Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. By E Cram

Abstract

“What might we do with violent inheritance?” (30) E Cram’s timely study centers on this question. Cram traces material, affective, and ideological “land lines” to engage places where sexual modernity intersects with other extractive structures including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and petromodernity (6–7). Their analysis focuses on a loosely defined western region including Wyoming (where they grew up) but also encompassing Colorado, Idaho, Iowa (where they live), and Manitoba (where I live). Bringing together queer ecologies, the energy humanities, settler-colonial studies, communication studies, and geography, Violent Inheritance models innovative research methods for “embodied queer ecological criticism” (9)—including looking for “gasps” in the archive (79), resisting extractive research practices, and pushing queer studies beyond the individual or the subject and toward the (infra)structural. Cram’s introduction lays out an important, yet dizzying, array of terms: “sexual modernities, land lines, and [queer and anticolonial] regeneration” are identified as the main ones (emphasis in original; 9), alongside others (especially “innervation” and “enervation” [emphasis in original; 14–15], and “infrastructures of feeling” [22; 202]). The first chapter, which centers on the writings of Owen Wister, engages late-nineteenth-century theories of neurasthenia alongside a modern, energetic, colonial notion of subjectivity forged through friction with and dominance of western climates and environments. The second chapter considers the archival remains of Wyoming political economist and settler feminist Grace Raymond Hebard as both a eugenic violent inheritance and a queer archive that can be regenerated without being recuperated.