Hardback
January 9, 2024
9780295752129
English
288
1 map, 1 table, 25 b&w illus.
9.00 Inches (US)
6.00 Inches (US)
$105.00 USD, £84.00 GBP
v2.1 Reference
Paperback / softback
January 9, 2024
9780295752136
English
288
1 map, 1 table, 25 b&w illus.
9.00 Inches (US)
6.00 Inches (US)
$29.95 USD, £22.99 GBP
v2.1 Reference

Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the iconic cowboy of the US West. Slapping Leather traces the history and growth of gay rodeo over the decades, demonstrating how queer cowfolx have fought to build a community where LGBTQ+ people can escape discrimination in both mainstream rodeos and broader society.

Yet not all LGBTQ+ groups have found full acceptance in gay rodeo. Originally formed by gay men for gay men, the rodeo has at times perpetuated historically problematic ideas about the US West, the iconic cowboy, and the meaning of masculinity. Despite the gay rodeo's credo of acceptance, its history reveals complicated relationships with straight rodeo, gender stereotypes, and women competitors. Drawing from multiple archives and over seventy oral history interviews, historians Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield demonstrate how amid these tensions, participants, volunteers, and spectators continue to redefine the performance of the cowboy and national belonging.

About the Authors

Elyssa Ford is associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University and author of Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo. Rebecca Scofield is associate professor of American history at the University of Idaho and author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West.

Reviews

"Through a range of sources, including myriad personal stories, Ford and Scofield chart an alternately triumphal and agonizing history of the gay rodeo from its rise in the 1970s, to its peak of popularity in the 1990s, to its slow decline in the new millennium. Along the way they consider the effects of the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, shifting gender norms and questions of inclusion, generational change, and the enduring myths of the Old West. This long-overdue study solidifies the authors' reputations as the leading historians of the American rodeo scene's marginalized members."—Peter Boag, author of Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon

"In Slapping Leather, Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield, established scholars of rodeo on the margins of mainstream culture, have produced a fine history of gay rodeo in the U.S. and Canada. Gay rodeo is a vexed subject for folks who care about exclusion in queer communities. Gay rodeoers embrace, even as they queer, a white masculinity embodied in a myopic memory of old-time cowboys, a memory that elides histories of dispossession, racial violence, and gender hierarchy in the North American West, not to mention the real variety of humans who've worked livestock there. Ford and Scofield understand all this, and they do a terrific job explaining it."—Susan Lee Johnson, Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West, UNLV

"For almost fifty years, gay rodeo has advanced the cause of a more inclusive rodeo, reimagining the West as a place of even wider horizons. Weaving personal testimonies of participants with closely-researched history in clear and often witty prose, Slapping Leather shows how transformative and empowering this process has been, and at the same time, how many of its limitations remain."—Louis Warren, author of Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show

 

9780295752129 : slapping-leather-ford-scofield
Hardback
January 9, 2024
$105.00 USD
9780295752136 : slapping-leather-ford-scofield
Paperback / softback
January 9, 2024
$29.95 USD

Other Titles by Rebecca Scofield

Outriders

Rebecca Scofield
Oct 2019 - University of Washington Press
$105.00 USD - Hardback
$30.00 USD - Paperback / softback