Manly Contests: Rodeo Masculinities at the Calgary Stampede

Abstract

Abstract: The Calgary Stampede is one of Canada's most popular annual festivals. Its long history and its mission to preserve Western values might suggest that its principle character, the cowboy, would be relatively uncomplicated. Yet recent scholarship on popular culture and public celebrations, as well as that on gender and masculinity, encourages a re-examination of the cowboy at the Calgary Stampede. This article examines how the Calgary Stampede constituted cowboy masculinities during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the era when the flamboyant Guy Weadick was the Stampede's manager (1912, 1923–32), it first explores how the idea that the West could recuperate masculinity was expressed through a definition of the cowboy that was, in Weadick's words, ‘open to all.’ As rodeo became a sport, a new normative cowboy emerged, as local men, both settler and Aboriginal, took centre stage, excluding women and performers. This paper argues that the Calgary Stampede helped foster the development of new rodeo masculinities for both settler and Aboriginal men, ones grounded in the respectability of sport, and in the economic, social, and political challenges of early-twentieth-century Western Canada.