Rodeo Queens And the American Dream

by Burbick, Joan

• ISBN13: 9781586482046
• ISBN10: 1586482041
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-20
• Publisher: PublicAffairs

Summary

Rodeo has always been considered a supremely masculine sport, a rough and tumble display of macho strength and skill. But author Joan Burbick shows us the other side of rodeo: the world of rodeo queens--part cowgirl and part pageant princess--who wave and smile and keep the dream of the ideal Western woman alive. So who are the women behind the candy-red chaps, Farrah Fawcett curls, and rhinestone tiaras? Burbick traveled the backroads of the rural West for years, trying to find out. She interviewed dozens of queens, including rodeo royalty from the 1930s and 40s, women who grew up breaking wild horses, branding calves, and witnessing the sad decline of the ranching life. Stories from white and Native American rodeo queens in the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of rodeo, reveal the conflicts over gender and race that shaped the rodeo and the Cold War politics of small Western towns. Finally, rodeo queens from the 1970s to the present describe a more fiercely commercial rodeo, driven largely by TV-ratings and sponsorships, glitter and hairspray. Illustrated throughout with wonderful photographs, this rich tapestry of women's voices echoes and challenges our cliches of the rural West. Their combined stories of fulfilled dreams and lost hopes reveal the tenacity of the myth of the American West, a place of muscled men, golden-haired women, relentless beauty and tragic limits.

Author Biography

Joan Burbick teaches American Studies at Washington State University. Born in Chicago, she has lived in the Palouse region of northern Idaho and eastern Washington for the last twenty years, writing, raising a family, and, in her free time, working with horses.

Table of Contents

Breakout	1	(10)
Rodeo Queen Lament	11	(18)
The Last Branding	29	(16)
A Drowned Land	45	(16)
Trusting the Wild	61	(16)
Leaving Pocahontas	77	(24)
Queen for a Day	101	(18)
Hidden Horses	119	(12)
Separate Belongings	131	(22)
Rhinestone Cowgirls	153	(20)
A Perfect Image	173	(20)
Dreaming Las Vegas	193	(22)
The Last Rodeo	205	(10)
Acknowledgments	215	(2)
Works Consulted	217	(12)
A Note on the Photographs	229	(2)
Index	231