ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses cowboy masculinities through a historical geographical lens. It seeks to 'place' analysis of cowboy masculinities, on the American frontier, in contemporary subcultures, in remote Aboriginal communities in the Australian outback. American Wild West shows travelled across the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, coincidentally when Australian nationalism intensified, as pastoralism expanded and a sense of permanence fuelled confidence in the fledgling national populace. In the American West, too, the cowboy was not so much a homogenous frontier figure embodying an emergent national individualism, but rather a type of marginal agricultural worker. For every prototype of the hegemonic, nationalistic, heroic cowboy there were darker doppelgangers. Metropolitan cultural industries generated a stock of images, ideas about bodily deportment, and fables of heroic acts that were hyperbolised, standardised and commodified. The cowboy would come to be a highly multivalent identity through which macho, camp and conservative masculine bodily identities could be performed.
