Book Review

Canada and the United States

As gender studies turned its focus on men, the American West became a prime "site" for investigation, since western lore is steeped in male stereotypes. "Cowboys and Indians" sum up the tradition of struggle and conquest in a mythic man's domain. Not surprisingly, then, in an anthology of thirteen original essays on "cultures of manhood in the American West," seven are as concerned with race as they are with gender.	1
"Several authors explore how subaltern communities contested hegemonic manhood by disrupting and recasting white myths of western masculinity" (p. 7), editor Laura McCall writes in her detailed introduction. The obvious examples all come late. In one of four essays devoted to post-World War II literature and film, Steven Lee mines the work of three Asian-American writers for evidence of a link between American nationalism (in the guise of the cowboy hero) and race that denies the Asian American a cultural role. Brian Klopotek uses three films dating from 1989 to 1998 to get at the white image of Indian hypermasculinity—a reading that needs more historical context for entrenched Indian stereotypes and less plot summary—while José Limón focuses on a single film, Lone Star (1996), to explore "the politics of racialized sexuality" in an essay that rediscovers the truism that when different races meet they usually bleed and always breed.	2
Race and gender are also intertwined in Durwood Ball's essay on public hangings, which argues that there was a right way to die and thereby honor one's race through a final display of unflappable white manhood. David A. T. Clark and Joane Nagel contend that the western "settler wars" were the product of white masculine insecurities as evidenced by the white community's willingness to embrace Indianness once the wars were won. Karen Leong offers a more persuasive essay on the Chinese exclusion debate. She argues that western exclusionists shifted their opposition from race, which had limited appeal in the East, to gender by focusing on the exploitation of Chinese women by the cartels that controlled migration and were introducing a new form of slavery into America. Here, a gender issue usefully illuminates a racial issue.	3
In other essays, manhood becomes a stand-in not just for race but for class conflict and economic anxieties as well. In Gunther Peck's essay on risk-taking on the Comstock Lode, class issues are paramount. The workers risked physical injury, the owners financial loss. Recreational gambling by the laborers allowed them to engage in a kind of economic—that is, middle-class—risk taking that, because it was devoid of calculation and rationality, further defined the class divide. Co-editor Matthew Basso establishes a culture under siege in his examination of Montana copper workers during World War II. Excused from military service to serve in an essential wartime industry, they had to ward off the doubts raised by their exemption while meeting the challenge to their masculine authority posed by female factory workers. One could as readily argue that the fundamental issue was not manhood but job security, here jealously guarded along racial as well as gender lines.	. . .