Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Global Cowboy: Rural Masculinities And Sexualities, Chris Gibson

Chris Gibson

There is arguably no more iconic motif of rural masculinity than the cowboy. The cowboy is a persona, a stereotype, an ideology, and a style of manhood strongly associated with rurality. With origins in Mexico and the American West, cowboy imagery and identities were globalized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were adopted, mutated, and subverted in contexts as different as Hawai'i, urban Japan, and remote Aboriginal Australia. This chapter traces the historical emergence and diffusion of cowboy masculinity, arguing that key to its endurance has been its malleability-its multivalent combinations of hero worship, ambiguity, rural place-based …