debates within and between First Nations members to further highlight complexity: this is a sharp but careful argument.
This question of Indigeneity takes further form in her exploration of prescribed notions of gender, when she draws on the pressing issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, high rates of sexual violence, the fossil fuel frontiersman as inhabitant of ‘man camps’ linked to the commercialisation of sexuality, Stampede Queens and the Stampede’s sex industry. Here she weaves together several strands to critique the prescribed gendered forms and ways of being sustained by the Stampede.
This is an impressive piece of cultural studies analysis where Williams unpacks a recurrent festive event in a carefully historicised way to show how these themes and politics are woven into the Stampede since its early 20th century formation and through the subsequent century and more. The result is a powerful critique of local, provincial and national Imagineering and constructions of identities, to highlight the excluded and silenced, and the powerful interests served by this image. The case is theoretically rich, but for the most part the theoretical frame is not intrusive, although it is vital to the case. Williams draws on both image and spatiality to build the case in ways that make it an important contribution to making sense of not only Canada’s prairie West, but also the potential nuanced analyses that weave together gender, class and colonialism.
Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews