Stampede - Misogyny, White Supremacy, and Settler Colonialism

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"The annual Calgary Stampede, Canada's largest Western heritage festival, and the City of Calgary's premier tourist attraction, is generally considered universally beneficial to the city and, by extension, those who live here. But development studies scholars have increasingly pointed to tourism as a key catalyst of the global sex industry, and scholars working in the area of critical tourism studies have demonstrated that the festival atmosphere generated around events like the Calgary Stampede often contributes to the reification of the exploitative ideologies that undergird rape culture, thus dramatically increasing rates of gender-based sexualized violence. Neither of these perspectives have yet been considered with regard to the Calgary Stampede--despite the fact that this annual event is infamous, too, for its seedy underside: each year, local media outlets report the increased rates of sexually transmitted infections, divorces, pregnancies, sexual harassment, and sexual assaults, and prostitution busts during and in the weeks immediately following the annual Stampede. Not surprisingly, these problems have been normalized in a city that is consistently ranked by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as among the worst urban areas in Canada to be a woman--even without explicitly considering the role of the Calgary Stampede. Additionally, this appallingly low ranking does not take into account differential experiences among women in Calgary based on skin colour, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristics usually considered in an intersectional analysis. The absence of such an analysis is particularly troubling because Calgary, one of Canada's most prosperous and fastest-growing cities, 2 is located at the heart of the Blackfoot Confederacy, in the territory ceded in 1877's Treaty 7 between the British Crown and the five First Nations of Southern Alberta. Not only, then, is there no consideration of the particular social and economic precarity of Southern Alberta's Indigenous women, already vulnerable as a consequence of centuries' worth of ongoing colonial projects (including, I contend, the Calgary Stampede), there has been little concern among municipal policy makers for addressing the roots of the widespread gender-based problems that plague our city. And there has been no scholarly consideration of the Calgary Stampede's role in either creating or sustaining them. My book, Selling Sex: Gender Matters at the Calgary Stampede, will address these gaps by turning an intersectional feminist lens on the gendered, racialized dynamics of the contemporary Calgary Stampede. This analysis forces a reckoning with the long-standing assumption that the Calgary Stampede is a family-friendly event, universally beneficial to all Calgarians."-- Provided by publisher