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Gender and Desire in Polo Ralph Lauren, continued... |
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Historians such as Owen Wister and Frederick Jackson Turner tell one story about the cowboy, but there is another, entirely different story revealed in more recent scholarship. Far from being a spirited, independent "Saxon," the nineteenth century cowboy had a distinctly marginal status in the West—marginal in terms of class and gender. Cowboys were young, poorly paid, poorly fed, itinerant workers who in the winter months were often unemployed, or, if they were lucky, obtained odd jobs such as painting houses. (13) |
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Paul H. Carlson notes that "until the mid-1880s the term cowboy in the West often meant "'drunkard,' 'outlaw,' 'cattle thief,' or something similar." (14) To be a cowboy, in other words, was probably not something to which many aspired. To be a rancher, on the other hand, was a far more desirous occupation in the West. "If he worked cattle in the West, a person wanted to be known as a 'waddy' or 'cowhand'" or better, a cattleman or rancher. (15) In fact, the cowboy was nearly an obsolete occupation by the late nineteenth century. "[B]y 1887 the open range cattle frontier was dead, killed by overextension, overgrazing, severe weather [...]." (16) After 1887, it was cattlemen, not cowboys, who "owned" the West. The cattleman, as owner rather than herder of cattle, was a relatively wealthy person who enjoyed a position of power in his community. The cowboy, by contrast, was a "landless wage earner" prone to thievery. (17) His numbers in the West were rapidly diminishing. The cowboy was also a transvestite. In his book, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture, Blake Allmendinger explains that cowboys lived not only on the margins of society, they lived on the margins of gender as well. (18) Often isolated for months at a time on open ranges while caring for and herding cattle, cowboys engaged in creative, gender-bending forms of entertainment. For example, Allmendinger describes a mock circus staged by cowboys in which one cowboy dressed in a skirt made from a blanket and posed as a lady lion-tamer. (19) Another example is dance parties. Because the ratio of men to women was great in the West, cowboys sometimes held stag dance parties in which the all-male dancers were designated as either "male" or "female." A "female" dancer was identified by a "heifer brand"—usually an arm band—that indicated her role as a follower, not a leader, in dancing roles. (20) Visits to town were marked by gender-bending performances as well. Sometimes, when the rigid, Victorian sensibilities of townspeople were too much for visiting cowboys, cowboys exacted revenge by "[getting] drunk and [running] down streets with women's stockings draped over their arms, scarves and jewelry wrapped around the brims of the hats, and petticoats drawn up over their pants." (21) Dee Garceau's essay, "Nomads, Bunkies, Cross-Dressers, and Family Men," reveals the instability of cowboy masculinity as well. (22) Living on society's margins, cowboys "developed alternative family structures and celebrated the freedoms of living outside the mainstream." (23) These alternative family structures were evident in the sleeping arrangements of cowboys on the range. As Garceau notes, cowboys had "bunkies," or sleeping partners. She writes, "Bunkies were necessary to survive cold nights on the range, where one slept in tents or under an open sky. The physical warmth of one's sleeping partner could make the difference between freezing and survival, between sleeplessness and comfort." (24) Although written accounts of homosexual liaisons are rare, the possibility that some cowboys may also have enjoyed the sexual comforts of their bunkies should not be discounted. (25) Even language on the prairie was gender-bent. Because one of the cowboy's tasks on the range was cooking, a cowboy who cooked was often referred to as "old woman" or "lady."(26) A man who cooked for other men was thus transformed by his labor from a man into a woman. Even the food itself took on a feminine metaphor—food was not just "it" but a "she" that was "juicy," "hot" and ready to be "ravished" like a virgin on her wedding night. (27) Likewise, women at this time who herded and branded cattle were referred to not as women, but rather as tomboys, fellers, or by the name "Mike." (28) Thus, the fact that women could transform themselves into men through their labor as well further reinforces the assertion that in the West, masculinity and femininity were dynamic, rather than static, categories of being. (29) |
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