Rebecca Scofield

Rebecca Scofield is an associate professor of American history. Her research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality, the American West, and popular performance.

 

Her current book project, Astride the Beast: Women Riding Horses, Dragons, and Everything in Between, is under contract with the University of Texas Press. Covering cycling suffragists to rodeo cowgirls and the Wicked Witch to Daenerys Targaryen, this work examines the dangerous allure of a woman harnessing the power of a beast—whether animal or machine—as she sat astride its back. Both driving and assuaging central cultural fears about feminism, reproduction, race, imperialism, and sexuality over the past century, Astride the Beast traces the wild history of this cultural image as it shifted between the 1890s and the 1990s. 

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She has published articles on the 1980s urban cowboy, Dolly Parton's body politics, and Idaho women's history. Her first book Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the America West (Univ. of Washington Press, 2019) examines how marginalized groups, such as gay men and incarcerated people, used rodeo to assert their place in a national mythology. Her second book, co-authored with Dr. Elyssa Ford, is entitled Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (Univ. of Washington Press, 2023) and provides an in-depth history of gay rodeo. 

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She is the Principle Investigator for the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project , co-creator of the web exhibit Voices of Gay Rodeo, and co-author of the verbatim theater piece That Damn Horse: The Stories of Gay Rodeo.

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