Outriders

[A]n engaging, insightful, wonderfully researched social and cultural study of forgotten or ignored participants in United States rodeo.

This is an ambitious book in which Scofield deftly tackles multiple historical contexts, secondary literatures, and political sensitivities...a foundational monograph that will no doubt inspire further research into the diversity of communities and traditions in rodeo and the North American West.

Controversial and dutifully written, Outriders...will be of interest to scholars while causing rodeo fans to think deeply about the conflicts within the myth of the sport.

Outriders offers an alternative perspective about what inspires people to enter rodeo, arguing that many do so as a way to claim a presence in the history of the West, and explores how rodeo gave agency to groups previously omitted from the history of cowboy lifestyle...provocative and contributes a framework for revisiting fringe groups.

Outriders function as a compendium of current cowboy and rodeo research. Scofield takes this research, and—with engaging style—demonstrates how women, Blacks, Gay men, and incarcerated men have chosen the cowboy as a symbol of what it means to be authentically American.

This well-researched book is a good introduction to rodeo beyond the mainstream and will be of interest to rodeo and western scholars, along with a more popular audience unfamiliar with rodeo’s more varied history.

Expansive in scope and engagingly written, Outriders demonstrates the power of marginalized communities’ rodeo performances to create a wider sense of belonging in the American West, and thus the nation.

In Outriders, Rebecca Scofield explores the surprisingly long and deep tradition of 'outsider' rodeo among women, convict, African-American, and gay riders. A well-written, consistently enlightening, often surprising history of a central, essential, and deeply-troubling entertainment.

Outriders is both a social history and a history of an imagined past and mythic West that centers the idea of performance and resistance. The research is comprehensive and broad—and the histories Scofield addresses illuminate the inherent contradictions surrounding identity and the potential for liberation and joyfulness.

This book focuses on the ways rodeo has been reclaimed and repurposed to empower those often seen as marginalized by typical rodeo practices. In turn, it shows how those reclamations complicate our understandings of rodeo's role in regional identity making.