Rebecca Scofield spends her time traveling to rodeos sponsored by the International Gay Rodeo Association, recording oral accounts and the histories of their participants.
Scofield, a University of Idaho history professor, recently received a fellowship to expand upon that research — the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project.
The $50,000 Whiting Foundation fellowship will allow Scofield to bring students with her as she travels to these rodeos, providing students the opportunity to gain experience ethically interviewing minority populations and documenting oral histories.
“(Students will learn the importance of) needing to be flexible because rodeos are not ideal situations to interview people,” Scofield said. “Often, you’re squeezing something in between bronco riding and pole bending, and they have five minutes to give you. (There’s) terrible recording conditions. Sometimes, we’re outside on hay bales next to horse trailers, sometimes I’m in a hotel lobby. But it’s really organic and lets people meet me where they’re at.”
In order to truly see the beauty and diversity of her home, Scofield said she had to travel far away.
While pursuing a master’s in regional studies centering on East Asia at Harvard University, she visited Tokyo. She was studying the impact of gender and race on the Tokyo acrylic nail industry.
As she explored the city, Scofield said she ran across a store selling Western-style clothing, and seeing the popularized Western wear made her think.
“I got to a moment where I was like, ‘Man, I spend a lot of my time critiquing issues of race and gender in another country,’” Scofield said. “‘Maybe I should be a little bit more critical about my own.’”
In addition to the oral history project, Scofield has spent her time researching and writing her first book, “Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West.”
Scofield divided “Outriders” into four chapters, with the first focusing on female bronco riders from 1910 to 1920. The second studies the Texas Prison Rodeo, while the third focuses on African American Western performers and the last examines the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA).
“It’s a history of ideas about the West from a particular perspective of embodied performance,” Scofield said. “So, I look specifically at rodeo over the 20th century and how communities that we think of existing outside of the stereotypical notion of the cowboy actively interacted with that stereotype or icon. How did they contest it? How did they challenge it? How did they in some ways buy into the mythology and help shape it over the 20th century?”
Scofield said she feels her work recording the oral histories of IGRA members combats the prejudice against working in academia outside of the East Coast.
She said she had been told while working on her doctorate that “no one really ‘rodeos.’” Nonetheless, she continued her efforts.
After she was hired at UI in 2016, her passion for the rodeo’s histories gave life to the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project.
“So many people I’ve interviewed have cried when they talk about the role of the rodeo in their life,” Scofield said. “How it gave them family, how it let them do something other than the metropolitan version of gayness and let them be rural and let them like horses and let them dance to country music. They had not found that before.”